Understanding the Self

• Self


  • Something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops
  • Not a static thing that one is simply born with
• Everyone is tasked to discover one's self
• Self


  • Separate, self contained, consistent, unitary and private
  • Distinct from others
  • Unique and has its own identity
  • Self contained and independent
  • Traits, characteristics, tendencies and potentialities are more or less the same
  • Private, each person sorts out information, feelings and emotions, and thought processes within the self
• • Names are supposed to designate us in the world
  • We were taught to respond to them because our names represent who we are
  • A name is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only a signifier
• The self


  • Something else than the name
  • Something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops
  • Not a static thing that one is simply born with
• The self is not just assigned by one's parents
• The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of the self
• The Greeks attempted to understand reality and respond to perennial questions of curiosity, including the question of the self
• Pre-Socratics


  • Preoccupied with the question of the primary substratum, arché that explains the multiplicity of things in the world
  • 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
• The pre-Socratics were tired of simply conceding to mythological accounts propounded by poet-theologians like Homer and Hesiod
• Socrates


  • First philosopher engaged in a systematic questioning about the self
  • Life-long mission, to know oneself
  • The unexamined life is not worth living
  • Engaging men to question their presuppositions about themselves and about the world, particularly about who they are
• Socrates's view of the self


  Dualistic: composed of 2 aspects - body (imperfect, impermanent) and soul (perfect and permanent)
• Plato's view of the self


  • 3 components of the soul: rational soul, spirited soul, appetitive soul
  • Justice in the human person can only be attained if 3 parts of the soul are working harmoniously
• Rational soul


  Reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of the human person
• Spirited soul


  Emotions should be kept at bay
• Appetitive soul


  In charge of desires like eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex are controlled as well
• St. Augustine's view of the self


  • 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, the other is capable of reaching immortality
  • Body is bound to die on earth and can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world
  • Soul can anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God
• Thomas Aquinas's view of the self


  Man is composed of 2 parts: Matter or hyle (common stuff that makes up everything in the universe), and Form or morphe (the essence of a substance or thing. It is what makes it what it is)
• Rene Descartes's view of the self


  • The self is a combination of 2 distinct entities: Cogito (the thing that thinks, which is the mind) and Extenza (the extension of the mind, which is the body)
  • Body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind
  • Mind is what makes a human person a man
• David Hume's view of the self


  • The self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions
  • Impressions are basic objects of our experience or sensation and form the core of our thoughts
  • Ideas are copies of impressions and are not as lively and vivid as our impressions
  • Self is simply "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's view of the self


  • There is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions
  • Time and space are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but are built in our minds
  • The self is the seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons
• Gilbert Ryle's view of the self


  The 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's view of the self


  • The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another
  • One's body is his opening toward his existence to the world