Introduction to Philosophy and Socrates

Philosophy

• Philosophy comes from the Greek words "philo," meaning love, and "sophia," meaning wisdom.
• It deals with fundamental questions of human existence, such as "Who am I?"
• The major branches of philosophy include:
  • Logic and Philosophy of Language
  • Ontology and Metaphysics
  • Epistemology and Methodology
  • Ethics
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Philosophy of Religion
  • Applied Ethics
  • Business Ethics
  • Medical Ethics
  • Political Philosophy
  • Social Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Law
  • Aesthetics
  • Philosophy of Art
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Philosophy of Physics
  • Philosophy of Biology
  • Philosophy of Psychology
  • Philosophy of the Social Sciences
  • Philosophy of Economics

Socrates' Concept of the Self (470 BCE - 399 BCE)

• Socrates believed that each person possesses an immortal soul that survives the death of the body.
• Reality is dualistic, comprised of dual realms:
  • One realm is changeable, transient, and imperfect
  • One realm is unchanging, eternal, and immortal
• The physical world belongs to the former realm, comprised of all that we can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel with all aspects of our physical world continually changing, transforming, and disappearing.
• Our bodies belong to the physical realm as they change, are imperfect, and die.
• Our souls are unchanging and immortal, surviving the death of the body, belonging to the ideal realm.
• Our souls strive for wisdom and perfection.
• Reason is the soul's tool to achieve this exalted state.
• As long as the soul is tied to the body, inhibited by the imperfection of the physical realm, the soul is confused by a world that spins round her, and she is like a drunkard.
• Reason enables the soul to free itself from the corrupting imperfection of the physical realm and achieve "communion with the unchanging."
• The soul is of a unified, indissoluble form, therefore one should not be concerned about death because the soul is incapable of being dispersed into nonexistence as it must be eternal.
• Physical existence on Earth is merely an imperfect reflection of ultimate and eternal reality.
• The purpose in life is to achieve communion with this ultimate reality.

Plato's Concept of the Self (428 BCE or 427 BCE - 348/347 BCE)

• The body, with its deceptive senses, keeps one from real knowledge and rivets one in a world of material things which is far removed from the world of reality, tempting people away from the virtuous life.
• Through the soul one shall have knowledge, be in touch with reality, and lead a life of virtue.
• Only the soul can truly know, for only the soul can ascend to the real world, the world of the Forms or Ideas.
• Thinking, a function of the soul, is described by analogy to talking.
• The parts of the soul are likened to a team of harnessed, winged horses and their charioteer labeled Reason, Emotion, and Desire.
• The body, vis-à-vis the soul, is a tomb, grave, prison, barnacles, or rocks holding down the soul.
• Plato compares the lowest or body-like part of the soul to a brood of beasts.
• The soul is much more important than the body.
• There are three elements of the Self:
  • Appetite: Includes desires, pleasures, physical satisfactions, comforts, etc
  • Spirit: Element of the psyche that is excited when given challenges, fights back when agitated, or fights for justice when unjust practices are evident.
  • Mind: The most superior of all elements which means the conscious awareness of the self. it decides, analyses, thinks ahead, proposes what is best, and rationally controls both the appetitive and spirited elements of the psyche.
• Human behavior flows from desire, emotion, and knowledge.
• Disharmony of our soul and lives occur when the appetitive and spirit controlled the reason.
• Reason must control the other two elements to avoid ignorance, to attain happiness.

St. Augustine of Hippo (354 AD - 430 AD)

• Augustine's concept of self is based on a notion that a human person is bifurcated or dualism of body and soul.
• A soul, which dwells in the world which is imperfect yearns to be with the Divine, which is God.
• Self is in search of happiness, because humans are eudemonic characters, as satisfaction in this life is derived from happiness.
• Happiness brings the two fundamental rules of humanity which are intertwined: love and justice.
• Loving things improperly lead to unhappiness.
• To be truly happy, one must have properly ordered loves, which can only be achieved as one embraces the spiritual life in deeper ways.
• The body is united with the soul, so that man may be entire and complete, is a fact we recognize on the evidence of our own nature.

