Understanding Self

Compilation of Notes Prelim

Who am I? Philosophical Perspective

PHILOSOPHY – study of all things through their highest causes in the light of reason alone.
SCIENCE – study of all things through their causes in the light of reason alone.
Theology – study of all things through their highest causes in the light of revelation alone.

“People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at

the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion
of the stars, and they pass by themselves without
wondering.”
- ST. AUGUSTINE

Socrates
• 470 – 399 BC
• Greek Philosopher
• Teacher of Plato
• Execution by drinking the drinking of “hemlock”
• Never wrote anything, but Plato mentioned him in his books
• “Know thyself”
• “An unexamined life is not worth living”
• Socrates’ metaphysical framework
• For Socrates, reality is dualistic, comprised of two dichotomous realms.
• One realm is changeable, transient, and imperfect, whereas the other realm is
unchanging, eternal, immortal-ideal realm.
• The physical world in which we live—comprised of all that we can see, hear, taste, smell,
and feel—belongs to the former realm. All aspects of our physical world are continually
changing, transforming, disappearing.
• The immortal soul
• An indissoluble entity that is immortal and will survive death
• An entity that is very different in kind from your physical body
• An entity that strives to achieve communion with some ultimate reality
• The soul uses the body as “an instrument of perception,” and that the soul “rules” the
body in the same way that the divine rules the mortals.
• We should notbe concerned about death because the soul is incapable of being
dispersed into nonexistence.
PLATO
• 438 – 348
• Greece
• Founder of Academy
• Teacher of Aristotle
 • “Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do act rightly because we are excellent,
in fact we achieve excellence by acting rightly”
• “Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge.”
• Three-part soul/self constituted by:
• Reason—our divine essence that enables us to think deeply, make wise choices, and
achieve a true understanding of eternal truths.
• Physical Appetite—our basic biological needs such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire.
• Spirit or Passion—our basic emotions such as love, anger, ambition, aggressiveness, empathy.
Plato illustrates his view of the soul/self in Phaedrus with a vivid metaphor: the soul is likened to a winged
chariot drawn by two powerful horses: a white horse, representing Spirit, and a black horse, embodying
Appetite. The charioteer is Reason, whose task is to guide the chariot to the eternal realm by controlling
the two independent-minded horses. Those charioteers who are successful in setting a true course and
ensuring that the two steeds work together in harmonious unity achieve true wisdom and banquet with
the gods. However, those charioteers who are unable to control their horses and keep their chariot on
track are destined to experience personal, intellectual, and spiritual failure.

Plato’s Lessons About the Soul and the Body

Plato’s dialogues are filled with lessons about knowledge, reality, and goodness, and most of the lessons
carry with them strong praise for the soul and strong indictments against the body. According to Plato,
the body, with its deceptive senses, keeps us from real knowledge; it rivets us in a world of material
things which is far removed from the world of reality; and it tempts us away from the virtuous life. It is in
and through the soul, if at all, that we shall have knowledge, be in touch with reality, and lead a life of
virtue. Only the soul can truly know, for only the soul can ascend to the real world, the world of the Forms
or Ideas.

Plato’s View of the Soul and Body, and His Attitude Toward Women
Plato, and anyone else who conceives of the soul as something unobservable, cannot of course speak as if
we could point to the soul, or hold it up for direct observation. At one point, Plato says no mere mortal
can really understand the nature of the soul, but one perhaps could tell what it resembles. So it is not
surprising to find Plato using many metaphors and analogies to describe what the soul is like, in order to
describe relations between parts of the soul.
There is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to woman because she is a woman or to a
man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and
women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all.

ST. AUGUSTINE

• November 13, 354 in Tagaste, Numidia

• August 28, 430 in Hippo Regius
• Doctor of the Church
• “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe”
• “This is the very perfection of man, to find out his own imperfections”
• Like Plato and Plotinus, Augustine believed that the physical body was both radically different
from and inferior to its inhabitant, the immortal soul. 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.” Nevertheless, as
for Plato, Plotinus, and all the other Neoplatonists, body and soul remain irreconcilably divided,
two radically different entities with diverging fates: the body to die, the soul to live eternally in a
transcendent realm of Truth and Beauty.
RENE DESCARTES

• 1596-1650
• French Philosopher
• Father of western philosophy
• Father of modern philosophy
• Methodic doubt
• “Cogito ergo sum”
• “If you are a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far
as possible aal things”
• Descartes ends up with Plato’s metaphysic, a dualistic view of reality, bifurcated
• into
• • a spiritual, nonmaterial, immortal realm that includes conscious, thinking beings,
• and
• • a physical, material, finite realm that includes human bodies and the rest of the
• physical universe.

