Philosophical Self Own

• “The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
• Living a good life means having the wisdom to distinguish what is right from wrong. - Socrates
• “Only a self-controlled man, then, will know himself and will be capable of looking to see what he actually knows and what he doesn’t know.” - Socrates
• Socrates rightly pronounced that “I know that I do not know.” For Socrates, only in the recognition of one’s ignorance that a person can truly know one self.
• Socrates the wisest among philosophers
• For Plato, the psyche is composed of three elements. ◦ appetitive, ◦ spirited, ◦ and the mind.
• The nous is the superpower that controls the affairs of the self.
• The appetitive element of the psyche includes one's desires, pleasures, physical satisfactions, comforts, etc.
• The spirited element is part of the psyche that is excited when challenges, fights back when agitated, or fights for justice when unjust practices are evident.
• The mind is what Plato considers as the most superior of all elements
• Mind - He refers this element as the nous which means the conscious awareness of the self.
• Another concrete example of a highly self-controlled nous is the life of St. Augustine
• He was not afraid to accept to himself and tell the people about his sinfulness. - St. Augustine
• Thus his journey toward the understanding of the self was centered on his religious convictions and beliefs. - St. Augustine
• To St. Augustine, man’s end goal is happiness.
• Only in God we can man attain true and eternal happiness, made possible by the truth and the divine wisdom - St. Augustine
• Rene Descartes - the father of modern philosophy
• Rene Descartes claimed that we cannot really rely on our senses because our sense perceptions can often deceive us.
• Descartes started to doubt whether the events he experiences at the moment are only products of his dreams and therefore illusions.
• “Cogito, ergo Sum.” This is translated as “I think therefore I am” or “I doubt therefore I exist.” Only after the certitude of the “doubting I” can all the other existence (e.g. God, the universe, things, events, etc.) become certain. - Rene Descartes
• The primary condition, therefore of the existence of the self, at least to Rene Descartes, is human rationality.
• His proposition is that the self is comparable to an empty space where everyday experiences contribute to the pile of knowledge that is put forth on that empty space. - John Locke
• The validity of sense perception is very subjective. - John Locke
• Experience, therefore, is an important requirement in order to have sense data which, through the process of reflection and analysis, eventually becomes sense perception. - JL
• David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian, put forward his skeptical take on the ideas forming the identity of the self.
• David Hume claimed that there cannot be a persisting idea of the self.
• Impressions are subjective, temporary, provisional, prejudicial and even skewed – and therefore cannot be persisting - David Hume
• This means that for David Hume, all we know about ourselves are just bundles of temporary impressions.
• He claimed that there is NO Self. - David Hume
• The self is always transcendental - Immanuel Kant
• Immanuel Kant is a Prussian metaphysicist who synthesized the rationalist view of Descartes and the empiricist view of Locke and Hume.
• Immanuel Kant calls his philosophy the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.
• For Immanuel Kant, ideas are perceived by the self, and they are connecting the self and the world
• All things in the world are in themselves and part of it belongs to the self. - Immanuel Kant
• Our rationality unifies and makes sense the perception we have in our experiences and make sensible ideas about ourselves in the world. - Immanuel Kant
• Sigmund Freud, refusing to take the self or subject as technical terms, regarded the self as the “I” that ordinarily constitute both the mental and physical actions.
• Admittedly, the question “Who am I?” will not provide a victorious unified answer but a complicated diverse features of moral judgments, inner sensations, bodily movements and perceptions. - Sigmund Freud
• Sigmund Freud sees "I" as a product of multiple interacting processes, systems and schemes. To demonstrate this, Freud proposed two models: The Topographical and Structural Models.
• Topographical Model. According to Freud’s concept of hysteria, the individual person may both know and do not know certain things at the same time. Freud’s solution to this predicament is to divide the “I” into conscious and the unconscious
• Structural Model. Similar to the disintegration of the self in Topographical Model, Freud’s Structural Model will also represent the self in three different agencies. Id, ego, and superego