/lit/ - Literature

>>5909573
Everything is a social construct.

>>5909573
Define Social-Construct.

>>5909595

An act or construction of language that is contained within or described by the social order

>>5909602
All words are social constructs then

>>5909573
What do you mean by the self?

>>5909573
>>5909585
>>5909595
>>5909602
>>5910264
>>5910265

4chan worst place for philosophy

>>5910284
this thread is about philology not philosophy

>>5910302
>Is the self a social construct?

yeah not a philosophical question at all

ITT: nobody answers the question without referring to 'define x'

>>5910265
What the fuck do you think?

>>5910636
I'd say that's a valid question, since different times and cultures have defined and thought about humans in different ways. Not sure if I'm indirectly answering the question, but it was still a fair question.

Is this an unanswerable question? Yikes

>>5910802
It's mostly that "is a social construct" doesn't really mean anything unless you're a tumblrette

doesnt look like one

>>5910808

Nobody outside of tumblr is interested in cognition or the social order? Maybe I should go there

>>5910265

Pic related is the only Self worth talking about.

>All this unfalsifiable nonsense in 1 thread
/lit/, I am disappoint.

A question older than many countries. Most philosophical evidence thus far points towards: the self is a construct.

Thinkers of note:
Descartes - pro (Meditations)
Hume - anti (Treatise)
Nietzsche - anti (Triumph of the Will, others)
Sartre - anti

>>5910284
Nice arguments.

It's a relation that relates to itself lol

>>5909573
The self, as defined as interpretation of one's own merit, purpose, or "soul' cannot even be agreed upon the extent of its own existence, but society's philosophers go at lengths to define it.
Essentially, the self may or may not exist, but do define it would require it to become a social construct.

The self necessarily is the self. It would still exist outside society because it is the only frame of view one has to existence.

>>5911948

with no mirrors and no language, can you talk about a self?

>>5911968
Non-sequitur. The self doesn't rely on the language we use to describe the self.

Also, language is inherent, even without a society to construct it.

The social construct is a self, according to Hegel.

>>5912094
>Hegel

>>5912094

Can anyone elaborate on this?

>>5910307
>4chan worst place for philosophy

yeah not a non-philosophical question at all

Is the idea of a social construct itself simply a social construct?

>>5912959
of course, you idiot cunt

>>5912483
LE SUBJECT/OBJECT IDENTITY

>>5909573
What do you actually mean by this dude? Be more specific.

The self, the 'I', identity, the alpha and omega, beyond creation and obliteration, enduring consciousness and unconsciousness, the experience and the experiencer, the totality of life, ineffable and unchanging, containing all, within all, transcending all, unstruck, 'i' creates.

Who? Self. What and which? Creation. Where? Here. When? Now. How? Laws and method. Why and wherefore? Fun :)

Look into the eyes of all living things and looking back at you from the void is the ineffable presence, the self, silent understanding perceiving itself. The eye is the window through which self perceives self.

>>5915066

Don't go so far beyond appearances, amigo.

- I.K.

>>5911948

Agreed. Even if you were a feral child, understanding no human language, you'd still be aware of your self as the immediate consciousness that all your experience has reference to. As long as you are an experiencer, then you have a self.

But what would we say about an organism that had no awareness of being subjected to sense-data? Something that survives based on its instinct and reflexes, without any awareness of its actions or its surroundings - something like what a jellyfish or a sea cucumber or an earthworm might be like, merely responding to the stimulation of the sense organs. Like a movie playing in an empty theater: sensory input without a subject to be aware of it.

Such an organism would no bet a "self," would it? The organism is a subject of transmissions within its nervous system, but it is not a subject of experience - it is not aware of itself as the subject experiencing the object before it.

>>5909573
Yeah, pretty much. We kight have evolved to form social constructs such as the self though, as the natural and social contributions to our being are not locked in some zere-sum game.

>>5916715
He ignores harmonics in his argument; misses how a Thing B can arise out of the interaction between two other things of Thing A and experience along an existence as Thing B until the two Thing A drop out and no longer create the harmony. In this manner it was not necessary for it to exist before experiences happened but rather simultaneously due to the system it's happening within (in this case a human reaching the point of harmony with existence via whatever straw breaks the camel's back biologically).

It's completely spot on if we ignore that option, though it seems to be relevant and better explains what we experience.

>>5909573
The self is not a social construct. The self is alive and life can be neither conceived nor confined by man and so it exists beyond the realm of social construction.

>>5917058
the concept of life cannot be...*

>>5917058

>the self is alive

What does that even mean?

If you are a solipsist, perhaps no. Otherwise, yes.

>>5909573
Fuck off back to philosophy 101 you dipshit.
And while you're at it, kill yourself.

