Lesson 1: The Self from Various Perspective

(Philosophy and Anthropology)

INTRODUCTION

How well do you know yourself? Are you aware of your talents? Skills?
Weaknesses? Strengths?

The persistent question, “Who am I?” is rooted in the human need to understand the
basis of the experiences of the “self.” Numerous studies have been conducted and
various approaches have been developed from concepts about it. Important
philosophers from ancient to contemporary times sought to describe the essential
qualities that compose a person’s uniqueness. On the other hand, Anthropology
views the “self” as a culturally shaped construct or idea. Anthropologists assert that
it is an autonomous participant in the society as much as it is submerged in the
community.
Learning the various fundamental concepts of the “self” is significant because these
ideas lay the foundation that will foster in you, the learner, a deep reflection and
insight into the continuous pursuit of self-discovery. In this module you will learn
about the different views of Philosophers and Anthropologist in defining the self.

OBJECTIVES

At the end of the module, you should be able to:

 Discuss the different representations and conceptualization of the

self from various disciplinal perspectives;
 Examine the different influences, factors and forces that shape the
self; and
 Compare and contrast how the self has been represented across the
different disciplines and perspectives.
 MAIN CONTENTS

PHILOSOPHY

What is philosophy? Philosophy is from the Greek words philo- (loving) and Sophia
(Knowledge, wisdom). At its simplest, philosophy means “loving knowledge” or loving
wisdom.” The term philosophy as originally used by the Greeks meant “the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake.”
Naturally, the need to understand the ‘self’ did not escape the philosopher’s curious
mind. Hence, here are the most relevant philosophical views that will give you a
historical framework in your quest of understanding yourself.

Socrates
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the main source of
Western thought. He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning.

Socrates was known for his method of inquiry in testing an idea. This is called the
Socratic Method whereby an idea was tested by asking a series of questions to
determine underlying beliefs and the extent of knowledge to guide the person toward
better understanding (Maxwell, 2015).

Some of Socrates ideas were:

 The soul is immortal
 The care of the soul is the task of philosophy
 Virtue is necessary to attain happiness.

One Socrates most quoted phases is, “The

unexamined life is not worth living.” According to
Socrates, self-knowledge or the examination of
one’s self, as well as the question about how one
ought to live one’s life, are very important concerns “I know That I Don’t Know”
because only by knowing yourself can you hope to
improve your life (Rappe, 1995).
He added self-knowledge would open your eyes to your true nature. According to
Socrates, the state of your inner being (soul/self) determines the quality of your life.
Socrates also believed that the goal of life is to be happy. How does one become
happy? According to Socrates, the virtuous man is a happy man.
Virtues is defined as moral excellence, and an individual is considered virtuous if his/her
character is made up of the moral qualities that are accepted as virtues, i.e., courage,
temperance, prudence, and justice.
Plato
Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works
of unparalleled influence in Western thought.
 He is best known for his Theory of Forms that asserted
the physical world is not really “real” world because the
ultimate reality exists beyond the physical world.

Plato views human self as an immaterial soul that can

think. He held that after death the souls of those who
most love the forms would rise to contemplate the eternal
truths, a sort of heaven beyond space and time.

According to Plato, the body, with its deceptive senses,

keeps us from real knowledge; it rivets us in a world of
material things which is far removed from the world of
“Balance between mind and Body” reality; and it tempts us away from the virtuous life.

The Three parts of the soul according to Plato are:

 The appetitive (sensual)
The element that enjoys sensual experiences, such as food, drink, and sex.
 The rational (reasoning)
The element that forbids the person to enjoy the sensual experiences; the part
that loves truth, hence, should rule over the other parts of the soul through the
use of reason.
 The spirited (feeling)
The element that is inclined towards reason but understands the demands of
passion; the part that loves honor and victory.

Aristotle

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of

Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote
on diverse subjects such as physics, poetry, biology,
and zoology, logic, rhetoric, politics, government and
ethics.

