Module 1 Defining The Self PDF

1 Module 1 DEFINING THE SELF: PERSONAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON SELF AND IDENTITY Lesson 1: The...

1 Module 1 DEFINING THE SELF: PERSONAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON SELF AND IDENTITY Lesson 1: The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives Introduction Before we even had to be in any official institution of learning, among the many things that we were first trained as kids was to articulate and write our names. Growing up, we were told to refer to this name when talking about ourselves. Our parents carefully thought about our names. Should we be named after a famous superstar, a respected official or historical personality, or even a saint? Were you named after one? Our names represent who we are. It has not been a custom to just randomly pick a combination of letters and numbers (or even punctuation marks) like zhjk879!! to denote our being. Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies because names are supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with names such as “precious,” “beauty”, or “lovely”. Likewise, when our parents call our name, we were taught to respond to them because our names represented who we are. As students, we are told to always write our names on our papers, projects, or any outputs for that matter. Our names signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the person and her name. names are inscribed even into one’s gravestone. A name is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only a signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probably will not become an actual saint. He may not even turn out to be saintly. The self is thought to be something else than the name. The is something that a person perennially molds, shaped, and develops. The self is not a static that one’s simple born with like a mole on one’s face or just assigned by one’s parents just like a name. Everyone is tasked to discover oneself. Have you truly discovered yours? ABSTRACTION The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of the self. Along with the question of the primary substratum that defines the multiplicity of things in the world, the inquiry on the self has preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy: the Greeks. The Greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myths and moved away from them in attempting to understand reality and respond to perennial questions of curiosity, including the question of the self. The different perspectives and views on the self can be best seen and understood by revisiting its prime movers and identifying the most important conjectures made by philosophers from ancient times to the contemporary period.  2 Socrates Socrates, praised as the greatest philosopher in the western civilization, stated that man is a being who thinks and wills. Prior the Socrates, the Greek thinkers, sometimes collectively called the Pre-Socratics to denote that some of them preceded Socrates while others existed around Socrates’s time as well. For Socrates the human person is composed of Body and Soul. This means that every human person is dualistic, that is he is composed of two important aspects of personhood. This means all individuals have imperfect, impermanent aspects to him, and the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent. As for Socrates, the soul should be nurtured properly through its acquisition of knowledge, wisdom and virtue. For him, a man who converges the two into one is a wise man, a man of wisdom. To the philosopher, he who is wise is a man who has disciplined his soul to know what is right and does what he knows to be right it is the recurring dictum Socrates maintains. If Socrates’ understanding of human nature in the context of the attitudinal level is ethical, the line of thinking of his brightest student, Plato is more or less, metaphysical. Plato For Plato, the nature of man is seen in the metaphysical dichotomy between body and soul. These dualistic entities in man have distinctive qualities which are contradictory to each other. For Plato, the body is material; it cannot live and move apart from the soul; it is mutable and destructible. On the contrary, the soul is immaterial; it can exist apart from the body; it is immutable and indestructible. In Plato’s view, the soul has three parts: it has a rational part, an appetitive part, and a spiritual part. Because man is a soul using body, three parts of the soul each has its locus in the body. The rational part is in the head, specifically in the brain; the appetitive part, in the abdomen; and the spiritual part, in the chest. For Plato, it is the appetitive part of the soul that drives man to experience thirst, hunger, and other physical wants. In the spiritual part of the soul that makes a man assert and experience abomination of anger. And it is the rational parts of the soul that enables man to think, to reflect, to draw conclusions, and to analyze. Seeing the rational part this way prompts Plato to say that this part of the soul is the most important and the highest.  3 St. Augustine Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the whole spirit of the medieval world when it comes to man. Following the olden view of Plato and infusing it with the new doctrine of Christianity, Augustine settled that man is of a bifurcated nature. As aspects of man dwells in the world and is imperfect and endlessly yearns to be with divine and the other can reach immortality. The Body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God. That God is Absolute Spirit, Absolute will, Absolute Intelligence, Absolute Freedom, will evil, no beginning and no end (Eternal) Transcendent. This is because the human body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with all transcendent God. The goal of every human [person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living his life on earth in virtue. St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of the medieval philosophy, added something to this Christian sights. Like his ancestors, particularly Aristotle and Augustine, St. Thomas understands man. But unlike them, St. Thomas claims that man is considerably united body and soul. Man is point of convergence the corporeal and spiritual substances. In other words, man “is one substance body and soul”. Acclimating some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas said that indeed, man is composed of two parts: matter and form. Matter, or hyle in Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up all in the universe”. Man’s body is part of this matter. From on the other hand, or morphe in Greek refers to the essence of a substance or thing. “It is what makes it what it is. In the case of the human person, the body of the human person is something that he shares even with animals. The cells in man’s body are skin to the cells of any other living, organic being in the world. However, what makes a human person a human person and not a dog, or a tiger is his soul, his essence. To Aquinas, just as in Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.  4 Rene Descartes Modern Philosophy would have been impossible without this French philosopher who was born in La Haye, Touraine, France in the year 1596. Descartes conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind. In his famous treatise, The Meditation of First Philosophy, he claims that there is so much what we should doubt. In fact, he says that since much of what we think and believe are not infallible, they may turn out to be false.one should believe that since which can pass the test of doubt (Descartes 2008). If something is so clear and lucid as not to be even doubted, then that is the only time when one should buy a proposition. In the end, Descartes thought that the only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, a thing that thinks and therefore, that cannot be doubted. Thus, his famous, cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am”. The fact that one should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that he exists. In his own terms, Descartes calls thinking substance Res Cogitans and extended substance Res Extensa. In Descartes view, the body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person has it, but it is not what makes man a man. If at all, that is the mind. Descartes says. “But what then am I? A thinking thing. It has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also and perceives” (Descartes 2008). David Hume David Hume, a philosopher from Scotland, that has a distinctive way of looking at man. Hume believes that one can know only what comes from experiences and senses, he argues that the self is nothing like what his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body. One can rightly see here the empiricism that runs through his veins. Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only attain knowledge by experiencing. For example, John knows Jean is another human person not because he has seen her soul. He knows she is just like her because he sees her, and toucher her. What is the self then? Self, according to Hume, is simply “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement. ” (Hume and Steinberg 1992). Men simply want to believe that there is a unified, coherent self, a soul or mind just like what previous philosophers though. What one thinks is a unified self is simply a combination of all experiences with a particular person.  5 Immanuel Kant Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant. Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and sensation of impressions. However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these impressions. To Kant, there is necessarily a mind that organized the impressions that men get from the external world. Time and space, for example, are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but are built in our minds. Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind. Gilbert Ryle Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy that has been running for a long time in the history of thought by blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self. For Ryle, what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-today life. For Ryle, looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exists is visiting your friend’s university and looking for the “university”. Ryle suggests that the ‘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 Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been going on for a long time is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem. Unlike Ryle who simply denies the “self”, Merleau-Ponty instead says that the mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another. One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience. All experience is embodied. One’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world. Because of these bodies, men are in the world. Merleau-Ponty dismisses the Cartesian Dualism that has spelled so much devastation in the history of man. For him, the Cartesian problem is nothing else but plain misunderstanding. The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one.