>>5918507
y do u evn post

>>5910352
define nobody, asshole

>>5916966

>He ignores harmonics in his argument; misses how a Thing B can arise out of the interaction between two other things of Thing A and experience along an existence as Thing B until the two Thing A drop out and no longer create the harmony

Kant would say we can have no way of knowing whether the (transcendental) self is a result of harmonic interaction - we can only have knowledge of how our selves appear to ourselves, not what we are independently of our thinking about ourselves.

But, interestingly, he does present the possibility of something like harmonic interaction, though only as an example of the unknowability of our deepest mental nature. He says that just because there is a persisting representation of our self that remains constant through all conscious experience, that doesn't prove that our self is a substance, an object persisting through the changes of its more superficial features (this is in refutation of Descartes, who thought that his "cogito" could prove that the self is a thinking *substance*). Kant's counterexample is something like a wave, in which the wave itself seems like an individual, persisting object, keeping its numerical identity as it rolls towards the shore; but in reality, the wave is not a substance, but the interaction of many particles that communicate their individual motion and give rise to something that resembles a single object. The self, Kant says against Descartes, could be something like this at bottom, and not a substance at all - but we can't know either way, because the attempted proofs contain fallacies, and we are restricted to knowledge of appearances, not things in themselves.

>>5916966

>In this manner it was not necessary for it to exist before experiences happened but rather simultaneously due to the system it's happening within (in this case a human reaching the point of harmony with existence via whatever straw breaks the camel's back biologically).

If you have in mind Kant's claim that the fundamental self* "precedes all experience," or "precedes all data of the intuitions," then you might find it unlikely or improper for him to claim that the fundamental self exists before the experiences that belong to it, as if consciousness would have to exist earlier in time than the objects that it is conscious of.

You'd be correct in this criticism, I think, and I'm pretty sure Kant would agree with you. He's NOT saying that the fundamental (transcendental) self exists temporally prior to its experience - it is rather logically prior to its experience, in that it is a precondition for experience, a requirement that must be in place before experience is possible. For Kant, experience is simultaneous with the order-imposing activity of our fundamental self, since self-awareness can only occur when our fundamental self is animated, working on imposing order on some sense data; it is only when this sense data is given conceptual order, formed in such a way that it can be thought about and judged, that we can be conscious of our thinking and judging about it. This consciousness is empirical apperception: the inner personality we are aware of when we consider our experience of the external world and our own train of thought, our selves as we appear to ourselves, but not our selves as we fundamentally are.

*(AKA whatever unknowable thing it is that imposes order upon the ever-changing data from the senses, thus making the universe orderly and predictable; AKA what my ultimate nature is in itself, not the way I merely appear to myself.)

The self being a social construct is a psychological foundation. Agree/disagree?

>>5918742

>logically prior to its experience, in that it is a precondition for experience, a requirement that must be in place before experience is possible.

And to say "BEFORE experience is possible" is only to use an analogy of time. It's better to say: it is required for any experience; or it is presupposed by experience; or it is the ground of experience.

this will come to the inevitable question

do you acknowledge that there is a n ultimate objective reality or not aka do you believe in god or not

>>5911913
>but do define it would require it to become a social construct.
Nah, I disagree. The thing in itself is not a social construct. Though my interpritation of the self is hegelian. The self or I comes from fixating on an object of consciousness. Through finding out what is in opposition to the object of consciousness, the consciousness discovers it itself is diffrent to the object. It gains a position to the object through negation and this position becomes the I or Self.

One could exist in complete social isolation, yet still come to discover the self by looking in a mirror, a pool of water, etc.

But like you said, by defining it through langauge it comes to be a social construct since language is in essence social. However, the concept of the self, or the self in and for (where it is positioned in relation to objects) itself, is not. It is merely a product of consciousness.

So for me, sorta. It depends on what you refer to when you talk of the self.

>>5912083
>The self doesn't rely on the language we use to describe the self.
It kinda does, or at least to have knowledge and be conscious of the self.
>Also, language is inherent, even without a society to construct it.
The ability to produce langauge is inherant, but language nessisarily needs the social for it to come into being. It relies both on the thing in itself and the other. Without any other social beings who also pocess the ability to talk, there would be no need to speak.

>>5912094
No it is not. The self is based on consciousness and an object of consciousness reflecting back into consciousness in a process called mediation. There is no social charecter whatsoever in the self. Spirit has a social character.

If superficially looked at, the self indeed seems constructed. Upon scrutiny, however, it is not quite so. It works in tandem with your body: the social "constructs" go through the predetermined biological 'filters' of yours; namely, we seem to appeal to our emotions, our reasoning capacities, etc. to asses these social "constructs".

>>5909573
No, because identify would exist independent of a society. You're hardwired to have an ego.

