PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE SELF

The Avocado View

4. The Self in the Modern Period
• Mitchell suggests:
• “If we define our humanity in terms of our
rationality, the superior computational skills of
a computer program may threaten us.”
• She also asks – Are androids candidates for
human status, according to the Greek
rationalist tradition stressing that life
dominated by reason is the ideal?
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE SELF
The Avocado View
4. The Self in the Modern Period
(Video: Sophia)
• We are learning, however, that suppressing
emotions can be unhealthy
• Rationalism may be important, but emotions
are an important aspect of life as well
• Feminism – “the theory that women should
have political, economic, and social rights equal
to those of men and should define their own
roles”
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE SELF
The Avocado View
Self according to Rene Descartes

• He conceived that the human person as having a body and a mind. In

his famous treatise, The Meditations of First Philosophy, he claims
that there is so much that we should doubt. That much of what we
think and behave, 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 as not to be even doubted, that that
is the only time when one should actually buy a proposition.
• 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.
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE SELF
The Avocado View
Self according to Rene Descartes
Thus, his famous COGITO ERGO SUM OR I THINK THEREFORE, I AM. The fact that one
thinks should lead one to conclude without a trace of doubt that the cogito or the thing
that thinks, which is the mind and the extenza or extension of the mind, which is the
body.
The body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. If at all, that is the
mind.
“But what then, am I? A thinking thing.
But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands
(conceives), affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives.

The radical separation of mind and body--and of the mental and the physical in general-
-is known as "Cartesian Dualism." And by attributing to the mind something like
sovereignty over the external physical world, it has prepared the way for a distinctly
modern conception and experience of reality, a conception which replaced older ways
of seeing the world in drastic ways.
JOHN LOCKE
“La Tabularasa”

Thinking Matter, Immateriality of the Soul and Immortality

Locke chooses the word "man" to refer to that aspect of the

human being that denotes him as a type of animal. With this
definition of man, Locke is able to claim that the identity of
man, because it is just a particular instance of animal, is tied
to body and shape. That other aspect of the human being,
the human as a thinking, rational thing, Locke calls "person."
The identity of person rests entirely in consciousness.

A person is defined as a thinking thing, and thought, as we

have seen, is inseparable from consciousness.

It is, therefore, in consciousness alone that identity must

exist.
 Marx's theory of alienation
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes
the estrangement (Ger. Entfremdung) of
people from aspects of
their Gattungswesen("species-essence") as
a consequence of living in a society of
stratified social classes. The alienation from
the self is a consequence of being
a mechanistic part of a social class, the
condition of which estranges a person from
their humanity The 19th-century German intellectual Karl Marx (1818–
1883) identified and described four types
of Entfremdung (social alienation) that afflict the
worker under capitalism
• The theoretic basis of alienation, within the capitalist mode of
production, is that the worker invariably loses the ability to
determine life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think
(conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to
determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with
other people; and to own those items of value from goods and
services, produced by their own labour.

• Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as

an economic entity, this worker is directed to goals and diverted to
activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of
production, in order to extract from the worker the maximum
amount of surplus value, in the course of business competition
among industrialists.
• The psychic value of a human consists in being able to
conceive (think) of the ends of their actions as purposeful
ideas, which are distinct from the actions required to
realize a given idea.
• That is, humans are able to objectify their intentions, by
means of an idea of themselves, as "the subject", and an
idea of the thing that they produce, "the object".
• Conversely, unlike a human being, an animal does not
objectify itself, as "the subject", nor its products as ideas,
"the object", because an animal engages in directly self-
sustaining actions that have neither a future intention, nor
a conscious intention.
 End

Of The First Part