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16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 3. Self as Non-physical

[Self is a distinct substance]

5 ideas
My individuality is my soul, which carries my body around [Plato]
     Full Idea: While I am alive I have nothing to thank for my individuality except my soul, whereas my body is just the likeness that I carry around with me.
     From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 959a)
I am a thinking substance, which doesn't need a place or material support [Descartes]
     Full Idea: I concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing.
     From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33)
     A reaction: To me that sounds like "I concluded that I wasn't a human being", which highlights the bizarre wishful thinking that seems to have gripped the human race for the first few thousand years of its serious thinking.
I can express the motion of my body in a single point, but that doesn't mean it is a simple substance [Kant]
     Full Idea: I can express the motion of my body through the motion of a point, since its volume is not relevant, but I could not infer from this that if I know nothing except the moving force of a body, that then the body can be conceived as a simple substance.
     From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B812/A784)
     A reaction: A nice analogy. The centre of gravity of a body is an abstraction, and people (such as Cartesians) who represent personal identity as being atomic seem to be discussing an abstraction rather than the real thing. My personal self is a bit of a mess.
The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard]
     Full Idea: A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.
     From: Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59)
     A reaction: The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY]
I am picked out uniquely by my individual essence, which is 'being identical with myself' [Chisholm]
     Full Idea: What picks me out uniquely, without relating me to some other being? It can only be the property of 'being me' or 'being identical with myself', which can only be an individual essence or haecceity, a property I cannot fail to have.
     From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.5)
     A reaction: Only a philosopher (and a modern analytic one at that) would imagine that this was some crucial insight into how we know our own identities.