Self-Knowledge and the Self

David A Jopling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135958381
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this clear and reasoned discussion of self- knowledge and the self, the author asks whether it is really possible to know ourselves as we really are. He illuminates issues about the nature of self-identity which are of fundamental importance in moral psychology, epistemology and literary criticism. Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama and psychology.

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INTRODUCTION

When does the butterfly in flight read what's written on its wings?

—Neruda, Book of Questions

By setting off you would never find out the ends of the soul, though you should tread along every path: so deep a measure [logos] does it have.

—Heraclitus

THREE TRADITIONS

The inscription above the gates of the ancient temple of the oracle at Delphi served as an injunction to all those who passed below it: Gnothi seauton, “Know thyself!” This injunction, which became a popular theme in ancient philosophy and drama, and which served as a terse and easily memorizable maxim for moral conduct in everyday life, continues to exert its hold over the popular imagination. In commonsense psychology, clinical psychology and psychotherapy, religion, and philosophy, among other domains of life, we are enjoined to know ourselves better than we currently do; to clarify our lives and our life histories, and the values that inform them; and to live with a greater awareness of how we are perceived by others and how our characters and decisions affect others. The injunction appears to be universally applicable: that is, it appears to be compatible with almost any morally and psychologically complex situation involving the self in its relations with others. But this does not mean that it is vacuous, or that it is merely a convenient rhetorical device with little moral import. The assumption behind the injunction is both plausible and reasonable: there are many situations in which it is easy not to know oneself, to be deceived about oneself, or to be misinformed. Self-knowledge, in other words, is not only something that one ought to work at; it is something that can only be had by working at it. It is an achievement and not a given. It is not something that I merely happen to have, like eye color or temperament. Nor is it something that I obviously or unproblematically have. My simply claiming to know who I am, for instance, is not enough to establish that I in fact know who I am. To begin with, I must call into question the veracity and plausibility of my conventional self-understanding, which supplies me with a reassuring and ready-to-hand account of who I am; and then I must move on to the more difficult task of raising the question “Who am I?” in a more fundamental manner.

The self-knowledge that results from the process of reflective self-inquiry and reflective self-evaluation is ascribed to those who know with some acuity the shape and development of their moral personality, the direction their lives are taking, and the values that matter most to them; who have achieved a level of personal integrity through the adoption of a stance of self-criticism toward their immediate desires, beliefs, and volitions; and who have not accepted uncritically any conventional and ready-to-hand forms of self-understanding as descriptive of the true nature of the self, but who have, by reasoning, choice, dialogue, or moral reflection, arrived at their own ways of making sense of themselves and their life histories. Not everyone actually attains this level of moral, psychological, and existential self-awareness, but it is held as an ideal to which all persons should aspire. Those who display a degree of self-knowledge in their conduct are typically praised; and barring certain exempting conditions such as childhood or mental illness, those who display self-ignorance, self-deception, or self-misunderstanding in their conduct are typically subject to moral criticism.

This is a broad description of what self-knowledge—the kind of knowledge that answers to the Delphic maxim—is like. But how is self-knowledge to be explained? How is it possible? Are there limits to what I can know of myself? And what is the self that is the object of self-knowledge?

Across the history of Western philosophy, at least three broad traditions in moral philosophy and philosophical psychology have emerged to address these questions. In one tradition, self-knowledge has been regarded as a virtue that is expressed in prudential action, and that is essential for leading a good life. In another, self-knowledge has been regarded as a morally valuable but largely unrealizable goal, because of the elusiveness of the self that is its putative object. In another, self-knowledge has been regarded as a form of reflexive critique, because of its destructive impact on conventional ways of understanding the self, and because of its potential for moral and psychological destabilization. While at the borders of these traditions there is some overlap, each one pulls in a different direction, and each undermines central commitments of the others.

