Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

Hugo Strandberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137538215
• eBook ISBN: 9781137538222
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

The aim of this book is to acquire a better understanding of the question 'who am I?' By means of the concepts of self-knowledge and self-deception questions about the self are studied. The light in which its topic is seen is the light of love, the light in which other people really become visible and so oneself in one's relation to them.

1

Know Thyself!

Are philosophical discussions sometimes about self-knowledge, sometimes not? Early in the history of philosophy, this suggestion would have been rejected. Philosophy and self-knowledge were seen as intimately connected; the call to ‘know thyself’ was an impetus to philosophical work and, by Aristotle, regarded as popular wisdom (δεδημοσιευμένα).¹ That self-knowledge is central to philosophy is by contrast nowadays something you say almost only on ceremonious occasions. This book is, however, written in the belief that there is something important to the connection of philosophy and self-knowledge. This should, however, not be understood as a connection between two concepts the meanings of which are already clear. On the contrary, saying that philosophy and self-knowledge are connected means clarifying the concept of philosophy in one particular way. And the same goes for the concept of self-knowledge. In other words, an understanding of these concepts is not given from the start; clarifying the relation of philosophy and self-knowledge is to clarify what philosophy and self-knowledge are.

How should the relation between self-knowledge and philosophy be understood? Simone Weil says:

‘Know thyself’ was among the Greeks a precept which had become a proverb, and which was written up at the entrance to the temple at Delphi, which was a repository of all wisdom. What sense could this saying have had? It seems that it meant: ‘Why do you have to come and ask me about the secrets of nature, of the future? All you need to do is know yourself.’²

In other words, philosophical thinking contrasts to oracular knowledge; wisdom is not to be found in the temple but in one’s own thinking.³ When trying to understand the nature of philosophy and oneself as a philosopher, self-knowledge is the central notion, for philosophy is about answering questions by going to oneself.

The most explicit emphasis of self-knowledge as philosophically central is, however, to be found in the thought of someone who understands what he does as, in fact, originating in an oracular mission: Socrates.⁴ His wisdom, it is said, does not consist in him knowing more than others, but in him knowing that he does not know, in him not believing that he knows that which he does not know; his wisdom, that in which he is superior to everyone, is his self-knowledge.⁵ In this first chapter, I will give an account of how the intimate connection of self-knowledge and philosophy in Socrates and Plato could be understood. This understanding is however not identical to my own, even though I believe there is much to learn from it; at the end of the chapter I will say a few words about how our investigations will proceed.

1 Self-knowledge in Socrates and Plato

Socrates’s self-knowledge is intimately connected to his wisdom, as we have seen. The wisdom the Socratic philosopher loves and searches for, but does not possess,⁶ consists in self-knowledge. The self-knowledge of the philosopher does not consist in new knowledge of a familiar kind, but in an understanding of the character and scope of the knowledge one already considers oneself the possessor of, and consists for Socrates in him knowing that he does not know. This understanding must be understood both as an understanding and as an attitude: ‘philosopher’ already indicates a distance to the sophist’s belief in his own wisdom or to the sophist’s claim to wisdom.⁷ The paradoxical character of this wisdom⁸ is then that it seems to disown itself: wisdom consists in not possessing wisdom. The paradox is, however, only apparent. Whereas the other attitude is about (giving others the impression that one is) focusing on the object of knowledge – the nature of things – the philosophical attitude is about turning⁹ one’s attention to oneself as a possible possessor of knowledge. The philosopher’s knowledge is then self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is not knowledge about just another object in the world but about my alleged knowledge of the world. Self-knowledge is knowledge in another sense than other kinds of knowledge, the self not an object of self-knowledge in the sense that every kind of knowledge has its particular object, and the wisdom of the philosopher another kind of wisdom than the wisdom the sophist claims to have. But that they are different does not mean that they are unrelated. On the contrary, self-knowledge is about countering those claims made in the name of other kinds of knowledge; self-knowledge is knowledge about my relations to things, in contrast to knowledge about the things as such and to knowledge about myself in isolation from them. Self-knowledge could therefore be said to be about the place of knowledge in my life, and is given a merely negative role by Socrates: self-knowledge is about understanding that you do not actually know what you took yourself to be knowing. If this is what self-knowledge is, it also provides an answer to the question ‘who am I?’: I am the one who knows or does not know, I am a possible possessor of knowledge, my relations to that which I am part of are epistemological relations.¹⁰

However, the topic of self-knowledge has an even more pervasive place in the Socratic or Platonic philosophy than the one accounted for above, although it is in the above context it is made most explicit. For Plato epistemological questions are questions with central moral dimensions. ‘The theory of forms’, when it is classically formulated in Phaedo and Republic, does not primarily enter as a way of understanding knowledge; the contexts in which it enters are about the relation of body and soul, about the ‘practice for dying and death’,¹¹ about ‘adorning one’s soul [ ... ] with its own ornaments’,¹² about ἀρετή and δικαιοσύνη. And recollection, when it enters in Meno, enters in order to clarify whether virtue can be taught. In other words, three different questions are associated: epistemological questions (or, with a different emphasis, questions about the relation between empirical and conceptual knowledge and about the nature of the latter), moral questions (about the good, about whether there is knowledge about the good and what nature that knowledge then has), questions about self-knowledge (about the soul, about my own nature, and about what self-knowledge is).

