4. A Response to a Non-Philosophical Stimulus
Please Note: Even though this NPS has been released the other previous NPS’s are still live and available for comments.
What does this non-philosophical source suggest to you?
Answer the two following questions in your response:
1) What Issues about the Self does it suggest?
2) What is your position on this issue?
Please feel free to respond to someone else’s comments.
Be the first one to offer a comment or interpretation!
April 17, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Hume’s Theory of the ’self’ as non-existent, being nothng more than a bundle of perceptions is represented by the above stimulus in the way the man’s “self” or identity is obscured. That which we call the ’self’ when unperceived, is non-existent. An object is no more than a collection of its properties – there is no substance. In the same way, the hand can be identified as a ‘hand’ only because we can clearly perceive it – its shape, proportion, etc. through seeing it. However, it the rest of the person cannot be perceived – then there is essentially no person. The gradual loss of the man’s “properties” behind the screen as his outline blurs, suggests the graudal loss of perceptions. Not perceiving anything, the person would cease to exist. Thus the loss of experience means complete annihilation.
But Hume never explains what constitues as a “bundle” – how much “perception” we must experience to make us human. Neither does he account for who bound up these perceptions into bundles to make individuals, creatures and objects. In other words, the properties’ compresence – the relationship between these properties that brings them together into the same bundle.
The language-reality objection also questions the legitimacy of an object’s supposed “properties”. For how are we to know when we perceive, that the cause of these percetions are the objects themselves, i.e. the properties of the objects? It may well be that our ‘perceptions’ are just abstractions of previous experiences, and that we attribute or project these abstractions onto a thing – that thing itself being a substance bare of all properties (a bare particular). Which by this arguement, the concept of a ’self’ is re-introduced. An essence of a ’self’ that can exist independent of our perceptions – our perceptions of the world being affixed to this ‘bare particular’ that is the self.
April 17, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Continued….
The fact that we cannot, through introspection find a ’self’ in within ourselves, hardly proves anything. Because if the only means of experiencing the world, including ourselves, is through our perceptions, neither then should we expect to understand or find a world or a “self” outside of perception. It is no wonder then, that we should not catch ‘ourself’ without a perception, for we are always perceiving, and it would be impossible to perceive the self outside of our perception of ourselves.
Humes theory does seem to present quite a few problems…
April 17, 2008 at 10:44 pm
A good, indepth response to this stimulus, Zuriel. Remember Kant’s response of the ‘transcendental ego’ as he suggests – in this stimulus – colour and depth must be perceived by something. THis provides a good contrast to Hume’s Bundle Theory. You allude to the thing-in-itself and the assumptions built into our perceptions – does Locke’s Tabula Rasa fail because of this, or does he also refer to the unknowable in our existence?