MODULE 1

Defining the Self: Personal and

Developmental Perspectives on Self and
Identity
In this module, it will enable you to understand the construct of the self from the
different perspectives – philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and psychological
views. This also includes the differing of East and West about the self.
To measure your learning, a set of exercises will be answered by you to evaluate
how much you understand the lessons.
In this module you are expected to:
- Explain why it is essential to understand the self;
- Discuss the different notions of the self from the points of view of various
philosophers across time and place;
- Explain the different ways by which society and culture shape the “self”;
- Analyze the effects of various factors identified in psychology in the formation of
the “self”
- Examine one’s self against the different views of the self.

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 Module 1.1:
The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives

At the end of the session, you will be able to:

1. Explain why it is essential to understand the self;
2. Discuss the different notions of the self from the points of view of various
philosophers across time and place;
3. Examine one’s self against the different views of the self.

Do this:
Words that Describe Me

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What makes you stand out from the rest?

Your Personal Identity

“Who are you?”

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Your Personal Identity
“Who are you?”

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 A Portrait of Yourself

 The best thing(s) I ever did was (were) ______________________________________.

 I wish I could lose my fear of ______________________________________________.
 I know I have the talent to ________________________________________________.
 I enjoy people who ______________________________________________________.
 I admire _______________________________________________________________.
 I feel most productive when _______________________________________________.
 I am motivated by _______________________________________________________.
 I almost never __________________________________________________________.
 My idea of fun is ________________________________________________________.
 Work is exciting when ____________________________________________________.
 The best advice I ever got was _____________________________________________.
 The thing I value most is __________________________________________________.
 If money were no object, I would ___________________________________________.
 It is easy for me to focus on _______________________________________________.
 My idea of a perfect life is _________________________________________________.
 My best days are ________________________________________________________.
 My dream is ____________________________________________________________.
 I always wanted to ______________________________________________________.
 I look forward to ________________________________________________________.
 I spent too much time ____________________________________________________.
 The thing my friends like about me is ________________________________________.
 When I try to change something ____________________________________________.
 In a group I like to _______________________________________________________.
 If I ever win a prize it will be for ____________________________________________.

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 Changes in our Lives
Think about an important change you made in your life.
1. Describe the change.

2. What were you thinking going through the change?

3. How were you feeling before, during, and after you made the change?

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 How is your “self” connected to your body?

How is your “self” related to other selves?

What will happen to your “self” after you die?

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Analysis
Were you able to answer the questions above easily? Why? Which questions did
you find easy to answer? Which ones are difficult? Why?
Questions Easy or Why?
difficult to
answer?

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 Let us learn!

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL

PERSPECTIVES

The various perspectives and views on the self can be best understood by revisiting
and identifying the most important speculations made by philosophers from the ancient
times to the contemporary period.

Socrates and Plato

Pre-Socratic (before the time of Plato) Greek thinkers were preoccupied with the
question about the primary substratum, “arché”, that explains the multiciplicity of things
in the world. These were the Pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales, Heraclitus, and
Empedocles, who were concerned with explaining what the world is really made of, why
the world is so, and what explains the changes that they observed around them.
After a series of thinkers from all
across the ancient Greek world who were
curious by the same questions, a man came
out to question something else. That man is
Socrates. He is the first philosopher to ever
engaged in a systematic questioning about
the self. This has become his life-long
mission. To him, the true mission of a
philosopher is to know oneself.
During his trial for allegedly corrupting
the minds of the youth and for impiety,
Socrates declared without regret that his
being accused was brought about by his
going around Athens engaging men, young
and old, asking their beliefs about themselves and about the world, particularly about
who they are (Plato, 2012). He considered himself as the “gadfly” that interrupts Athenian
men from their rest and shakes them off in order to reach the truth and wisdom. In his
reckoning, most men were not fully aware of who they were and the virtues that they
were supposed to have in order to preserve their souls for afterlife. He thought that it is
the worst that can happen to anyone. To live but die inside.

