understanding sell

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¬Understanding the Self is one of the core courses under the General Education Curriculum. It covers the nature of identity, the factors and forces that affect personal development and the maintenance of personal identity. Understanding oneself is an integral process one needs to undergo to set direction for current and future actions and behaviors. It is important to be able to address issues about the self – philosophical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and even the dilemma of viewing the self from the eastern and western perspectives – to define one’s purpose and act accordingly.

Lesson 1: The Self from Various Philosophical Perspective

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

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Socrates: Know Yourself

Socrates is principally concerned with man. He considers man from the point of view of his inner life. The famous line of Socrates, “Know yourself”, tells man to bring his inner self to light .He was the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self.

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Plato: The Ideal Self, the Perfect Self

Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master and supported the idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul. According to Plato, man was omniscient or all-knowing before he came to be born into this world. 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.

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Immanuel Kant: Respect for Self

Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant. He recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and sensation of impressions.

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Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”

Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind. His first famous principle was “cogito, ergo sum”, which means “I think, therefore I am”. Although the mind and the body are independent from each other and serve their own function, man must use his own mind and thinking abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment and develop himself.

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John Locke: Personal Identity

John Locke holds that personal identity [the self] is a matter of psychological continuity. For him, personal identity is founded on consciousness [memory] and not on the substance of either the soul or the body.

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David Hume: The Self is the Bundle Theory of Mind

David Hume, a Scottish philosopher. Has a very unique way of looking at man. As an empiricist who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and experiences. Hume argues that the self is nothing like his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body.

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Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar of the medieval philosophy, appended something to this Christian view. Adapting some ideas from Aristotle, he said 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, refers to the “essence of a substance or thing”.

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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 manifests in his day-to-day life.

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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. He says that the mind and the body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.

Lesson 2 : The Self, Society, and Culture

THE SELF, SOCIETY AND CULTURE

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What is the self?

The self, in contemporary literature and even common sense, is commonly defined by the following characteristics: separate, self-contained, independent, consistent, unitary and private.

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The Self and Culture

According to Marcel Mauss, the French Anthropologist, every self has two faces: personne and moi. Moi refers to a person’s sense of who he is, his body and his basic identity. Personne, is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.

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The Self and the Development of the Social World

More than his given ness, one is believed to be in active participation in the shaping of the self. We think the human persons are just passive actors in the whole process of the shaping of selves. That men and women are born with particularities that they can no longer change.

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Mead and Vygotsky

For Mead and Vygotsky, the way that human persons develop is with the use of language acquisition and interaction with others. The way that we process information is normally a form of an internal dialogue in our head.

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Self in Families

Apart from the anthropological and psychological basis for the relationship between the self and the social world, the sociological likewise struggled to understand the real connection between the two concepts.

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Gender and the Self

Another important aspect of the self is gender. Gender is one of those loci of the self that is subject to alteration, change and development.

Lesson 3 : The Self as Cognitive Construct

THE SELF AS COGNITIVE CONSTRUCT

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Self is the sense of personal identity and of who we are as individuals.

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William James was one of the earliest psychologists to study the self and conceptualized the self as having two aspects—the “I” and the “me”. The “I” is thinking, acting and feeling self. The “me” is the physical characteristics as well as psychological capabilities that make who you are.

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. Identity is composed of personal characteristics, social roles and responsibilities as well as affiliations that define who one is. Self-concept is what basically comes to your mind when you are asked about who you are.

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Carl Rogers captured this idea in his concept of self-schema or collection of knowledge about who we are. The schema includes your interests, work, course, age name and physical characteristics. As you grow and adapt to the changes around you, they also change. But they are not passive receivers, they actively shape and affect how you see, think and feel about things.

SIGMUND FREUD

Freud saw the self, its mental processes, and one's behavior as the results of the interaction between the Id, the Ego and the Superego.

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Id exists since birth, pertaining to instinct. It serves as a storeroom of wishes and obsessions related to sexual and aggressive desires. It operates on the hedonistic or pleasure principle -- seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It ignores reality, harmony, common sense and reason.

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Ego operates according to the reality principle. This structure’s role is to maintain equilibrium between the demands of Id and Superego in accordance with what is best and practical in reality. Ego borrows some of the Id’s energy in order to deal with the demands of the environment. It is developed by the individual’s personal experiences and adheres to the principles of reason and logic. Ego ensures the continuous existence and protection of the individual. If ego is successful, it turns out to be a brilliant, creative and emotionally-balanced individual.

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Superego is the last layer to develop. It operates according to the morality principle. Superego is the reservoir of moral standards. It ensures compliance with the norms, values and standards prescribed by society. It is developed by means of socialization in various agents like home, school. church and others.

Lesson 4 : The Self in Western and Eastern Thoughts

Different cultures and varying environment tend to create different perceptions of the “self” and one of the most common distinctions between cultures and people is the Eastern-vs- Western dichotomy wherein Eastern represents Asia.

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Confucianism can be seen as a code of ethical conduct of how one should properly act according to their relationship with other people, thus, it is also focused on having harmonious social life.

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Taoism is living in the way of Tao or the universe. However,Taoism rejects having one definition of what the Tao is, and one can only state clues of what it is as they adopt a free- flowing, relative, unitary, as well as paradoxical view of almost everything.

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Buddhism,the self is seen as an illusion, born out of ignorance, trying to hold and control things or human centered needs, thus, the self is also the source of all these sufferings.

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The Western culture is what we would call an individualistic culture since their focus is on the person. The Asian culture is called a collectivist culture as a group and social relations that is given more importance than individual needs and wants.