WikiPortallus: Self (philosophy).html

In philosophy, the self is the agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity. If the thought of future reward or punishments is to encourage or deter me from some course of action, I must be thinking of the person rewarded as me, as myself, as the same person who is now going to endure the hardship of righteousness or pass up the enjoyments of sin in favor of this ultimate reward. But this same self, this same identity, comes up in much more mundane transactions. If I pick up the cake and shove it in this mouth rather than that one, isn’t it because I think it will be me, the very same person who picks up the cake, that will have the pleasure of tasting it? This self, the identity of which is at the bottom of every action, and involved in every bit of knowledge, is the self philosophers worry about.¹

The English expression “self” is a modest one; in its normal use, it is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one: “her” into “herself,” “him” into “himself” and “it” into “itself”. The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude. If I sayMark Twain shot himself in the foot, I describe Mark Twain not only as the shooter but as the person shot; if I say Mark Twain admired himself, I describe him not only as the admirer but as the admired. In this sense, “the self” is just the person doing the action or holding the attitude that is somehow in question. “Self” is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: self-love, self-hatred, self-abuse, self-promotion, self-knowledge.²

A straightforward view of the self would be that the self is just the person, and that a person is a physical system. This view has been challenged on two fronts. First, the nature of freedom and consciousness has convinced many philosophers that there is a fundamentally non-physical aspect of persons. We shall not dwell on this issue for two reasons. First, the arguments in favor of immateriality of the mind or self do not have as strong a hold on the philosophical community as they once did. While there are many philosophers who think that mental properties cannot be fully reduced to physical or material properties, most such philosophers would allow that these are properties of a physical system, rather than an immaterial self. Second, these issues are considered in articles about the mind-body problem.³

The second challenge stems from puzzling aspects of self-knowledge. The knowledge we have of ourselves seems very unlike the knowledge we have of other objects in several ways, and this has led some philosophers to rather startling conclusions about the self. In his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein tells us that “I am my world,”, and that “ ‘the world is my world’ ” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 5.63,5.641). This should lead us to the rather surprising conclusion, that I am the world, or that at least Wittgenstein was. He draws at least one conclusion that would follow fromthis; he says “...at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.”⁴

The contemporary philosopher Tom Nagel has been led to a possibly less radical but still quite dramatic view. According to Nagel, when he says “I am Tom Nagel,” at least in certain philosophical moods, the “I” refers to the “objective self,” which is not identical with, but merely contingently related to, the person Tom Nagel. This self could just as well view the world from the perspective of someone else other than him ⁵.

Self is broadly defined as the essential qualities that make a person distinct from all others. The task in philosophy is defining what these qualities are, and there have been a number of different approaches. The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of an idiosyncratic consciousness^{citation needed}. Moreover, this self is the agent responsible for the thoughts and actions of an individual to which they are ascribed. It is a substance, which therefore endures through time; thus, the thoughts and actions at different moments of time may pertain to the same self (See John Locke's theory of consciousness as the basis of personal identity). As the notion of subject, the "self" has been harshly criticized by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, on behalf of what Gilles Deleuze would call a "becoming-other".

Most philosophical definitions of self are expressed in the first person, as with Descartes, Locke, Hume, and William James. A third person definition with which we might all agree does not refer to specific mental qualia but instead strives for objectivity and operationalism. To another person, the self of one individual is exhibited in the conduct and discourse of that individual. Therefore, the intentions of another individual can only be inferred indirectly from something emanating from that individual. The particular characteristics of the self determine its identity.

Self Knowledge

Knowledge of self is inherently important in understanding our own identity. At first “Self-knowledge” seems to have a straightforward meaning: cases of knowledge in which the knower and the known are identical, but this in practise this is complicated. Take the story of Mach, The philosopher who once got on the end of a bus, and saw a scruffy unkempt bookish looking sort of person at the other end. He thought to himself,
(1) That man is a shabby pedagogue.
In fact, Mach was seeing himself in a large mirror at the far end of the bus, of the sort conductors used to use to help keep track of things. He eventually realized, this, and thought to himself:
(2) I am that man.
(3) I am a shabby pedagogue.
Now consider Mach at the earlier time. Did Mach have self-knowledge? In our straightforward sense, it seems that he did. After all, he knew that a certain person was a shabby pedagogue. Furthermore that person was, in fact, him. The knower and the known were the same. But this isn’t really what we have in mind when we talk about self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is something Mach really only had when he got to step 3), when he would have used the word “I” to express what he knew.
Self-knowledge is peculiar, firstly, it seems “essentially indexical.” Statement (3) expresses self-knowledge because of the word “I”; it is hard to see how Mach could have expressed self-knowledge without using the first-person. If he said “Mach is a shabby pedagogue,” he would be only claiming to know what everyone else may have known—something he could have learned by reading the papers, even if he had amnesia and didn’t know who he was, or that he was a shabby pedagogue. It doesn’t seem that there is any objective characterization D of Mach, such that knowing that he is a shabby pedagogue, amounts to knowing that D is a shabby pedagogue ⁶⁷
Secondly, we seem immune to certain sorts of misidentificationwith respect to selfknowledge. If we learn, in certain ways, that someone is in pain, then we cannot miss the fact that it is we who are in pain. That is, if Mach discovers that he has a headache in the ordinary way that a person discovers they have a headache, he can scarcely be wrong about who has the headache, if the range of choices is “I/you/that man, etc.” Of course he can be wrong if the range of choices is “Mach/Freud/Wittgenstein,” etc., for he might not realize which of those people he is. (Shoemaker, 1984)
Thirdly, self-knowledge seems to play a unique cognitive role. IfMach desires that he do so and so, and believes that he can do so and so by executing such and such a movement, then he will execute that movement without further ado ⁸.