René Descartes (1596-1650)

• Cogito, ergo sum is the first principle of Descartes' theory of knowledge because no rational person will doubt their own existence as a conscious, thinking entity, and are aware of thinking about our self.
• Cogito ergo, sum is the keystone of Descartes' concept of self.
• The essence of existing as a human identity is the possibility of being aware of our selves because being self-conscious in this way is integral to having a personal identity.
• It would be impossible to be self-conscious if one didn't have a personal identity of which to be conscious with a self identity and being self-conscious are mutually dependent on one another.
• The essence of one's self means you are a “thinking thing," a dynamic identity that engages in all of those mental operations associated with being a human self.
• One can understand situations they find themself in, doubt the accuracy of ideas presented to them, affirm the truth of a statement made about them, deny an accusation that someone has made, will themself to complete a task they have begun, refuse to follow a command that you consider to be unethical, imagine a fulfilling career for themself, feel passionate emotions toward another person, etc.
• One's self identity is dependent on the fact that one is capable of being aware they are engaging in these mental operations while they are engaged in them.
• If one was consistently unconscious of their mental operations, consistently unaware of their thinking, reasoning, and perceiving processes, then it would not be possible for them to have a self identity, a unique essence, a you.
• Your physical body is secondary to your personal identity; you can conceive of yourself existing independently of your body.
• The essential self, the self as thinking entity, is radically different than the self as physical body.
• The thinking self, or soul, is a non-material, immortal, conscious being, independent of the physical laws of the universe.
• The physical body is a material, mortal, non-thinking entity, fully governed by the physical laws of nature.
• The soul and body are independent of one another and each can exist and function without the other.
• Descartes' believed that the intermingling point of contact was through the pineal gland, a small gland located at the base of the skull.
• The pineal gland is where the thinking self connected to the physical brain.
• His fascination with the pineal gland is mirrored in the Hindu belief that the pineal gland is the seat of the highest chakra, the connection between the individual body and mind to God.

John Locke (1632 - 1704)

• Locke was an British philosopher and he believed the self is consciousness
• In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke lays the groundwork for empiricist philosophy.
• The mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which experience writes, challenges the rationalist philosophy that preceded him.
• Rationalism states that the view that reason is the primary source of all knowledge and that only our reasoning abilities can enable us to understand sense experience and reach accurate conclusions.
• Empiricism states that the view that sense experience is the primary source of all knowledge and that only a careful attention to sense experience can enable us to understand the world and achieve accurate conclusions.
• It is a discovery to know the nature of personal identity to find out what it means to be a person.
• A person is a thinking, intelligent being who has the abilities to reason and to reflect.
• A person considers itself to be the same thing in different times and different places.
• Consciousness is someone who is aware that we are thinking, always accompanies thinking and is an essential part of the thinking process.
• Consciousness is what makes possible our belief that we are the same identity in different times and different places.
• Consciousness explains: “When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. and Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self.
• Its reasonable to believe that mammals such as chipmunks, dogs, and dolphins are able to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, just like humans.
• The difference being what mammals are they conscious of the fact that they are performing these activities as they are performing them. As most people would say no.
• Consciousness, or more specifically, self-consciousness is a necessary part of having a coherent self-identity.
• Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Descartes, Locke, all had agreed that the self existed in the form of an immortal, non material soul that continues to exist following the death of the body.
• Locke denies that the individual self necessarily exists in a single soul or substance.
• For Locke, the essence of the self is its conscious awareness of itself as a thinking, reasoning, reflecting identity.
• Personal identity is not necessarily included in a single substance or soul as they may take up residence in any number of substances or souls.
• Personal identity is not in doubt or jeopardy, because we are aware of our self (or remember being aware of it).
• There is no way of knowing if our personal identity has been existing in one substance (soul) or a number of substances (souls).
• Personal identity is distinct from whatever substance it finds itself associated with.
• If the consciousness of a prince has assumed the physical body of a cobbler (retaining memories of the prince's past life), Locke would still consider him to be the same person, in spite of his different physical forms at the end of time, when all people of faith are resurrected.

David Hume (1711-1776)