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 For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul which is supposed to mean
that every human person is dualistic – composed of two important aspects of his
personhood. This means that all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect, the
body, while maintaining that there is a soul that is perfect and permanent.
Plato, a student of Socrates, supported the
idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul. He
added that there are three components to the soul.
In his magnum opus, The Republic (Plato 2000), he
emphasized that justice in the human person can
only be achieved if the three parts of the soul are
working harmoniously with one another.
• Rational soul – forged by reason and
intellect has to govern the affairs of the human
person;
• Spirited soul – in charge of emotions,
should be kept at bay;
• Appetitive soul – in charge of base desires like eating, drinking, sleeping,
and having sexual intercourse, is controlled as well.

When this ideal state is attained, the human person’s soul becomes just and
virtuous.

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Augustine and Thomas Aquinas
Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the
spirit of the medieval world during that time. Following the
ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound
doctrine of Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is a
bifurcated nature. There is an aspect of man which dwells in
the world that is imperfect and continuously longing to be
with the divine while the other is capable of reaching
immortality. The body is bound to die on earth and the soul
is to live eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion
with 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.
Early in his philosophical development, he describes
the body as a “snare” and a “cage” for the soul. He considers
the body a “slave” to the soul, and sees their relation as
contentious: “The soul makes war with the body.” As his thinking matured, Augustine
sought to develop a more unified perspective on body and soul. He ultimately came to
view the body as the “spouse” of the soul, with both attached to one another by a “natural
appetite.” He concludes, “That 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.”
Thomas Aquinas, attached something to this Christian view. He said that indeed
man is composed of two parts: matter and form.

• Matter, or hyle in Greek, - common stuff that

makes up everything in the universe.
• Form, or morphe in Greek, - the essence of
a substance or thing
In the case of the human person, the body is
something that we share even with animals. The
cells in our body is more or less same to the cells of
any other living, organic being in the world. The
body is part of the matter that Aquinas is pointing
out. However, what makes a human person a human
and not a dog or any other animal is our soul, and
that is our essence. The soul is what emanates the body, it is what makes us human.
From this perspective, Aquinas views persons as material substances whose souls
emerge from the unified relationship of form and prime matter. So rather than beginning
life with a self-comprised of a material body and an immaterial soul, Aquinas believes
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that life begins with the inseparable union of form and matter, gradually giving rise to
the conscious self as we know it. And in the same way that a mold pressed onto warm
wax creates a unified formal whole, so the substantive form encountering matter creates
a unified self that cannot be separated into discreet entities, unlike Plato’s (and
Augustine’s) dualistic soul and body. For Aquinas, human beings are living bodies with
certain distinguishable potentiae: powers, abilities, or capacities. The Latin for “soul” is
anima, and Aquinas believes that every living thing has a soul since the soul is the
principle of life—that is, what distinguishes a living (animate) thing from a nonliving
(inanimate) thing. You are alive because you have a soul. The soul actualizes and
transforms matter into a living body by acting on appropriate quantities and qualities in
order to constitute a new substance, which is a case of emergence. The key to
understanding Aquinas’s position on human persons as emergent material substances is
his claim that the human soul is the substantial form of the human being. But if the form
and the body are so closely connected in creating the “personhood” of the individual,
what happens to the form when the body can no longer function? Aquinas would agree
with others that natural life for the soul ends with the life for the body.

Descartes
Rene Descartes was known to be the Father of Modern Philosophy. He was the
one to conceived that the human person has a
body and a mind. In his famous treatise, The
Meditations of First Philosophy, he claimed that
there is so much that we should doubt and that
much of what we think and believe, because
they are not infallible, may turn out to be false.
“One should only believe that which can pass
the test of doubt. If something is so clear and
lucid to be even doubted, then that is the only
time when one should actually buy a proposition” (Descartes 2008).
Descartes thought that the only thing that one cannot doubt is the existence of
the self. For even if one doubts oneself, that only proves that there is a doubting self, a
thing that thinks and therefore that cannot be doubted. Thus, his famous cognito ergo
sum or I think therefore, I am.
The ‘self’ then for Descartes is a combination of two distinct entities:
• Cognito or the thing that thinks which is the mind
• Extenza or extension of the mind which is the body
In Descartes’ view, the body is nothing 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.