>>5910284
4chan is a social construct

>>5909573
only the dead can know peace from these doubles
check em

>>5918665
If a thing looks like an A, acts like an A when stressed, and exhibits the qualities of A when at rest, it might be B but why cares if it is when all meaningful interactions can be defined by A? It's only when considering influencing the whole through the distinct parts where it becomes necessary, and a harmonic existence seems to be a fundamentally different yet better reflective of reality due to the results enacted upon the real world for this matter.

>>5918742
That's a hella complicated way of saying "other people can know you better than you know yourself, therefor your image of yourself is partial." given that there are real world scenarios where an outsider can predict your actions in a posited situation cum reality better than you did; something which happens all the time and is evidenced by psychopathy.

>>5918822
>the social "constructs" go through the predetermined biological 'filters' of yours; namely, we seem to appeal to our emotions, our reasoning capacities, etc. to asses these social "constructs".
>making shit up for no reason

why

>>5918742
So, I'm an almost entirely self-taught and unstudied observer of human existence. I don't bother reading most philosophy because it's fundamentally misunderstood bullshit for the most part, but it seems like Kant had some fun things to say about the objective reality of our existence isofar as we can experience it via the senses we have and have developed externally. Is he truly worth reading or will a careful continued observation of our passage through reality yield same-or-better results?

Like, when I read Neitzche, all I see is a pussy who, when observing the true natural world as we exist in it, pansied out and did his best to come up with alternatives that made him feel better. They're not even bad alternatives, they're just needlessly complicated and improbable compared to a natural state of spontaneously arising harmonics in a complex system of arrangements based on biology and metaphysical power dynamics.

>>5918828
Someone who actually removed himself from social society says you're wrong: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-true-hermit?currentPage=1

The experience doesn't make him right, but it lends his view some evidence you can't claim.

>>5921335
The actual claim is at the end of the article and the interviewer is a giant cunt who misses the point even when it's blatantly laid out to him, but it's a good read besides.

>>5921322
>I'm an almost entirely self-taught and unstudied observer

Well, gee, I would have never have guessed.

"The Unique One is the straightforward, sincere, plain-phrase. It is the end point of our phrase world, of this world in whose "beginning was the Word."

The only thing that can be known of the self is the social construct. The self itself is not. The perceptible self is the approximation between the most ideal social construct and the most ideal self.

>>5918791
Even babies have a sense of self, but they don't have the capability to express it with language. Certain animals as well. Your statement here is false.

>>5921286

>If a thing looks like an A, acts like an A when stressed, and exhibits the qualities of A when at rest, it might be B but why cares if it is when all meaningful interactions can be defined by A?

Because in this case, A and B are not equal alternatives, as if both are just different ways of trying to explain the same phenomena. Kant's goal is to not just to identify the general features of experience, but to access a level deeper than that to discover what is necessary if those general features are to be possible; Kant isn't just asking what a natural object is or what it means for an event to be possible, but he's investigating the preconditions that must be in place in order for concepts like "object" and "event" and "possibility" to have meaning at all.

In the present case, Kant's method leads him to differentiate between the empirical self, which we can make everlasting progress in learning about via empirical sciences like biology and (to a lesser extent) psychology - which we can think of as A-level explanations - and the transcendental self, which lies below level A at the basis of our empirical consciousness of ourselves and of the universe, and which thus won't be describable by higher level rules, since it grounds those rules. These more fundamental B-level explanations describe the individualized powers of the mind, the distinguishable mental capacities that work in unison to produce your empirical self and its conscious experience of an objective world. Kant's B-level account leads him to distinguish sensibility from understanding from reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the three of these from the reflective power of judgment in the Critique of Judgment.

>a harmonic existence seems to be a fundamentally different yet better reflective of reality due to the results enacted upon the real world for this matter.

I haven't grasped yet why this harmonic thesis is such a superior explanation, or the array of phenomena it is invoked to explain (except for the example of conscious experience as if it were the harmonious interaction of distinct individual causes).

>>5921286

>That's a hella complicated way of saying "other people can know you better than you know yourself, therefor your image of yourself is partial."

No. It's a way of saying that other people are just as cut off from knowledge of your fundamental, transcendental self - and cut off from such knowledge of their own transcendental selves too - as you are cut off from such knowledge, because no human mind can know any thing-in-itself, whether such a thing-in-itself is thought as the ground of the sequential appearances called the external world, or if such a thing-in-itself thought as the grounding upon which our own personal consciousness rests.


>given that there are real world scenarios where an outsider can predict your actions in a posited situation cum reality better than you did; something which happens all the time and is evidenced by psychopathy.

But these are only predictions made about how a person's is going to behave, considering the psychological causes influencing the person's decision-making process, and the physical causes affecting the function of their body. All of these predictions concern observations of phenomena in the universe, experience of the external world and the people inhabiting it. And such objects are mere appearances, describable and explainable by deterministic, mechanistic natural laws - reliably predictable and certain.

