UNDERSTANDING THE SELF (GSELF)

Prepared by: Ylona Veronica A. Bayod, RPm, LPT

Know thyself

It is imperative to know the limits of the self so that one knows what one is capable of doing and what one is not.

Self- control

A requirement for self-moderation, prudence, good judgement, and excellence of the soul.

 Anything that is excessive is not good.

 Put oneself in moderation so that one is capable of self-control and sound judgement
 Strike a balance of things.
 The ethics in knowing thyself bring the person to the excellence of the soul (which is believed by the Ancient Greeks as the
essence of the person).

Therefore, to know thyself is to:

1. achieve moderation
2. choose what is good
3. bring excellence to the soul

HOW? By understanding the different philosophical perspectives.

SOCRATES • Father of the Western Philosophy

• Famous as unknown
• Left no writings and was described by his detractors (Aristophanes) and his followers (Xenophon,
Plato, and Aristotle)
• He taught only orally and his teachings have come down through the writings of his pupils.
• He recognized the fact that no improvement in men’s lives and morals is possible without a solid
philosophy of knowledge.
• “Knowledge is virtue” and of all knowledge, KNOWLEDGE OF THE SELF IS THE CORE AND
THE ESSENCE.

Socratic Method:
1. Ironic Process
- a question is posed leading to conflicting and impossible statements to pointing out distressing state of
affairs until the confession of ignorance.

1st essential step in the work of achieving knowledge of the self-.

2. Maieutic Process
- the process of “bringing to birth” the ideas and judgement of the mind.
- discussion or dialogue
- asking students to explain, institute, comparison, noting similarities and differences, citing examples,
etc.
- inductive method (Socrates as the Father of Induction)

 Socrates was concerned with the CRITICAL QUESTION which is intimately bound up in the
Socratic System with the ETHICAL QUESTION since Socrates held that “Knowledge is Virtue.”
 Hence, man’s great moral effort must be directed to knowledge, especially SELF-KNOWLEDGE.
… and the best way to show concern for virtue is to spend every day of your life to the philosophical
discussion about the virtue.
 “The unexamined life is not worth living “

 All of us, every day, must review and reconsider the values that direct our lives.
 An examined life is a life that is duty bound to develop self-knowledge and self-dignity with
values and integrity.
 Living a good life means having the wisdom to distinguish what is right from wrong.

PLATO - Plato in Greek is “breadth”

(ARISTOCLES) - Pupil of Socrates for 8 years
- Died in Athens at the age of 80

- Plato was also interested in the CRITICAL QUESTION but the question was intertwined with
the psychological question rather than the ethical question.
- Allegory of the Cave
- Plato’s unifying doctrine is his THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

“TRUE LIE or LIE IN THE SOUL”

- Believing wrongly about the most important things in one’s life.
- One is unaware that what they believe to be true is actually false (worst affliction) and so they
speak untruths constantly without knowing they are doing so.
- Hence, it renders one incapable of seeing life realistically and so, incapable of understanding the
true nature of existence, of others, and especially ONESELF.

The Solution: one must pursue wisdom and in this pursuit, one will come to understand what one’s lie is
and once it is realized, will allow one to leave the lie behind and move on to live a life of truth, honesty,
and clarity.

3 ELEMENTS OF THE PSYCHE:

1. Appetitive
- includes one’s desires, pleasures, physical satisfactions, comforts, etc.
- Belly and genitals

2. Spirited
- Becomes excited with challenges, fights back when agitated, fights for justice, loves victory, challenge,
and honor.
- Hot blooded part of the psyche
- heart

3. Mind
- Most superior part
- Referred by Plato as the “nous,” which means the conscious awareness of the self.
- Controls the affairs of the self.
- Analyzes, thinks ahead, proposes, rational.
- Mind

ST. AUGUSTINE • From Tagaste, Africa

• He succumbed to vices and pleasures of the world until his conversion to Christianity.
• Development of the SELF is achieved through self-presentation and then self-realization centered
around one’s relation to God.
• Self can only be truly discovered through a recognition of God’s love and man’s response to that
love.
• Man’s end goal is happiness and only in God can man attain true and eternal happiness, made
possible in his contemplation of the Truth and the Divine Wisdom.
• Human beings alone, without God, are bound to fail.