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 “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 (conceives), affirms, denies, wills,
refuses; that imagines also, and perceives” (Descartes, 2008).

Hume
David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, has a
very unique way of looking at a man. He argued
that self is nothing like what his antecedents
thought of it. As an empiricist, he believed that
one can only know what comes from the senses
and experience. The self is not an entity over and
beyond the physical body.
Empiricism is the school of thought that
promotes the idea that knowledge can only be
possible if it is sensed and experienced. Men can
only attain knowledge by experiencing. Ex. Jack
knows that Jill is another human person not
because he has seen her soul but because he
sees her, hears her, and touches her. To him, the self is nothing else but a “bundle of
impressions”. For David Hume, if one attempts to examine his experiences, he finds that
they can all be categorized into two: impressions and ideas.
• Impressions – are the basic object of our experience or sensation and
therefore form the core of our thoughts. Example, when one touches an ice
cube, the cold sensation is an impression. They are vivid because they are
products of our direct experience with the world.
• Ideas – are copies of impressions. They are not as vivid and lively as our
impressions. Just like when one imagines the feeling of being in love for the
first time, that still is an idea.
Self, according to Hume, is simply “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, as cited in Alata, Caslib Jr, Searfica J, Pawilen
R, 2018).

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Kant
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant helped create
the conceptual scaffolding of modern consciousness in the
areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Kant was
alarmed by David Hume’s notion that the mind is simply a
container for fleeting sensations and disconnected ideas, and
our reasoning ability is merely “a slave to the passions.” 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, including
questions such as the nature of our selves. For Kant, Hume’s
devastating conclusions served as a Socratic “gadfly” to his
spirit of inquiry, awakening him from his intellectual sleep and
galvanizing him to action.
Kant observes an obvious fact that Hume seems to have overlooked, namely, that
our primary experience of the world is not in terms of a disconnected stream of
sensations. Instead, we perceive and experience an organized world of objects,
relationships, and ideas, all existing within a fairly stable framework of space and time.
True, at times discreet and randomly related sensations dominate our experience: for
example, when we are startled out of a deep sleep and “don’t know where we are,” or
when a high fever creates bizarre hallucinations, or the instant when an unexpected
thunderous noise or blinding light suddenly dominates our awareness. But in general, we
live in a fairly stable and orderly world in which sensations are woven together into a
fabric that is familiar to us. And integrated throughout this fabric is our conscious self
who is the knowing subject at the center of our universe.
Where does the order and organization of our world come from? According to
Kant, it comes in large measure from us. Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and
synthesize the fragmented, fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs
take in. For example, imagine that someone dumped a pile of puzzle pieces on the table
in front of you. They would initially appear to be a random collection of items, unrelated
to one another and containing no meaning for you, much like the basic sensations of
immediate unreflective experience. However, as you began to assemble the pieces, these
fragmentary items would gradually begin to form a coherent image that would have
significance for 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. As you might
imagine, this mental process is astonishing in its power and complexity, and it is going
on all of the time.

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 How do our minds know the best way to construct an intelligible world out of a
never-ending avalanche of sensations? We each have fundamental organizing rules or
principles built into the architecture of our minds. These dynamic principles naturally
order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data into the familiar fabric of our lives,
bounded by space and time. These organizing rules are a priori in the sense that they
precede the sensations of experience and they exist independently of these sensations.
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.