Describing these connections in greater detail, we could start with the question about how to judge claims to expertise. The expert is by means of definition someone who knows more than I do as a layman. This could seem to mean that it is not possible for me to judge whether someone is really an expert, for the one who claims to be an expert exemplifies her purported knowledge by stating things I am not knowledgeable enough to verify or refute. So is it the case that the only one who can judge whether someone really has expert knowledge is the one who has it? Are we going in a circle? And Socrates says again and again that we should ask the physician, that is the expert, if we want to know anything about health.¹³ But who is really a physician, and who is a quack who poses as a physician? This question I must consider myself, without being able to consult any experts. Furthermore, this question – who is really a physician? – can be rephrased as a question about what health is, that is, as a conceptual question. The physician has expert knowledge about health (about how health is produced, for example), but I must ask myself what I really consider as health. This is a conceptual question – unlike the physician’s knowledge which is an empirical one, even though the physician’s knowledge certainly presupposes the same conceptual knowledge my question is about – and a question I must answer. The conceptual question could be said to be a question about self-knowledge, a description the point of which is underlined by the observation that this knowledge is not a knowledge one acquires in any usual sense since that would only lead us back to that circle – conceptual knowledge as expert knowledge – which the emphasis on the personal nature of the question takes us out of. This consideration, of what I should count as health, is in the Socratic context formulated in terms of recollection: what I need to do is not to pursue some complicated investigation but to get to know myself better, realizing what I already know. That the conceptual question, which at the same time is a question of self-knowledge, is also a moral one is perhaps not immediately clear in the context of the concept of health, but becomes more obvious in the light of other concepts Socrates discusses: courage, virtue. This aspect is however there also in the case of health: ‘health’ does not refer to those more or less blurry examples of health we meet with empirically but to that ideal perfection which appears when we consider these empirical examples in the light of the good.¹⁴

This conceptual consideration, hence also moral and about self-knowledge, becomes for Socrates a pursuit of definitions – paradoxically enough, for stating a definition is an attempt at turning the result of the conceptual consideration into public knowledge, which we have seen would not solve the problem but only give rise to it again – a pursuit which fails. (We do not get a definition of courage in Laches, not of ἀρετή in Meno, not of knowledge in Theaetetus.) As an anti-sophistical point there may be something to this – if I do not know what it is I want there is no sense in engaging a purported expert, which it would be if I knew what I wanted – but the failure is in any case more a problem concerning the pursuit of definitions than showing an insurmountable difficulty in striving for self-knowledge. Is a definition of health at all needed? In a way the important point in Socrates’s discussions is that such a definition is, in fact, not needed. When the orator tries to convince the assembly, he may use general and abstract ways of speaking,¹⁵ in that way hiding his lack of knowledge. But Socrates wants us to see that these general and abstract ways of speaking are empty, and he wants us to realize this without him telling us anything we did not know, but only by drawing our attention to things we already know but tend not to be attentive to, that is by means of a dialogical and recollective process.¹⁶ The difficulty of philosophy is hence not that it is an unusually abstract kind of thinking, but on the contrary that it, by wanting us to be attentive to what is concrete, stands in contradiction to our everyday tendency to think, and to be led into thinking, in abstract terms.¹⁷ In other words, it is in relation to what is abstract that Socrates’s lack of knowledge stands out – he is not able to formulate any general definitions – and it is in relation to what is concrete that the recollected knowledge – the knowledge I already have, in some sense or other – stands out: I already know all those cases a successful definition is supposed to cover. This point becomes all the more obvious when we pay attention to the fact that it is precisely in those juridical contexts the orator / sophist is at home in and Socrates wants us to dissociate ourselves from personally,¹⁸ that a definition has a use.¹⁹

There is however more than this to be said about the attempt to remedy my apparent ignorance by recollecting what I already know. To Socrates this has a moral significance of a more immediately moral kind, when the concept of recollection is used to explain the nature of moral badness, as both known and not known. The famous geometrical example of recollection in Meno does not primarily enter as an attempt at characterizing mathematical knowledge, but as an attempt at characterizing moral knowledge.²⁰ If we want to say that the one who morally wrongs someone both is and is not conscious of what she is doing, the possibility of recollection is a way of describing someone as both conscious and not conscious of something. The paradoxical conclusion of Protagoras – that virtue is a kind of knowledge which cannot be taught²¹ – is in this light not at all paradoxical, or is only paradoxical if our understanding of virtue is modelled on our understanding of empirical knowledge.²² In contrast to empirical ignorance, moral badness is inadequate self-knowledge, and moral development comes about by reflecting upon oneself.²³

With the help of the above it is possible to come to an understanding of the dialogical character of Socratic philosophy.²⁴ Since what should be attained concerns self-knowledge, I must be involved. A non-dialogical form – such as making a speech – or a non-dialogical product – such as writing, no matter whether what it contains are dialogues or not – has a philosophical value only to the extent I enter into a dialogue with them and turn them into my interlocutors.²⁵ Self-knowledge means that I do not stand in an outer relation to what I possibly acquire knowledge about;²⁶ it is only if I consider myself as just another empirical object that I can take a statement about myself on authority, as when a physician says that if I take this and that drug, I will get well. But the question about what I should count as health – a question I must answer, at least implicitly, in order for it to be possible for me to check whether this purported expert really has the k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Know Thyself!
• 2  What Kind of Self-Knowledge?
• 3  The Concept of Self-Deception as Morally Central
• 4  Self-Deception
• 5  The True Self
• 6  The Individual and Society
• 7  Kants Political Philosophy
• 8  The Freedom of the Will
• 9  The World as Resistance
• 10  The Will
• 11  The Good
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index