The Philosophy of the Self

No other topic of intersection between personality psychology and philosophy is as significant and difficult as the topic of our Self. The Self can be thought of as the core of who we are and who we want to become. Therefore, we assume stability, that there is something immutable in us. At the same time we want to change for the better, we want to become less Neurotic, more Agreeable, more Extroverted, etc., etc. Are we changing the Self then? And how is that possible when we assume that the Self is a stable core of who we are? If we decide to walk both ways, can we think of the processes that change the Self and at the same time of the processes that guarantee the Self is not broken during that change?

These questions deal with dialectic - a philosophical concept and discipline dealing with the substance of things, how it is created and transformed, how it could be itself and not itself, and how this dualism of being something and not being that something is reduced back to being whole albeit a qualitatively different one. Sounds profound, right? That is where psychology cannot help the reader any more and philosophy, the mother of all sciences, has to interfere. Because psychology being a science, albeit a weaker type than the hard, exact sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, thinks of existence only empirically. For psychology if something has to be explored, measured, and written about, it must exist somewhere or it has to have tangible indicators at least like the case is for personality traits and factors. That is why, when psychologists try to define the Self they inescapably fall into the trap of measuring different, contextualized Self-es - the social self, self-esteem, self-worth, self-enhancement, self-handicapping, self-control. So many Self-es, right? And just like Humpty Dumpty, psychologists are unable to put back together what is broken.?Enters philosophy ...

The Self used to be called many names throughout the history of ideas. In Plato’s dialogue Apology Socrates talks about his daimonion, which guides him what he should NOT do. Socrates says: “I have a divine sign [daimonion] from the god which… began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never turns me towards anything. “ (Apology, 31c). The daimonion might be functioning as a Super Ego, a conscience to not do morally wrong things. Or it might be another name Socrates used for his rationality as a guiding principle. Some readers of Plato such as Nietzsche suggested that the daimonion might have been a psychotic hallucination. Whatever it was, it was perceived to be personal and not from the Gods and we know that for certain because one of the accusations against Socrates in his trial was that he was introducing a new divine thing (i.e., his daimonion). Yet, one thing remains certain - the daimonion was a guide for Socrates, it was an inner voice, but not really a Self because it was not present with him all the time.

The reader would of course ask about the soul. Did Plato think of the Soul? Wasn’t the Soul back then the closest to what nowadays is known as the Self? Plato did write about the Soul. In one of his masterpiece dialogues Phaedo Plato tells us that the Soul is intelligent and immortal but being the principle of movement and life it has to work with the body, which makes the Soul sort of dizzy and corrupted by the body's physiological needs and deficiencies. Thus, during life, our Souls are unable to perceive the true ideas and acquire true knowledge. Our knowledge is more of an opinion (Theaetetus) and a shadow of the truth (Plato’s the Allegory of the Cave in The Republic). As you can see for Plato the soul functions both as life-principle and as thinking mind. In the dialogues Phaedrus and Timeraeus Plato tells us that the soul is immortal and reincarnation might be possible. After death and depending on how virtuously the soul’s carrier has lived (because there is potential trip to the underworld for judgment), a good soul might finally rise to the rim of heaven and contemplate what only the Gods can see - the ideal forms (i.e., ideas) of things. At some point the Soul exits this higher plane of existence (think of it as a cosmic object coming out of orbit) and falls down to be reincarnated in another body - human or animal. Apparently, personality in terms of the Your Self cannot be retained in this process. The only memory from the previous life can be about the ideal forms.

With the father of philosophy and greatest discipline of Plato - Aristotle - the closest thing to Self is again the Soul (psyche). But Aristotle took a much more empirical view of it. According to him even plants have souls, but the soul is more of a moving principle, a source of locomotion, and guarantor of life. The mind or intellect, called nous, is the faculty of the soul which knows and understands. However, the nous might not really be ours (i.e., it is not a personal mind). It is a faculty of our soul but it is not individual, nor does it hold personalized memories. It actually might be interpreted as something existing through the universe and permeating everything, a sort of active, God-like principle of all things (On the Soul, III, 5-7). Thus, for Aristotle, there is no personality - humans are just combos of vegetative soul, sensing soul, and thinking soul (nous). All personality characteristics are just like attributes (accidents in Latin) or dependent substances our substance (i.e., the human being) acquire in life, but when we die we lose these attributes. The vegetative and sensing faculties of the soul disappear and the nous as discussed above lives off independently from us. Now, some of our readers who love philosophy might reply that Aristotle has a grand theory of virtues and morality and personality could be likened to the accumulation and practice of virtues. This is a great point but it still does not guarantee a personal Self, because for Aristotle the virtuous life is one according to the Nous, not according to a personal Self and what it wants from life.

