Category: Abstracts

Part One; What is knowing and its limits Part Two; What are the limits of knowing the individual self. Part Three; The Social ‘I’ Throughout this project I aim to understand the subjective ‘self.’ I am ultimately investigating this area because in the UK, the Mental Health Foundation has claimed that “1 in 4 people will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year.” In my opinion this figure is drastic, and therefore I believe that an understanding of the human mind is crucial in overcoming the problems we currently face in our society.  1. I commenced with an investigation into the development of knowledge throughout Western history, beginning with Kant and Newton. This will enable me to analyse how successfully we can attain an understanding of the self. I discover that the scientific method itself is proven to be limited and non-universal. The examples I looked at as a potential cause of this were Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, and also the theories of Existentialist Philosophers. As demonstrated by Watts (1957), arguably any new Western theories turn out to be mere restatements of old positions. 2. I then looked into Western conceptions of the self from statements of neuroscience and theories proposed by phenomenologists and philosophers of mind. Naturally Western Science excludes any investigation of the self from its domain by requiring an identifiable object to which we can apply mathematics to. 3. The revelation of our limits in knowledge will consequently lead me to investigate an alternate conception of the human self and the ability to attain knowledge. This originates in the Eastern world, in both Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This focuses on an alternate type of knowledge such as the unconscious knowledge we have of moving our hands. Crucially the conscious thinking process is not the centre of the mind’s activity. As we directly experience reality, it is in the realm of the non-verbal. 4. This lead me to understand the nature of language, which I discovered is extremely limited in providing an explanation of the world. Language by nature is linear because it allows us to make rapid grasps of our thoughts, which we can think of only one at a time, however this causes a depiction of the world as static and fragmented. 5. Heidegger argues that we can have a liberation from these social conventions, by appealing to the notion of an original spontaneous being who exists priori to being influenced by social codes. However, I have argued that this notion that anything can remain constant is unlikely. 6. Furthermore, I believe that it is impossible to try to understand an isolated individual self in the Western sense, because through language the social aspect is fundamental to our nature. Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, John Teasdale and Jon Kabat-Zinn (2007) have promoted this form of Eastern understanding as being beneficial to those with mental health problems, and I believe this significantly demonstrates that Western scientific knowledge is certainly not a superior discipline.