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August 7, 2018 | Kenneth Best - UConn Communications

Know Thyself: The Philosophy of Self-Knowledge

Dating back to an ancient Greek inscription, the injunction to 'know thyself' has encouraged people to engage in a search for self-understanding. Philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses its history and relevance to the present.

From Socrates to today's undergraduates, philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses the history and current relevance of the human quest for self-knowledge. (Getty Images)

UConn philosopher Mitchell S. Green leads a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) titled Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge  on the online learning platform Coursera. The course is based on his 2018 book (published by Routledge) of the same name. He recently spoke with Ken Best of UConn Today about the philosophy and understanding of self-knowledge. This is an edited transcript of their discussion.

Q. ‘Know Thyself’ was carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi in Greece, according to legend. Scholars, philosophers, and civilizations have debated this question for a long time. Why have we not been able to find the answer?

A. I’m not sure that every civilization or even most civilizations have taken the goal to achieve self-knowledge as being among the most important ones. It comes and goes. It did have cachet in the Greece of 300-400 BC. Whether it had similar cachet 200 years later or had something like cultural importance in the heyday of Roman civilization is another question. Of course some philosophers would have enjoined people to engage in a search for self-understanding; some not so much. Likewise, think about the Middle Ages. There’s a case in which we don’t get a whole lot of emphasis on knowing the self, instead the focus was on knowing God. It’s only when Descartes comes on the scene centuries later that we begin to get more of a focus on introspection and understanding ourselves by looking within. Also, the injunction to “know thyself” is not a question, and would have to be modified in some way to pose a question. However, suppose the question is, “Is it possible to know oneself, either in part or fully.” In that case, I’d suggest that we’ve made considerable progress in answering this question over the last two millennia, and in the Know Thyself book, and in the MOOC of the same name, I try to guide readers and students through some of what we have learned.

Q. You point out that the shift Descartes brought about is a turning point in Western philosophy.

A. Right. It’s for various reasons cultural, political, economic, and ideological that the norm of self-knowledge has come and gone with the tides through Western history. Even if we had been constantly enjoined to achieve self-knowledge for the 2,300 years since the time Socrates spoke, just as Sigmund Freud said about civilization – that civilization is constantly being created anew and everyone being born has to work their way up to being civilized being – so, too, the project of achieving self-knowledge is a project for every single new member of our species. No one can be given it at birth. It’s not an achievement you get for free like a high IQ or a prominent chin. Continuing to beat that drum, to remind people of the importance of that, is something we’ll always be doing. I’m doubtful we’ll ever reach a point we can all say: Yup, we’re good on that. We’ve got that covered, we’ve got self-knowledge down. That’s a challenge for each of us, every time somebody is born. I would also say, given the ambient, environmental factors as well as the predilections that we’re born with as part of our cognitive and genetic nature, there are probably pressures that push against self-knowledge as well. For instance, in the book I talk about the cognitive immune system that tends to make us spin information in our own favor. When something goes bad, there’s a certain part of us, hopefully within bounds, that tends to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. That’s probably a good way of getting yourself up off the floor after you’ve been knocked down.

Q. Retirement planners tell us you’re supposed to know yourself well enough to know what your needs are going to be – create art or music, or travel – when you have all of your time to use. At what point should that point of getting to know yourself better begin?

A. I wouldn’t encourage a 9-year-old to engage in a whole lot of self-scrutiny, but I would say even when you’re young some of those indirect, especially self-distancing, types of activities, can be of value. Imagine a 9-year-old gets in a fight on the playground and a teacher asks him: Given what you said to the other kid that provoked the fight, if he had said that to you, how would you feel? That might be intended to provoke an inkling of self-knowledge – if not in the form of introspection, in the form of developing empathetic skills, which I think is part of self-knowledge because it allows me to see myself through another’s eyes. Toward the other end of the lifespan, I’d also say in my experience lots of people who are in, or near, retirement have the idea they’re going to stop working and be really happy. But I find in some cases that this expectation is not realistic because so many people find so much fulfillment, and rightly so, in their work. I would urge people to think about what it is that gives them satisfaction? Granted we sometimes find ourselves spitting nails as we think about the challenges our jobs present to us. But in some ways that frequent grumbling, the kind of hair-pulling stress and so forth, these might be part of what makes life fulfilling. More importantly, long-term projects, whether as part of one’s career or post-career, tend I think to provide more intellectual and emotional sustenance than do the more ephemeral activities such as cruises, safaris, and the like.

