Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 30

Assignment Example Hume claimed that in his reflections on the self, he learnt that it is impossible to have a unified impression of self without the particular perceptions. Hume argued that whenever he thinks about the concept of self, what he finds are particular perceptions such as heat or cold, love or hate, or pleasure or pain. Hume argued that these particular perceptions do not exist as a unified entity that can be termed self, Hume says, â€Å" Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time† (Selby-Bigger, 294). For this reason, therefore, Hume concluded self is an illusion, and that what we call self is a bundle of sensations. Unlike Hume, however, Immanuel Kant held that self is a reality and that we are able to know the self. Kant’s conception of the self is also an offshoot of his Epistemology. In his theory of knowledge, Immanuel Kant taught that there are two sources of human knowledge, which are sensibility and understanding. According to Immanuel Kant, sensibility gives us objects, while the understanding thinks and reasons about the given objects. For Kant, therefore, it is possible for us to have knowledge of things which have no direct impressions. Kant, therefore, argued that by looking for the self in sense impressions, Hume was looking for the self in the wrong place. For Kant, the self is the entity that unifies human experiences, thus enabling human mind to synthesis sense perceptions. For Kant, the self is what Rene Descartes had termed as the thinking I. By arguing that existence precedes essence, Sartre meant that human beings are born indeterminate, or without their essence, and that it is human beings themselves who make up their essence. According to Sartre, human beings are not determined, before they are born, what they will be in life. For this reason, therefore, Sartre viewed human beings as existing first before they determine their essence of what they will be in life.