Consider the first tradition. In ancient Greek and Roman moral philosophy, the kind of moral self-knowledge that is commanded by the Delphic maxim is considered to be one of the highest goods of human life. There are two ways this claim about the value of self-knowledge can be interpreted. First, self-knowledge can be considered as intrinsically valuable: that is, its possession is good in itself, independent of any consequences it may have in action, character formation, or the relative well-being of the agent. The assumption here is that knowledge is always a good, and ought always to be maximized. Second, self-knowledge can be considered as instrumentally valuable: that is, it can serve as a means to ethical action, and as the basis upon which other virtues, especially prudence and self-control, can be cultivated. But it is not good in itself. This is because it is not impossible to be both self-knowledgeable and immoral, or self-knowledgeable and unhappy. It is possible, for example, to cultivate an exceptionally deep and clear understanding of ones antisocial character and cruel impulses, which one then uses to good effect in furthering ones socially destructive ends. Under both interpretations, those who are self-knowledgeable will know such things as the limits of what they can do; their place in the world; the limits of their understanding; and the extent and nature of their faults.¹

The Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity, for example, illustrates one interpretation of the ideal of self-knowledge as a virtue.² Magnanimity is an ideal mean between what Aristotle calls petty-mindedness and conceitedness, both of which states arise from the moral agent's state of self-ignorance or self-deception. Those who are magnanimous have a true and action-guiding estimate of their character, an awareness of their flaws, and an understanding of their limits as finite human beings. It is because of their balanced self-knowledge that they are worthy of great things: they aim neither too high nor too low in their projects and plans. Those who are petty-minded, by contrast, have the potential of greatness, but it remains unrealized because they systematically underestimate the true worth of their own talents and traits, which flourish only with proper cultivation and rational direction: they do not, in other words, know their own measure. Conceited persons are just as self-ignorant as the petty-minded, but their self-ignorance takes a different form: they are convinced of their superiority, counterevidence notwithstanding, but their talents and traits fail to live up to their inflated self-assessments. Because they systematically overestimate themselves, their actions consistently fall short of, and often far afield of, their most carefully considered intentions and plans.

Socrates' interpretation of self-knowledge also has a strong moral and practical bearing, but it places more emphasis on knowing one's soul than on the Aristotelian goal of knowing one's character. The central concern of Socratic ethical intellectualism—the view that knowledge and virtue are one—is care for the soul. But to care for the soul adequately presupposes knowledge of what, in general, the soul is; and this entails knowing what the soul needs, how it flourishes, and what is detrimental to it. Socrates thus distinguishes self-knowledge as an understanding of the nature of the soul in relation to virtue and vice from self-knowledge as knowledge of particulars, such as empirically discernible character traits, talents, and motives. While self-knowledge is embodied, as it is in the Aristotelian view, and must determine the particular kind of character that one becomes, it also transcends the knowledge of mere particulars. Because the true object of knowledge is the universal, in terms of which particulars are understood, those who are self-knowledgeable frame their personal knowledge in terms of a robustly philosophical understanding of the nature of the soul. In Socratic thought the universal and the particular are dialectically intertwined, with self-knowledge coming to be suffused with Eros, desire, and existential commitment.

Despite the differences between the Aristotelian and Socratic views, there is still broad agreement that self-knowledge is an essential component in the formation of good character, and in care for self; and that it is a necessary condition for living a good life and being a responsible citizen. Those who are self-knowledgeable are better equipped for the practical and political duties of life than those who suffer from self-deception, or from the kind of self-ignorance or self-misunderstanding that comes from obsession with material things, social status, or sensual pleasure. Concern with these transient goods undermines the development of self-knowledge, and therefore the development of related virtues such as integrity, political and moral responsibility, and self-direction.

But the idea that self-knowledge is a virtue, and that it is a necessary condition for leading a good life, rests on a crucial assumption: viz., that the self is something that is knowable in the first place. If this assumption is false, then the role of self-knowledge in the acquisition of virtue is rendered highly problematic. Exploring this assumption generates a number of questions about the conditions and limits of self-knowledge, and the very possibility of knowing the self. If character or soul are not knowable as such, if they are only knowable indirectly, or if they are known only as appearances rather than as they are in themselves, then the ideal of self-knowledge as a virtue may be unattainable.

The tradition that begins with Heraclitus and continues through Nietzsche and Freud defends precisely this view: self-knowledge is not a fully realizable ideal, because the self is elusive and cannot be adequately identified and conceptualized as it is in itself. Human beings are cognitively and phenomenologically constituted in such a way that they are strangers to themselves, and their efforts to improve their lives through reflective self-inquiry are destined to failure or incompletion. There are two ways these claims can be construed. The weak construal holds that the self is such a complexly configured and multilayered reality that many aspects of it simply cannot come into full view for the person whose self it is: that is, there is always more about the self that can be identified and represented at any one time. This is an important construal, and one that serves as a useful constraint on any theory of self-knowledge. But it is a construal that is trivially true: it is a version of the claim that reality is always richer and more complex than our knowledge of it. The strong construal is more philosophically interesting: the cognitive powers—and especially the reflexive powers—of human beings are structured in such a way that there is a blind spot to the self and its existence. The self is not merely something that is difficult to know because of its complexity; it is something that systematically eludes knowledge—despite first-person claims to the contrary.

