THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES

PHILOSOPHY

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 1000 BC to 500 AD

The Ancient Triumvirate - Socarates, Aristotle, Plato

Socrates -“Know thy self”

Man must live and stand according to his nature

Man must look at himself

“Nasa loob na raw natin ‘yung knowlede. It is burried within yourself.”

“An unexamined life is not worth living.”

Two fundamental questions:

To find what?

Invitation to introspection: Platonic Theory of Reminiscence

Knowledge is within, inherent in man; not outside

Wisdom is learning to reflect.

By what means?

Two methods: The Socratic Method: Dialogue between the soul and itself.

Student and his teacher - because teachers have more experiences than the
students.

Two Aspects of Reality

Physical world - Changeable, transient, imperfect. World of Senses/Matter

- Everything physical, you can see and you can touch.

Spiritual World - Unchanging, eternal, perfect. World of Ideas/Form.

Dualistic Reality of Body and Soul:

Soul - is the real self, unchanging, Quality of soul should be perfect.

-Your soul lives forever.

- Our life is like the test drive, because we will be having this soul forever.

- Strive for wisdom and perfection


- Reason is the soul’s tool to achieve such state

- A unified, indissoluble, immortal entity that remains the same over time

- That is in the very likeness of the divine

Body - is something that can be changed.

Plato - 3-Part Soul/Self (Psyche):

!Reason: the divine essence that lets us think deeply (wisdom), make wise choices, and achieve a true
understanding of eternal truths.

: is the part of yourself that thinks.

!Physical Appetite: accounts for the basic biological needs such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire

: Nagpu-push sa atin to get our biological needs.

!Spirit/Passion: accounts for the basic emotions such as love, anger, ambition, aggressiveness, and
empathy.

The three are in a dynamic relationship with each other: in agreement or in conflict, but it is the
responsibility of the Reason to restore harmony among the three

Harmony: justice in the individual, social, and political levels

Four Big Ideas:

1. Think More

We usually go along “DOXA” (Societal Thinking)


2. Let your lover change you

like marriages!

3. Decode the Message of Beauty

We find things beautiful where we see an attribute that we lack

4. Reform Society

We are here to make this a better world because our ancestors first did that for us.

Just because someyhing is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

Aristotle - The mind (self) is Tabula Rasa – a blank slate

The difference between a mind and a brain: brain is the physical manifestation, and
mind is the thoughts.

Brain - hardware - physical (touch)

Mind - software - spiritual (can’t touch)

- Self is composed of matter and form: Brain is the matter, mind is the form

- Matter is in a continuous process of developing becoming: Brain completely develops at 12

years old.

- The Process of Completion is through experiences

- Knowledge is acquired through the senses

 - Self comes from a First Cause, the source of all changes although unchangeable itself

First Cause means God, Aristotle did not allowed him to say God because logical deduction
does not allow him to say that something came from nothing.

- The goal of the human self is reached in happiness through moderation or balance of things.

Virtue theory - something becomes virtue when it is a balance of two extremes.

- Everything that is too much is bad.

- If you are on either end of the spectrum, you will be miserable.

Post Aristotelians - Maintains the dualism between body and soul

- More ethical in the ideas

- Moral norms: attainment of happiness

Stoicism - Apathy or indifference to pleasure

“Emphasizing that they are saying that emotions are the number one distractor of the
mind. When we indulge too much on our emotions we often decide incorrectly.”

Hedonism - “Eat, drink, and be happy. For tomorrow, you will die.”

“So focused on yourself. Your own happiness.”

Epicureanism - Moderate pleasure

“Actually under Hedonism but it has rationalization in the mix.”

Stoicism - Rather than imagining an “ideal society”, they try to deal the world “as it is”

Personal Improvement through 4 Cardinal Virtues:

1. Practical Wisdom

2. Temperance

3. Justice

4. Courage

Hedonism - They believe that pleasure is the only good in life, and pain is the only evil, and our life's
goal should be to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Epicureanism - emphasized the reduction of desire over the immediate acquisition of pleasure.

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 500 AD to 1350 AD

Theo-centric - From the scientific investigation on nature and search for happiness to the question of life and
salvation in another realm, in a better world (i.e., the afterlife)

Influence from ancient thought:


The (human) self endures through time

More imposing than informing, because it was trying to aim at paganism and barbarism

There was an aim to merge philosophy and religion (Christian, Jewish, Muslim)

St. Augustine - Integrates Platonic ideas with the tenets of Christianity.

- Platonic Realm of Idea = Christian Philosophy of a Transcendent God.

- The self strives to achieve union with God through faith and reason.

St. Thomas Aquinas - Self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us (objects in our
environment)

- We don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents
interacting with our environment.

- The labels we attribute to ourselves are taken from the things we encounter in our
environment.

Examples: Gardener, Artist, Kind, Loving

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”

- Experiencing that something exists doesn’t tell us what it is.

- Knowing and learning about a thing requires a long process of understanding; same with
the mind and the self – with experience and reason.

MODERN PHILOSOPHY 14th Century to the early 20th Century

- Genuine knowledge has to be based on independent rational inquiry and real world experimentation, rather
than dependent on knowledge handed down by authorities

Anthropocentric - Thinkers began to reject the scholastics’ (medieval thinkers) excessive reliance on authority

- Period of radical social, political and intellectual developments

Rene Descartes - “Cogito ergo sum”

- “I think, therefore, I am”


- Human identity: self-awareness

- The Self if a thinking thing which can exist independently of the body

John Locke - The self endures because of memory

- Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are the keys to understanding the self

David Hume - Impressions – basic sensations of experiences

- The self is a “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other in an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement”

Immanuel Kant - A priori concepts


- The self actively organizes all the sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to
each one of us

- Self as subject, not object

Sigmund Freud - Father of Psychoanalysis

The self is multi-tiered/multi-layered:

Conscious – refers to those thoughts and feelings that we are aware of

Preconscious – experiences that are unconscious but could become conscious with little effort

Unconscious – contains all drives, urges or instincts that are beyond our awareness but
motivate our feelings, thoughts and behavior.

Gilber Ryle - The self is defined in terms of behavior that is presented to the world

- The self is a pattern of behavior, the tendency or disposition for a person to behave in a certain way
in certain circumstances

Paul Churchland - Eliminative Materialism

- Grounded in neuroscience

- The mind/self is the brain

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY - late 19th Century

- Political Revolution

- Industrial Revolution

- Scientific advancements and growth of materialism

- Theory of Evolution

- More humanist as a response to the so-called alienation of the human person

Edmund Husserl - We experience our self as a unity which the in mental and physical are seamlessly woven
together

Maurice Merleau - Ponty - “Lived Body”


- An entity that can never be objectified or known in a completely objective sort
of way, as opposed to the “body as object” of the dualists.

- “There is no duality of substance but a dialectic of living being in its biological

milieu”