Neoplatonism fully merged Plato’s universe of ideas with Aristotle’s system of forces, substances, and attributes. The result was mystical metaphysics, almost a philosophical religion. And the Soul became the grand principle of life cascading from the One (i.e., the first principle, the transcendent impersonal God), through the Nous (the cosmic reason and truth according to which everything moves and acts), to matter (dull substance). The human soul is just a tiny little percolating drop in this giant cosmic soul waterfall and just like in Aristotle it is vegetative, sensing, and perishable. However, unlike Aristotle and like Plato, the soul being divinely originated might want to reminisce about its higher spheres of existence, it wants to remember the origin, the realm of everlasting forms (i.e., ideas). Thus, again, there is no true Self or personality in Neoplatonism. In a way, our true personality is letting go of all the attributes our souls have acquired through experience and returning through memory to the One (Ennead IV.8.4-6), the first principle and origin, the One which in a very Platonic way has three characteristics - goodness, truth, and beauty. Even if hopped on a time machine, met Plotinus and explained to him what personality in our modern sense is he would still stick to his guns and perhaps ask us why do we want to have unique personality and an independent Self when we can have access to the One and bask in its goodness, truth, and beauty. A no brainer conversation.?

After Neoplatonism came Christianity, which borrowed so heavily from Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism. The soul became the immortal soul, that which is created by the mysteries of God and will be judged by God at the end. People’s personalities really did not matter, or said in a more precise way, personality was not of interest. What was important was what you did during your life, how you lived, was it according to God’s laws, and the Soul was to be judged for its actions. At the end of the day everyone who was good, that followed God’s laws, was the same personality-wise. Wanting to stray from what was prescribed in the Book was either misunderstood or worse, punished for coming from the Devil. Unfortunately Christian theologians back then and nowadays seem to not take heed of the warning of their greatest systematizer St. Thomas of Aquinas who warned us to fear the person of the one book.

So let us fast forward to 1638 when Rene Descartes (1596-1650) wrote the famous Cogitio, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) in his book Discourse on the Method. This phrase and Descartes as an envoy of Rationalism can be considered as the official end of Middle Ages Scholasticism and the start of the Enlightenment. The Soul/Self was finally unchained from God but unfortunately it was quickly chained again, this time to Reason. Descartes radically separated the mind from the body and grounded the reality of our human existence in the Cogito argument. We may doubt the existence of our bodies but because the act of doubting is only possible if something thinks, then this thinking substance is our mind which must exist. No longer do we need God to be the guarantor of our existence, although Descartes was not very explicit about this point because he knew what happened well, let us just say that the ashes of Italian philosopher Jordano Bruno were still smoldering when the 4-year old Descartes was still playing with his toys in La Haye, central France.

Mind is immaterial and the body is material. For Descartes our minds are the seats of our consciousness, they are our Self-es. But for one to be a functional human being, the Self and the body have to be intermixed and work together, sort of using each other - the mind has to receive neural signals from the body and its senses, but the body needs the mind to process and understand these signals. According to Descartes the mind interacts with the body in the pineal gland and that is where the seat of the Soul is. Personality, just like with Aristotle, comes through experiences and can be likened to a specific organization of the senses and habits of the body. It is not truly ours, and nothing is per se ours and beyond doubt but the ability of our mind to think.

We believe that the history of personality really started with another Enlightenment philosopher who, unlike Descartes, grounded knowledge in sensory experiences and memories, not in the mind’s ability to access a priori truths. Enters the room John Locke (1632-1704). In Locke’s view and similarly to Descartes, the mind thinks but this time it also has a consciousness which “can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27, 9). Thus, the mind has de facto personality-through-memory in the form of the uninterrupted awareness that whatever happened to our bodies through experience happened to the same body. Explained with an example, Martin remembers when he was a petulant young child, he has an uninterrupted consciousness of himself being himself throughout all this time until the present when he is a furry ball of anger and anxieties (i.e., Martin has high Neuroticism). True, high Neuroticism is not a definitional quality of Martin, but if you ask Locke why Martin is Martin, Locke might say that Martin’s memory of being neurotic at time A, neurotic at time B, neurotic at time C, etc., etc. is one of the many memories defining Martin’s consciousness and making Martin who he is - a unique human being. Martin’s consciousness is the guarantor of his personal identity, not his body.

