Key Points:

• Is there a foundation of what it is to be you? Is it unique?
• What are the constituent parts of the self?
• Is the self real?
• Are there inherent parts in all humans? Are they good or bad?
• To what degree is there selfishness?
• Is my mind's eye considered the self?

In a climate where Reason was the prevailing idea and was often underpinned by religious and spiritual doctrine, Rousseau sought to break away from this idea and placed the happiness of the human first.

His conception of the self is all to do with feeling and empathy; the self is distinctly moral and man is naturally good. None of his natural inclinations are bad - they are not harmful, illusory or contradictory. His desires are all proportioned to his needs and his faculties to his desires. And on a still deeper level, he has within himself a fundamental source of contentment and joy in merely existing.

Although man is free and morally good, he becomes corrupted by society. By living as part of a society, he is no longer a free man, he is a citizen, a participant that must adhere to the rules. Man is governed by laws and rules that takes away what it is to be human… “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”.

In order to understand how Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion on what the self is, we first need to look at how he defines the will. The will, for Schopenhauer, is defined as desire, drive, a ‘blind’ striving to be alive. The will is shared by other living creatures such as animals and plants: both want to live, to grow and continue surviving.

The will is arational, it has nothing to do with our ability to reason or understand but our will does interact with our intellect. From this, Schopenhauer suggests 2 ways in which the self comes to be:

• It comes directly from the will, that is to say, it is centered on fulfilling our desires and drives to be a human.
• The will interacts with the intellect and harvests the self. Reason and understanding cultivates self-hood

In his bleak conclusion, Schopenhauer takes the nature of our will and, therefore, our self-hood and says it is ultimately absurd just as the world is around us. None of us can be in control of our nature, we just have a blind urge to exist which gives way to accepting the illusion that being a human is worthwhile. The world is a meaningless struggle that is better off not existing.

Key Points

• Schopenhauer’s world is neither rational nor good, but rather is an absurd, polymorphous, hungry thing that lacerates itself without end and suffers in each of its parts.
• At best we might see our way through the absurdity, and achieve some sort of quasi-Nirvanic peace by denying the Will and the futile desires that are its most immediate manifestations . no matter what meaning and brief satisfaction we might find in life, it was essentially absurd
• All true philosophy is idealistic but the correct starting point is to follow the footsteps of Descartes and discuss the individual subjective consciousness

Kierkegaard believed that in order to understand ourselves and the world, the best place to look is within ourselves as humans. The scientists and philosophers looking for objective knowledge were wasting their time as it wasn’t possible. Instead, we can make sense of things by looking at our actions and decisions, and the choices we are able to make. Kierkegaard concludes that we have absolute freedom to make any choice we want, there’s nothing to stop us from being immoral, responsible, kind, negligent or apathetic. We can do anything or nothing.

However, what comes from this realisation of freedom is anxiety. Anxiety is the possibility of freedom, anxiety makes us realise that our freedom is real.

For example: A woman stands at the top of a tall building looking over the edge. She experiences 2 kinds of fear: the fear of falling and the fear brought on by the impulse to throw herself off the edge. The second type of fear described here is the realisation that she’s able to throw herself off if she wanted to.

Anxiety is therefore the consequence of us knowing the absolute freedom we have. It’s the dizziness that comes with making decisions about the future and the sheer possibilities that come with it. However, anxiety is not all bad. It can cause despair but it makes us more aware of the choices, rather than mindlessly making decisions. It makes us more responsible and brings about self-awareness.

But what can we done about this? Kierkegaard believes that we can calm anxiety through faith: The highest passion that drives us to have a more profound encounter with truth and with God. This allows us to better understand our anxiety and ultimately utilise it.

Phenomenology is a field of philosophy that tries to describe what our experience of the world is, from our perspective. It comes up with theories on how our consciousness interacts with the world. By understanding our relationship with the world, we can get closer to understanding things like our existence, what knowledge is, what ethics we should live by and so on.

So to answer questions about knowledge and ethics, some phenomenologists believe that we need to understand our existence first, some believe that we need to understand consciousness itself and some believe that we must acknowledge our freedom before we begin to understand anything else.

Levinas believes that these starting points are incorrect, because they are self-centered; looking to the self is an insufficient starting point in trying to understand how we interact with the world. What he instead suggests is looking at our relationship with others, as a starting point for developing any branch of philosophy. It’s the ethical responsibility towards the other that is the first philosophy to adopt.

So why this ethical responsibility?

When we encounter the other person, it is the most fundamental experience. There’s something that stirs deep inside when we look at the face of another, an ethical demand to be responsible, to not harm that person. This feeling is inherent, it’s automatic, it comes before any philosophical theory.

Before we come up with any theory of knowledge, the relationship between humans comes first.