Understanding the Self

Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)

The Paradigm of the Old
Learning Objectives

By the end of the session, the students will be able to:

1. identify the different perspectives of man in his society
2. create their own perspective of what man is
3. share their personal values with the people around them
What makes you Human?

What makes you, YOU?

Fill me up

1. In your paper draw an image of a man

2. Fill up your drawing with the different elements

that you think are essential to who and what a
human person is.

3. Write characteristics, traits, elements,

personalities, emotions, and etc.
Philosophical Concepts of the Self

• Sophist perspective of Man

• Socrates’ View “Man is a soul imprisoned in a body?”
• Aristotle’s Souls and Human Charioteer
• The Epicurean Moderation
• The Stoics Human Predeterminism
• Descartes’ Concepts of a Man
 Sophist perspective of Man

• The Sophists were primarily practical people, competent in

grammar, writing and public discourse.
“Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that
they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.”
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-c. 420 BCE)
• Meaning: A person is the ultimate standard of all
judgements that he/she makes.
• This means that whatever knowledge I might achieve about
anything would be limited to my human capacities.
Sophist perspective of Man

• Example: if two people observe the same object, their sensations would
be different, because each would occupy a different position in relation
to it.
• To say that a person is the measure of all things is, therefore, to say
that our knowledge is measured by what we perceive.
• If something makes us perceive things differently there is then no
standard for testing whether one person’s perception is right and
another person’s is wrong.
Sophist perspective of Man

• On the theory of knowledge, it would be

impossible to attain any absolute scientific
knowledge since there are built-in differences in
each observer, which lead each of us to see things
differently.
• The Sophists, therefore concluded that knowledge
is relative to each person.
 Socrates’ View “Man is a soul imprisoned in a
body?”
• Socrates dictum, “Know thyself’ or
“taking trouble over oneself” or
“taking care of oneself”

• Taking care of oneself is said to yield

self-knowledge, which implies sound
mindedness (sophrosyne), and this
self-knowledge is said to be
achievable through dialogue.
• Socrates asks, “How, then, is it likely that you should know the
just and unjust things, when you are in such uncertainty and have
plainly never learned them from anyone nor discovered them
yourself?”
• Socrates concludes with the assertive question, “A human being is
different, therefore, from his own body?”. Introducing the notion
of the soul to assist Alcibiades in proffering a definition of man,
soul, or both together in equal parts.
• Socrates leads Alcibiades through a roof devised to convince him
that SELF itself is coextensive with the SOUL (130ff).
• For Socrates, humans are nor equivalent to body. The body is ruled; we
are not seeking what is ruled but what rules, therefore, humans are not
body.
• That humans cannot be both body and soul. Human beings cannot be
(essentially defined as) both body and soul unless both elements rule
equally; they are not co-rulers, therefore, humans can be both body and
soul least of all.
• Since humans are neither body nor equally body and soul, the SELF itself
must be defined as soul. 130c1-3
• In this way, Socrates translates the injunction “Know thyself” into the
requirement to become acquainted with and to work to improve one’s
soul.
• Because sophrosyne entails self-knowledge, everyone
who lacks self-knowledge necessarily lacks
sophrosyne. (the orderliness of the soul)
Four steps can be delineated in Socrates overall argument:
1. Taking trouble over oneself is necessary to attain excellence in
oneself.
2. Excellence in oneself is necessary before one can take care of
the affairs of the city.
3. The principal objective of the political art is to improve the
citizens
4. Only by taking trouble over oneself can a ruler impart
excellence to those ruled.
PLATO

- the soul existed before it inhabited the body

- It is reason that lies at the core of the human person
- To be fully human we must exercise our reason; to do otherwise would
be to risk slipping to the levels of animals being ruled by our passionate
impulses
- The soul is the immortal part of us - Its true home is not in the world
of matter and in the world of senses (Socrates) but in the higher world
of pure forms- a world that only reason can reveal
 Aristotle’s Souls and Human
Charioteer

• Plato argued, as Socrates had before him, that

moral evil is the result of ignorance.
• There can be order between the charioteer and
the horses only if the charioteer is in control.
Similarly,. our human souls can achieve order
and peace only in our rational part is in control
of our spirit and appetites
• For Aristotle, the human soul combines in itself
all the lower forms of soul---- the vegetative,
nutritive, and sensitive--- and has in addition
to these, the rational soul.
• The rational soul has the capacity of scientific
thoughts. Our reason is capable of
distinguishing between different kinds of
things, which is the capacity of analysis, and it
also understands the relationships of things to
each other.
• Aristotle contends the soul is the definitive
form of the body. Without the body, the soul
could neither be nor exercise its functions.
• Aristotle says that the body and soul together
form one substance.
• Aristotle, said that the soul has two parts, the irrational and the
rational. The irrational part is composed of two subparts. First, as
with plants there is vegetative component that gives us the
capacity to take in nutrition and sustain our biological lives.
• Human nature (the self) consists for Aristotle not simply in
rationality but in the full range covered by the vegetative,
appetitive and the rational souls. Virtue does not imply the
negation or rejection of any of these natural capacities.
• Three steps can be delineated in Aristotle overall argument:
1. The ultimate end of human action is happiness.
2. Happiness consists in acting in accordance with reason
3. Acting according to reason is the distinguishing feature of all the
traditional virtues.

