Defining the Self: Personal and Developmental Perspectives

of Self and Identity

I. The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives
The different perspectives and views on the self can be best seen and
understood by revisiting the prime movers and identify the most important
conjectures made by philosophers from the ancient times to the contemporary
period.

A. SOCRATES
-“Father of Western Philosophy”
- He was the philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning
about self. He affirmed that unexamined life is not worth living. Man
should be fully aware of who they were and the virtue that they supposed
to attain in order to preserve their souls after life.
-“The worst that can happen is to live but die inside”
- Every man is composed of body and soul:
BODY= which is the imperfect and impermanent
SOUL= perfect and permanent

B. PLATO
-Socrates’ student supported the idea that man is dual nature of body and
soul.
Plato added that there are three components of soul.
1. Rational Soul – forged by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs
of the human person.
2. Spirited Soul – seat of emotions
3. Appetitive Soul – charge of base desires like eating, drinking, sleeping,
and sex.

C. ST. AUGUSTINE (Aurelius Augustinus*Latin name*)

Man is bifurcated (divided into 2 nature): the body bound to die on
Earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in realm of spiritual bliss
(complete happiness in communion intimate fellowship with God)

D. THOMAS AQUINAS
He adapted some ideas from Aristotle. He said that man is composed of
two parts: matter and form;
1. Matter (Hyle) common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.
Man’s body is a part of this matter.
 2. Form (morphed in Greece) refers to the essence of a substance of thing or
a thing.
“The body of the Human person is something that he shares and the soul is
the one that makes us Human, differ from animals”

E. ARISTOTLE
He believed that human being is composite of body and soul and
that can’t be separated from body.
Hilomorphism – soul of human body forms the structure of human body.

F. RENE DESCARTES
-“Father of Modern Philosophy”
The self from Descartes is also a combination of two distinct entities.
a. Cogito – the thing that thinks which is the mind
b. Extenza – extension of the mind which is the body.
- “What makes a man a man is his mind which makes a person a
‘thinking thing”

G. HUME, DAVID
-an empiricist
Empiricism is the school of thought that espouses the idea that
knowledge can be only be possible if it is sensed and experienced.
-Self: bundle of impressions
-Impressions: basic objects of our experience and sensation.

H. JOHN LOCKE
-“Father of classical Liberalism”
-He considered Personal Identity or the self to be found on Consciousness
and not on the substance of either the soul or the body.
-Personal Identity is not in the brain, but in the consciousness
- In order to exist after death, here has to be a person after death who is the
same person as the person who died if one can remember his past life

I. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
-“the mind and the body are intertwined that they cannot be separated
from one another”
-the living body, the thoughts, emotions and experiences are all in one.

J. PAUL MONTGOMERY CHURCHLAND

- Adheres to materialism, the belief nothing but matter exist
- Eliminative materialism argues that the ordinary “folk psychology” of
the mind is wrong.
 - It is physical brain and not the imaginary mind that gives us our sense
of self.

K. IMMANUEL KANT
- “Self is not just what gives one his personality but the seat of
knowledge requisition to all human persons”
- Mind that organizes impressions that men got from the external worlds
- Ideas and self are the apparatus of the mind that without these one
cannot organize the different impressions that he gets in relation to his
experiences.

L. RYLE, ALBERT
- For Ryle, what matters is the behaviour that a person manifests to his
day to day life.
- Self refers to all behaviour that people make.
- He believes on the Cartesian Theory that mental acts determine
physical acts of the mind.
- This theory is “The myth of the ghost in the machine”
- The nature of a person’s motives may be define by the action and
reactions by of that person in that various circumstances or situations.
- He believes on Behaviourism.

M. SIGMUND FREUD
-Psychoanalytic Theory
Three Structures of Personality
1. ID – responsible for the pleasure principle, instinctual and
biological urges
2. EGO – based on the reality principle and the awareness for the
gratification of impulses and urges.
i. Find ways for the gratification of ID
3. SUPEREGO – based on the morality principle.
Must follow moral standards and rules;
Breaking them causes guilt
Serves as our conscience