RENE DESCARTES • French philosopher

• Father of Western Modern Philosophy
• Rationalist
• “Meditations on First Philosophy”
• Descartes was more concerned with understanding the thinking process we use to answer the critical
existential questions.
• He was convinced that to develop the most informed and well-grounded beliefs about human
existence, we need to be clear about the thinking instrument we are employing for if our thinking
instrument is flawed, then it is likely that our conclusions will be flawed as well.
• Descartes is convinced that committing yourself to a wholesale and systematic doubting of all things
you have been taught and not to simply accept without question is the only way to achieve clear and
well-reasoned conclusions.
• That was the beginning of Descartes quest for true knowledge that leads to his famous first principle:

“COGITO, ERGO SUM”/ “I THINK, THEREFORE I AM”/ “I DOUBT, THEREFORE I EXIST”

 The essence of existing as a human identity is the possibility of being aware of ourselves: Being self-
conscious is integral to having a personal identity.
  For Descartes, the essence of yourself is that you are a “thinking thing,” a dynamic identity that
engages in all of those MENTAL OPERATIONS we associate with being a human self.
 Examples of mental operations:
Understand Refuse
Doubt Imagine
Affirm Deny
Deny Feel
Will

In addition to all of the mental operations, your self-identity is dependent on the fact that you are capable
of being aware you are engaging in these mental operations while you are engaged in them.

Dualistic View:
1. Spiritual – conscious, thinking beings
2. Physical – human bodies and the rest of the physical universe

Descartes believed that the body is secondary to the self. They exist independently.

JOHN LOCKE • A British Philosopher

• Empiricist
• The Self is Consciousness
• Locke: “Experience is that upon which all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately
derives itself.”
• We are furnished with the ideas through experience and we form knowledge via experience too.
• Self-reflection is simply a part of experience.

- Self-awareness follows form, and comes after, the impressions that are imposed upon the human mind
by external entities.
- The concepts of the mind arising from self-reflection are not innate, but are the consequences of the
ideas of the external things that are printed upon the mind starting from birth.”

• The self is identical with consciousness and consciousness is accessible empirically.

- Identity of the self depends on the consciousness of the person.

Memory-ideas content of consciousness

This provides constancy of the idea of the self

DAVID HUME  Scottish Philosopher

 Empiricist, Skepticist, Naturalist
 The Bundle Theory of the SELF
 Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us our concept of self. We tend to think of
ourselves as SELVES – stable entities that exist overtime. But no matter how closely we
examine our own experiences, we never observe anything beyond a series of transient
feelings, sensations, and impressions.
 Scottish philosopher whose skeptical examinations of religion, ethics, and history made him a
controversial eighteenth-century figure.
 There is no SELF.
 We cannot observe ourselves, or what we are in a unified way. There is no impression of the “self”
that ties our particular impressions together.
 We can never be directly aware of ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at any given moment.
 According to Hume, if we carefully examine the contents of our experience, we find that there are
only two distinct entities, “impressions” and “ideas”
1. Impressions—Impressions are the basic sensations of our experience, the elemental data of our
minds: pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and so on. These impressions
are “lively” and “vivid.”
2. Ideas—Ideas are copies of impressions, and as a result they are less “lively” and “vivid.” Ideas
include thoughts and images that are built up from our primary impressions through a variety of
relationships, but because they are derivative copies of impressions they are once removed from
reality.
 Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. To look for a
unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for chain apart from the links that constitute it.

IMMANUEL KANT  German philosopher considered by many to be the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century.
 Kant attempted to synthesize the two competing schools of the modern period, rationalism and
empiricism, by showing the important role both experience and reason play in constructing our
knowledge of the world.
 Critical Philosophy:
 Critique of Pure Reason
 Critique of Practical Reason
 Critique of the Power of Judgment
 Self- consciousness arises from combining or synthesizing representations with one another
regardless of their content.
  Kant: “Self-consciousness does not yet come about by my accompanying representation, but rather
by my adding one representation to the other and being conscious of their synthesis.”
 Since no particular content of the experience is invariable or unchangeable, self-consciousness must
be derived from the experience having an invariable form or structure, and consciousness of the
identity of the self through all of the unchanging experiences must consist in awareness must consist
in awareness of the formal unity and law governed regularity of the experience.

KANT’S PRINCIPLE OF APPERCEPTION

“ The I think must be able to accompany al my representations; for otherwise something would be
represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation
would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.”

