PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE SELF

As a broad field about knowledge, thinking, reasoning, nature, as well as how we should live,
among others, it is almost inevitable that the study of philosophy would lead for the philosophers
to reflect on themselves and ask, "Who am I?” What characterizes this 'self that I say I am?" Here
are several philosophers and their ideas that we can also reflect on.
Greek thinkers prior to Socrates, like Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, among others, focused
on the composition and processes of the world around them. Unsatisfied with mere mythological
and supernatural explanations, these so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers turned to observation,
documentation, and reasoning.

Socrates and Plato

Socrates (469-399 BCE) provided a change of perspective by focusing on the self. His life and
ideas, documented by his students, the historian Xenophon and the philosopher Plato, showed how
Socrates applied systematic questioning of the self. Socrates believed that it is the duty of the
philosopher to know oneself. To live without knowing who you are and what virtues you can attain
is the worst that can happen to a person. Thus, he noted that an "unexamined life is not worth
living."
Socrates saw a person as dualistic, that is, every person is composed of body and soul. There is an
imperfect and impermanent aspect of every one of us, which is our physical body, and then, there
is also the perfect and permanent, which is our soul.
Plato (428-347 BCE) further expounded on the idea of the soul by stating that it has three parts or
components: the appetitive soul, the rational soul, and the spirited soul. The appetitive soul is the
one responsible for the desires and cravings of a person; the rational soul is the thinking, reasoning,
and judging aspect; and the spirited soul is accountable for emotions and also makes sure that the
rules of reason is followed in order to attain victory and/or honor.
In his work The Republic, Plato emphasized that all three parts of the soul must work harmoniously
to attain justice and virtue in a person. The rational soul must be well-developed and in-charge,
the emotions from the spirited soul are checked, and the desires of the appetitive must be controlled
and focused to those that give life, like eating, drinking, and sleeping among others.

St. Augustine
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) is considered as one of the most significant Christian thinkers,
especially in the development of the Latin Christianity theology. His idea of the "self" merged that
of Plato and the then new Christian perspective, which led him to believe in the duality of a person.
He believes that there is this imperfect part of us, which is connected with the world and yearns to
be with the divine, and there is a part of us that is not bound by this world and can therefore attain
immortality. The imperfection of the body incapacitates it from thriving in the spiritual
communion with God, thus, it must die for the soul to reach the eternal realm. However, this
communion of the soul with God can only be attained if the body lives in this world with virtue.

René Descartes
René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. He claimed
that the person is composed of the cogito or the mind, and the extenza or the body, which is the
extension of the mind. He argues that a person should only believe the things that can pass the test
of doubt (Descartes 2008). In his "Discourse on the Method" and "Meditations on First
Philosophy," he therefore concluded that the only thing that a person cannot doubt is the existence
of his or her "self." Because even doubt about the self proves that there is a thinking or doúbting
self. Thus, his famous quote "cogito ergo sum." St. Augustine René Descartes
What makes a person a person is therefore the mind, and the body is just some kind of a machine
that is attached and controlled by it. In his words, "But what then, am 1? A thinking thing. It has
been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands (conceives), affirms,
denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives" (Descartes 2008).

John Locke
Locke (1632--1704) was an English philosopher, political theorist, and physician. His works as a
physician provided him with an idea that deviated from the duality of the body or soul.
A person's mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa at birth. It is through experiences that this blank
slate is filled, and a personal identity or "self" is formed. This "self" cannot be found in the soul
nor the body but in one's consciousness (Nimbalkar 2011).
Note, however, that the consciousness is not the brain itself. It is something that goes beyond the
brain and thus, for Locke, the consciousness and the "self" that comes with it can be transferred
from one person or body to another (Nimbalkar 2011).

David Hume
Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher and an empiricist who believes that all concepts as
well as knowledge come from the senses and experiences. Based on such perspective, he argued
that there is no self beyond what can be experienced. We do not know others because we have
seen or touched their souls; we know them because of what we can actually observe.
The "self," according to Hume, is a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed
each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement" (Hume and
Steinberg 1992). Simply, the self is a combination of experiences of a person.
We can categorize these experiences into impressions and ideas. Impressions are feal or actual
experiences or sensations, like feeling the rough edges of a stone or tasting a sweet ice cream.
Ideas are copies of impressions or representation of the world and sensations, like love, faith, or
even an association that this certain event is caused by something in the past could possibly create
another reaction in the future.

Immanuel Kant
One of the most influential philosophers in Western philosophy, Kant (1724-1804) contributed to
the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics among others.
While everything starts with sensations and impressions, Kant believes that there must necessarily
be something in us that organızes these sensations to create knowledge and ideas. Against the
empiricist Locke, Kant is a rationalist who thinks that reason, not mere experience, is the
foundation of knowledge. It is like seeing a visual effect in television, your experience say it is
there, but reason says it is only a computer-generated image.
For Kant, it is the self that organizes and synthesizes our experiences into something meaningful
for us. It can do such thing because it is independent from sensory experiences. It is something
that transcends or is above even our consciousness.

Ryle, Churchland, and Merleau-Ponty

The debate on the duality of a person's self, of mind and body, of consciousness and substance,
internal and external, have been revised and adapted for a long time that several modern-day
philosophers had to take drastic actions, so to speak. This action is the rejection of that duality.
A British philosopher mainly associated with the Ordinary Language Philosophy Movement,
Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) proposed that we should instead focus on the observable behavior of a
person in defining the "self" One of the things that the duality approach seems to state is that there
can be a private, unobservable aspect of a person, and a different public and observable part. One
can describe one's "self" as good but do otherwise in real life.
Ryle do not adhere to this idea and sees the self as an entirety of thoughts, emotions, and actions
of a person that relates to observable behavior. We aget to know others by observing their behavior
and inferring about their "selves." We can apply the same observation and reflection on ourselves.
Maurice Jean Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), a leading French existentialist and phenomenologist,
also contributes to the idea by stating that mind and body are interconnected with each other and
therefore cannot be separated. Our body is connection to the external world, including other
people, thus all experiences are embodied. This also includes the thoughts and emotions ofa
person.
More recent philosophers, like Paul Churchland (1942-) further utilized knowledge from other
academic and research fields to talk about the self as well as the mind. He was one of those who
proposed the use of "eliminative materialism" or "eliminativism," which claims that the old terms
we use to describe the mind are outdated, if not mere "folk psychology," thus the need to use more
accurate and scientifically proven terms, especially based on neuroscience research.
Neuroscience somehow shows a connection of what we call mental states to that of the physical
activities of the brain. It can be argued therefore that the self is actually located in the brain, and
that the actions of the mind or the self are processes of the brain.
The dual perspective of the "self" continues to exist, perhaps because our brains are programmed
to think of dualities. Our religious beliefs, that of a mortal body and an immortal soul, also affects
such continuity. However, new ideas from other academic fields as well as findings from
technological advances are being considered and incorporated in this debate and the discovery of
the self. Being open to such new ideas may help us know more about our own "self."