PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

Pre-Socratics [Prior to Socrates] 

• 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, 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. 

Socrates

• was more concerned with another subject, the problem of the self. This has become his life-long mission, the true task of the philosopher is to know thyself. 

• affirmed that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” 

• every man is composed of body and soul. 

  • body – the imperfect, impermanent aspect. 

  • soul – the perfect and permanent aspect. 

Plato

• 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 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 soul which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay; and the 

  • The appetitive soul, the one 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

• 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. 

Thomas Aquinas

• 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. 

• To Aquinas, just as 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 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 the end, Descartes thought that the 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 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. 

David Hume

• David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, is an empiricist who believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and experiences. 

• Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced. 

• Hume argues that the self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body. 

• Men can only attain knowledge by experiencing. 

• To David Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions [or collection of different perceptions]. 

• 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. 

  • Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions.

•  In reality, what one thinks is a unified self– is simply a combination of all experiences with a particular person. 

Immanuel Kant

• Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant. 

• 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. 

• The self is not just what gives one his personality, 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 manifests in his day-to-day life. 

• Looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exists is like visiting your friend’s university and looking for 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 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 that is not an embodied experience. All experience is embodied. 

• One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the 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.