UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

The three-unit course on Understanding the

Self is included in the revised General
Education component of the curricula for all
college programs, including teacher
education, offered i all higher education
institutions in the Philippines in accordance
with CHED Memorandum Order (CMO) No. 20,
series of 2013, otherwise known as the
“General Education Curriculum: Holistic
Understandings, Intellectual and Civic
Competencies”.
UNDERSTANDING THE SELF
As the course title suggests, it is
meant to help the College students
arrive at a holistic understanding of
himself/herself in order to live life
more meaningfully as a student and
a member of society.
The SELF is the foundation of human
behavior. It is the totality of our
personal identity as unique individual. It
is an agent that has a body and mind
that are responsible for the thoughts
and actions of human being.
WEEK 1
THE PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF SELF
The Self from Various Perspectives of Different
Philosophers
The Self According to Ancient Philosophers
SOCRATES (496-399 B.C.)
Socrates was a great
Greek philosopher during
his times that influenced
different theories in the
Western world like Plato.
His “Socratic methods” became prominent in
Western. He spent his days walking in Athen’s agora
influencing people to question and examine how
they were living.
Socrates believed that the self exists in two parts.

One part is the physical, tangible and mortal

aspect of us that can be/is constantly changing.

The second part is the soul, which is believed to

be immortal.
Socrates believed that when we are alive our body
and soul are attached therefore making both parts
of our “self” present in the physical realm.

When we die however, our body stays in the physical

realm while our soul travels to the ideal realm, thus
making our soul immortal.
The true self is not to be identified with what we
own, with our social status, with our reputation,
or even with our body. Instead, Socrates
maintained that our true self is our soul.
Socrates was known for his dictum
“Ignorance is the beginning of
wisdom”
Socrates is also famous for his quote
“The unexamined life is not
worth living.”
PLATO (428-348 B.C.)

Plato, an Athenian
Philosopher is Socrates’s
student who proudly
admitted that he was a
loyal young protégé of his
teacher.
In Plato’s, Charmides, his concept of “who
am I” is a self-knowledge that is
synonymous to self-control. To be self-
controlled is to have knowledge of self, only
a self-controlled man is capable of
determining what is he actually knows and
doesn’t know.
“Only a self-controlled man, then, will
know himself and will be capable of
looking to see what he actually knows and
what he doesn’t know.”
For Plato, the self is an “immortal soul in
an mortal perishable body.”
The soul has a tripartite nature. This
tripartite nature consists of
a) a soul or an immortal rational part
which existed before it became part of the
body,
b) a courageous or “spirited” part and
c) an appetitive part.
In Book IV of Plato’s Republic, the soul is the
“giver of life to the body, the permanent,
changeless and divine element “as opposed
to the changing, transitory and perishable
body.”
This makes the self “a soul using the body.”
The body is just a shell of the soul. For Plato,
our life is a “continuous ascent towards the
world of ideas.” Our life’s journey is a
continuous striving to free our soul from its
imprisonment in the body.
ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.)

For Aristotle, the self is

composed of body and soul,
mind and matter, sense and
intellect, passion and reason.
Aristotle put emphasis on reason, however,
unlike Socrates and Plato, he does not
neglect the development of a human
person’s physical, economic and social
powers.

For Aristotle, human happiness comes

from the harmonious development of the
whole self.
Aristotle, likewise, taught the theory of
the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean
means moderation; avoid extremes;
avoid too much and too little. Living a
life of moderation is doing things on
consonance with reason.
The Self According to Medieval Philosophers
ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430 A.D.)
St. Augustine was known to
be the first Western
Psychologist who got
influenced by Aristotle and
Plato.
The difficulty in reconciling the promising
Christian doctrine and the suffering he was
witnessing around him awakened his
interest to study self and human mind.
He used his own experiences to explain
that
Self development is united with spiritual
development. In his own version of self, the
individual could possibly who is if he has
clearly defined his relationship with God.
Self development process is accomplished
through self-presentation along with self-
realization. He deemed that an individual
has a part of self-called the “inner self”.

He believed that a healthy person has inner

peace while those who experience inner
disharmony might have personal difficulties.
The self is made up of a body and a soul, “
a soul in possession of a body” which does
not constitute two persons but one man.”

Unlike the ancient Greek philosophers, St.

Augustine’s concept of self is in the
context of his relation to God.
Happiness is the end-all and the be-all of
human living and this happiness can be
found in God alone. At his conversion, St.
Augustine remarked

“You have made our hearts for Thee, O

God and so they will find rest only in
Thee.”
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274 A.D.)

Like Aristotle, Aquinas

proclaimed the supremacy of
reason in a human person. A
human person can know the
truth with certainty by the use
of his reason.
Like Aristotle, Aquinas taught that man’s
longing for happiness on earth comes
with the full development of man’s
powers. But Aquinas pointed to a higher
form of human perfection beyond this life
because of the immortality of the human
soul-found in God alone.
In this sense, St Thomas Aquinas was
like St. Augustine who taught about the
human soul that is restless and
imperfect until it rests in God.
The Self According to Modern and
Contemporary Philosophers
RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650)
He understood that if one is
capable of doubting, then
the individual must exist-
Cogito Ergo Sum: I think,
therefore I am.
After establishing the fact of his
existence, he still probed to ask himself
what he is-what is a thinking thing?
He believed that a self is a thinking thing
who has a rational mind that is capable
of perceiving, investigating, analyzing,
experimenting, and developing well-
reasoned conclusions with correct
evidences.
In Cartesian Self, the individual’s mind is
separate from the body and outside
world; it is thinking only about itself and
its existence.
According to Descartes, there is an
intrinsic partition to consciousness that
one cannot bridge the gap between
one’s own consciousness and of the
other.
Descartes is known for his “ I think,
therefore, I am.” The rationality and
activity of the mind are at the center
of man’s being.
JOHN LOCKE (1631-1704)

A British Philosopher
who believed that
self is identical with
consciousness and
unconsciousness.
Personal identity is synonymous to self,
and identity of the self depends on the
consciousness of the person.