• Hume believed there is no self.
• Hume believed self is not tied to any particular body or substance.
• Self only exists in other times and places because of our memory of those experiences.
• If we carefully examine our sense experience through the process of introspection, we discover that there is no self!
• There are only two distinct entities that are only in our experiences or contents.
  • Impressions:
    • Impressions are the basic sensations of our experience, the elemental data of our minds and include pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and so on.
    • These impressions are lively and vivid.
  • Ideas:
    • Ideas are copies of impressions and 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.
• All of our experiences are perceptions, and none of these perceptions resemble a unified and permanent self-identity that exists over time.
• The perceived self is a a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.
• Humans desperately want to believe that they have a unified and continuous self or soul that they use their imaginations to construct a fictional self.
• This fictional self is not real; what we call the self is an imaginary creature, derived from a succession of impermanent states and events.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Kant believed we construct the self.
• Our primary experience of the world is not in terms of a disconnected stream of sensations.
• We perceive and experience an organized world of objects, relationships, and ideas, all existing within a fairly stable framework of space and time.
• Our minds actively synthesize and relate these sensations in the process of creating an intelligible world.
• The sensations of immediate experience conform to our minds, rather than the reverse.
• We construct our world through these conceptual operations allowing insight and knowledge.
• Your self can perform the synthesizing, unifying function because it transcends sense experience.
• The self isn't an object located in your consciousness with other objects the self is a subject, an organizing principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible.
• Kant accords the self “transcendental" status because it exists independently of experience.
• The self is the product of reason, a regulative principle because the self "regulates" experience by making unified experience possible.
• Other such "transcendental regulative ideas" include the ideas of cosmos and God.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• Freud believed there are two selves, One Conscious, One Unconscious
• The concept of the unconscious forms the central core in Freud's theory of the structure and dynamics of the human personality.
• Although the conscious self has an important role to play in our lives, it is the unconscious self that holds the greatest fascination and has the dominant influence in our personalities.
• Freud's focus on the unconscious self marks a significant departure from previous efforts in philosophy to understand the nature of the self.
• Freud is generally given credit for the extensive articulation and subsequent popularization of the concept of the unconscious, it was his sincerest conviction that the unconscious was not a concept that he invented, but rather a reality characterizing human functioning that he discovered.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976)

• Ryle believed the self is how one behaves.
• The self is defined in terms of the behavior that is presented to the world, a view that is known in psychology as behaviorism.
• This dualistic view has serious implications for what we can know and not know.
• Although each person has direct knowledge of his or her mind, it is impossible for us to have any direct knowledge of other minds as each mind is its own private, personal universe.
• The minds the body and their movements are available to everyone, including ourselves
• While the bodies can be observed, photographed, measured, analyzed, and their movements can be recorded, the minds are completely private, but our bodies and their movements are completely public.

Paul Churchland (Born October 21, 1942)

• Churchland believed Materialism is the self, or rather, the brain.
• Mental states are identical with, reducible to, or explainable in terms of physical brain states, according to materialistic view.
• The health of our bodies, our ingestion, the experiences we endure all these dimensions of our physical self have a profound effect on our mental and emotional functioning.
• Our emotional states, the way we think about things, our levels of stress, the optimism (or pessimism) we feel all of these dimensions of our mental self have a dramatic impact on our physical condition.
• As scientific mind progress, brain research has encouraged many to conclude that it is only a matter of time before the mental life of consciousness is fully explainable in terms of the neurophysiology of the brain.
• The ultimate goal of such explorations is to link the self including all of our thoughts, passions, personality traits to the physical wiring and physiological functioning of the brain.
• Although thinkers recognize that achieving such a goal will take time, they are confident that minds will progressively develop better ways of describing the mind, consciousness, and human experience that are physiologically based.
• In his view, the idea that the self is inseparable from the brain and the physiology of the body, all a person has is the brain, and so if the brain is gone, there is no self.
• There is no mind, and the mind is nothing but just a mere imagination as the brain and not the imaginary mind that gives us our sense of selfsince our minds aren't recognized by our senses.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

• The division between the mind and the body is a product of confused thinking.
• We experience our self as a unity in which the mental and physical are seamlessly woven together.
• This unity is our primary experience of our selves, and we only begin to doubt it when we use our minds to concoct abstract notions of a separate mind and body.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

• The self is embodied subjectivity and ideas of "mind" and "body" radically different entities that need to be connected in some way that is not real, mental constructions of our imaginations, not expressions of reality or even accurate descriptions of our experience.
• When one finds themself dancing, playing a sport, or performing musically, in the moment, mind and body are fully functioning as one integrated entity.
• For Merleau-Ponty, this unified experience of our self is the paradigm or model that we should use to understand our nature.
• There is not a duality of substances but only the dialectic of living being in its biological milieu.
• 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.

Conclusion

• The self is a wonder, a miracle, an extraordinary creation.
• When Socrates urged each of us to "Know thyself" and warned that “The unexamined life is not worth living," he was issuing a challenge that requires a lifetime commitment and our mind's best work.
• It is in the process of striving to understand our self that we may also discover the purpose of our existence and the path to living a productive and fulfilling life.