Spiritual Self

In spirituality, and especially nondual, mystical and eastern meditative traditions, the human being is often conceived as being in the illusion of individual existence, and separateness from other aspects of creation. This "sense of doership" or sense of individual existence is that part which believes it is the human being, and believes it must fight for itself in the world, is ultimately unaware and unconscious of its own true nature. The ego is often associated with mind and the sense of time, which compulsively thinks in order to be assured of its future existence, rather than simply knowing its own self and the present.

The spiritual goal of many traditions involves the dissolving of the ego, allowing self-knowledge of one's own true nature to become experienced and enacted in the world. This is variously known as Enlightenment, Nirvana, Presence, and the "Here and Now".

Lao Tzu: Self-knowledge

Lao Tzu in his Tao Te Ching says "Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment. Mastering others requires force. Mastering the self requires strength."

Socrates and Plato: Soul as the essence of self

Aristotle: The self as activity

Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core essence of a being, but argued against its having a separate existence. For instance, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because 'cutting' is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). As the soul, in Aristotle's view, is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal (when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops). More precisely, the soul is the "first activity" of a living body. This is a state, or a potential for actual, or 'second', activity. "The axe has an edge for cutting" was, for Aristotle, analogous to "humans have bodies for rational activity," and the potential for rational activity thus constituted the essence of a human soul. Aristotle used his concept of the soul in many of his works; the De Anima (On the Soul) provides a good place to start to gain more understanding of his views.

Aristotle's view appears to have some similarity to the Buddhist 'no soul' view. For both, there is certainly no 'separable immortal essence'. Aristotle also believed that there were four sections of the soul. The four sections are calculative part, the scientific part on the rational side used for making decisions and the desiderative part and the vegetative part on the irrational side responsible for identifying our needs.

Avicenna and Descartes: The self as independent of the senses

While he was imprisoned in a castle, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. His "Floating Man" thought experiment tells its readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic terms when he stated: "I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness."⁹

Hume: The bundle theory of self

Hume pointed out that we tend to think that we are the same person we were five years ago. Though we have changed in many respects, the same person appears present as was present then. We might start thinking about which features can be changed without changing the underlying self. Hume, however, denies that there is a distinction between the various features of a person and the mysterious self that supposedly bears those features. When we start introspecting, "we are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception; man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement".¹⁰
"It is plain, that in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. It is likewise evident that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects."¹¹
On Hume's view, these perceptions do not belong to anything. Rather, Hume compares the soul to a commonwealth, which retains its identity not by virtue of some enduring core substance, but by being composed of many different, related, and yet constantly changing elements. The question of personal identity then becomes a matter of characterizing the loose cohesion of one's personal experience. (Note that in the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume said mysteriously that he was dissatisfied with his account of the self, yet he never returned to the issue.) This view is very similar to that in Buddhism.

Maharshi: Self-enquiry and self-surrender

Ramana Maharshi's primary teachings are documented in the book Nan Yar (Who am I), originally written in Tamil (see note at the end of this section about Nan Yar). Given below are selections from the book:

Although his primary teaching was Self-Enquiry, he was also known to have advised the use of Self Surrender (to one's Deity or Guru) as an alternative means, which would ultimately converge in to the path of Self-Enquiry.

Dennett: The self as a narrative center of gravity

Daniel Dennett has a deflationary theory of the self. Selves are not physically detectable. Instead, they are a kind of convenient fiction, like a center of gravity, which are convenient as a way of solving physics problems, although they need not correspond to anything tangible — the center of gravity of a hoop is a point in thin air. People constantly tell themselves stories to make sense of their world, and they feature in the stories as a character, and that convenient but fictional character is the self.¹²¹³

The Buddha

The concept of the self has been disputed by some prominent philosophers. The Buddha in particular attacked all attempts to conceive of a fixed self, while stating that holding the view "I have no self" is also mistaken. This is an example of the middle way charted by the Buddha.

Others

Other broader understandings of Self place it to mean the essence of any living being. With this understanding, Self is the hand of God or the expression of life that makes any living entity inherently unique.

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