WEEK 1: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF.
 (1) Provides a sense of purpose; (2) leads to healthier relationships; (3) helps harness your
natural strength; and (4) promotes confidence.
Personality
 The etymological derivative of personality comes from the word “persona”, the theatrical
masks worn by Romans in Greek and Latin drama.
 Personality also comes from the two Latin words “per” and “sonare”, which literally means
“to sound through”.
 Personality have no single definition since different personality theories have different views
on how to define it.
 Personality plays a key role in affecting how people shape their lives.
 Personality is the overall pattern or integration of a person’s structure, modes of behavior,
attitudes, aptitudes, interests, intellectual abilities, and many other distinguishable
personality traits.
 Personality is the conglomeration of the following components: physical self, intelligence,
character traits, attitudes, habits, interest, personal discipline, moral values, principles and
philosophies of life.
Determinants of Personality
 Environmental Factors of Personality - The surroundings of an individual compose the
Environmental factors of personality.
 Biological Factors of Personality
o 1. Hereditary factors or genetic make-up of the person that inherited from their
parents.
o 2. Physical features - include the overall physical structure of a person: height,
weight, color, sex, beauty and body language, etc.
o 3. Brain - The preliminary results from the electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB)
research gives indication that better understanding of human personality and
behavior might come from the study of the brain.
o 4. Situational Factors of Personality - Although these factors do not literally create
and shape up an individual’s personality, situational factors do alter a person’s
behavior and response from time to time.
o 5. Cultural Factors - Culture is traditionally considered as the major determinants of
an individual’s personality.
Personality Traits
 Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors.
The Five-Factor Model of Personality
 Research that used the lexical approach showed that many of the personality descriptors
found in the dictionary do indeed overlap.
 The Big Five comprises five major traits shown in the Figure 2 below. A way to remember
these five is with the acronym OCEAN (O is for Openness; C is for Conscientiousness; E is for
Extraversion; A is for Agreeableness; N is for Neuroticism).
Table 1. Descriptions of Personality Traits
Big 5 trait
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neurotism
Definition
The tendency to appreciate new art, ideas, values, feelings, and
behaviors.
The tendency to be careful, on-time for appointments, to follow rules,
and to be hard working.
The tendency to be talkative, sociable, and to enjoy others; the
tendency to have a dominant style.
The tendency to agree and go along with others rather than to assert
one owns opinions and choices.
The tendency to be frequently experience negative emotions such as
anger, worry, and sadness, as well as being itnerpersonally sensitive.
Who am I?
 Understanding of who you are as a person is called self-concept
 Understanding what your motives are when you act is called self-understanding.
WEEK 2: THE SELF ACCORDING TO PHILOSOPHY
 Philosophy is defined as the study of knowledge or wisdom from its Latin roots, philo (love)
and sophia (wisdom).
Socrates
 A philosopher from Athens, Greece and said to have the greatest influence on European
thought.
 Socratic Method or dialectic method involves the search for the correct/proper definition of
a thing.
 The foundation of Socrates philosophy was the Delphic Oracle’s that command to “Know
Thyself”.
 According to Socrates, self is dichotomous which means composed of two things: The
physical realm or the one that is changeable, temporal, and imperfect. The best example of
the physical realm is the physical world. It is always changing and deteriorating. The ideal
realm is the one that is imperfect and unchanging, eternal, and immortal. This includes the
intellectual essences of the universe like the concept of beauty, truth, and goodness.
 For Socrates, a human is composed of body and soul, the first belongs to the physical realm
because it changed, it is imperfect, and it dies, and the latter belongs to ideal realm for it
survives the death. Socrates also used the term soul to identify self.
 The self, according to Socrates is the immortal and unified entity that is consistent over time.
Plato
 A student of Socrates, who introduced the idea of a three part soul/self that is composed of
reason, physical appetite and spirit or passion.
o The Reason enables human to think deeply, make wise choices and achieve a true
understanding of eternal truths. Plato also called this as divine essence.
o The physical Appetite is the basic biological needs of human being such as hunger,
thirst, and sexual desire.
o And the spirit or passion is the basic emotions of human being such as love, anger,
ambition, aggressiveness and empathy.
 Plato also illustrated his view of the soul/self in “Phaedrus” in his metaphor: the soul is like 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.
St. Augustine
 He is considered as the last of the great ancient philosophers whose ideas were greatly
Platonic.
 Augustine has been characterized as Christianity’s first theologian.
 Like Plato, Augustine believed that the physical body is different from the immortal soul.
Early in his philosophical development he described body as “snare” or “cage” of the soul
and said that the body is a “slave” of the soul he even characterized that “the soul makes
war with the body”. Later on he came to view the body as “spouse” of the soul, with both
attached to one another by a “natural appetite.” He concluded, “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.”