Q. We’re on a college campus with undergraduates trying to learn more about themselves through what they’re studying. They’re making decisions on what they might want to do with the rest of their life, taking classes like philosophy that encourage them to think about this. Is this an optimal time for this to take place?

A. For many students it’s an optimal time. I consider one component of a liberal arts education to be that of cultivation of the self. Learning a lot of stuff is important, but in some ways that’s just filling, which might be inert unless we give it form, or structure. These things can be achieved through cultivation of the self, and if you want to do that you have to have some idea of how you want it to grow and develop, which requires some inkling of what kind of person you think you are and what you think you can be. Those are achievements that students can only attain by trying things and seeing what happens. I am not suggesting that a freshman should come to college and plan in some rigorous and lockstep way to learn about themselves, cultivate themselves, and bring themselves into fruition as some fully formed adult upon graduation. Rather, there is much more messiness; much more unpredictable try things, it doesn’t work, throw it aside, try something else. In spite of all that messiness and ambient chaos, I would also say in the midst of that there is potential for learning about yourself; taking note of what didn’t go well, what can I learn from that? Or that was really cool, I’d like to build on that experience and do more of it. Those are all good ways of both learning about yourself and constructing yourself. Those two things can go hand-in-hand. Self-knowledge, self-realization, and self-scrutiny can happen, albeit in an often messy and unpredictable way for undergraduates. It’s also illusory for us to think at age 22 we can put on our business clothes and go to work and stop with all that frivolous self-examination. I would urge that acquiring knowledge about yourself, understanding yourself is a lifelong task.

Q. There is the idea that you should learn something new every day. A lot of people who go through college come to understand this, while some think after graduation, I’m done with that. Early in the book, you talk about Socrates’ defense of himself when accused of corrupting students by teaching them in saying: I know what I don’t know, which is why I ask questions.

It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge. — Mitchell S. Green

A. That’s very important insight on his part. That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. Socrates is right to say that’s a cognitive error, that’s fallacious reasoning. We should ask ourselves: Do I know what I take myself to know? It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge; the fact that opinions we have might just be opinions. It’s always astonishing to me the disparity between the confidence with which people express their opinions, on one hand, and the negligible ability they have to back them up, especially those opinions that go beyond just whether they’re hungry or prefer chocolate over vanilla. Those are things over which you can probably have pretty confident opinions. But when it comes to politics or science, history or human psychology, it’s surprising to me just how gullible people are, not because they believe what other people say, so to speak, but rather they believe what they themselves say. They tend to just say: Here is what I think. It seems obvious to me and I’m not willing to even consider skeptical objections to my position.

Q. You also bring into the fold the theory of adaptive unconscious – that we observe and pick up information but we don’t realize it at the time. How much does that feed into people thinking that they know themselves better than they do and know more than they think they do?

A. It’s huge. There’s a chapter in the book on classical psychoanalysis and Freud. I argue that the Freudian legacy is a broken one, in the sense that while his work is incredibly interesting – he made a lot of provocative and ingenious claims interesting – surprisingly few of them have been borne out with empirical evidence. This is a less controversial view than it was in the past. Experimental psychologists in the 1970s and 80s began to ask how many of those Freudian claims about the unconscious can be established in a rigorous, experimental way? The theory of the adaptive unconscious is an attempt to do that; to find out how much of the unconscious mind that Freud posited is real, and what is it like. One of the main findings is that the unconscious mind is not quite as bound up, obsessed with, sexuality and violence as posited by Freud. It’s still a very powerful system, but not necessarily a thing to be kept at bay in the way psychoanalysis would have said. According to Freud, a great deal with the unconscious poses a constant threat to the well-functioning of civilized society, whereas for people like Tim Wilson, Tanya Chartrand, Daniel Gilbert, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Ekman, and many others, we’ve got a view that says that in many ways having an adaptive unconsciousness is a useful thing, an outsourcing of lots of cognition. It allows us to process information, interpret it, without having to consciously, painstakingly, and deliberately calculate things. It’s really good in many ways that we have adaptive unconscious. On the other hand, it tends to predispose us, for example, to things like prejudice. Today there is a discussion about so-called implicit bias, which has taught us that because we grew up watching Hollywood movies where protagonist heroes were white or male, or both; saw stereotypes in advertising that have been promulgated – that experience, even if I have never had a consciously bigoted, racist, or sexist thought in my life, can still cause me to make choices that are biased. That’s a part of the message on the theory of adaptive unconscious we would want to take very seriously and be worried about, because it can affect our choices in ways that we’re not aware of.