Aristotle define the soul as the core essence of a living

being, but argued against its having a separate
existence. He did not consider the soul as some kind of
separate, ghostly occupant of the body.

According to Aristotle, Soul is the first activity in the

body, and therefore it cannot be immortal. He thinks
that humans have bodies for rational activity. “De Anima” On the Soul

The four sections of the soul according to Aristotle:

 Calculative
The rational side used for making decisions.
 Scientific
 Desiderative
The irrational side responsible for identifying our needs.
 vegetative

St. Augustine
Saint Augustine, also called Saint Augustine of Hippo, is one of the Latin Fathers of the
church, one of the Doctors of the church, and one of the most significant Christian
thinkers.
Saint Augustine was deeply influenced by Plato’s ideas. Not surprisingly, he adopted
Plato’s view that the “self” is an immaterial soul that can think.
Giving the theory of forms a Christian perspective, Augustine
asserted that these forms were concepts existing within the
perfect and eternal God.

Saint Augustine’s concept of the “self” was an inner,

immaterial “I” that had self-knowledge and self-awareness. He
believed that the human being was both a soul and body, and
the body possessed senses, such as imagination memory,
reason and mind through which the soul experienced the
world.

The aspect of the self/soul according to Saint Augustine’s are:

 It is able to be aware of itself. “All knowledge leads to God”
 It recognizes itself as a holistic one.
 It is aware of its unity.
Saint Augustine believed that the human being who is both soul and body is meant to
tend to higher, divine, and heavenly matters because of his/her capacity to ascend and
comprehend truths through the mind. Saint Augustine pointed out that a person is
similar to God as regards to the mind and its ability; that by ignoring to use his/her mind
(or the incorrect use of the mind) he/she would lose his/her possibility to reach real and
lasting happiness.

Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He is

considered the father of modern Western philosophy. Descartes proposed that doubt
was a principal tool of disciplined inquiry. For Descartes human ability to reason
constitutes the extraordinary instrument we have to achieve truth and knowledge.

He explains, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it

is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as
far as possible, all things.” You will never have the
opportunity to construct a rock-solid foundation for your
beliefs about the world and your personal philosophy of
life if you don’t doubt.

Descartes claims about the “self” are:

 It is constant; it is not prone to change; and it is not
affected by time.
Cogito, Ergo Sum
“I Think, Therefore I Am.”
 Only the immaterial soul remains the same throughout
time.
 The immaterial soul is the source of our identity.
Some directions between the soul and body as pointed out by Descartes are:

THE SOUL THE BODY

 It is a conscious thinking substance that It is a material substance that changes
is unaffected by time. through time.

It is known only to itself (only you know It can be doubted; the public can correct
your own mental event and others cannot claims about the body.
correct your mental states).
It is not made up of parts. It views the
entirety of itself with no hidden or It is made up of physical, quantifiable
separate compartments. It is both divisible parts.
conscious and aware of itself at the same
time.

John Locke

John Locke was a philosopher and physician and was one of

the most influential enlightenment thinker. Locke defines the
self as "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever
substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple,
or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or
conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or
misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that
consciousness extends".

Locke posits an "empty" mind, a tabula rasa, which is

shaped by experience; sensations and reflections being the
two sources of all our ideas. Locke's some thoughts about “Tabula Rasa”
education is an outline on how to educate this mind: he expresses the belief that
education make the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet",
with the statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten
are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education."

David Hume
David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian during
the Age of Enlightenment.
Hume bundle theory described the self or person as a
bundle or a collection of different perceptions that are
moving in a very fast and successive manner; therefore,
perpetual flux.
According to Hume, there is no such thing as self,
because in every situation, time, and circumstances, we
portray a different person and different identity.
Hume divided the mind’s perceptions into two groups:
1. Impressions. These are directly experienced; they
result from inward and outward sentiments.
2. Ideas. These are mechanisms that copy and
reproduce sense data formulated based upon the
“Bundle Theory of self” previously perceived impressions.
Immanuel Kant
Philosopher Immanuel Kant is a central figure in modern philosophy. His contributions
to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics have had a profound impact on
almost every philosophical movement that followed him.
According to Kant, our primary experience of the world is
not
in terms of a disconnected stream of sensations. Instead,
we perceive and experience an organized world of objects,
relationships, and ideas, all existing within a fairly stable
framework of space and time.

