Chapter 1: Who Am I? A Philosophical Journey to Discovering the Self PDF

CHAPTER 1: WHO AM I? A PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNEY TO DISCOVERING THE SELF  1. SOCRATES: KNOW THYSELF ◼ “An unexamined life is a life not worth living”. ▪ Examine one’s life, for it is in the examination that we can know ourselves”. ◼ There was soul first before man’s bo...

CHAPTER 1: WHO AM I? A PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNEY TO DISCOVERING THE SELF  1. SOCRATES: KNOW THYSELF ◼ “An unexamined life is a life not worth living”. ▪ Examine one’s life, for it is in the examination that we can know ourselves”. ◼ There was soul first before man’s body. ◼ Man’s existence was first in the realm of ideas and exists as a soul or pure mind. ▪ This soul has knowledge by direct intuition and all these are stored in his mind. ◼ SOCRATIC METHOD – is an exchange of question and answer that ultimately aims to make the person remember all the knowledge that he has forgotten, including his former omniscient self. 2. PLATO ◼ The dichotomy of the: 1. IDEAL WORLD or the WORLD OF FORMS – is the permanent, unchanging reality 2. MATERIAL WORLD - a world that keeps on changing; it is what we see around us; this is where we live; the replica of the real world found in the world of forms. ◼ HUMAN BEINGS are composed of 2 things: 1. Body – changing; not the real self but only a replica of our true Self. 2. Soul – is the true self - the permanent, unchanging Self ◼ The soul exists before birth and leaves room for the possibility that it might survive bodily death. ◼ The body is seen as some sort of prison. ◼ We can free ourselves from the imprisonment of our bodily senses through contemplation. ◼ CONTEMPLATION – communion of the mind with universal and eternal ideas ◼ We continue to exist even in the absence of our bodies because we are Souls only.  3. AUGUSTINE ◼ “But my sin was this – that I looked for pleasure, beauty and truth and not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion and error.” ◼ In his younger years, he abandoned his early Christian faith because he found it difficult to reconcile a loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God with the evils in the world. ◼ Taking his cue from the two worlds of Plato, he now differentiated what is the real world and the temporary world. ◼ Our world (world of materials) – is not our final home but a just a temporary home where we are just passing through ◼ Our real world is found in the world where there is permanence and infinity – that’s the world where God is. ◼ Moral law exists and is imposed on the mind; reason makes us recognize these laws, and thus, we can discern the distinction between right and wrong. ◼ Only God is fully real – as the unchanging, permanent being and he sees God as the ultimate expression of love. ◼ God, out of love, created MAN. ◼ Man in fact, is created in the image of God. ▪ He has an immortal souls whose main pursuit is to have an everlasting life with god ▪ In this world, man pursues happiness , but this can only be achieved in God alone. ◼ There is an eternal law – which should be universally followed – coming from the Eternal Reason or God himself. ◼ ETERNAL LAW – the law of conscience and this conscience is that small still voice that tells us instinctively whether our actions are morally good or bad.  4.RENE DESCARTES ◼ Father of Modern Philosophy; brilliant mathematician ◼ “I think, therefore, I am”. ▪ His essence lay in being a purely thinking being, because even if he can doubt whether he has real body or it’s just a trick of his senses, one thing he cannot doubt is that he is thinking. ◼ Mind and body are separate and very distinct from one another. ◼ But the mind is conjoined with the body in an intimate way – they causally act upon each other. ◼ The essence of the Self (as a thinking being) – the self being the Mind more than the body ◼ When the body is gone, the mind may continue to exist and function.  5. JOHN LOCKE ◼ He is a great British empiricist philosopher and is widely credit for laying the foundation of human rights and commitment to the idea that the sovereign should be the people and not the monarch. ◼ The concept of a ◼ The memory theory – person’s memory in the holds that we were in the definition of the self. past for as long as we can ◼ The memory renders us remember something self-conscious we are from the past. that one and the same ◼ Personality identity is person. explained in terms of psychological connection between life stages in the memory theory  6. DAVID HUME ◼ An empiricist – regarded the senses as our key source of knowledge. ◼ The existence of the mind is divided into two: ▪ 1. IMPRESSION ▪ 2. IDEAS ◼ IMPRESSIONS ◼ The self is nothing over and ▪ Based on sensory above the stream of experience perceptions we enjoy. ◼ IDEAS ◼ There is no permanent and ▪ Things we create in our unchanging self. minds even though we are no longer experiencing ◼ A person is a bundle of them. perception. ▪ “I” will be constantly changing because the different experiences one has for every constant change will affect and reshape that person. IMMANUEL KANT  7. SIGMUND FREUD ◼ Father of Psychoanalysis ◼ He devised a structure and the influence of his socio-cultural environment.  TRIPARTITE DIVISION OF MIND ◼ ID – represents man’s biological nature, the impulses and the bodily desires. ◼ EGO – reality principle; it reduces the conflict between id and superego by implementing defense mechanism ◼ SUPEREGO – represents the ethical component of the personality and provides the moral standards by which the ego operates.  8. GILBERT RYLE ◼ “Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies”. ◼ A talk about the mind is simply a talk about behavior. ◼ The mind is not distinct from the body. ◼ The only way by which we can know the mind is working is through the behavior of the person, hence we can only know a person through how a man behaves, their tendencies and reactions in certain circumstances.  9. PAUL CHURCHLAND ◼ He believes that the “self” is the brain. ◼ “We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain”. ◼ The term mind – our moods, emotions, actions, consciousness are deeply affected by the state of our brain. ◼ By manipulating certain parts of our brain, our feelings, actions and physical state are successfully altered.  10. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ◼ “ We know not through our intellect but through our experience”. ◼ A person is defined by virtue of movement and expression. ◼ “I am the sum of all that I make my body do”. ◼ THIS INCLUDES THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST AND HOW I ACTUALLY MAKE DECISIONS IN THE PRESENT.