The Ego And The Self

14 Pages 3556 Words

EGO AND THE SELF: A PERSONAL VIEW
In both traditional philosophy and modern psychology, the concept of the ego has played an important role in defining the boundaries of the "self." Although the two fields may seem to take very different views of what the ego is, this is only because they attempt to describe the concept in different terms. In this essay, I will try to take a more personal view of this concept, to explain how I have perceived and understood my "ego" or selfhood in the course of my own life. First, however, I think it might be useful to explain how I see the differences between the philosophical and psychological concepts of the ego, based on how the two schools of thought have approached the problem.
Philosophers seem to me to start by looking at the concept of self as a logical problem of separating the individual and his or her consciousness from the world around it. The word "ego," which simply means "I" or "myself" in Latin, does not have any other specific meaning from a philosophical viewpoint: the ego is the self, or the self as it is perceived in the mind of a conscious human subject. Although this basic idea of the self as a separate individual may seem like one of the most obvious and "self-evident" concepts imaginable, it is actually one of the most difficult philosophical problems imaginable. Philosophers have shown us that defining where the "self" leaves off and the rest of the world begins, or even proving that there is definitely such a boundary line between self and world at all, quickly becomes involved in all kinds of logical and philosophical problems.

For example, if we look at the ego as the condition of a human being who is conscious and aware of the world as something distinct from the self, how can we prove where the things that create and maintain that consciousness are? If we think of our ego as an internal conscious mind that feels, sees, smells and hears, we can trace the o...