Module 1

VAED 2 (UDSELF)
Title: The Self from various Philosophical Perspectives

I.INTRODUCTION

Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, among the many things that we
were first taught as kids is to articulate and write our names. Growing up, we were told to refer
back to this name when talking back to our selves. Our parents painstakingly thought about our
names. Should we be named after a famous celebrity, a respected politician or historical
personality, or even a saint? Were you named after one? Our names represent who we are. It
has not been a custom to just randomly pick a combination of letters and number like zhjk756!!
To denote our being. Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies
because names are supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with
names such as “precious,” “beauty,” or “lovely,”. Likewise, when our parents call our names,
we were taught to respond to t hem because our names represent who we are. As a student,
we are told to always write our names on papers, projects, or any output for that matter. Our
names signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the person and her name. Names
are inscribed even into one’s gravestone.

A name is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only a
signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probably will not become an actual saint.
He may not even turn out to be saintly! The self is thought to be something that a person
perennially molds, shapes, and develops. The self is not a static thing that one is simply born
with like a mole on one’s face or is just assigned by one’s parents just like a name. Everyone is
tasked to discover one’s self.

II. LESSON

The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental
nature of the self. Along with the question of the primary substratum that defines the
multiplicity of things in the world, the inquiry on the self has preoccupied the earliest thinkers
in the history of philosophy: the Greeks. The Greeks were the one’s who seriously questioned
myths and moved away from them in attempting to understand reality and respond to
perennial questions of curiosity, including the question of the self. The different perspectives
and views on the self can best be seen and understood by revisiting its prime movers and
identify the most important conjectures made by philosophers from the ancient times to the
contemporary world.

A. SOCRATES AND PLATO

Prior to Socrates, the Greek thinkers, sometimes collectively called the Pre-Socratics to denote
that some of them preceded Socrates while others existed around Socrates’ time as well,
preoccupied themselves with the question of the primary substratum, arche, which explains
the multiplicity of things in the world. These men like Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Heraclitus, and Empedocles, to name a few, were 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. Tired of simply conceding to mythological accounts propounded by poet-
theologians like Homer and Hesiod, these men endeavored to finally locate an explanation
about the nature of change, the seeming permanence despite change, and the unity of the
world amidst its diversity.

After a series of thinkers from all across the ancient Greek world who were disturbed by the
same issue, a man came out to question something else. This was Socrates. Unlike the pre-
Socratics, Socrates was more concerned with another subject, the problem of the self. He was
the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self. To Socrates,
this has become his lifelong mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know about the self.

Plato calimed in his “Dialogues” that Socrates affirmed that the unexamined life is not worth
living. During his trial for allegedly corrupting the minds of the youth and for impiety, Socrates
declared without regret that his being indicted was brought about by his going around Athens
engaging men, young and old, to question their presumptions about themselves and about the
world, particularly about who they are (Plato, 2012). Socrates took it upon himself to serve as a
“gadfly” that disturbed Athenian men from their slumber and shook them off in order to reach
the truth and wisdom. Most men, in his reckoning, were really not fully aware of who they were
and the virtues that they were supposed to attain in order to preserve their souls for the
afterlife. Socrates thought this this was the worst than can happen to anyone; to live but die
inside.

For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every human person is
dualistic, that is, he is composed of two important aspects of his personhood. For Socrates, this
means all individuals have an imperfect, permanent aspect to him, and the body. While
maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent.

Plato, Socrates’ student, basically took off from his master and supported the idea that man is a
dual nature of body and soul. In addition to what Socrates earlier espoused, Plato added that
there are three components of the soul: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive
soul. In his magnum opus, “The Republic” (Plato,2000), Plato emphasizes that justice in the
human person can only be attained if the three parts of the soul are working harmoniously
with one another. The rational soul, forged by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of
the human person, the spirited part which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay, and
the appetitive soul in charge in charge of base desires like eating, drinking, sleeping, and having
sex are controlled as well. When this ideal state is attained, then the human person’s soul
becomes just and virtuous.
Augustine and Thomas Acquinas

Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it
comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine
of Christianity, Augustine agreed that 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 and the other is
capable of reaching immortality.

The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of
spiritual bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect,
physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm
with the all-transcendent God. The goal of every human person is to attain this communion
and bliss with the Divine by living his life on earth in virtue.

Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of medieval
philosophy, appended something to this Christian view. Adapting some ideas from Aristotle,
Acquinas said that indeed, man is composed of two parts: matter and form. Matter, or “hyle” in
Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.” Man’s body is
part of this matter. Form on the other hand, or “morphe” in Greek refers to the “essence” of a
substance or thing. It is what makes it what it is. In the case of the human person, the body of
the human person is something that he shares even with animals. The cells in man’s body are
more or less akin to the cells of any other living, organic being in the world. However, what
makes a human person a human person and not a dog, or a tiger is his soul, his essence. To
Aquinas, just as in Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.

Descartes

Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the human person as having a body
and a mind. In his famous treatise, The Meditations of First Philosophy, he claims that there is
so much that we should doubt. In fact, he says that since much of what we think and believe
are not infallible, they turn out to be false. One should only believe that since which can pass
the test of doubt (Descartes, 2008). If something is so clear and lucid as not to be even
doubted, then that is the only time when one should actually buy a proposition. In the end,
Descartes thought that the only thing that cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for even if
one doubts himself, that only proves that there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and
therefore, that cannot be doubted. Thus, his famous, cogito ergo sum, “ I think therefore I am.”
The fact that one thinks should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he exists.
The self then for Descartes is also a combination of two distinct entities, the cogito, the thing
that thinks, which is the mind, and the extenza or extension of the mind, which is the body. In
Descartes’s view, the body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind.Descartes
says, “But what then, am I? A thinking thinking thing. It has been said. But what is a thinking
thing? I t is a thing that doubts, understands (conceives), affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that
imagines also, and perceives” (Descartes, 2008).
Hume

David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, has a very unique way of looking at man. An empiricist
who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and experiences, Hume
argues that the self is nothing like what his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an entity
over an beyond the physical body. One can rightly see here the empiricism that runs through
his veins. Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only
be possible if it sensed and experienced. Man can only attain knowledge by experiencing. For
example, Jack knows that Jill is another human person not because he has seen her soul. He
knows that she is just like him because he sees her, hears her, and touches her.

To David Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions. What are impressions. For
Hume, if one tries to examine his experiences, he finds that they can all be categorized into
two: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the basic objects of our experience or sensation.
They, therefore form the core of our thoughts. When one touches an ice cube, the cold
sensation is an impression. Impressions therefore are vivid because they are products of direct
experience with the world. Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions. Because of this,
they are not as lively and vivid as our impressions. When one imagines the feeling of being in
love for the first time, that is still an idea.

What is the self then? Self, according to Hume, 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.” (Hume and Steinberg, 1992). men simply want to believe that there is a
unified, coherent self, a soul or mind just like what the previous philosophers thought. In
reality, what one thinks is a unified self simply a combination of all experiences with a particular
person.

Kant

Thinking of the “self” as mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant.
Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and
sensation of impressions. However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them
are not just randomly infused into the human person without an organizing principle that
regulates the relationship of all these impressions. To Kant, there is necessarily a mind that
organizes the impressions that men get from the external world. Time and space, for example,
are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but is built in our minds. Kant calls these the
apparatuses of the mind.

Along with the different apparatuses of the mind goes the ‘self”. Without the self, one cannot
organize the different impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence. Kant therefore
suggests that it is actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and
experience. Thus, the self is not just what gives one his personality. In addition, it is also the
seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons.
Ryle

Gilbert Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy that has been running for a long time in the
history of thought by blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self. For Ryle,
what truly matters is the behaviour that a person manifests in his day to day life.

For Ryle, looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exists is like visiting your friend’s
university and looking for the “university”. One can roam around the campus, visit the library
and the football field, and meet the administrators and faculty and still end up not finding the
“university”. This is because the campus, the people, the systems, and territory all from the
university, Ryle suggests that 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

Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has
been going on for a long time is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem. Unlike Ryle who
simply denies the “self”, Merleau-Ponty instead says that the mind and body are son
intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.One cannot find any experience
that is not embodied experience. All experience is embodied. One’s body is his opening toward
his existence towards his world. Because of these bodies, men are in the world. Merleau-Ponty
dismisses the Cartesian Dualism that has spelled so much devastation in the history of man. For
him, the Cartesian problem is nothing else but plain misunderstanding. The living body, his
thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one.

Reference:

Alata, Eden Joy, et. Al. Understanding the Self.Manila: Rex Bookstore, 2018.