 According to St. Augustine, the human nature is composed of two realms:
o God as the source of all reality and truth - Through mystical experience, man is
capable of knowing eternal truths.
o The sinfulness of man - The cause of sin or evil is an act of mans’ freewill. Moral
goodness can only be achieved through the grace of God.
 He also stated that real happiness can only be found in God. For God is love and he created
humans for them to also love.
Rene Descartes
 A French philosopher, mathematician, and considered the founder of modern philosophy.
 Descartes, famous principle the “cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I exist” established
his philosophical views on “true knowledge” and concept of self
 He explained that in order to gain true knowledge, one must doubt everything even own
existence. Doubting makes someone aware that they are thinking being thus, they exist.
 The self is a dynamic entity that engages in metal operations – thinking, reasoning, and
perceiving processes.
 He declared that the essential self or the self as the thinking entity is radically different from
the physical body.
 He identified the physical self as part of nature, governed by the physical laws of the
universe, and available to scientific analysis and experimentation, and the conscious self
(mind, soul) is a part of the spiritual realm, independent of the physical laws of the universe,
governed only by the laws of reason and God’s will. And because it exists outside of the
natural world of cause-and-effect, the conscious self is able to exercise free will in the
choices it makes.
John Locke
 An English philosopher and physician and famous in his concept of “Tabula Rasa” or Blank
Slate that assumes the nurture side of human development.
 He discussed the reflective analysis of how an individual may experience the self in everyday
living. He provided the following key points:
o 1. To discover the nature of personal identity - it is important to find out what it
means to be a person.
o 2. A person is a thinking - intelligent being who has the abilities to reason and to
reflect.
o 3. A person is also someone who considers themself to be the same thing in
different times and different places.
o 4. Consciousness as being aware that we are thinking—
Always accompanies thinking and is an essential part of the thinking process.
o 5. Consciousness makes possible our belief that we are the same identity in different
times and different places.
 Locke was not convinced with the assumptions of Plato, St. Augustine and Descartes that the
individual self necessarily exists in a single soul or substance.
David Hume
 He was a Scottish philosopher and also an empiricist.
 Impressions are the basic sensations of our experience, the elemental data of our minds:
pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and so on.
 Hume considered that the self does not exist because all of the experiences that a person
may have are just perceptions and this includes the perception of self.
Sigmund Freud
 A well-known Australian psychologist and considered as the Father and Founder of
Psychoanalysis. His influence in Psychology and therapy is dominant and popular in the 20th
to 21st century.
 The dualistic view of self by Freud involves the conscious self and unconscious self
 The conscious self is governed by reality principle. Here, the self is rational, practical, and
appropriate to the social environment. The conscious self has the task of controlling the
constant pressures of the unconscious self, as its primitive impulses continually seek for
immediate discharge.
 The unconscious self is governed by pleasure principle. It is the self that is aggressive,
destructive, unrealistic and instinctual. Both of Freud’s self needs immediate gratification
and reduction of tensions to optimal levels and the goal of every individual is to make
unconscious conscious.
 Subconscious serves as the repository of past experiences, repressed memories, fantasies,
and urges. The three levels of the mind are:
o Id - This is primarily based on the pleasure principle. It demands immediate
satisfaction and is not hindered by societal expectations.
o Ego - The structure that is primarily based on the reality principle. This mediates
between the impulses of the id and restraints of the superego.
o Superego - This is primarily dependent on learning the difference between right and
wrong, thus it is called moral principle.
Gilbert Ryle
 A British analytical philosopher. He was an important figure in the field of Linguistic Analysis
which focused on the solving of philosophical puzzles through an analysis of language.
 According to Ryle, the self is best understood as a pattern of behavior, the tendency or
disposition for a person to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.
 He opposed the notable ideas of the previous philosophers and even claimed that those
were results of confused conceptual thinking he termed, category mistake.
 The category mistake happens when we speak about the self as something independent of
the physical body: a purely mental entity existing in time but not space
Immanuel Kant
 A German Philosopher who made great contribution to the fields of metaphysics,
epistemology, and ethics. Kant is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the
modern period.
 Kant maintained that an individual self makes the experience of the world comprehensible
because it is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a
meaningful whole.
 It is the self that makes consciousness for the person to make sense of everything. It is the
one that help every individual gain insight and knowledge. If the self-failed to do this
synthesizing function, there would be a chaotic and insignificant collection of sensations.
 Additionally, the self is the product of reason, a regulative principle because the self
regulates experience by making unified experience possible and unlike Hume, Kant’s self is
not the object of consciousness, but it makes the consciousness understandable and unique.
WEEK 3: THE SELF ACCORDING TO SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Sociology and Anthropology
 Sociology and Anthropology are two interrelated disciplines that contributes to the
understanding of self.