But for Kant, the actions of a human mind are not explainable by the same laws once we investigate it at a deeper level; not the level of physical laws, but the level of transcendental grounds. At this deeper level, the rules of natural experience of the physical universe - like cause-and-effect and the nature of space and time - no longer apply, which liberates reason to make free moral decisions using the criteria of the categorical imperative. But this kind of freedom, liberation from mechanistic determining causes such as are found in the operation of the natural world, comes at a price; it is unknowable to us how our own faculty of human reason could choose the moral action over the immoral action, or initiate an action that unfolds before our eyes in the empirical world. The way in which human freedom operates is a mystery, but our awareness of moral obligation shows us that such freedom must exist, and Kant's distinction of the empirical from the transcendental, the phenomenal from the noumenal, allowed him to maintain that while our actions are explainable by the deterministic natural laws that govern the physical domain in which those actions occur, the same actions can simultaneously and consistently be conceived as the consequence of our noumenal selves, our transcendental free will.

I don't believe so. You would need social interaction to understand the definition of self and its context relative to you, but it isn't required to simply have a sense of self. If I were to hypothetically raise a child alone in a room for 10 years with no outside interaction, they would still be able to comprehend the idea that "I am hungry" or "I am cold", even if they believe the rest of the world is too.

>>5921322

>it seems like Kant had some fun things to say about the objective reality of our existence isofar as we can experience it via the senses we have and have developed externally.

Yep. What I find most entertaining about Kant's philosophy is its insistence on the active role that the mind plays in generating the external world. Space and time themselves, and thus all the objects within them, are just aspects of how your mind organizes its own responses to unknowable things-in-themselves; space and time are not entities or forces existing independently of human minds. And the natural laws that describe the most basic characteristics of the natural universe are also contributed a priori by our mind, not derived from experience; for example, that events in nature all follow lawfully as effects from prior causes, that objects can be considered on their own or as members of a larger group, that external objects have spatial limits and sensory qualities that never allow us to become conscious of a gap or nothingness in nature, and that certain kinds of events can possibly occur in nature while other kinds can not. These rules that all appearances fit into give rise to our orderly, regular experience of the universe, and thus to our awareness of our selves as unified, persisting subjects.

Again, Kant believed that our consciousness of ourself is bound up with our consciousness of objects; it's only when our thinking is directed toward some object* that we can be aware of our self, of our role as subject (at both the empirical and transcendental levels). This is especially interesting because it's easy for us to believe - especially given the influence of Descartes - that our mind, our self, has a kind of independence from what it is directed at, such that we can discard all sensory influences and by introspection see what the mind is really like all on its own.

Kant focuses on this point especially in a section of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Refutation of Idealism - one of his more difficult and lesser developed passages. He argues that that our awareness of being temporally conscious - of having a mind whose thinking is represented as spread across time - requires the perception of a stable external world, since it's only in reference to these apparently persisting objects of outer sense that the constantly changing series of inner sense, which includes awareness of the self as subject, can be judged. For Kant, awareness of change requires awareness of something else unchanging against which the change can be contrasted - otherwise we'd have disconnected moments of a series without anything to relate them to one another, as if each moment were perceived by a different mind without them all being unified and ordered in a single, identical mind.

*(either an object represented as external to us in space, or an object represented as among the inner contents of our own mind like a memory or a desire or an imaginary entity.)

This thread got good :)

Do cats have selves? Turtles?

>>5924367

To the degree that they are conscious, I'd say so - but their type of self might be an intermediary between human selfhood and the non-selfhood of, say, minerals; that is, cats and turtles might not have the capacities for memory and abstract thought that humans have, and which are integral to the value of human selfhood; cats and turtles might have something more like a fleeting, always-in-the-present awareness of their selves. But we can't know for sure since we can only inhabit our own minds.

My take on it from earlier:

>But what would we say about an organism that had no awareness of being subjected to sense-data? Something that survives based on its instinct and reflexes, without any awareness of its actions or its surroundings - something like what a jellyfish or a sea cucumber or an earthworm might be like, merely responding to the stimulation of the sense organs. Like a movie playing in an empty theater: sensory input without a subject to be aware of it.
>Such an organism would no bet a "self," would it? The organism is a subject of transmissions within its nervous system, but it is not a subject of experience - it is not aware of itself as the subject experiencing the object before it.

>>5910265
> The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself.

>>5925742

>tfw this is actually true and never goes out of your head

>>5918762

>do you acknowledge that there is a n ultimate objective reality or not aka do you believe in god or not

Why does the concept of "objective reality" imply the existence of a god? What do you mean by the terms "objective reality" and "god?"

>>5925742
furthermore, this former relation is between the absolutely limited (material) and the divine (god); man is the link between these two qualitatively infinitely disparate objects
THANK YOU KIERKEGAARD FOR SHOWING ME THE WAY