The Self according to Ancient Philosophers

Socrates
The self exists in two parts.
• One part: Physical, tangible and mortal aspect of us that can be/is constantly
changing. Second part is the soul, which he believed to be immortal.
• 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, our soul travels to the ideal realm, thus making our soul immortal.
• True self: not with what we own, social status, our reputation, or even with our
body. Instead, Socrates maintained that our true self is our soul.
• Dictum: “Ignorance is the Beginning of wisdom” and “Know thyself”.
• “The unexamined life is not worth living” An examining, a thinking, and an
investigating self is what the self essentially is. In fact, he preferred to
continue to seek the truth to the answer to his question in the after-life so he
preferred death to exile because for him exile was tantamount to not being able
to identify the answer to his questions on life while on exile on earth.

Plato
• The self is an “immortal soul in a mortal perishable body.”
• Soul has a tripartite nature:
a. A soul or an immortal rational part existed before it became part of the
body
b. A courageous or “spirited” part : are mortal and they perish when we
die.
c. An appetitive part
• What survives after we die is our soul, the rational part of our self.
• 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 striving to free our soul from its
imprisonment in the body.
Aristotle
• The self is composed of body and soul, mind and matter, sense and intellect,
passion and reason.
 • Reason is supreme in a human person and so should govern all of life’s
activities. When reason rules over the senses, mind over matter, the human
person tends to live a happy life.
• 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.
• Perfection and happiness come from the harmonious development of the whole
self and, wisdom and virtue. Wisdom is knowledge and virtue is doing what is
best for you that which leads you to the attainment of your own perfection and
happiness.
• Taught the theory of the Golden Mean. Golden Mean means moderation; avoid
the extremes; avoid too much and too little. Living a life of moderation is doing
things in consonance with reason.

The Self according to Medieval Philosophers

St. Augustine
• 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 created
into the image and likeness of God. Every human person is made for God. It is
only upon his/her recognition of God’s love and his/her response to the invitation
to love that he/she finds inner peace.
• 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 they will find rest only in Thee.”
• Virtue is “the order of love.” To love God means necessarily to love one’s
fellowmen.
• Taught against hedonism, he stressed that man craves for something perfect,
immutable and enduring. Possession of the goods of this world such as health,
beauty, power, honor, fame can never give to a human person what he/she is
truly looking for ,as these goods are finite, unstable and ephemeral.

St. Thomas Aquinas

• Proclaimed the supremacy of reason in a human person. There are truths
which cannot be known by human reason alone and which can be
perceived only with the aid of the light of divine revelation. Yet these two
truths-those known through reason and those from Divine Revelation can
never contradict each other because they emanate from the same source,
God, who is TRUTH Itself.
 • 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. Agustine
who taught about the human soul that is restless and imperfect until it rests in
God.

The Self According to Modern and Contemporary Philosophers

Descartes
• The self is an immaterial mind and a material body.
• He believed that the mind is the seat of consciousness. The body (which includes
the human senses) is unreliable hence, should not be trusted. One can have
ideas prior (a priori) to experience.
• This secondary position of the body to the mind or to the soul is a unifying thread
among Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
• “I think, therefore, I am.” The rationality and activity of the mind are at the center
of man’s being.
John Locke
• At birth the (human) mind is a tabula rasa which means “blank slate.” The mind is
empty at birth.
• During infancy is very 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.

Immanuel Kant
• A human person has an inner and an outer SELF which, together, form his/her
consciousness. The inner SELF consists of his/her of psychological state and
rational intellect. Outer SELF is a human person’s senses and the physical world.
• Life is a constant struggle between beauty and pleasure, between the inner self
and the outer self.
• “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a natural law.” Kantian Categorical imperative
Contemporary Philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• The self is an inextricable union between mind and body.
• There is no experience that is not an embodied experience.
• “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. Bodily
knowledge shows that the body is also intelligent. Conversely, the mind is not
pure spirit, detached from the material world through its cognitive activity. The
mind always thinks in an embodied way.”

