THE SELF FROM EASTERN AND WESTERN PERSPECTIVES

THE SELF FROM EASTERN AND WESTERN PERSPECTIVES

INTRODUCTION

Different cultures and varying environments tend to create different perceptions of the "self," and one of the most common distinctions between cultures and people is the Eastern versus Western dichotomy, wherein Eastern represents Asia and Western represents Europe and North America. It must be understood that this distinction and the countries included were politically colored at the time that aforementioned concepts were accepted and used in the social sciences.

THE EASTERN AND WESTERN SELF

Almost two thousand years before the first Western text was introduced, the Eastern civilization was already so advanced that it had accounts of the virtuous philosophies of China, the famous civil codes like the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, and the earliest religious texts of India like the Rigveda. Noticeably, the Eastern thoughts are concerned about the collective life in the community. This is very much in contrast with the individualistic concepts of the West.

The concept of the psyche is a Western model of the soul. Western traditions are always preoccupied by the duality of the body and soul. Plato started with the idea that the soul inhabited the world of ideas, while the body descended to the world of the sensible. The ideal self is there up above the heavens, while the bodily self, or the soul imprisoned in a finite material body, by which we know today, is only thrown into the oblivion of remembering what the soul used to know while still living in the world of ideas.