Kant view’s conscious self who is the knowing subject at the

center of our universe. All our knowledge begins with
experience, but it does not follow that it all arises out of
experience. For Kant it well be that even our empirical
knowledge is made up of what we receive through
impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge
supplies from itself.
“We construct the self”
Two components of the “self”:
1. Inner self. The “self” by which you are aware of alterations in your own state. This
include your rational intellect and your psychological state, such as moods, feelings,
and sensations, pleasure, and pain.
2. Outer self. It includes your senses and the physical world. It is the common boundary
between the external world and the inner self. It gathers information from the external
world through the senses, which the inner self interprets and coherently expresses.

Gilbert Ryle
Philosopher and professor, he wrote The Concept of Mind (1949) where he rejected the
notion that mental states are separable from physical states.
Ryle views that each mind has its own private,
personal universe. Our physical bodies are just the
opposite of our minds and our bodies and their
movements are available to everyone, including
ourselves.
Ryle goes on to analyze how this apparent conflict
between the theory of Cartesian dualism and our
everyday experience of others is actually the result of
confused conceptual thinking, a logical error that he
terms a “category mistake.”

For Ryle, University is a concept expressing the entire

system of buildings, curricula, faculty, administrators,
“I Act, therefore I Am”
and so on.

He believes that the mind is a concept that expresses the entire system of thoughts,
emotions, actions, and so on that make up the human self. The category mistake
happens when we speak about the self as something independent of the physical body:
a purely mental entity existing in time but not space.
Paul Churchland

Philosopher and professor, Paul Churhcland is known for his studies in neurophilosophy
and the philosophy of mind. His philosophy stands on a materialistic view or the belief
that nothing but matter exists.
Churchland and other Materialists believe that to fully
understand the nature of the mind we have to fully
understand the nature of the brain. He begins by
acknowledging that a simple identity formula mental states =
brain states is a flawed way in which to conceptualiz the
relationship between the mind and the brain.
Churchland views that 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 which he call as “eliminative
materialism.”
Churchland’s central argument is that the concepts and
theoretical vocabulary we use to think about our selves using
such terms as belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy “The self as the brain”
actually misrepresent the reality of minds and selves.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher and authoer emphasizing the body as the
primary site of knowing the world.
Merleau-Ponty views that the division between the “mind” and the “body” is a product of
confused thinking. He thinks that the simple fact is, we experience our self as a unity in
which the mental and physical are seamlessly woven together. He asserted that this
unity is our primary experience of our selves, and we only begin to doubt it when we use
our minds to create abstract ideas of a separate “mind” and “body.”
Merleau-Ponty, it’s these mental creations that result
in the apparent mysteries and paradoxes such as the
mind/body “problem.”

According to him, the body acts what the mind

percieves as a unified one. In other words, our “living
body” is a natural synthesis of mind and biology, and
any attempts to divide them into separate entities are
artificial and nonsensical.

From Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s vantage point,

it’s the moments of direct, primal experience that are
the most real, what they call the Lebenswelt or “lived
“The self as embodied subjectivity” world,” which is the fundamental ground of our being
and consciousness.