HAPPINESS is a life of moderation. Whatever is extreme is bad

The Epicurean Moderation

• Epicurus was a practical philosopher. He thought that

ideas should have as much effect upon the control of life
as medicine has upon the health of the body. Indeed, he
considered philosophy as the medicine of the soul.
• To Epicurus, the chief aim of human life is pleasure.
• Epicurus portrayed the origin of all things in a
mechanical way and placed humans into the nature of
things a just another small mechanism whose nature
leads us to seek pleasure.
• He writes, “we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from
pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure
we return again.”
• Feeling is as immediate a test of goodness or badness as sensation as the
test of truth.
• The ultimate pleasure human nature seeks is repose, by which Epicurus
means the absence of bodily pain and the gentle relaxation of the mind.
• This sense of repose can be most successfully achieved by scaling down
our desires, overcoming useless fears, and, above all, turning to the
pleasures of the mind, which have the highest degree of permanence.
 The Stoics Human Predeterminism

• The Stoics maintain that happiness through wisdom, a

wisdom by which to control what lay within human ability and
to accept with dignified resignation what had to be.
• They further claim, “Do not demand that events should
happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do
happen, and you will go on well,” because we cannot
control all events, but we can control our attitude what
happens. It’s useless to fear future events, for they will
happen in any case. But it is possible by an act of will to
control nothing our fear. We should not, therefore, fear
events-in a real sense we have ‘nothing to fear but fear
itself.”
• The stoics are famous for the saying that people contain a spark of
the divine within them.
• By this expression they meant that, in real sense, a person
contains part of the substance of God.
• God is the soul of the world, so also a person is a material being
who is permeated by this very same fiery substance.
• However, a persistent problem in Stoic philosophy is the problem
of freedom because as we observe that the Stoic notion of nature
is fixed and ordered by God’s reason.
• It may be true that actors do not choose their roles. But what is
the difference between choosing your role in the drama, on the
other hand, or choosing your attitude on the other?
• It could very well be that God not only chose you to be a poor
person, but also cast you as a particularly disgruntled poor person.
• Question: Do attitudes float around freely and wait to be chosen by the
passing parade of people, or are they much a part of person as eye color?
• The Stoics stuck doggedly to their notion that attitudes are under the control
of a person’s choice, and that by an act of will we can decide how we shall
react to events.
• But they never provided a satisfactory explanation for the fact that
providence rules everything while at the same time providence does not rule
our attitudes.
• Happiness is not a product of choice; it is rather a quality of existence, which
follows from agreeing to what has to be. Freedom, therefore, is not the
power to alter our destiny but rather the absence of emotional disturbance.
Descartes’ Concepts of a Man

• In this context, clear means “that which is present

and apparent to an attentive mind,” in the same
way that objects are clear to our eyes. Distinctness
refers to “that which is so precise and different
from all other objects that it contains within itself
nothing but what is clear.
• The whole drift of Descartes’ thought is in the
direction of dualism – the notion that there two
different kinds of substances in the nature.

Rene Descartes
• We know substance by its attribute, and since we clearly and distinctly know
two quite different attributes namely, thought and extension, there must be
two different substances, the spiritual and the corporeal or mind and body.
• Descartes tried to give the human body a mechanical explanation and at the
same time preserve the possibility of the soul’s influence upon human
behavior through the activity of the will.
• Humans therefore unlike animals, are capable of several kinds of activities.
We can engage in pure thought, our minds can be influenced by physical
sensations and perceptions, our bodies can be directed by our minds, and our
bodies are moved by purely mechanical forces.
Application and Evaluation

Look and See:

Get one half sheet of Paper and Provide a situation of an experience
where this Ideas has become part of a decision, a conversation or
opinion in your life
What are existing outlooks that shares the same paradigm if the
Philosophers presented?
Does it have an influence in your life?
Do you think it is beneficial for us today?
 “Wisdom from the ancient may be old, historical, and
sometimes forgotten but they still have a mark to our current life,
and contemporary outlook of things. They are the foundations to
the building blocks that we have today and to the developments
that we are proud of. We sometimes consider them as just part of
history or is a pigment of the past, but they have aided mankind to
in reach the pinnacle of development and a much richer
understanding of one’s self.”