The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives

The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of
the self. The greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myth and moved away from them in
attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions of curiosity, including the question
of the self

Socrates and Plato

For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every human person is dualistic.
It is composed of body and soul. This means all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect to
him, and the body while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent.

Plato, socrate’s student basically took off from his master and supported the idea that man is a dual
nature of body and soul. Plato added three components: rational soul, spirited soul, and appetitive soul.
Human person can only be attained if the three parts is working harmoniously.

Augustine and Thomas Aquinas

Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of Christianity. Man is 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 realmspiritual bliss in communion with God.

Thomas Aquinas

Man is composed of wo 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 or Morephe in Greek refers
to the essence of a substance or thing. To Aquinas, the souls is what animates the body, it is what makes
us humans.

Rene Descaretes

Descartes thought that the only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for evenif one
doubts oneself, that only approves that there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and therefore, that
cannot be doubted. 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.

Hume

Knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and experienced. For David Hume, if one tries to examine
his experieces, he finds that they can all be categorized into two: impressions and ideas. Impressions are
the basic objects of our experiences or sensation. Ideas are copies of impressions. Self is simply a bundle
or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are
in a perpetual flux and movement.

Kant
There us anecessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the external world. Self
is not just what gives one his personally. In addition, it is also seat of knowledge acquisition for all
human persons.

Ryle

Looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exist is like visiting your friend’s university and
looking for the university. What truly matters is the behavior that a person manifest in his day to day
life. According to Ryle, 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

Mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another. One cannot find any
that is not experience that is not an embodied experience. All experience is embodied. The living body,
his thought, emotions, and experiences are all one.

What is the Self?

Self is defined by the ff. characteristics:

 Separate
 Self-contained
 Independent
 Consistent
 Unitary
 Private

Separate – self is distinct from other selves. Self is uniqie and has its own identity

Self contained and independent – It does not require any other self for it to exist

Consistent – personality that is enduring and therefore can be expected to persist for quite some time.
Consistency also means that a particular self’s traits, characteristics, tendencies and potentialities are
more or less the same

Unitary – center of all experiences and thought that run through a certain person

Private – isolated from the external word. It lives within its own world.

Social constructivist argue that the self should not be seen as a static entity that stays constant through
and through. Rather, the self has to be seen as something that is in unceasing flux. The self is always in
participation with social life and its identity subjected to influence.
The self and culture

Moi- refers ti a persons sense of who he is, his body and his basic identity, his biological giveness.

Personne- composed of the social concept of what it means to be whoe he is. Peresonne has much to do
with what it means to live in a particular institution, a particular family, a particular religion, a particular
nationality and how to behave given expectations and influiences from others.

This dynamics and capacity for different personne can be illustrated better cross-culturally.

Lanugage is another interesting aspect of this social constructivism.

If a self is born into a particular society or culture, the self will have to adjust according to its exposure.

The self and the development of the social world

Mead and Vygotsky

Human person develops is with the use of language acquisition and interaction with others.

Both treat the human mind as something that is made

Constituted through language as experienced in the external world as encountered in dialogs with
others

Self in Families

Human learn the ways of living and therefore their selfhood by being in a family.

Family initiates a person to become that serves as the basis for this person’s progress.

Without a family, a person may not even survive or become a human person

Gender and the Self

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

This includes stereotypes and other beliefs.

I is the thinking, acting, and feeling self.

Me – is the physical characterisitics as well as psychological capabilities that makes who you are

i- As the one who acts and decides

Identity is composed of personal characteristics, social roles and responsibilities as well as affiliations
that define who he is.

Self Concept – is what basically comes to your mind when you are asked about who you are.

Schema – include your interests, work, age, name, course, and physical characteristics among others. As
you grow and adapt to the changes around you, they also change.

Mental Constructs – created and recreated in memory. Frontal lobe of the brain is the specific area in
the brain associated with process concerning the self. One’s behavior as the results of the interaction
between the Id, Ego and Superego.

Social Interaction – are vital factors in creating our self-concpet especially in the aspect of providing us
with our social identity or our perception of who we are based on our membership to certain groups.

Also inevitable that we can have several social identities that those identities can overlap, and that we
automatically play the roles as interact with our groups.

Self Awareness- three other self schema: actual, ideal and ought self. The actual “self” is who you are at
the moment, the “ideal” self is who you like to be and the “ought” self is who you think you should be.

May be positive or negative depending on the circumstances and our next course of action. Self-
awareness can keep you from doing something dangerous.

One of the ways in which our social relationship affects our self-esteem is through social comparison.
We learn about ourselves, the appropriateness of our behaviors as well as our social status by
comparing aspects of ourselves with other people.

The downward social comparison is more than common type of comparing ourselves with others. We
create a positive self-concept by comparing ourselves with those who are worse off than use. Upward
social comparison which is comparing ourselves with those who are better off than us.