Name: Franzelle B.

Jaicten
Subject: Understanding the Self
Section: GEC101 A3-2

“I think, therefore I am” this is the quote of Rene Descartes which amazed me and think of many
realizations and perception. Because it is impossible to doubt the existence of your own thoughts,
because in the act of doubting, you are thinking. Mind is everything I believe it intersects every aspects
of our lives and soul
Know Thyself?
• The concept and nature of the “self” has been an ongoing, and evolving, subject of inquiry
among philosophers since the time of Socrates. To grapple with the concept of self is to begin to explore
what it is to know, to believe, to think, to be conscious.
The Soul Is Immortal: Socrates and Plato
• For Socrates and Plato, the self was synonymous with the soul. Every human being, they
believed, possessed an immortal soul that survived the physical body.
• Plato further defines the soul or self as having three components: Reason, Physical Appetite,
and Spirit (or passion). These three components may work in concert, or in opposition.
Saint Augustine’s Synthesis of Plato and Christianity
• Augustine enthusiastically adopted Plato’s vision of a bifurcated universe in which “there are
two realms, an intelligible realm where truth itself dwells, and this sensible world which we perceive by
sight and touch.” In Augustine’s adapted Christian framework, Plato’s ultimate reality, the eternal realm
of the Forms, became a transcendent God. Plato’s life-long efforts to encourage people to “take care of
their souls” became for Augustine immortal souls striving to achieve union with God through faith and
reason.
• Reflecting his dualistic view of the “self,” Augustine viewed the physical body and the
nonphysical soul as two radically different entities with diverging fates: the body to die, the soul to live
eternally in a transcendent realm of spiritual bliss.
• Augustine anticipated Descartes’s core belief of cogito ergo sum with a remarkably similar
announcement of “I am doubting, therefore I am.”
Descartes’s Modern Perspective on the Self
• Early modern European philosophers, including René Descartes, expanded the concept of the
self to include the thinking, reasoning mind. For Descartes, the act of thinking about the self—of being
self-conscious—is in itself proof that there is a self. Descartes still demonstrates the powerful influence
of Platonic thought in his distinction between the physical body (which he believes is material, mortal,
and non-thinking) and an immortal, nonmaterial thinking self, governed by God’s will and the laws of
reason.
The Self Is Consciousness: Locke
• John Locke argued that consciousness—or, more specifically, self-consciousness—of our
constantly perceiving self is necessary to “personal identity,” or knowledge of the self as a person.
• Instead of positing that the self is immortal and separate from the body, Locke argues that our
personal identity and the immortal soul in which that identity is located are very different entities.
There Is No Self: Hume
• David Hume went radically further than Locke to speculate that there is no self or immortal soul
in the traditional sense. Our memories and experiences, Hume argued, are made up of impressions and
ideas with no one “constant and invariable,” unified identity. When we are not actively perceiving, or
conscious of ourselves perceiving, Hume notes, there is no basis for the belief that there is any self.
We Construct the Self: Kant
• If Hume’s view of the mind was a kind of passive “theatre” across which random experiences
flitted, Kant proposed an actively engaged and synthesizing intelligence that constructs knowledge
based on its experiences. This synthesizing faculty Kant’s version of the self transcends the senses and
unifies experience.
• In addition, Kant proposed a second self, the empirical self or ego, which consists of those traits
that make us each a unique personality.
The Self Is Multilayered: Freud
• Although Freud was not, strictly speaking, a philosopher, his views on the nature of the self
have had a far-reaching impact on many areas of study, including Philosophy. Freud’s view of the self
was multi-tiered, divided among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Although the conscious
self has an important role to lay in the “split-level functioning” of our lives, it is the unconscious and its
influence that hold the greatest fascination for Freud.
• In addition to the Topographical model of the mind, Freud later developed a Structural model
of the mind that divided it according to mental functions: the id, the ego, and the superego.
• Although the contents of the unconscious are protected from conscious awareness by psychic
defense systems and cannot be observed directly, we can nevertheless look for evidence of unconscious
functioning in areas such as dreams and neuroses.
The Self Is How You Behave: Ryle
• Gilbert Ryle solves the “mind/body problem” by simply denying the existence of an internal,
nonphysical self, and instead focus on the dimension of the self that we can observe—our behaviour.
• Ryle provides a devastating critique of Descartes’s dualism by characterizing it as “the ghost in
the machine” metaphysic that has infiltrated every area of our culture, a view that makes no conceptual
sense. Just as a visitor to a college might commit a “category mistake” by wanting to see “the college”
after viewing all of the parts of the college, so we make a category mistake when we seek to find a “self”
which is apart from all of the public behaviours of our selves.
• Many people believe that Ryle’s effort to reduce the rich complexity of human experience to a
compilation of observable behaviors is a much too limited view of the human self and the world we
inhabit.
The Self Is the Brain: Physicalism
• Materialism holds that the self is inseparable from the substance of the brain and the
physiology of the body. Contemporary advances in neurophysiology allow scientists to observe the living
brain as it works to process information, create ideas, and move through dream states. Philosopher Paul
Church land argues that a new, accurate, objective, and scientifically based understanding of our
“selves” will “contribute substantially toward a more peaceful and humane society.”
The Self Is Embodied Subjectivity: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty
• Phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty simply dismiss Cartesian
dualism as a product of philosophical misunderstanding. The living, physical body and its experiences are
all one, a natural synthesis, what Husserl and Merleau-Ponty called the Lebenswelt (a German word
meaning “lived world”).
Buddhist Concepts of the Self
• Buddhist doctrine holds that the notion of a permanent self that exists as a unified identity
through time is an illusion. For Buddhists, every aspect of life is impermanent and all elements of the
universe are in a continual process of change and transition, a process that also includes each self as
well.
• Accordingly, the self can best be thought of as a flame that is continually passed from candle to
candle, retaining a certain continuity but no real personal identity.
• According to Buddhist philosophy, the self is composed of five aggregates: physical form,
sensation, conceptualization, dispositions to act, and consciousness.