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Single Idea 20757

[filed under theme 16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 7. Self and Body / a. Self needs body ]

Full Idea

Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man - he is called a self. He lives in your body; he is your body.

Gist of Idea

The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body

Source

Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], I.4), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Creature'

Book Ref

Aho,Kevin: 'Existentialism: an introduction' [Polity 2014], p.76

A Reaction

I find Nietzsche's view of the self very congenial, though I tend to see the self as certain central functions of the brain. The brain is enmeshed in the body (as in the location of pains).

The 15 ideas with the same theme [a body is necessary for a sef]:

4836 The mind only knows itself by means of ideas of the modification of the body [Spinoza]
5583 We need an account of the self based on rational principles, to avoid materialism [Kant]
20757 The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body [Nietzsche]
15583 Certainty that I will die is more basic to my existence than the Cogito [Heidegger]
23747 What is sacred is not a person, but the whole physical human being [Weil]
5324 Bodily identity and memory work together to establish personal identity [Ayer]
5668 People own conscious states because they are causally related to the identifying body [Ayer]
5173 Two experiences belong to one self if their contents belong with one body [Ayer]
5176 Empiricists can define personal identity as bodily identity, which consists of sense-contents [Ayer]
9263 A person is an entity to which we can ascribe predicates of consciousness and corporeality [Strawson,P]
5673 If we have a pain, we are strongly aware of the bodily self [Cassam]
16236 Maybe our persistence conditions concern bodies, rather than persons [Olson, by Hawley]
6669 For 'animalism', I exist before I became a person, and can continue after it, so I am not a person [Olson, by Lowe]
4936 The self is founded on bodily awareness centred in the brain stem [Edelman/Tononi]
6144 You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks]