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Introduction
Knowing oneself is critical to being an effective
team member as well as being successful in life,
work, and relationships. Your personal identity
influences everything you do, and it changes
and evolves over time.
You will have an opportunity to examine how
your personal identity has been shaped by a
variety of people and experiences. You will also
experience sharing and discussing your values,
interests, hopes for the future including your
strengths and weaknesses. You will develop
critical thinking and explore concepts about
change and how important it is in today’s
workplace to be adaptive and to embrace it as
a part of your personal and professional
growth experience.

LESSON 1
The Self from Various Perspectives
(Philosophical Perspectives of the Self)

PHILOSOPHY
comes from two Greek words philos which means “love” and
sophia which means “wisdom”
in essence, it can be translated to love of knowledge or
passion for learning
the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and
existence, especially when considered as an academic
discipline
can also be considered as a guiding principle

THE GREATEST PHILOSPHERS AND THEIR
CONTRIBUTION TO PHILOSOPHY
St. Augustine
Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the
medieval world when it comes to man. Following the ancient view of
Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine if Christianity,
Augustine agreed that man is a bifurcated nature. There is an aspect of
man, which dwells in the world, which is imperfect and continuously
yearns 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
anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communication
with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect,
physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after
death in an eternal realm with the all transcendent 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.

St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent 13th century scholar and stalwart of
the medieval philosophy, appended something to this Christian view.
Adopting some ideas from Aristotle, Aquinas said that, indeed, man is
composed of two parts: matter and form. Matter, or hyle in Greek,
refers to the common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.
Man’s body is part of this matter. On the other hand, form or morphe
in Greek, refers to the essence of a substance or thing. It is what makes
it what it is. In the case of the human person, the body of the human
person is something that he shares even with animals. The cells in a
man’s body is more or less akin to the cells of any other living, organic
being in the world. However, what makes a human person a human
person and not a dog or tiger is his soul, his essence. To Aquinas, just
as for Aristotle, the soul is what animates the body, it is what makes us
humans.

Socrates
Socrates affirms, that the unexamined life is not worth living. During his
trial for allegedly corrupting the minds of the youth and for impiety,
Socrates declared without regret that his being indicated was brought
about by his going around Athens engaging men, young and old, to
question their presuppositions about themselves and about the world,
particularly about who they are. For Socrates, every man is composed
of body and soul. This means that every human person is dualistic, that
is, he is composed of two important aspects of his personhood. For
Socrates, this means all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent
aspect, the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is
perfect and permanent.

Plato
Plato added that there are three parts or components to the soul: the
rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul. In his magnum
opus, The Republic (2002), Plato emphasizes that justice in the human
person can only be attained if the three parts of the soul are working
harmoniously with one another. The rational soul forged by reason and
intellect has to govern the affairs of the human person; the spirited
part, which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay; and the
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.

Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy, conceived that the
human person as having a body and a mind. He claims that there is so
much that we should doubt. In fact, he says that much of what we think
and believe, because they are not infallible, may turn out to be false.
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 cogito ergo sum or I think
therefore I am. The self then, is a combination of two distinct entities:
the cogito or the thing that thinks which is the mind and the extenza or
extension of the mind which is the body. In Descartes’ vies, the body is
nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind.

David Hume
To David Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions. If
one tries to examine his experiences, he finds that they can all be
categorized into two: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the basic
object of our experiences or sensation. They therefore form the core of
our thoughts. Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions.
Because of this, they are not as lively and vivid as our impressions. 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. Men simply want to believe
that there is a unified, coherent self, a soul or mind just like what the
previous philosophers thought. In reality, what one thinks as unified
self is simply a combination of all experiences with a particular person.

Immanuel Kant
Kant recognizes the veracity in Hume’s account that everything starts
with perception and sensation of impressions. However, Kant thinks
that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly
infused into the human person without an organizing principle that
regulates the relationship of all these impressions. For Kant, there is
necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from
the external world. Without the self, one cannot organize the different
impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence. Kant
therefore suggests that the self is an actively engaged intelligence in
man that synthesizes all knowledge and experience. Thus, the self is
not what gives one his personality. It is also the seat of knowledge
acquisition for all human persons.

Sigmund Freud
“You may know me but you have no idea who I am.” Sigmund Freud
argues that the unconscious mind governs behaviour. Past experiences
greatly shaped a person’s personal functioning. He used the iceberg
principle of personality which he considers as the three levels of the
mind, and these are the unconsciousness, preconscious (subconscious)
and consciousness to describe a person’s behaviour. What happened in
the past are embedded in the unconscious but has the possibility of
getting into the preconscious until it reach consciousness, especially
when a similar experience occur. Those that are shown by a person
however, are only at the surface level and the true personality which is
at the most important part of the mind is the one that cannot be seen.

Sigmund Freud
He also formulated his Psychosexual Stages of Development wherein
he identified specific changes in the sexual parts of the body (mouth,
anus, phallic, genital ) he called erogenous zones that corresponds to
an individual’s age/developmental stage (from infancy to early
adulthood). The manifestations of untoward or fixated adult behaviour
according to Freud are the products of unsatisfied desire in any of
those stages. So for him, the changes experienced by a person, be it
sexual or social should be understood in its full context: unless you
understand your past experiences, you cannot understand your present
self.

A PHILOSOPHER ONCE SAID…
Jodie Beatriz Zamora (2023)
“No matter what you are going through in life, eat first.”

What do you think
is the implication
or the essence of
these philosophies
in your life?

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