Gilbert Ryle
• Unlike the dualism of Descartes but like Merleau-Ponty, 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 a mysterious entity that controls the mechanical workings of the
body.
• The mind should be seen as the form, or organizing principle of the body.
• Distinction between KNOWING HOW (technical ability) KNOWING THAT (facts
and propositions), and KNOWING WHAT (acquaintance with things and
persons) Ryle asserts that knowing that (some fact) is empty intellectualism
without knowing how to make use of the fact. Effective possession of a piece of
knowledge (museum possession of knowledge) involves knowing how to use
that knowledge, when required, for the solution of other theoretical or practical
problems (workshop-possession of knowledge).
Paul Churchland
• Adheres to MATERIALISM, the belief that nothing except matter exists.
• If a thing can’t be recognized by the senses then it is not real.
• The mind can’t be experienced by our senses, then the mind doesn’t really exist.
• It is the physical brain and not the mind that gives us our sense of self.
• Decision-making and moral behavior are a biological phenomena. Human
behavior must be explained rather by a mature cognitive neuroscience. Human
behavior must be explained materially in terms of “recurrent neural network.”
The Self from Sociological Perspective
George Herbert Mead
• The self is not there at birth.
• Self is not based on inherited traits and other biological factors. Rather, the self is
developed over time from social experiences and activities. The biological self is
not the self.
• Our concept of self emerges from social interactions such as observing and
interacting with other’s opinions about the self and it is developed with social
experience.
• That the influence is restricted only to a “significant others” and at aa certain
periods. The significant others are people who play important roles in the life of a
person such as parents, teachers, friends.
• The influence of the “significant others” takes place only at certain periods in our
life. Ex. Children grow up and get more socialized, their beliefs about how other
people perceive them become important. They gain a new understanding of
society, the ‘generalized other.” They act based on personal beliefs but also on
what society expects of them.

Charles Cooley
• Explained our sense of self through his theory, LOOKING-GLASS SELF
THEORY. We learn to view ourselves as we think others view us.
• Three steps in the formation of the looking glass self:
1. We imagine how we appear to others.
2. We imagine how others judge our appearance.
3. We develop feelings about and responses to these judgements.
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/individuals-and-society/self-presentation-
and-interacting-with-others/v/three-components-of-emotion-and-universal-emotions
Three components of emotion and universal emotions (video) | Khan Academy

The Self from an Anthropological Perspective

• Anthropology employs a holistic approach to the study of the self.

• Quinn refers to the self as the “totality of what an organism is physically,
biologically, psychologically, socially and culturally.”
• Ewing “self” encompasses the physical organism, all aspects of psychological
functioning and social attributes.
 • Anthropology employs a holistic approach to the study of the self by integrating
various models into broader framework by considering what each models brings
and by showing the interactions among them.
Stratigraphic Approach
• Anthropologists advise us to avoid two common pitfalls that must be avoided in
our study of the self. Simply stacking independent models one after the other
without interrelating them. Simply, there is no integration of the different selves.
• The Erroneous stratigraphic approach is simply stacking independent models
one after the other without interrelating them. The self is divided and fragmented
into the physical self, the biological self, the psychological self and the social self.
There is no integration of the different selves. The self is a mere collection of bits
and pieces which should not be.

Reductionism
• We commit the second error “reductionism” when we attempt to interpret all
observations by reducing them to a single level of analysis.
• Example: “ideas are explained purely in terms of chemical equations; and a
human culture is described only by biological needs and instincts.
Understanding the SELF and Culture
• Culture is the integrated system of learned patterns of behavior, ideas and
products characteristics of a society. A person’s culture infuences his/her physical
being.
• People’s physical being also affects the kind of culture they build and the ways in
which they relate to fellow human beings. Imagine: what the world would be like if
even the slightest changes were made in the body. What types of buildings,
furniture, cars and cities would people build if they were 10 feet tall, had a tail, or
reached sexual maturation at twenty-four instead of twelve? What would social
relationships be like if they were three sexes?

Two contrasting models of the self: Egocentric and sociocentric:

Egocentric
• Egocentric the identity is always in part unique and internal to an individual.
• Egoentrism is the “natural tendency to view everything within the world in
relationto oneself
Sociocentrism
• Sociocentrism is the natural tendency to view everything within the world in
relation to one’s group and be group-centered.

