1|Page

Philosophical Accounts of the Nature of the Self in the context of Human

Development

This short paper will attempt to give a brief overview of what some of the

major philosophers have to say on the concept of self. Obviously, it lays no

claim to exhaustiveness, and will be, of necessity, selective and personal. It

is written against a background more in personal or human development

rather than philosophy qua philosophy. Hence, philosophers will find it

somewhat lacking in detail and learned nuance. It seeks to elaborate and

elucidate such philosophical concepts so as to provide a foundation for

further reflections in that more generic and interdisciplinary area of study

called human development.

Self-Mastery

According to Taylor, the modern western conception of self, with its

emphasis on individualism and authenticity, can, along one tributary, be

traced back to Plato’s conception of self as being all about “self-collection” or

“self-mastery.” This early Greek philosopher substituted “reason and

reflection” for the “action and glory” particular to the previously widely

accepted ethic of the warrior citizen. He believed that we humans could only

stand up to the distractions and corruptions of our senses through our “self-

mastery,” and this we deployed through the use of our reason. 1 If the root

of evil and chaos was to be found in base human desires, then the solution

was to found in correctly ordering the self towards the Truth or the Good as

depicted in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Here our Greek philosopher’s

1
See Taylor (2010), p. 116 ff.
2|Page

concern is with a type of inwardness that is such only insofar as it is

oriented to the light or truth beyond the individual. To this extent the self is

very much a teleological reality for Plato, being drawn forward towards its

goal in the Truth or the Good.

The Interior Self

The second major influential thinker in the history of early philosophy is

St Augustine of Hippo. Indeed, Augustine was at one with Plato that the

major flaw in humanity was its tendency to be distracted by the pleasures,

base desires and cares of the human condition. Augustine borrowed much

from both Plato and the Neo-Platonists to give expression to his Christian

theology.2 However, he goes much further than Plato insofar as his

conception of God is not just an ultimate or transcendent external Truth or

Good to which our souls need to be oriented but rather very much an

immanent internal ground 3 of our very being: in other words God could be

found deep within one’s own self. 4 Or, to put this in spatial terms: the

journey to God is inward and thence upward. Van Bavel states that in

2 It is easy indeed to see why this philosophy lends itself so easily as an underpinning of
Christian theology. In this very sentence we are footnoting, we could read “original sin” or
“sin” as substitutes for “base desires,” “soul” for “self,” “salvation” for “solution,” “God” for
“the Good” and so on. Taylor observes in Augustine a basically Platonic thrust with “things
below” finding their ultimate telos through correspondence with “things above.”
3 “Immanence” is a theological or metaphysical term that refers to the divine presence in the

human or material world. It is an opposite term, therefore, to that of the “transcendence” or

“beyondness” of God.
4 “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new... You were within

me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself... You were
with me, but I was not with you...” Confessions, Book X, chapter 27, see Pine-Coffin, R.S.
(ed.) (1979), p. 231.
3|Page

Augustine’s monastic rule the “way of interiorization is repeatedly applied”

on the journey to God. 5

What we have here in the above two points is a concept of self that is at

once teleological and theological, namely that it is an entity which is being

drawn onwards beyond itself by a transcendent ground and that

mysteriously this ground can also be plumbed immanently by journeying

within. Likewise this notion of self is essentially ontological, deeply related

to the nature of being and to the ground of that being.

The Unanchored or Disconnected Self

And yet we are very much aware of both the eclipse and erosion (not to

mention the actual denial) of the reality of self over the past several hundred

years. Such a reification of the self, or de-spiritualisation of the soul, can

doubtlessly be traced back to the cognitive explorations of René Descartes

(1596 –1650). The self was now not to be understood ontologically or

theologically, but most clearly and distinctly in a mechanistic way. We no

longer found ourselves in a world where we were anchored or rooted in

meaning. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes such a world

as being “disenchanted.”6 The self, then, in this scheme of things is

unanchored as it is reduced to the parameters of a mind within which

5 Van Bavel (1984), p. 7. See also Confessions, Book X, chapter 27, see Pine-Coffin, R.S.
(ed.) (1979), p. 231.
5 Van Bavel (1984), p. 7
6 Taylor (2007) describes his understanding of ‘disenchantment’, a term that he traces

back to Weber, as the belief in ‘the disappearance of a world [of spirits, demons and moral
forces], and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of
thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are
those of human beings; and minds are bounded, so that those thoughts, feelings, etc., are
situated “within” them.’ See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of the University of Harvard, 2007), pp. 29-30.
4|Page

