Philosophical Perspectives on the Self PDF

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES PHILISOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE  Who a person is, including the qualities such as SELF personality and ability that make one person different from another  SELF The essence of a man’s being. PHILOSOPHICAL (the being, whi...

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES PHILISOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE  Who a person is, including the qualities such as SELF personality and ability that make one person different from another  SELF The essence of a man’s being. PHILOSOPHICAL (the being, which is the source of a person’s DEFINITION consciousness)  The original meaning of the word philosophy comes from the Greek roots philo- meaning "love" and -sophos, or "wisdom." The pursuit of wisdom PHILOSOPHY the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school SOCRATES  For Socrates, reality is dualistic, made up of two realms. ▪ One realm is changeable, transient, and imperfect, (The physical world in which we live—comprising all that is subject to the 5 Metaphysical senses.) ▪ The other realm is unchanging, eternal, Scheme immortal. (It is only the ideal forms themselves that are perfect, unchanging, and eternal.)  For Socrates; Our bodies belong to the physical realm: They change, they’re imperfect, they die. Our souls, however, belong to the ideal realm: They are unchanging and immortal, Metaphysical surviving the death of the body. Scheme Although a close relationship exists between our souls and our bodies, they are radically different entities. As long as the soul is tied to the body, this quest for wisdom is inhibited by the imperfection of the physical realm. PLATO  Plato took Socrates’ Metaphysical Scheme and developed it. Metaphysical MAIN ISSUE: If the soul is so incapable of change, then why do we grow (emotionally Scheme - and intellectually)? Developed  Plato took Socrates’ Metaphysical Scheme and developed it. MAIN ISSUE: If the soul is so incapable of Metaphysical change, then why do we grow (emotionally and intellectually)? Scheme - He kept the body but further divided the Developed soul into three parts.  QUESTION: Metaphysical For Plato, what is Scheme - the soul? Developed The Allegory of the Chariot APPETITES includes all our myriad desires for various pleasures, comforts, physical satisfactions, Plato's three elements of and bodily ease. they can often be in conflict even with each other. this element of the soul is represented by the psyche: the black horse SPIRITED hot-blooded, part, i.e., the part that gets angry when it perceives (for example) an injustice being done. the part of us that loves to face and overcome great challenges, the part that can steel itself to Plato's three adversity, and that loves victory, winning, challenge, and honor. elements of "spirited" in the same sense that we speak of a the psyche: high-spirited horse, for example, one with lots of energy and power. this element of the soul is represented by the noble white horse. MIND (nous) our conscious awareness represented by the charioteer who is guiding (or Plato's three who at least should be guiding) the horses and chariot. elements of the part of us that thinks, analyzes, looks ahead, the psyche: rationally weighs options, and tries to gauge what is best and truest overall. NEOPLATONISM PLOTINUS  Roman philosopher named Plotinus (205–270 c.e.) breathed new life into Plato’s ideas, spearheading an intellectual movement that came to be known as Neoplatonism. Plotinus based his views on Plato’s core concepts. Plotinus had a profound impact on Saint Augustine. This extraordinary and far-reaching influence was the result of Augustine integrating the philosophical concepts of Plato with the tenets of Christianity. ST. AUGUSTINE  Plato’s vision of immortal souls striving to achieve union with this eternal realm through intellectual enlightenment became transformed into immortal souls striving to achieve union with God through faith and reason. Metaphysical The transient, finite nature of the physical world described by Plato became in Christianity a Scheme as proving ground for our eternal destinies. basis for Christianity Plato’s metaphysical framework thus provided philosophical justification for Christian beliefs.  Like Plato and Plotinus, Augustine believed that the physical body was both radically different from and inferior to its inhabitant, the immortal soul. Metaphysical Early in his philosophical development, he describes the body as a “snare” and a “cage” for Scheme as the soul. He considers the body a “slave” to the soul. basis for As his thinking matured, Augustine sought to develop a more unified perspective on Christianity body and soul. He ultimately came to view the body as the “spouse” of the soul. ST. AQUINAS  Aquinas views persons as material substances whose souls emerge from the unified relationship of form (morphe) and matter (hyle). (Taken from Aristotle’s theory) Hyle is the common stuff that makes up Synthesis of everything in the universe. Aristotle and Morphe refers to the essence or substance of a thing. Christianity Rather than beginning life with a self comprised of a material body and an immaterial soul, as the Platonists contend, Aquinas believes that life begins with the inseparable union of form and matter, gradually giving rise to the conscious self as we know it.  This unified self cannot be separated into discreet entities, unlike Plato’s (and Augustine’s) Synthesis of dualistic soul and body. Aristotle and The Latin for “soul” is anima, and Aquinas believes that every living thing has a soul since Christianity the soul is the principle of life—that is, what distinguishes a living (animate) thing from a nonliving (inanimate) thing. DESCARTES  Descartes was convinced that we need to use our own thinking abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop our own well- reasoned conclusions, supported with compelling proof. contrasts the process of learning to construct knowledge by thinking Dubito, independently with simply absorbing information from authorities Cogito Descartes is convinced that committing yourself to a wholesale and systematic doubting of all Ergo, Sum things you have been taught to simply accept without question is the only way to achieve clear and well-reasoned conclusions. It is the only way for you to develop beliefs that are truly yours and not someone else’s.  Descartes was convinced that we need to use our own thinking abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop our own well- reasoned conclusions, supported with compelling proof. Descartes is convinced that committing yourself Dubito, to a wholesale and systematic doubting of all things you have been taught to simply accept Cogito without question is the only way to achieve clear and well-reasoned conclusions. Ergo, Sum It is the only way for you to develop beliefs that are truly yours and not someone else’s. Thus, the fact that a person doubts and thinks proves that there is a self.  doubting of all that you have been taught requires great personal courage calling into question things like your religious beliefs, cultural values, and even Dubito, beliefs about your self can be a very disruptive enterprise. Cogito It may mean shaking up your world, questioning the beliefs of important people Ergo, Sum in your life, perhaps challenging your image of yourself.  Dubito, Cogito Ergo, Sum is also the keystone of Descartes’s concept of self. The person is made up of a body and a mind Dubito, The essence of existing as a human identity is the possibility of being aware Cogito of our selves: Being self-conscious in this Ergo, Sum way is integral to having a personal identity.  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. Dubito, If you were consistently not conscious of Cogito your mental operations, consistently unaware of your thinking, reasoning, and Ergo, Sum perceiving processes, then it would not be possible for you to have a self- identity. LOCKE  For Locke, all knowledge originates in our direct sense experience. (Empiricist View) Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are the keys to understanding the self. You have a coherent concept of your self as a personal identity because you are aware of your self when you are thinking, feeling, and willing. You have memories of times when you were aware of your self in the past, in other situations—at the party two weeks Plenty of ago, or your high school graduation several years ago. But there are many moments when we are not consciously Souls aware of our self when we are thinking, feeling, and willing—we are simply, unreflectively, existing. There are also many past experiences that we have forgotten or have faulty recollections of. During those lapses, when we were not aware of our self, or don’t remember being aware of our self, we can’t be sure if we were the same person, the same substance, the same soul. Therefore, we have no way of knowing if our personal identity has been existing in one substance (soul) or a number of substances (souls). HUME  David Hume continued in the empiricist tradition of John Locke In Locke’s view, your self is not tied to any particular There Is body or substance, and it only exists in other times and places because of our memory of those experiences. Using the same empiricist principles as Locke, Hume ends up with an even more startling conclusion—if No Self we carefully examine our sense experience through the process of introspection, we discover that there is no self!  The self is simply a collection of experiences within a particular person. The self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions. Categorized experiences into two: Impressions: basic objects of our There Is experience or sensation (ice cube No Self is cold, cold sensation is an impression) Ideas: copies of impressions (imagining being in love for the first time)  Kant was alarmed by David Hume’s notion. If Hume’s views proved true, then humans would never be able to achieve genuine knowledge in any area of experience: scientific, ethical, religious, or metaphysical, We Construct including questions such as the nature of the Self our selves. from Kant’s standpoint, it’s our self that makes experiencing an intelligible world possible because it’s the self that is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful whole.  Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize the fragmented, fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs take in. The unity of consciousness is a phrase invented by Kant to describe the fact that We Construct the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being the Self all contained in one consciousness—my consciousness. That’s precisely what makes your world intelligible to you: It’s your self that is actively organizing all of your sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to you.  According to Kant, this meaning- constructing activity is precisely what our minds are doing all of the time: taking the raw data of experience and actively synthesizing it into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live. We Construct We each have fundamental organizing rules the Self or principles built into the architecture of our minds. These dynamic principles naturally order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data. We didn’t have to “learn” these a priori ways of organizing and relating the world— they came as software already installed in our intellectual operating systems. Freud  Freud’s view of the self was multitiered, divided among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious The Self Is The concept of the unconscious forms the central core in Freud’s theory of the structure Multitiered and dynamics of the human personality. The Self Is Multitiered  PRECONSCIOUS/SUBCONSCIOUS The contents of the conscious mind include all of the things that you are actively aware of. The Self Is contains all of the things that you could potentially pull into conscious awareness Multitiered Gatekeeper between the conscious and unconscious  CONSCIOUS consists of everything inside of our awareness The Self Is includes such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling, and Multitiered fantasies inside of our current awareness  UNCONSCIOUS basic instincts and urges are contained in the unconscious mind. Things that the conscious mind wants to keep hidden from awareness are repressed into the unconscious mind. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. The Self Is While we are unaware of these feelings, thoughts, urges, and emotions, Freud believed Multitiered that the unconscious mind could still have an influence on our behavior. Things that are in the unconscious are only available to the conscious mind in disguised form. Freudian Slips (slips of the tongue) and dreams  Freud’s topographical model of the mind was divided into systems on the basis of their relationship to consciousness: conscious, The Self Is Multitiered preconscious, and unconscious. Freud later developed a structural model of the mind that divided it according to mental functions: the id, the ego, and the superego.  ID primitive and instinctive component of personality consists of all the inherited (i.e., biological) components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct - Thanatos. impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the The Self Is Multitiered instincts. The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego. engages in primary process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy oriented. operates on the pleasure principle (Freud, 1920) which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences. When the id achieves its demands, we experience pleasure when it is denied we experience ‘unpleasure’ or tension.  EGO The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable. operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The Self Is The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how to behave. has no concept of right or wrong; something is good Multitiered simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id. If the ego fails in its attempt to use the reality principle, and anxiety is experienced, unconscious defense mechanisms are employed. The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is rational, realistic, and orientated towards problem-solving.  SUPEREGO incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one's parents and others. consists of two systems: The conscience can punish the ego through causing feelings of guilt. The ideal self (or ego-ideal) is an imaginary picture of how you ought to be, and represents career aspirations, how to treat other people, and how to behave as a member of society. The Self Is If a person’s ideal self is too high a standard, then whatever the person does will represent Multitiered failure. Function; to control the id's impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression. persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection. Gilbert Ryle  “ghost in the machine” dualism (Ryle’s central metaphor) in which the “self” is thought to be a spiritual, immaterial ghost rattling around inside The Self Is the physical body. How You he completely disregarded the concept of a soul and instead believed that what truly mattered is Behave the behavior a person manifests in his day to (Behaviorism) day life. Paul Churchland  The Self Is Physicalism is the philosophical view that all aspects the Brain of the universe are composed of matter and energy (Neurological and can be fully explained by physical laws. Framework) Merleau-Ponty  Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty articulated the phenomenologist position in a simple declaration: “I live in my body.” By the “lived The Mind and body,” Merleau-Ponty means that the mind and body are so intertwined, they cannot be Body Are One separated.