I can distinguish in myself no parts, but I very clearly discern that I am somewhat absolutely one and
entire; and although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet, when a foot, an arm, or
any other part is cut off, I am conscious that nothing has been taken from my mind; nor can the faculties
of willing, perceiving, conceiving, etc., properly be called its parts, for it is the same mind that is exercised
[all entire] in willing, in perceiving, and in conceiving, etc. But quite the opposite holds in corporeal or
extended things; for I cannot imagine any one of them [how small soever it may be], which I cannot easily
sunder
in thought, and which, therefore, I do not know to be divisible. This would be sufficient to teach me that
the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body, if I had not already been apprised of it on
other grounds.

JOHN LOCKE

• 1632—1704
• Among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the 17th century
• Founder of a school of thought known as British Empiricism
 • “Man-He is aware of himself, of his past and future, which is death, of his smallness and
powerlessness; he is aware of others as friends, enemies, or as strangers. Man transcends all
other life because he is for the first time, life aware of itself.
• Locke’s claim that your conscious self is not permanently attached to any particular body or
substance.
• Locke believes that it is our memory that serves to link our self at this moment with our
• self in previous circumstances.
• Have you ever suspected that your personal identity lived a
• previous life? If so, how would Locke evaluate your belief?
DAVID HUME

• 1711–1776
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• There Is No “Self”
• “I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but
the perception.”
• “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

IMMANUEL KANT
• 1724–1804
• Brilliant German philosopher
• “One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”
• “we perceive and experience an organized world of objects, relationships, and ideas, all existing
within a fairly stable framework of space and time.”

SOCIOLOGY

• Study of the development, structure, and functioning of the human society.

• A social science that studies human societies, their interaction, and the processes that preserve
and change them.
• Also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal
disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution.
• socios means companion with others and logos means reason.

 AUGUSTE COMTE
• - is a french philosopher (1798-1857)
• - first used the term 'sociology' in 1838 to refer to scientific study of society.
• - He believed that all societies develop and progress through the following steps: religious,
metaphysical, and scientific.
PAUL CHURCHLAND

• Born October 21, 1942

• Canadian Philosopher
 • Known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.
• Belief that “everyday, common-sense, ‘folk’ psychology, which seeks to explain human behavior in
terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, actually a deeply flawed theory that must be eliminated
in favor of a mature cognitive neuroscience.
• Professor Churchland has authored several books in philosophy like the book of “Could a Machine
Think?”
• - Analytic Philosopher
• - “ Dualism “
• “ Materialism ”
• “ We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts, it is called the brain. ”

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

• March 14, 1908 - May 3, 1961

• Was a french phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin
Heidegger.
• The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on
perception, art, and politics.
• Developed the concept of the body-subject.
• He described scientific point of view as “always both naïve and at at the same time dishonest”.

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

• February 27, 1863 - April 26, 1931

• Was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University
of Chicago.
• He was one of several distinguished pragmatist.
• He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be
referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition.
• He insisted that “the individual mind can exist only in relation to the other minds with shared
meanings.”

ANTHROPOLOGY

• The study of people past and present.

• Focuses on understanding human condition in its cultural aspect. Concerned with understanding
how human evolved and how they differ from one another.
The term originates from two words in Greek:
• Anthropos meaning “man” as in
“human being”
• logos meaning “study”.
There are four fields of anthropology:
1. Archaeology- the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the
analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.
2. Biological anthropology- study of the past and present evolution of the human species and is especially
concerned with understanding the causes of present human diversity.
3. Cultural anthropology- the branch of anthropology concerned with the study of human societies and
cultures and their development.
4. Linguistic anthropology- the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life.