 Sociology presents the self as a product of modern society. It is the science that studies the
development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of human being.
 Anthropology is the study of humanity. This broad field takes an interdisciplinary approach
to looking at human culture, both past and present.
George Herbert Mead and the Social Self
 Mead is an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist. He is regarded as one of
the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general. Mead
is well-known for his theory of self.
 The self represents the sum total of people’s conscious perception of their identity as
distinct from others.
 Mead argued that the self like the mind is social emergent.
 He claimed that the self is something which undergoes development because it is not
present instantly at birth.
 One cannot experience their self alone, they need other people to experience their self.
 He proposed the stages of self-formation:
o 1. Preparatory Stage - Mead believed that the self-did not exist at birth. Instead, the
self develops over time.
o 2. The Play Stage - Skills at knowing and understanding the symbols of
communication is important for this constitutes the basis of socialization.
o 3. The Game Stage - Here, the child is about eight or nine years of age and now does
more than just role-take.
 Generalized other the person realizes that people in society have cultural norms, beliefs and
values which are incorporated into each self.
 The self, according to Mead is not merely a passive reflection of the generalized other. Mead
identified the two phases of self:
o 1. the phase which reflects the attitude of the generalized other or the “me”; and
o 2. The phase that responds to the attitude of generalized other or the “I”.
The Self as a product of modern society among other constructions
George Simmel
 Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. He was intensely interested in
the ways in which modern, objective culture impacts the individual’s subjective experiences.
 In contrast to Mead, Simmel proposed that there is something called human nature that is
innate to the individual.
 Simmel as a social thinker made a distinction between subjective and objective culture. The
individual or subjective culture refers to the ability to embrace, use, and feel culture.
 There are interrelated forces in modern society that tend to increase objective culture
according to Simmel. These are urbanizations, money, and the configuration of one’s social
network.
 Urbanization is the process that moves people from country to city living. This result to the
concentration of population in one place brought about by industrialization. This paved way
to the organization of labor or increased division of labor, which demands specializations
wherein this creates more objective culture.
 Simmel also stressed that the consumption of products has an individuating and trivializing
effect because this enables the person to create self out of things.
 Money creates a universal value system wherein every commodity can be understood.
 Because of urbanization, Simmel observed that social networks also changed.
 On the other hand, in the modern urban settings, group membership is due to rational
motivation or membership due to freedom of choice.
The Self and Person in the Contemporary Anthropology
 The four subfields of anthropology – Archeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics, and
Cultural Anthropology, suggest that human beings are similar and different in varying ways
and tendencies.
o Archeology - Focus on the study of the past and how it may have contributed to the
present ways of how people conduct their daily lives.
o Biological Anthropology - Focus on how the human body adapts to the different
earth environments.
o Linguistic Anthropology - Focused on using language as means to discover a group’s
manner of social interaction and their worldview.
o
Cultural Anthropology - Focused in knowing what makes one group’s manner of
living forms an essential part of the member’s personal and societal identity. This
encompasses the principles of Theory of Cultural Determinism which suggests that
the human nature is determined by the kind of culture he is born and grew up in.
Cultural diversities are manifested in different ways and different levels of dept. The
following are the ways in which culture may manifest itself in people:

Symbols - These are the words, gestures, pictures or objects that have
recognized or accepted meaning in a particular culture. Example: colors
have similar meaning across all cultures.

Heroes - These are persons from the past or present who have
characteristics that are important in culture. They may be real of work of
fictions. Example: Fiction – Thor, Captain America; Real – Jose Rizal,
Apolinario Mabini.

Rituals - These are activities participated by a group of people for the
fulfilment of desired objectives and are concerned to be socially essential.
Example: Wedding, fiesta, Christmas celebration, graduation, etc.

Values - These are considered to be the core of every culture. These are
unconscious, neither discuss or observed, and can only be inferred from the
way people act and react to situations. Example: hospitality, respect for
elders etc.
 The field of Anthropology offers another way by which a person can view themselves.
The Self Embedded in the Culture
Clifford Geertz
 Was an Anthropology Professor at the University of Chicago. He studied different cultures
and explored on the conception of the self in his writings entitled, “The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” (1966) in his fieldwork at Java, Bali and
Morrocco.
 The analysis of Geertz (1966) in his cultural study about the description of self in Bali is that
the Balinese person is extremely concerned not to present anything individual
(distinguishing him or her from others) in social life but to enact exclusively a culturally
prescribed role or mask. In one instance, Geertz (1973) gave an example of the stage fright
that pervades persons in Bali because they must not be publicly recognizable as individual
selves and actors points precisely to the fact that agency or an ability to act in one’s own
account is an integral ability of human beings—an ability which continually threatens the
culturally established norm of nonindividuality