GENED 1: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

CHAPTER I: DEFINING THE SELF: PERSONAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL

PERSPECTIVE ON SELF AND IDENTITY
LESSON 1: THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
1. Explain why it is essential to understand the self;
2. Describe and discuss the different notions of the self from the points-of-view of
the various philosophers across the time and place;
3. Compare and contrast how the self has been represented in different
philosophical schools; and
4. Examine one’s self against the different views of self that were discussed in class.

INTRODUCTION
Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, among the many
things that we were first taught as kids is to articulate and write our names. Growing
up we were told to refer back to this name when talking about ourselves. Our parents
painstakingly thought about our names. Should we be named after a famous celebrity, a
respected politician or historical personality, or even a saint? Were you named after
one?
Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies because
names are supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with
names such as “Precious” or “Lovely”. Likewise, when our parents call our names, we
were taught to respond to them because our names represent who we are. Our names
signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the person and her name. Names
are inscribed even into one’s gravestone.
A man is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the
bearer. It is only a signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probably will
not become an actual saint. The self is thought to be something else than the
name. The self is something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and
develops. The self is not a static thing that one is simply born with like a mole on one’s
face or is just assigned by one’s parents just like name. Everyone is tasked to
discover one’s self.
Have you truly discovered yours?
ABSTRACTION
The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the
fundamental nature of the self. Along with the question of the primary substratum that
defines the multiplicity of things in the world, the inquiry on the self has preoccupied
the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy: the Greeks.
INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO
 The Greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myths and moved away from
them in attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions of
curiosity, including the question of the self. The different perspectives of and views on
the self can be best seen and understood by revisiting its prime movers and identify the
mist important conjectures made by the philosophers from the ancient times to the
contemporary period.
Prior the Socrates, the Greek thinkers, sometimes collectively called them the
Pre-Socratics to denote that some of them preceded Socrates while others existed
around Socrates time as well, preoccupied substratum, arche that explains the
multiplicity of things in the world. These men are like Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Heraclitus and Empedocles, to name a few, were concerned with explaining what the
world is really made up of, why the world is so, and what explains the changes that they
observed around them.
They locate an explanation about the nature of change, the seeming
permanence despite change, and the unity of the world amidst its diversity.
Socrates and Plato
After series of thinkers from all across the ancient Greek world who were
disturbed by the same issue, a man came out to question something else. This man was
Socrates. Unlike the Pre-Socratics, Socrates was more concerned with another subject,
the problem of the self. He was the first Philosopher who ever engaged in systematic
questioning about the self. To Socrates, and this has become his life-long mission, the
true task of the philosopher is to know one self.
For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every
human person is dualistic, that is, he is composed of two important aspects of his
personhood. Meaning, all individual has an imperfect, impermanent aspect to him, and
the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent.
Plato claimed in his dialog that Socrates affirmed that the unexamined life is
not worth living. Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master and
supported the idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul.
THREE COMPONENTS OF THE SOUL ACCORDING TO PLATO:
1. The Rational Soul – forged by reason and intellect has to govern the
affairs of the human person.
2. The Spirited Soul – in charge of emotions should kept at bay.
3. Appetitive Soul – in charge in desires like eating, drinking, sleeping and
having sex are controlled well.
When this ideal state is attained, then the human person’s soul becomes just and
virtuous.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas

INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO

 Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval
world when it comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the
newfound doctrine of Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated 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 body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a
realm of spirit bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in
the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after
death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent God. 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, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of the
medieval philosophy, appended something to this Christian view. According to him, man
is composed of two parts: matter and form.
 Matter or hyle in Greek refers to common stuff that makes up everything in
the universe.
 Form or Morphe in Greek refers to the essence of a substance or thing.
For Aquinas, the soul is what animates the body; it is what it makes us humans.

Rene Descartes
Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the human person as
having a body and a mind. In his famous treatise, The Meditations of First Philosophy,
he claims that there is so much that we should doubt. In fact, he says that since much of
what we think and believe are not infallible, they may turn out to be false. One should
only believe that since which can pass the test of doubt.
The only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for even if one
doubts oneself, that only proves that there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and
therefore, that cannot be doubted.
“Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore, I am”.
COMBINATION OF TWO DISTINCT ENTITIES ACCORDING TO
DESCARTES:
1. Cogito – the thing that thinks, the mind.
2. Extenza – extension of the mind, the body.
The body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human
person has it but not what makes a man a man.

DAVID HUME

INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO

 David Hume disagrees with all the other aforementioned philosophers. Hume was
an Empiricist, meaning he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason,
but by experience". He goes on to say that, even with the perspective of the past,
humanity cannot dictate future events because thoughts of the past are limited,
compared to the possibilities for the future.
 “One can only know what comes from the senses and experiences”
 “Self is not an entity beyond the physical body”
 You know that other people are humans not because you have seen their
soul, but because you see them, hear them, feel them.
 “The self is nothing but a bundle of impressions and ideas”
o Impression – basic objects of our experiences or sensation; forms the
core of our thoughts.
o Idea – copies of impressions; not as “real” as impressions. In short
“Feeling mo lang yan!”
o Self – a collection of different perceptions which rapidly succeed each
other – in a perpetual flux or movement – it is all just a combination of
experiences.

IMMANUEL KANT
According to him, we all have an inner and an outer self which together form our
consciousness. The inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational
intellect. The outer self includes our sense and the physical world. When speaking of
the inner self, there is apperception.
 Agrees with Hume that everything starts with perception and sensation of
impressions.
 There is a mind that regulates impressions.
 “Time, space, etc. are ideas that cannot find in the world, but is built in our
minds.”
 The self organizes different impressions that one gets in relation to his own
existence.
 We need active intelligence to synthesize all knowledge and experience; the
self is not only personality but also the seat of knowledge.
GILBERT RYLE
Arguing that the mind does not exist and therefore can't be the seat of self, Ryle
believed that self comes from behavior. We're all just a bundle of behaviors caused by
the physical workings of the body.
 Denies the internal, non-physical self.
 “What truly matter is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to-day
life?”
 The self is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the
convenient name that we use to refer to the behaviors that we make.
INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO
MERLEAU-PONTY
Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed the physical body to be an important part of
what makes up the subjective self. This concept stands in contradiction to rationalism
and empiricism. Rationalism asserts that reason and mental perception, rather than
physical senses and experience, are the basis of knowledge and self.
 A Phenomenologist who says that mind-body bifurcation is an invalid
problem.
 Mind and body are inseparable.
 One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world.
 The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one.

Knowing Yourself is the Beginning of Knowing Everything.

- Aristotle

INSTRUCTOR: MA. CHARISH LIANNE Y. COJAMCO