DEFINITION OF SELF IN MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY

 “Unit but unitary”

 Prof. Katherine Ewing described self as encompassing “physical organism, possessing
psychological functioning and social attributes.”

2 ASPECTS OF THE SELF

(Joseph LeDoux)

• Implicit – self that you are consciously aware of.

• Explicit – self that is not immediately available to the consciousness.
“The self is not static, it is added to and subtracted from genetic maturation, learning, forgetting, stress,
ageing, and disease.”

THE SELF EMBEDDED TO CULTURE

• The ways of how the self is developed are bound to cultural differences.
• The principles of how the mind works cannot be conceived of as universal, but that is as varied as
the culture and traditions that people practice all over the world (Cultural Anthropologists). The
self is culturally shaped and infinitely variable.

DISTINGUISHED TWO WAYS OF HOW THE SELF IS CONSTRUCTED (CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGIST)

Independent Construct (Individualistic Culture)
• Internal Attributes – values and skills

Interdependent Construct (Collectivist Culture)

• The essential connection between individual to other people.

Catherine Raeff (2010) believed that culture can influence how you view: relationship, personality traits,
achievement, and expressing emotions.

PHSYCHOLOGY
-Study of human behavior

Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist
“One if the most influential modern scientist to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of
self.”
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier way.”
“In matter of sexuality we are at present, everyone of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.”
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for
treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to
Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire.
Year : 1856-1939
Born: 6 May 1856, Příbor, Czechia
Died: 23 September 1939, Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
Full name: Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Freud’s concept of the identity , ego, and superego has gained prominence in popular culture, despite a
lack of support and considerable skepticism from many researchers.

3 Elements of Personality
ID - refers o the biological component of the personality responsible for basic human drivers and urges.
EGO - Is the mediator between the needs of the individual and the social world.
SUPEREGO - Moral Arm of the personality. This represents the traditional rules, values, norms and ideals
of society.
(The 3 elements work together to create complex human behaviors)

5 MATURATION PROCESS
Psychosexual Stages
Oral - Birth to 1 year erogenous zone: Mouth
- It is the stage where eating is the major source of satisfaction
Anal - 1 to 3 year erogenous zone : bowel and bladder control
- The child’s focus of pleasure in this stage is on eliminating and retaining feces.
Phallic - 3 to 6 years erogenous zone: genitals
- This stage develop unconscious sexual desires. Oedipus Complex (boy) Electra Complex (Girl)
Latency - 6 to puberty Libido Inactive
- The development of ego and superego contributes period of calm.
- Intellectual Pursuits and and Social Interactions this develop the social and communication skills and self
confidence.
Genital - Puberty to Death Maturing Sexual Interests
- The final stage of psychosexual development begins at the start of puberty when sexual urges are once
again awakened.

EARLY STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

Breastfeeding
Toilet training
Sexual Awareness
“Failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage results in emotional and psychological
consequences throughout adulthood” - freud

Erik Homburger Erikson

German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst
-according to him, “death” is important aspect
-Man undergoes a challenge of balancing his life between ego, integrity and despair
“the more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in other”
“You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.”
Erik Homburger Erikson was a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known
for his theory on psychological development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the
phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T. Erikson, is a noted American sociologist.
Born: 15 June 1902, Frankfurt, Germany
Died: 12 May 1994, Rosewood Manor, Harwich, Massachusetts, United States
Education: University of Vienna
Spouse: Joan Erikson (m. 1930–1994)
Children: Kai T. Erikson, Sue Erikson, Jon Erikson
Influenced by: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict
Father and Mother :Jewish and Danish Gentile

“Ego Integrity” refers to a person achieving his or her life’s purpose or having come to terms with his or
her life.
“despair” if a person views his life as a “failure” or his or her “life experience” as generally unsatisfactory,
he or she may be prone to feelings.