thoughts rattle around rather mechanistically. Both Plato and Augustine

had been united in their view that human life depended on external ‘moral

sources’ as well as interior motivations. Now there were no such external

‘moral sources’ as all meaning was immediately and firmly located within

the parameters of the mind or its cognition which provides us with the only

certainty that we exist at all – the famous “cogito ergo sum.” However, this

notion of a separate, rather disembodied mind, or as Gilbert Ryle famously

described it as the "ghost in the machine,” 7 has long been a source of the

mind-body dualism which has persisted down the centuries. We are heirs to

the absurdity of dualist systems like Descartes' where mental activity

seemingly carries on in parallel to physical action, but where their means of

interaction are unknown or, at best, speculative.8 Essentially, this mind-

body dualism, as we have seen, is the cause of what Rollo May describes as

the disconnection of the self from the body. Further, according to Taylor

this resulted in “a mechanistic universe of matter which is most

emphatically not a medium of thought or meaning, [a universe] which is

expressively dead.” 9

7This book, The Concept of Mind (2000) which Ryle wrote when he was only 29, attacks the
traditional metaphysical view of dualism of mind and body, a concept, he believes, that
merits “deliberate abusiveness.” The quotation in the text comes from p. 17.
8 Descartes speculated that the mind and body interacted in the pineal gland.
9 Taylor (2010), p. 148.
5|Page

The Self as Continuous and Conscious 10

We may argue that the simple self is continuous over the history of the

individual’s lifetime. The unborn child I was in my mother’s womb, the little

toddler, young boy, teenager and adult I later became are all indeed the one

“me” or the self that I am. We may ask ourselves the question as to what

then was conserved in me over my history. The traditional answer to this

question was the soul (the answer of major religions) or self

(psychology/spirituality). One can notice the same phenomenon of

continuity at work in all of nature, for example, the acorn grows into the

young sapling which eventually matures into a fine oak tree. In a

commentary on John Locke’s (1632-1704) insight into soul or self,

Blackburn mentions that this empirical philosopher saw that

“organisational or functional unity” was its predominant characteristic. 11

Further, Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of

consciousness – it is "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance,

made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it

matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of

happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that

consciousness extends." 12 In other words, we may say that the same

consciousness inhabited my “self” at four as it does now at fifty-six years of

10 The point about whether identity is continuous over time is exceedingly important. For
example, is one of the female jailers at Bergen-Belsen, Hilde Lisiewicz, who is still alive as I
write this note, the same evil jailer who inflicted much torture (and arguably much death)
on the inmates in that infamous concentration camp? In other words, is she the same
person as the nonagenarian Catholic grandmother of today who shares the same name and
the same passport identity? If so, should she be tried now after all these years for war
crimes? See this link for a wonderful TV documentary made by survivor Tomi Reichental:
http://www.thejournal.ie/tomi-reichental-close-to-evil-1644454-Sep2014.
11 Blackburn (2001), p. 125
12 Ibid., p. 125
6|Page

age. Locke postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa.

Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are

born without innate ideas and that knowledge is instead determined only by

experience derived from sense perception. We consequently go on to make

or form the self through all our lived experiences over our lifetime. This

Lockean self is, therefore, a self-aware and self-reflective consciousness

which, while firmly fixed in a body, is without extension. It becomes also,

what Taylor calls merely “a punctual self” that can be set like a clock in a

mechanistic way and it gains control of its environment through

“disengagement” which always leads to “objectification.” In this way we can

see that the drive to “inwardness” is gradually un-anchoring, disconnecting

and disenchanting the self more and more from centres of meaning outside

itself. 13

The Simple versus the Composite Self

Blackburn refers to an interesting debate between two other Scottish

philosophers, David Hume (1711 – 1776) and his contemporary, Thomas

Reid (1710-1796) with respect to the concept of self. 14 The former, being a

strict empiricist, looked upon the self as “a bundle of perceptions” and very

much saw it as an elusive phenomenon that is simply unobservable.