Cultural Relativism
• The idea that a person’s beliefs, values, and practices should be understood
based on that person’s own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of
another.
• There is no universal standard of morality so no one has the right to judge
customs of another
Ethnocentrism
• Is the belief that one’s culture is superior to that of others while
Xenocentrism
• is the thinking that other’s culture is superior to one’s culture.
The Self from a Psychological Perspective
• The sense of self is defined as the way a person thinks about and views his or
her traits, beliefs, and purpose within the world.
• The self is a multi level system not simply reducible to genes or neurons.
• As one grows up, his or her sense of self changes.

Sigmund Freud
Id
• Id is the completely unconscious, impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche that
operates on the “pleasure principle” and is the source of basic impulses and
drives.
• It seeks immediate pleasure and gratification.
Ex. The infant fails to realize that thumb-sucking behavior cannot sustain life.
Ego
• Acts on the “reality principle.”
• Sole region of the mind that is in contact with the external world.

Superego
• Acts on moralistic and idealistic principles.
• Has no contact with the outside world and therefore is unrealistic in its demands
for perfection.
A pleasure-seeking person dominated by the id.

A guilt-ridden or interior=feeling person dominated by the super-ego.

A psychologically healthy person dominated by the ego

William James
• The Self is the totality of all that a person can call his or hers.
The Material Self
• The core of the material self is the body.
• Associated with the body are clothes, family, home and material possessions.
• A person’s immediate family is a part of his material self.
• A person’s home is also a part of the material self.
The Social Self
• The social self is who a person is in a social situation.
• It is the person given recognition by others.
• Every person has an innate desire to get himself/herself noticed favorably by
others.
• A person has as many social selves as the number of social situations he/she
participates in.

The Spiritual Self

• A person’s subjective and most intimate self. It is who a person is at his/her core.
It is more permanent than the other two selves.
• It includes things like personality, core values and conscience.
• William James asserts that achieving a high level of understanding of our
spiritual selves is more rewarding than satisfying the needs of the social and
material selves.
The “I” Self
• The pure ego.
• Similar to the soul or the mind.
• Refers to the thinking being
• Subjective self

Me Self
• To the object thought of by the “I.”
• Objective self
“I” is the thinking self, the agent doing the thinking and “me” is the object being thought
of.

The Self in Western Thought

• The idea of the separation of body and mind has been ingrained in Western
thought.
• Western philosophers give more attention to the dualism between the body and
the soul. Plato claimed the body is the prison of the soul. Aristotle disagrees with
 Plato, his teacher that the body is the prison of the soul. For Aristotle, the body is
the matter which the soul informs. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas echoed
or commented on these two Greek philosophers and claimed that the body and
soul are inseparable. Descartes, also claimed that the body is different from the
soul/mind which is a thinking thing.
• We, Filipinos, have been Westernized and so we, too, associate the body with
the physical, anatomical body, separate from the mind, its spiritual or psycho-
emotional aspect.
Ex. Western Medicine: How many among you have had recurrent symptoms, say
headache, chest tightness, panic attacks but nothing was seen in the laboratory
tests? And the doctor attributes these stress or worse says “it’s only in the
mind…”

The Self in Oriental Thought

• Human person lives as Shenti, not just a body or a mind but both body and mind.
• Everything is a combination of both yin and yang not either yin or yang. Nothing
is completely yin or completely yang. Each aspect is the beginning point for the
other aspect.
Ex. A day becomes night (yin) and then night becomes day (yang).
• In Chinese healing practice, an excess of yang results in a fever. An excess of
yin could mean the accumulation of fluids yin and yang are interdependent upon
each other.
• Zen Buddhism, like the Chinese philosophy, subscribes to the belief that a
human person is composed of a body, soul and a spirit.
• Hindu philosophy likewise believes in the continuum of matter and spirit. The
ATMAN (real self) is the BRAHMAN (Ultimate reality) in man/woman. ATMAN is
identical to BRAHMAN.
Comparing Oriental and Western Self
Oriental Western
• Human person is one • Human being has an
integrated whole. One with individualistic nature and is an
society and the universe. independent part of the
• Duty towards all others is a universe and the society.
very important matter. • Individualism is comparatively
• Collectivism stronger.