STAGE(Approxiate Age) Issue Description of Task

Infancy (0 to 1 year)
Todderhood (1 to 3 year)
Preschool (3 to 6 year)
Elementary School (6 years to
puberty)
Adolescence (teen years into 20s)
Young Adulthood (20s to early
40s)
Trust Vs Mistrust
Autonomy Vs Shame and Doubt
Initiative Vs Guilt
Competence Vs Inferiority
Identity Vs Role Confusion
Intimacy Vs Isolation
If needs are dependably met,
infant develop a sense of basic
trust.
Toddlers learn to exercise their
will an do things for themselves,
or they doubt their abilities.
Preschoolers learn to initiate
tasks and carry out plans, or
they feel guilty about their
efforts to be independent.
Children learn the pleasure of
applying themselves to tasks, or
they feel inferior.
Teenagers work at refining a
sense of self by testing roles and
then integrating them to form a
single identity, or they become
confused about who they are.
Young adults struggle to form
close relationships and to gai

Middle Adulthood (40s to 60s)
Late Adulthood (late 60s and up)
the capacity for initimate love,
or they feel socially isolated.
Generativity Vs Stagnation In middle age, people discover a
sense of contributing to the
world , usually through family
and work, or they may feel a
lack of purpose.
Integrity Vs Despair Reflectinng on his or her life, an
older adult may feel a sense of
satisfaction or failure.
Albert Bandura
social cognitive psychologist
as one of the greatest living psychologists
“Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.”
Influential and best known for his social learning theory, the concept of self-efficacy, and his famous Bobo
doll experiments. He is a Professor Emeritus(Retired. Latin, originally meaning "veteran soldier.") at
Stanford University.
Born: December 4, 1925, in Canada
Education: University of British Columbia and University of Iowa
Spouse: Virginia Varns (1921–2011) in 1952
Children: Carol and Mary

THE SOCIAL COGNITIVE THORY

Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) started as the Social Learning Theory (SLT) in the 1960s by Albert Bandura. It
developed into the SCT in 1986 and posits that learning occurs in a social context with a dynamic and
reciprocal interaction of the person, environment, and behavior. The unique feature of SCT is the emphasis
on social influence and its emphasis on external and internal social reinforcement. SCT considers the
unique way in which individuals acquire and maintain behavior, while also considering the social
environment in which individuals perform the behavior. The theory takes into account a person's past
experiences, which factor into whether behavioral action will occur. These past experiences influences
reinforcements, expectations, and expectancies, all of which shape whether a person will engage in a
specific behavior and the reasons why a person engages in that behavior.

Many theories of behavior used in health promotion do not consider maintenance of behavior, but rather
focus on initiating behavior. This is unfortunate as maintenance of behavior, and not just initiation of
behavior, is the true goal in public health. The goal of SCT is to explain how people regulate their behavior
through control and reinforcement to achieve goal-directed behavior that can be maintained over time.
The first five constructs were developed as part of the SLT; the construct of self-efficacy was added when
the theory evolved into SCT.

1. Reciprocal Determinism - This is the central concept of SCT. This refers to the dynamic and
reciprocal interaction of person (individual with a set of learned experiences), environment
(external social context), and behavior (responses to stimuli to achieve goals).
2. Behavioral Capability - This refers to a person's actual ability to perform a behavior through
essential knowledge and skills. In order to successfully perform a behavior, a person must know
what to do and how to do it. People learn from the consequences of their behavior, which also
affects the environment in which they live.
3. Observational Learning - This asserts that people can witness and observe a behavior conducted
by others, and then reproduce those actions. This is often exhibited through "modeling" of
behaviors. If individuals see successful demonstration of a behavior, they can also complete the
behavior successfully.
4. Reinforcements - This refers to the internal or external responses to a person's behavior that
affect the likelihood of continuing or discontinuing the behavior. Reinforcements can be self-
 initiated or in the environment, and reinforcements can be positive or negative. This is the
construct of SCT that most closely ties to the reciprocal relationship between behavior and
environment.
5. Expectations - This refers to the anticipated consequences of a person's behavior. Outcome
expectations can be health-related or not health-related. People anticipate the consequences of
their actions before engaging in the behavior, and these anticipated consequences can influence
successful completion of the behavior. Expectations derive largely from previous
experience. While expectancies also derive from previous experience, expectancies focus on the
value that is placed on the outcome and are subjective to the individual.
6. Self-efficacy - This refers to the level of a person's confidence in his or her ability to successfully
perform a behavior. Self-efficacy is unique to SCT although other theories have added this
construct at later dates, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior. Self-efficacy is influenced by a
person's specific capabilities and other individual factors, as well as by environmental factors
(barriers and facilitators).