Thomas Reid argued strongly against this composite or bundle view of the

self and stated intuitively and clearly in a matter-of-fact way that the self is

clearly simple and unified. Blackburn quotes Reid as stating that “a part of

13 Taylor (2010), p. 160.

14 Blackburn (2001), pp. 122-123
7|Page

a person is manifestly absurd.” 15 In other words, if I lose a leg through

some misadventure, I am still the same person – the unity of the “I” which

centres me as one substantial entity or self is in no way diminished. I may

even be tortured, with parts of me cut away, but I am still the “simple” and

complete unity known as “I” or “me” or “Tim Quinlan.” In short, Reid argued

that the “I” or self simply cannot be cut up. This intuitively obvious fact

eluded even the great philosophical mind of David Hume. For Christian

believers like Reid, this argument about the simplicity of the self or soul

leaves the way open for the traditional Christian belief of immortality. Only

composite things can decay never simple things, because simple things

always remain intact.

For Hume there is no mind or self. The perceptions that one has – and

that is all the self is, a bundle of such perceptions – are only active when

one is conscious. “When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by

sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to

exist.”16 Hume, here, appears to be reducing personality and cognition to a

machine that may be turned on and off. Finally, death brings with it the

annihilation of all the perceptions one has. He also argues that our passions

are the determinants of our behaviour. Here, he appears to be prefiguring

behaviourism insofar as he believes that humans learn in the same manner

as lower animals, that is, through reward and punishment. In behaviourism

15 Ibid., p. 123
16 Quoted Flew (1989) p.259
8|Page

and cognitive behaviour therapy, there is no need for any elaborate theory of

the self as such is deemed unnecessary and indeed redundant.17

One could argue very plausibly indeed that Carl Rogers was following in

the rather practical and matter-of-fact or commonsensical understanding of

self that Thomas Reid argued for above in opposition to the rather sceptical

position of the empiricist philosophy of Hume. Thorne18 reports that early in

his career Carl Rogers had been somewhat doubtful as to whether such an

entity as the “self” existed at all in psychology. However, he subjected that

youthful hypothesis to the test in clinical trials and came very soon to

believe that the self is very real indeed and is a most significant element in

any client’s experience. All clients, he found, spoke in terms of the “self” in

questions and statements such as: “I wonder who I really am?” and “I feel I

am not being true to my real self,” among many others. And quite often

their experience of “self” could be perplexing, distressing or even anguished

as it was in the case of this present author. That the self was very real was

now a clinical given for Rogers and that its healthy expression was the goal

of all psychotherapy was beyond doubt despite the protests of some few

reductionist scientists.

17 Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) provides any therapist with a very important set of
skills for tackling problems like anxiety disorders, which include a wide array of phobias
and panic disorder, and certain types of depression, eating disorders and post-traumatic
stress disorder among others, all of which, the experts argue, are based on irrational
thinking. Change the irrational thinking, they contend, and you’ll change the irrational
behaviour. However, it is not deep enough to deal with identity crises, alienation, suicidal
tendencies and other major life-meaning crises and issues which require a much deeper
philosophy of self and appropriate listening skills. Most therapists will consequently use a
broad set of skills drawn from all the various areas of therapy: humanist, existential,
psychodynamic, gestalt and CBT.
18 Thorne (2002), p. 28.
9|Page

The Rise of Scientism and the Eclipse of Self

I use the term “scientism” purposely here as distinct from science to refer

to the belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and

approach to all phenomena, including the human person, without

exception. It found fertile soil for its self-defence in both the Cartesian

method and in the empiricism described so clearly and advocated so

forcefully by both Locke and Hume. Scientism, as opposed to science which

is more open to questioning its own presuppositions and axioms, insists

that it alone possesses the most authoritative worldview or the most

valuable approach to human meaning to the exclusion of all other

viewpoints. It was the rise of scientism, as distinct from the growth in

science per se that brought about what I term an eclipse of the phenomenon

of the self. 19

The classical age of materialism may be said to have begun with the

eighteenth century, when the philosopher-physician Julien de la Mettrie

(1709-51) wrote his famous book L'homme machine ("Machine man"),

wherein he rejected the Cartesian dualism of mind and body we have

described above, and proposed the rather simple reductive and seductive

metaphor of the human person as a machine. Another famous work of this

period is the Système de la nature of Baron Holbach (1723-89). According to

this work there exists nothing but nature, and all beings, which are

supposed to be beyond nature, are simple figments of the imagination. In

this materialist scheme of things, nothing spiritual at all exists, and man is

19Obviously it also brought about a denial and eclipse of the religious idea of the soul
which mirrors the psychological reality of the self.
10 | P a g e