ANTHROPOLOGY
What is anthropology? What is its view about the concept of “self”? Anthropology is the
study of people, past and present. It focuses on unsertanding the human condition in its
cultural aspect. In a general snse, anthropology is concerned with understanding how
humnaas evolved and how they differ form one another. Anthropology is a very dynamic
field, and anthropological literature offers several different definitions of “self”.
This discussion, however, will tackle the widely acceptable definitions of “self” in modern
anthropology.
A unit but unitary
Katherine Ewing (1990), a anthropologist and professor,
described the self as encompassing the “physical
organism, possessing psychological functioning and social
attributes.” This definition portrays the “self” as implicitly
and explicitly existing in the mind comprised of
psychological, biological, and cultural processes.
Nueroscientist Joseph LeDoux (2002) conceptualized the
implicit and explicit aspects of the self. The aspect of the
self that you are consciously aware of is the explicit self
while the one that is not immediately available to the
consciousness is the implicit aspect. This oncept can be
traced to the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud’s “level
of consciousness”.
LeDoux’s view on how the “self” was developed asserted
that it is framed, maintained, and affected biologically,
mentally, and socially. According to LeDoux (2002), “the
self is not static; it is added to and subtracted from by
genetic maturation, learning, forgetting, stress,ageing, and
disease.” This is ture of both the implicit and explicit
aspects of the self.

Self as representation
Ewing (1998) asserted that a “self” is illusory. “People construct a series of self-
representations that are based on selected cultural concepts of person and selected
chains of personal memories. Each self-concept is experienced as whole and
continuous, with its own history and memories that emerge in a specific context to be
replaced by another self-representation when the context changes.” By self-
representation, Ewing menat culturally shaped “self” concepts that one applies to
oneself (Quinn, 2014); “it is the mental entities that are supposed to represnts the self”
(Schlichtet, 2009).
According to Ewing (1990), people form all cultures have been observed to be able ot
rapidly project different self-representations, depending on the context of the situation.
The person is unaware of these shifts; however, he/she will still experience wholeness
and continuity depsite these shifts.
The self embedded in culture
Cultural anthropologists have argued that the self is culturally shaped and infinitely
variable. “Cultural traditions and social prcatices regulate, express, and transform the
human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences
in mind, self, and emotion”.
Cultural psychologist distinguished tow ways of how the self is constructed. These are
the independent and interdependent constructs. These self-construals are also
imbedded in culture.Construal is an interpretation of the meaning of something; hence,
in this sense, the meaning of “self”. The independent construct is characteristic of
individualistic culture, such as in North America and Europe.
Individualistic culture represents the self as separate, distinct, with emphasis on internal
attributes or traits, skills, and values. The interdependent construct is typical of the
collectivist culture in East Asia stressing the essential connection between the individual
to other people.
Developmental psychologist Catherine Raeff (2010), believed that culture can influence
how you view: relationships, personality traits, achievement, and expressing emotions.
Relationships
Culture influences how you enter into and maintain relationship.
Personality traits
Culture influences whether (and how) you value traits, like humility, self-esteem,
politeness, assertiveness, and so on, as well as how you percieve hardship or how
you feel about relying on others.
Achievement
Culture influences how you define success and whether you value certain types of
indicidual and group achievements.
Expressing emotions
Culture influences what will affect you emotionally, as well as how you express
yourself, such as showing your feelings in public or keeping it private.

Glossary

The following terms used in this module are defined as follows:

Collectivist - value among the group over the self. Worldview that tend
to find common values and goals in a group.
Conscious - awareness of external and internal existence.
Explicit - the aspect of self that you are fully aware of.
Immaterial - spiritual rather than physical.
Materialists - mental states and consciousness, are results of material
interactions.
Rational activity - generally accepted activity. Daily activity, such as; eating,
walking.
Virtue - behavior showing high moral standard.
 References
Ariola, Mariano M. Philosophy of Human Person, Manila: Purely Books Trading, 2013
Ariola, Mariano M. Sociology and Anthropology with Family Planning, Manila: Purely
Books Trading, 2012
Brook, A. Kant’s view of the Mind and Consciousness of Self. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Retrieved
from the World Wide Web November 24, 2004:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/kant-mind/
Cohon r. Hume’s moral Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Retrieved from the Word Wide Web November 24,
2004: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/hume-moral/