This sounds all good for personality but our discussion room enters David Hume (1711-1776). Hume was perhaps the greatest Empiricism philosopher of the Enlightenment and he did not follow a common sense approach like Locke but endorsed skepticism. Hume thought of the Self as a collection of perceptions, there is no Self itself, it has no immaterial substance as Descartes’ rational mind. Interestingly, however, Hume did not dismiss preferences, character traits, and dispositions (i.e., personality) as metaphysical entities like the Self. Just like with his theory of aesthetics where beauty is not a quality of a an object but a sentiment arising in us observing this object (i.e., we ascribe beauty, it is not a quality we perceive in objects), Hume might have believed that traits are sentiments to which certain actions give rise (Costelloe, 2004). Thus, nobody has a personality per se, Martin is neither Neurotic, nor an Extravert. We, his observers, call him this way, but de facto these are our sentiments when we see him angry and talking all the time. This idea can be best explained in Hume’s own words about vice which we can compare to having some sort of antisocial, Dark Triad-esque personality. According to Hume vice:

?“ entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Section 1).

Clearly, for Hume personality is just our practice of ascribing traits to people because of the way we interpret their behavior. Basically, personality is the reputation these people have created for themselves by acting in certain ways and being judged by observers to have this or that personality trait. Let us however, acknowledge that Hume requires the judgements to be as objective as possible - that is, the target’s behavior is objectively appraised (e.g., Someone is neurotic because we, you, and so many other people see them all the time angry and agree on that judgment), not tendentiously to create a bad reputation for people we dislike. So where are we now at - we finally have personality but it is not owned by the Self.

Let us get some help for the Self and where else to look than in Germany where everything is so fascinatingly complex but runs so well, philosophy not being an exception. We cannot but discuss Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose transcendental idealism and ideas about the self and consciousness are still percolating today in cognitive science. Kant by his own acknowledgement was greatly disquieted by Hume’s skepticism (way to go Kant!) and went forward to defend the possibility of knowing things outside of the fallibility of our empirical experiences. Two ideas not coming from experience (i.e., a priori) were of time and space and our minds actively use time and space to organize and synthesize the data coming from our senses and experiences. According to Kant, this is done by our transcendental apperception. Think of this complex term as true self-consciousness (Kant calls it the “I” of reflection) versus the inner passive experience that something happens to us because our senses and perceptions report it to us (Anthropology from Pragmatic Point of View, Section 7). In other words, for Kant self-consciousness is created in the act of active perception and thinking; of synthesizing our experiences in a coherent whole within the concepts of time and space; of realizing that oneself as the subject of all this cognition (i.e., the Self, the Subject thinking of its experiences a priori).? Needless to say, this interpretation of self-consciousness makes it the primary tool for creating a unified and personal Self - one that is not the mere sum of what has happened to you (i.e., while you were conscious like Locke thought) but one that has synthesized all your experiences, so that you have a consciousness of a Your Self.

Thus, finally we have a Self that can unite our experiences into one and make them our experiences, not the cognitions of an immaterial impersonal mind like with Descartes. With our second German philosopher - Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) - the Self was further upgraded with the ability for development. Hegel is famous with his dialectic philosophy which lives and breathes development. The dialectic goes like this: You (thesis), becoming something new and different (even contradictory) to what you were (antithesis) and then conflating (synthesis) this new You with your old You into a new, upgraded, developed You. Definitely the reader understands why Hegelian dialectic is the sine qua non for a humanistic and positive psychology of personality.

For Hegel, the basis stage is our subjective mind which just like Aristotle’s soul senses the world, but does not understand it. Think of a fetus, it definitely senses, but its mind is passive, it is affected upon but it cannot affect, it cannot “own” its experiences. The ownership of one’s experiences comes at the second stage, the feeling mind,? which is characterized by feeling our sensations, that is we know something happens to us, we have memory of all these happenings, we know that we are ourselves because we remember the succession of our feelings. But wait, that does not still mean we have a human self-consciousness. Only in the third stage, the one of the actual mind, do we become the subjects of ourselves. I, the subject, contemplate on my body, sensations, and feelings (i.e., everything corporeal) in opposition, as if these are an object. In this act of me, the subject, thinking of itself as an object I absorb my corporeal-ness and become a qualitatively different entity - a consciousness thinking of itself, thinking and body inseparable one-ness, a self-consciousness (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Volume 3, Sections 411-412). Now you can understand why in our definition of personality the Self develops itself.

We have to stop here with the stroll down the history of philosophy as we have already accumulated enough material to argue for a personal Self which develops itself. You might think that all these philosophical theories are just a waste of time in this very person-alized 21st century where the I, my individuality is synonymous with personality. Think twice however. Because we know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human-like robots (cyborgs) are coming in the future. What would be the driving principle of their personality or you think we can just load them with some Big Five, a bit of Dark Triad for spice, some needs and motivations? This would be just a complicated algorithm. If you want to endow AI with true personality you need to give it a core, an organizing principle for all the personality characteristics or as we called them in the last chapter - the puzzle pieces of personality. You need to give AI an independent Self which can develop itself.