very much part of that nature. Being solely part of nature is described in

philosophy as “naturalism,” that is, the belief that what is studied both by

the pure sciences and the human sciences comprises all there exists. It also

rules out the need for any explanation of things that go beyond natural

causes to supernatural ones. Darwinism is a good example here, which

underscores the fact that the evolution of humankind, and of all other living

organisms, took place without any divine intervention. One can, of course,

rule out supernatural intervention without ruling out cultural, spiritual and

moral influences. However, naturalism can become very restrictive and can

become synonymous with a reductionism 20 which rules out any deeper

understanding of the human emotions and motivations, of values and

standards, cultural and moral: in short it rules out any mention of

“horizons” or “frameworks” as outlined in the writings of, for example,

Charles Taylor. Such reductionism has led to the actual denial of the self at

all as a real phenomenon. In this regard, the current writer was both drawn

to and a little unnerved at the naive and somewhat arrogant certainty of the

title of a recent book, written by a scholar and scientist, which runs: The

Self Illusion: Why there is no “you” inside your head.21 This book lies firmly

in the tradition of scientism.

20 When naturalism becomes a reductionism which rules out the pursuit of the good, of any
higher moral principles, it becomes essentially soul-destroying or self-destroying because
there is no longer any engagement of the reason with cultural values, horizons or
frameworks. It would suggest that we are moved by mere desire only.
21 Hood, B (2012), London, Constable. Hood is a professor of cognitive development at the

University of Bristol. His book is an interesting and provocative read, but its style is
preachy and smacks of scientism and biologism as he talks assuredly of “the cognitive
illusions that create the self” (p.207). It would seem to me that for him the mind could be
equated with the brain. It is also hard to see how Hood’s theory would stack up at a
human or personal level, for example, as sufficiently complete and real to engage with a
person in a human or existential crisis.
11 | P a g e

Such narrowness of perspective as delineated above rules out the rather

commonsense approach of the man and woman in the street and of the

actual clinical findings of the three schools of psychotherapy discussed in

our first three chapters where clients come to the therapist with a fractured

sense of self, actively seeking help in healing that fracture so as to find,

heal, make whole, be true to their elusive, but really deeply felt sense of self.

To be told that the “self” does not really exist is nothing short of meaningless

in a therapeutic situation and would be nothing but a clear denial of the

existential and phenomenological situation encountered by both client and

therapist – not to mention its being a total undermining of the individual’s

need for self-assurance.

Self as Subject

There are perhaps no two greater contrasting models of self, historically,

than those of David Hume (1711 – 1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).

In response to Hume’s model of self as a “bundle of perceptions,” which are

fleeting like images flashing before us on a screen, Kant proposed a self that

is a subject who is actively manipulating data (that is, s/he is an agent who

is in no sense passive) through acts of synthesis. While Brook’s learned

summary of Kant’s philosophy of the mind and consciousness of self 22 is

beyond the scope of this short essay, suffice it to say that overall a strong

case remains for Kant’s use of the synthesizing power of the faculties in the

mind for unifying objects, representations, experience, and consciousness

22Brook, A. (2004) Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self. Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/kant-
mind , accessed, 12/11/2013
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into a coherent reference to the self. This, undoubtedly, has had

considerable influence on present day cognitive psychology.

Self as Moral Agent

However, to turn to the concept of self as moral agent, one of the

quotations from Kant which always inspired this present author was one

which appeared on his tombstone and concluded his Critique of Practical

Reason (1788) runs thus: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and

increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon

them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”23 The

first part of this quotation anchored the self very much in the physical world

while the second, he goes on to argue, deals with his “invisible self,” the very

moral centre of his personality and this opens him up to “a world that has

true infinity, but which can only be detected through the understanding.” It

is to this notion of the self as moral agent that we now turn our attention in

more detail.

Taylor argues that any account of human selfhood that fails to take

account of moral subjectivity, or what traditionally we termed the moral call

in theology, is deeply flawed.24 Calhoun sums up Taylor’s position

succinctly: “Taylor's claim is not that the self - the person, identity - is prior

to morality, but rather that it is constituted in and through the taking of

moral stances. This idea runs counter to the predominant accounts in the

23 The quotation and its context is available on-line here: The Cambridge Companion to Kant

and Modern Philosophy at http://cco.cambridge.org/extract?id=ccol052182303x

CCOL052182303XA001, accessed 20/11/14
24 See Taylor (2010), p. 42, passim.
13 | P a g e

