GE Psy1a

UNDERSTANDING
THE SELF

LEARNING MODULE
SY 2021 - 2022

Week 1

Unit 1: Defining the Self: Personal and Developmental

Perspective on Self and Identity
Topic: The Self from Various Philosophical Perspective

Learning Outcomes:
1. Identify the different philosopher and how they conceived
the Self.
2. Explain why it is essential to understand the self.
3. Compare and contrast how the self has been represented in
different philosophical schools;
4. Examine one’s self against the different views of self
that mention.

Concept Digest

The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who

inquired into the fundamental nature of 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 ones who seriously question myths and moved
away from them in attempting to understand
reality and respond to perennial question
of curiosity, including the question of the
self. The different perspective and views
on the self can be best seen and understood
by revisiting its prime movers and identify
the most important conjectures made by the
philosophers from the ancient times to the
contemporary period.

Socrates and Plato

Prior the Socrates, the Greek thinkers, sometimes collectively

called the Pre-Socratics to denote that some of them preceded
Socrates while others existed around Socrates’s time as well,
preoccupied themselves with the question of the primary
substratum, arche that 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 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 and
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’ form all across the ancient Greek

world who were disturbed by the same issue, a man came out to
question something else. This man 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, and this has become his life-long mission, the true
task of the philosopher is to know oneself.

For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This

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

Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master

and supported the idea that man is dual nature of the body and
soul. In addition to what Socrates earlier espoused, Plato
added that there are three components of the soul: The rational
soul, spirited soul, and the Appetitive
soul. Plato emphasis that
Justice in the human person can only be
attained if the three parts of the soul
are working harmoniously with one
another.

Augustine and Thomas Aquinas

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
living in a realm of his spiritual bliss in
communion with God. This is because the body
can only thrive in the imperfect, physical
reality 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 thirteen century scholar and
stalwart of the medieval philosophy appended something to this
Christian view. Adapting some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas
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 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 and not a dog, or a tiger is
his soul, his essence. To Aquinas, just in Aristotle, the soul
is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.

Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the

human person a 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 say that since much of what
we think and believe are not infallible,
they may turn out to be false. One
should only believe that since which can
pass the test of doubt
(Descartes 2008). Descartes thought that
only thing that one cannot doubt is the
existence of the self, for even if one
doubts oneself 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 exist.

The self for Descartes is also a combination of two distinct

entities, which is mind, and the extenza or extension of the
mind, which is the body. Descartes’s says, “But what then, am
I? A thinking thing. It has been said, “But what is thinking
thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands (conceives),
affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and
perceives” (Descartes 2008).
David Hume

David Hume, Scottish philosopher, has a very unique way of

looking at a man. As an empiricist who
believes that no one know what comes from
the senses and experiences, Hume argues
that the self is nothing like what is his
predecessors thought it. Empiricism is the
school of thought that espouse the idea
that knowledge can only be possible if it
sensed and experiences. Men can only attain
knowledge by experiencing. For example,
Jack knows that Jill is another human
person not because he has seen her soul.
He know she is just like him because he
sees her, hears her, and touch her.

To David Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of

impressions. What are impressions? For David Hume, if one tries
to examine his experience, he finds that they can call all be
categorized into two: impressions and ideas. Impression are the
basic object 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. Impression therefore are
vivid because they are product of our direct experience with
the world, on the other hand, are copies of impressions.
Because of this, they are not as lively and vivid as our
impression. When one imagines the feeling of being in love for
the first time, that still is an idea.

What is 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 perpetual
flux ad movement” (Hume and Steinberg 1992).

Immanuel Kant

Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impression was

problematic for Immanuel Kant. Kant recognize 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 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, nut is built in our minds. Kant
calls these 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 suggest that it is an 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

Gilbert 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 behavior that a person
manifest in his day to day life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle

Merleau-Ponty

Merleau Ponty is a phenomenologist 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 so intertwined
that they cannot be separated from one
another. One cannot find any experience is
embodied experience. All experience is
embodied. One’s body is his opening toward
his existence to 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 alone.