It depends on how one is aware of the

thoughts as well as perceptions, whereas
the memory sets the limits of the
consciousness.
In his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, John Locke explained
that at birth the (human) mind is a tabula
rasa which means “blank slate.” The
mind is empty at birth.
It is without rules for processing data
and that data is (sic) blank.

According to Locke, impressions during

infancy have important and lasting
consequences.
He argued that the “associations of
ideas” that individuals make when young
are more important than those made
later because they are the foundation of
the self.
He argued that the “associations of
ideas” that individuals make when young
are more important than those made
later because they are the foundation of
the self.
DAVID HUME (1711-1776)
If some philosophers have
associated self with
personal identity, memory
or consciousness, then for
Hume, self does not exist.
Why? It is because these agents are
constantly changing, as a result, there is
“no self” that is constant.

For Hume, there is no impression of a

self, and of there is one, it is frequently
changing. Thus, the self is unreliable and
inconsistent entity.
A person a year ago will never be the
same person now because of the
emotions, behaviors, memories, and
experiences he gained over time.
IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)
Immanuel Kant’s concept of
the self is in response to
Hume’s theory that we are
indirectly connected with
self no matter how expert we
are reflection or
introspection, we can never
find the self as an item of
experience for Hume.
But for Kant, there is an underlying synthetic
unit of consciousness that can connect all
these sensations to come up with meaningful
perceptions.

According to Kant, a human person has an

inner and outer self which, together, form
his/her consciousness.
The inner self consists of his/her of
psychological state and rational intellect.

The outer self is a human person’s senses

and the physical world.
Kant is known for his supreme principle of
morality, the Kantian Categorical imperative,
“Act only according to that maxim by which
you can at the same time will that it should
become natural law.”
The Self According to Contemporary
Philosophers
SIGMUND FREUD (1724-1804)

Sigmund Freud, proponent

of Psychoanalysis, is a
well-known neurologist
and psychologist.
According to Freud, our self is composed
of mind with three levels.

a. Conscious mind- refers to things that

we are aware of
b. Preconscious mind- which lie in the
middle of consciousness and
unconsciousness.
c. Unconscious mind- is beyond our
awareness like our dreams, urges, hopes
and mannerisms.
For Freud, these
features of the mind are
like an iceberg- the
upper part or the tip
which is in the surface
and can be seen easily
is the conscious mind.
The other part of the iceberg that is
underneath the water that is bigger, wider
and deeper are preconscious and
unconscious mind.

Freud’s theory of personality and

unconscious motivation seemed like the
iceberg analogy.
The gigantic iceberg that is underneath
that controls our behaviors and desires
drives our decisions and beliefs but we are
not fully aware of it.
GILBERT RYLE (1900-1976)
Gilbert Ryle was a British
philosopher who critiqued
the Cartesian Dualism
because for him it
contained category
mistakes or confused
conceptual thinking.
Gilbert Ryle believes that the
workings of the mind are not distinct
from the actions of the body but are
one and the same.
The mind is a set of capacities and
abilities belonging to the body. The
mind is mysterious entity that
controls the mechanical workings of
the body.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY (1908-1961)

Maurice is one of the

Philosophers who opposed
the dualism theory. The
body cannot be known in
an absolute objective way
because “I live in my body”
The “lived body” is a unified
experience of mind, body and soul
and should not be separately
described.
Unlike Plato and other Philosophers
who look at the body as a mere tool
in the service of the mind or spirit,
the self, according to Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, is an inextricable
union between mind and body.
For Ponty, there is no experience that is
not embodied experience.

Corpuz, et al (2019) assert that “Everything

that we experience in this world-
experiences of joy, sadness, love, remorse-
happens with our bodies.
There is never a moment in which we are
separated from our bodies as if it is a
clothing that we can shed off.”
With Ponty, it is clear that “the mind and
the body are so intertwined that we
cannot even distinguish where the work
of the mind ends and where the work of
the body begins.
With Ponty, it is clear that “the mind and
the body are so intertwined that we
cannot even distinguish where the work
of the mind ends and where the work of
the body begins.
PAUL CHURCHLAND (1942-present)
Identity Theory
Professor Churchland is a
Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy and was
known for his studies in
neurophilosophy and
philosophy of mind.
The identity theory, also referredas
the reductive materialism is one of
the views Professor Churchland
used to describe the mind-body
correlation.
Churchland adheres to materialism
the belief that nothing except matter
exists. If a thing cant be recognized
by the senses then it is not real.
For Churchland, decision-making
and moral behavior are a biological
phenomena. Human behavior must
be explained rather by a mature
cognitive neuroscience.
“ Brains are not magical, they are
causal machines”-
Paul Churchland