Existentialists & Essential Self

Locke

* introspection is the key to the self
* A person is definite by thinking and consciousness
* The self has psychological continuity—if it is disrupted, they are not the same person
* A person is a thinking intelligent being with logic and reflection. It Can consider itself AS an itself, the same thinking being in different times and places.
* The self has reflection, sensation, and memory.
* We are our memory
* There is a meaningful self, but it is under development/revision as we obtain new memories

Aristotle

* man is a rational animal
* as long as we can reason, we are people—the capacity to deal with abstract concepts using logic

Hume

* we’re just a bundle of perceptions
* The self is just a set of relations between experiences in a particular order
* There is no essential self
* If we move these experienced around, we’d be different people

Kant

* the self is an ACTIVITY—the real self is the ability to choose for oneself
* Because everything that we experience is bound to time and space, so is the self

Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception

The mental process of making sense of an idea by assimilating it with what we already believe to know—interaction between the world and mind

Noumenal vs Phenomenal

Noumenal—the world as it truly is, what we cannot understand

Phenomenal—the world as we experience/interpret it

Accidental Properties

Varied properties of a person (hair, size, facial features. physical strength, etc)

Plato

* “self” exists in the metaphysical world
* The self is the source of the rational, moral, and biological selves
* To gain pure knowledge (thus attaining the true self) we must discard the body
* The self is the seat of knowledge—it performs the function that we attribute to the mind
* The self is the bringer of life—having a self distinguishes a living being from a non-living being

Essentialism

Rooted in the idea that all things have essences, or traces, permanent natures or qualities.

Kierkegaard

* Despair is when you’re trying to be what you’re not
* Despair sets us apart from animals
* Despair is basically a sin
* The only way to escape in to find God
* The good in despair—it proves that we are self aware

Nietzche

* good is associated with the truth, not judeo-Christian values
* Slave and master moralities are the distortion of the truth

Sartre

* human existence precedes our knowledge/essence/self
* Atheist—there’s no set juman nature, because that would necesitate a god making a plan for us
* The self is what we choose, but how we act still affects others
* The universal law is that there is no universal law to act on