philosophical literature.” 25 This is the very heart of the matter for Taylor

and, indeed, Calhoun. By taking our moral stance in life we constitute our

very self.26

What strikes this writer is that the moral call is a call to be as well as to

do. Not alone are we called to do good, but we are also called to be good. In

that sense we are firmly rooted in a nexus of values which are calling us

towards the good, or drawing us forward as if to the magnetic north. We are

moved deeply by what we believe to be the good. Glover calls this nexus of

values our “moral identity.” 27 And that moral identity is not just something

I create myself. Rather it was something I was born into, something greater

than me, something beyond me, yet embracing me, constantly drawing me

on. Because this is such a complex issue, the reader will see that our

language is straining at its very joints to come up with appropriate

metaphors. This “moral identity” is captured in a wonderful quotation from

Brian Keenan quoted in Glover:

As my anger diminished I felt a new and tremendous

kind of strength flooding me.... The more I was beaten
the stronger I seemed to become... To take what violence
they meted out to me and stand and resist and not allow
myself to be humiliated. In that resistance I would
humiliate them. There was a part of me they could never
bind nor abuse nor take from me. There was a sense of
self greater than me alone which came and filled me in
my darkest hours. 28

The phrase that jumps out at this writer is “a sense of self greater than

me alone” and it is one which sums up for me what the “moral call” or more

25 Calhoun (1991), p. 233.

26 “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame
or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable,
or what ought to be done.” (Taylor 2010) p. 44
27 Glover (2001) p. 26.
28 Ibid., pp. 26-27
14 | P a g e

precisely what our “moral identity” may be. In short, the tenor here is at

one with Taylor (2010, p. 28) that the self is very much embedded by its very

nature in what he describes as a “moral space.”29 He puts it succinctly

thus:

What this brings to light is the essential link between

identity and a kind of orientation. To know who you are
is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which
questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth
doing and what not...

Taylor believes that his choice of a spatial metaphor here – that is our

being “oriented” – is no simple personal preference, but rather is one deeply

rooted in our nature. Take, for example, he argues, the opposite case of

where people become uncertain about where they stand, this often spills

over “into a loss of grip on one’s stance in physical space.” He is arguing

that, if we truly reflect upon our situation as human beings, we will realise

that we are naturally oriented by given “frameworks” and are drawn to

certain “goods” and “hypergoods,” and that not to be so oriented means that

we are very much off course, or even mentally or physically ill.

Taylor's starting point, then, is the idea that we all act within moral

frameworks which enable us to make qualitative distinctions among goods.

Adhering to the good of universal respect for all human beings, for example,

is much different from preferring to eat healthy food or to go to the gym twice

weekly. Commitment to certain "higher," or more basic, goods provides us

with the capacity to locate ourselves within a given horizon (the spatial

29 Taylor (2010) p. 28.

15 | P a g e

metaphor again), to establish an identity, and to determine the significance

of various events or things for us. Such "hypergoods" or "constitutive goods,"

30 as he also calls them, may not be the same for everyone, but every one of

us must have some. Hypergoods, then, enable us to constitute frameworks of

"strong evaluations" by which we can negotiate our path through life in a

way that is both authentic and moral.

Taylor’s stress on the link between our ethical evaluation of a situation

and our essential human identity, then, allows us to understand the

connection between who we are and our real core values. In other words,

having an identity at all necessarily involves following a course of values in

the world, and, vice versa, committing ourselves to a set of values also

entails our adoption of a particular identity. Someone once remarked to this

writer as regards strongly held personal values and concerns: “If you have

nothing to stand for, you will fall for anything.” Now, taking a stand or

following one’s core values always requires courage, and this leads us nicely

on to discuss how this virtue may be inextricably linked with any notion of

an authentic self.

In summary, then, this brief philosophical survey of the main strands in

the history of the philosophy of self has shown us that this subject is a

complex one that certainly cannot be dismissed cavalierly by any narrow

reductionism or naive scientism. It has convinced us that its

mysteriousness lies in both its potentialities and its very complexity or

multiplicity of connections. Selfhood involves such overlapping concepts as

30 Ibid., pp. 63, 93

16 | P a g e

self-mastery, interiority, connectedness, enchantment, creativity,

consciousness, continuity, simplicity, subjectivity, moral agency and a sense

of values. Most essentially, we learn from this short philosophical survey

that it is at our peril that we either deny the existence of the self against all

commonsensical evidence or attempt to reduce its comprehensiveness and

sheer uniqueness by bare and brittle scientific descriptors.

17 | P a g e

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