Ryle
Gilbert Ryle is a British philosopher whose book, The
Concept of Mind, had a dramatic impact on Western
thought. Ryle’s behaviorism was a different sort from that
of psychology. He thought of his approach as a logical
behaviorism, focused on creating conceptual clarity, not on
developing techniques to condition and manipulate human
behavior.
Gilbert Ryle resolves 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 him, what really matters are the behaviors
that a person displays in his day-to-day life.
According to Ryle, human bodies are in space and are subject to the mechanical
laws which govern all other bodies in space and are accessible to external observers. But
minds are not in space, their operations are not subject to mechanical laws, and the
processes of the mind are not accessible to other people—it’s career is private. Only I am
able to perceive and experience the states and processes of my own mind. In Ryles
words: “A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one consisting of what
happens in and to his body, and other consisting of what happens in and to his mind.
The first is public, the second private.”
In our everyday experience, we act and speak as if we have much more direct
knowledge of other minds and what they’re thinking without having to go through this
tortured and artificial reasoning process. We encounter others, experience the totality of
their behavior, and believe that this behavior reveals directly “who” they are and what
they’re thinking.
Imagine that an acquaintance from a distant country come to visit you, eager to
see the University you attend, which you are delighted to share with him. You take him
first to the main administrative building including the Director’s office; to several classes
that are in session; the library and student union; athletic facilities including a basketball
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game being played, and so on. At the conclusion of your tour, your friend thanks you and
says: That was a very interesting tour: But why didn’t you introduce me to the University?
I saw the administrative offices, several classes in session, the library and student union,
the athletic facilities with a basketball game in process, and other parts beside: But you
didn’t show me the University! You would no doubt endeavor to explain that “the
University” is not another collateral part of the University, some ulterior counterpart to
what he has seen. Instead, the University includes all of the parts of the University as
well as the way in which they are organized. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption
that it was correct to speak as if “the University” stood for an extra member of the class
of which the other parts of the College are members. He was mistakenly allocating the
University to the same category as that to which the constitutive parts of the University
belong.
Ryle proposes that the self is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply
the convenient name that people can use to refer to all the behaviors that people make.

Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who asserts that
the mind-body dichotomy is a pointless endeavor and invalid
problem. Phenomenology refers to the conviction that all
knowledge of ourselves and our world is based on the
“phenomena” of experience.
He articulated the phenomenologist position in a simple
declaration: “I live in my body.” By the “lived body,” Merleau-
Ponty means an entity that can never be objectified or known in
a completely objective sort of way, as opposed to the “body as
object” of the dualists. For example, when you first wake up in
the morning and experience your gradually expanding awareness
of where you are and how you feel, what are your first
thoughts of the day? Perhaps something along the lines of “Oh no, it’s time to get up,
but I’m still sleepy, but I have an important appointment that I can’t be late for” and so
on. Note that at no point do you doubt that the “I” you refer to is a single integrated
entity, a blending of mental, physical, and emotional structured around a core identity:
your self. It’s only later, when you’re reading Descartes or discussing the possibility
of reincarnation with a friend that you begin creating ideas such as independent “minds,”
“bodies,” “souls,” or, in the case of Freud, an “unconscious.”
As Merleau-Ponty explains, “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

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entities are artificial and nonsensical. For him, one cannot find any experience that is not
an embodied experience. For him, the living body, his thoughts, emotions, and
experiences are all one.

Questions and answers!

A. Today you are going to be a philosopher, as a

philosopher you are going to synthesize the readings above
and come up with your own definition of the ‘self’ based on what and
whose idea you believe to and adhere to the most. Choose your personal
‘philosopher name’ and put it at the end of your definition.

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B. Direction: Make a table like the one below. Complete the table (column
2) by writing the ideas on the self of the philosopher and (column 3)
writing your reaction or comment of the said idea – state whether you
agree, disagree, partially agree and your explanation. Make it brief and
direct to the point.
Philosopher Idea on the Self Your Point of View (POV)
Socrates
Plato
St. Augustine
St. Aquinas
Descartes
Hume
Kant
Ryle

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