Both interpretations of the nature of the elusive self are compatible with at least two different explanations. According to one, the self cannot be known as it is in itself because it is too familiar and too pervasive to be noticed; it is like a horizon that frames objects within it, but it is not itself framed by anything else because it is not itself an object. This is a familiar theme of existential and phenomenological theories of the self. According to another explanation, the self cannot be adequately known because the only available access to it is distorted by inadequate descriptive language, or by conceptual schema that are poorly fitted to the contours of experience. Nietzsche defends a version of this idea. Whichever explanation is the most plausible, it is clear that the claim that the self is elusive introduces into the relation between the self and itself a disjunction between reality and appearance: who I am is not who I think I am. My access to the self that I am is necessarily underprivileged, even if that self belongs to me, and is me, in a way that no one else can possibly replicate, and even if my attempts to explore my self and describe it are constitutive of what it is. It is more than a mere logical possibility that my most carefully considered self-descriptions and self-evaluations, those that form my best self-understanding, are widely off the mark; it is an empirical fact.

Suppose that there is a clear disjunction between reality and appearance in matters pertaining to self-knowledge. It does not follow from this that the self is unknowable. The claim that the self is unknowable is to be distinguished from the claim that the self eludes knowledge. The former is a principled claim: it establishes a dichotomy between reality and appearance, and restricts all legitimate knowledge claims (and the epistemic practices that lead to them) to the dimension of appearances. The latter claim, by contrast, establishes a disjunction between reality and appearance, and gives support to the idea that self-knowledge is difficult to acquire and difficult to maintain over time. If the principled claim is true, it makes the self a mystery, and self-knowledge regarding anything beyond the dimension of appearances an unattainable ideal. If the weaker claim is true, considerable pressure is placed on the approach that holds that self-knowledge is a virtue, and is to be pursued either for its own sake or for its extrinsic value.

Nietzsche is one of the philosophers in this tradition who forcefully expresses the disjunction between the self as it appears, and the self as it is:

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?… Present experience has… always found us “absent-minded”: we cannot give our hearts to it—not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: “what really was that which just struck?” so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, “what really was that which we have just experienced?” and moreover “who are we really?” and, afterward as foresaid, count the twelve trembling bellstrokes of our experience, our life, our being—and alas miscount them.—So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law “Each is furthest from himself” applies to all eternity—we are not “men of knowledge” with respect to ourselves.³

Nietzsche locates the roots of self-estrangement in the logical principles of discrimination and identification that are embedded in the psychological vocabulary of everyday discourse. According to Nietzsche, the language of psychological self-reference is inherently imprecise, with first-person descriptions of the passing moods, feelings, and traits of which selves are constituted being pitched at levels that systematically misrepresent the actual phenomena. Nietzsche's claim that referential imprecision is the norm is plausible, but only if it is restricted to a description of a narrow range of uses of ordinary language: for instance, casual self-reports and habitual self-descriptions. Owing to the constraints of context, linguistic parsimony, and functionality, these forms of self-reference are often highly simplified. But it would be false to say that all the uses to which the ordinary psychological language of self-reference is put are inherently imprecise. It is the goal of novelists and autobiographers, for instance, to describe the passage of lives, and the changing states of mind and traits of character of their subjects, with exacting detail. But to do this successfully, they must draw from the same fund of psychological and phenomenological descriptive terms as that deployed in nonliterary contexts. The difference is that they use these terms more carefully and precisely, and without regard to the demands of communicative economy that structure non-literary descriptions. Nietzsche, however, writes:

Language and the prejudices upon which language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want to explain inner processes and drives: because of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2: APPROACHES TO THE SELF
• CHAPTER 3: SELF-DETACHMENT AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 4: A MYSTERY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT
• CHAPTER 5: “THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES”: IRONY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
• CHAPTER 6: DIALOGIC SELF-KNOWING
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX