THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES PHILISOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

• Self


  Who a person is, including the qualities such as personality and ability that make one person different from another
• Self (philosophical definition)


  The essence of a man's being, the being which is the source of a person's consciousness
• Philosophy


  The pursuit of wisdom, the rational investigation of questions about existence, knowledge and ethics, a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school
• The original meaning of the word philosophy comes from the Greek roots philo- meaning "love" and -sophos, or "wisdom"
• Socrates' metaphysical scheme


  • Reality is dualistic, made up of two realms: One realm is changeable, transient, and imperfect (the physical world), the other realm is unchanging, eternal, immortal (the ideal forms themselves)
• Socrates' view of the self


  Our bodies belong to the physical realm, they change, are imperfect, and die. Our souls, however, belong to the ideal realm, they are unchanging and immortal, surviving the death of the body.
• Plato's metaphysical scheme


  • Kept the body but further divided the soul into three parts: Appetites, Spirited, and Mind (nous)
• Appetites


  Includes all our myriad desires for various pleasures, comforts, physical satisfactions, and bodily ease. They can often be in conflict even with each other.
• Spirited


  The hot-blooded part, the part that gets angry when it perceives an injustice, the part that loves to face and overcome great challenges, the part that can steel itself to adversity, and that loves victory, winning, challenge, and honor.
• Mind (nous)


  Our conscious awareness, the part of us that thinks, analyzes, looks ahead, rationally weighs options, and tries to gauge what is best and truest overall.
• Neoplatonism


  An intellectual movement spearheaded by the Roman philosopher Plotinus, who breathed new life into Plato's ideas. Plotinus had a profound impact on Saint Augustine.
• St. Augustine's metaphysical scheme


  • Plato's vision of immortal souls striving to achieve union with the eternal realm through intellectual enlightenment became transformed into immortal souls striving to achieve union with God through faith and reason. The transient, finite nature of the physical world described by Plato became in Christianity a proving ground for our eternal destinies.
• St. Augustine's view of the self


  Early in his philosophical development, he describes the body as a "snare" and a "cage" for the soul, considering the body a "slave" to the soul. As his thinking matured, he sought to develop a more unified perspective on body and soul, ultimately coming to view the body as the "spouse" of the soul.
• St. Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity


  • Persons are material substances whose souls emerge from the unified relationship of form (morphe) and matter (hyle). The self cannot be separated into discreet entities, unlike Plato's (and Augustine's) dualistic soul and body. The soul is the principle of life, what distinguishes a living (animate) thing from a nonliving (inanimate) thing.
• Descartes' "Dubito, Cogito Ergo, Sum"


  Descartes was convinced that we need to use our own thinking abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop our own well-reasoned conclusions, supported with compelling proof. Committing to a wholesale and systematic doubting of all things you have been taught is the only way to achieve clear and well-reasoned conclusions, and to develop beliefs that are truly yours and not someone else's. The fact that a person doubts and thinks proves that there is a self.
• Locke's view of the self


  All knowledge originates in our direct sense experience. Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are the keys to understanding the self. But there are many moments when we are not consciously aware of our self, and many past experiences that we have forgotten or have faulty recollections of, so we can't be sure if our personal identity has been existing in one substance (soul) or a number of substances (souls).
• Hume's view of the self


  Continued in the empiricist tradition of John Locke, but ended up with the startling conclusion that there is no self.
• In the past, in other situations—at the party two weeks ago, or your high school graduation several years ago, we were consciously aware of our self
• There are many moments when we are not consciously aware of our self when we are thinking, feeling, and willing—we are simply, unreflectively, existing
• There are also many past experiences that we have forgotten or have faulty recollections of
• During those lapses, when we were not aware of our self, or don't remember being aware of our self, we can't be sure if we were the same person, the same substance, the same soul
• Therefore, we have no way of knowing if our personal identity has been existing in one substance (soul) or a number of substances (souls)
• David Hume


  Continued in the empiricist tradition of John Locke
• Locke's view


  Your self is not tied to any particular body or substance, and it only exists in other times and places because of our memory of those experiences
• Hume's conclusion


  If we carefully examine our sense experience through the process of introspection, we discover that there is no self
• The self


  Is simply a collection of experiences within a particular person
• The self


  Is nothing else but a bundle of impressions
• Categorized experiences


  • Impressions: basic objects of our experience or sensation
  • Ideas: copies of impressions
• Kant was alarmed by David Hume's notion
• If Hume's views proved true, then humans would never be able to achieve genuine knowledge in any area of experience: scientific, ethical, religious, or metaphysical, including questions such as the nature of our selves
• From Kant's standpoint


  It's our self that makes experiencing an intelligible world possible because it's the self that is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful whole
• Our minds


  Actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize the fragmented, fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs take in
• The unity of consciousness

  The fact that the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness—my consciousness
• What makes your world intelligible to you


  It's your self that is actively organizing all of your sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to you
• According to Kant


  This meaning-constructing activity is precisely what our minds are doing all of the time: taking the raw data of experience and actively synthesizing it into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live
• We each have


  Fundamental organizing rules or principles built into the architecture of our minds that naturally order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data
• We didn't have to "learn" these a priori ways of organizing and relating the world—they came as software already installed in our intellectual operating systems
• Freud's view of the self

  Multitiered, divided among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious
• Preconscious/Subconscious


  Contains all of the things that you could potentially pull into conscious awareness and acts as a gatekeeper between the conscious and unconscious
• Conscious


  Consists of everything inside of our awareness, including such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling, and fantasies inside of our current awareness