 Self-consciousness therefore involves a priori knowledge about the necessary and universal truth
and a priori knowledge cannot be based on experience, it belongs to the self because the mind
possesses the order and unity of all raw sensations.

In sum:
Our rationality unifies and makes sense the perceptions we have in our experiences and make sensible
ideas about ourselves and the world.

SIGMUND FREUD  Born in Freiburg, Moravia (Czechoslovakia)

 At age 4, his family moved to Vienna.
 Founder of Psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the importance of unconscious forces.
 Freud regarded the self as the “I” that ordinarily constitute both the mental and physical actions.
 “I” is a product of multiple interacting processes, systems, and schemes.

Q: Why is there something somewhere inside us that makes many of us do what we know is wrong?

Freud’s answer: The Self is Multi-layered

1. Topographical Model
2. Structural Model

1. Topographical Model
“I” is divided into:
1. Conscious
2. Unconsious

2. Structural Model
3 Components of the Self:
1. Id – pleasure principle
2. Ego – reality principle
3. Superego – conscience principle
 Defense Mechanisms

GILBERT RYLE  Analytic Philosopher. An important figure in the field known as “Linguistic Analysis” that focuses
on the solving of philosophical puzzles through an analysis of language.
 He mounted an attack against Cartesian mind-body dualism and supported a behaviorist theory of
mind.
 British Philosopher
 Advocates logical Behaviorism/ philosophical Behaviorism
 Focuses on creating conceptual clarity, not on developing techniques to condition human behavior
(psychology).
 He was against Descartes’ Theory of Dualism
 According to Ryle, THE MIND IS NEVER SEPARATE FROM THE BODY.
Ex. The University tour

The mind is a concept that expresses the entire system of thoughts, emotions, actions, and so on that
make up the human self.
IOW, the mind is nothing but a disposition of the self.
 A logical error called “category mistake” happens when we think of the self as existing apart from
certain observable behaviors, a purely mental entity existing in time but not in space.
 The self is best understood as a pattern of behavior, the tendency or disposition for a person to
behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.
IOW, we will only be able to understand the self-based from the external manifestations –
behaviors, expressions, language, desires, and the like.
 “ I act therefore I am”
“You are what you do”

PAUL AND  Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytical philosopher noted for her
PATRICIA contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of the mind.
CHURCHLAND  Paul Churchland is a contemporary American philosopher and professor at the University of
California, San Diego. Churchland’s interests are the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind,
artificial intelligence and cognitive neurobiology, epistemology, and perception.
  Eliminative Materialism
We need to develop a new, neuroscience-based vocabulary that will enable us to think and
communicate clearly about the mind, consciousness, and human experience. He refers to this view as
eliminative materialism.
 It is the physical brain and not the abstract, imaginary mind that gives us our sense of the self.
 Churchland’s central argument is that the concepts and theoretical vocabulary we use to think about
ourselves—using such terms as belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy—actually misrepresent the
reality of minds and selves. All of these concepts are part of a common sense “folk psychology” that
obscures rather than clarifies the nature of human experience.
 Eliminative materialists believe that we need to develop a new vocabulary and conceptual
framework that is grounded in neuroscience and that will be a more accurate reflection of the human
mind and self.

MAURICE  French philosopher whose thinking was influenced by Edmund Husserl.

MERLEAU -  Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German Philosopher who established the school of
PONTY phenomenology.
 Edmund Husserl speaks about the SELF (the “monad”) as the experienced totality of one’s
life.
 Maurice Merleau Ponty objected to philosophies that underestimated the significance of the body
and argued that perception is fundamental to our knowledge of the world.
 In The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he argued that consciousness is a dynamic form that
actively structures our experience.
 Our “living body” is a natural synthesis of mind and biology, and any attempts to divide them into
separate entities are artificial and nonsensical.
 The unified experience of your self is the paradigm or model you should use to understand your
nature.
 For Merleau-Ponty, everything that we are aware of—and can possibly know— is contained within
our own consciousness. It’s impossible for us to get “outside” of our consciousness because it
defines the boundaries of our personal universe. The so called real world of objects existing in space
and time initially exists only as objects of my consciousness. Yet in a cognitive sleight-of-hand, we
act as if the space-time world is primary and our immediate consciousness is secondary.
 Our perceptions are caused by intricate experiences of the self and processed intellectually while
distinguishing truthful perceptions.
 Therefore, the self is taken as a phenomenon of the whole – a Gestalt understanding of perception
synthesis.