Q. With all of this we’ve discussed, what kind of person would know themselves well?

A. Knowing oneself well would, I suspect, be a multi-faceted affair, only one part of which would have to do with introspection as that notion is commonly understood. One of these facets involves acknowledging your limitations, “owning them” as my Department of Philosophy colleague Heather Battaly would put it. Those limitations can be cognitive – my lousy memory that distorts information, my tendency to sugarcoat any bad news I may happen to receive? Take the example of a professor reading student evaluations. It’s easy to forget the negative ones and remember the positive ones – a case of “confirmation bias,” as that term is used in psychology. Knowing that I tend to do that, if that’s what I tend to do, allows me to take a second look, as painful as it might be. Again, am I overly critical of others? Do I tend to look at the glass as overly half full or overly half empty? Those are all limitations of the emotional kind, or at least have an important affective dimension. I suspect a person who knows herself well knows how to spot the characteristic ways in which she “spins” or otherwise distorts positive or negative information, and can then step back from such reactions, rather than taking them as the last word.

I’d also go back to empathy, knowing how to see things from another person’s point of view. It is not guaranteed to, but is often apt to allow me to see myself more effectively, too. If I can to some extent put myself into your shoes, then I also have the chance to be able to see myself through your eyes and that might get me to realize things difficult to see from the first-person perspective. Empathizing with others who know me might, for instance, help to understand why they sometimes find me overbearing, cloying, or quick to judge.

Q. What would someone gain in self-knowledge by listening to someone appraising them and speaking to them about how well they knew them? How does that dynamic help?

A. It can help, but it also can be shocking. Experiments have suggested other people’s assessments of an individual can often be very out of line with that person’s self-assessment. It’s not clear those other person’s assessments are less accurate – in some cases they’re more accurate – as determined by relatively well-established objective psychological assessments. Third-person assessments can be both difficult to swallow – bitter medicine – and also extremely valuable. Because they’re difficult to swallow, I would suggest taking them in small doses. But they can help us to learn about ourselves such things as that we can be unaccountably solicitous, or petty, or prone to one-up others, or thick-skinned. I’ve sometimes found myself thinking while speaking to someone, “If you could hear yourself talking right now, you might come to realize …” Humblebragging is a case in point, in which someone is ostensibly complaining about a problem, but the subtext of what they’re saying might be self-promoting as well.

All this has implications for those of us who teach. At the end of the semester I encourage my graduate assistants to read course evaluations; not to read them all at once, but instead try to take one suggestion from those evaluations that they can work on going into the next semester. I try to do the same. I would not, however, expect there ever to be a point at which one could say, “Ah! Now I fully know myself.” Instead, this is more likely a process that we can pursue, and continue to benefit from, our entire lives.

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Michel de Montaigne and Socrates on ‘Know Thyself’

‘Know Thyself’ is a popular philosophical dictum. This article explores how Socrates popularized the saying, and how later thinkers like Montaigne interpreted it.

In ancient Delphi, the phrase ‘Know Thyself’ was one of several philosophical sayings allegedly carved over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo. These phrases came to be known as the ‘Delphic maxims’. Clearly ‘Know Thyself’ was influential enough in ancient Greek society to feature so prominently at one of its most revered holy sites. It would later be referenced over a thousand years later by Montaigne in his celebrated Essays. So where did the maxim actually come from?

Socrates on “Know Thyself”

While many people assume that Socrates invented ‘Know Thyself’ , the phrase has been attributed to a vast number of ancient Greek thinkers, from Heraclitus to Pythagoras. In fact, historians are unsure of where exactly it came from. Even dating the phrase’s appearance at Delphi is tricky. One temple of Apollo at Delphi burnt down in 548 BC, and was replaced with a new building and facade in the latter half of the sixth century. Many academics date the inscription to this time period. Christopher Moore believes that the most likely period of its appearance at the temple is between 525 and 450 BC, since this is when “Delphi would have been asserting itself as a center of wisdom” (Moore, 2015).

The fact that we’ve struggled to establish the origins of ‘Know Thyself’ has two major consequences for Socrates’ use of the phrase. First, we’ll never be able to say with certainty how Socrates was reinterpreting the earlier Delphic maxim (since we have no idea when or why it appeared!). Second, we do know that the maxim was hugely important within ancient Greek philosophical circles. Its prominent location at Delphi, home of the famous oracle , means we have to take it seriously.

What Is Self-Knowledge? Some Views on Socratic Self-Knowledge

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Nevertheless, scholars have interpreted Socrates’ interest in self-knowledge in very different ways. Some academics are dismissive of its value altogether, believing that the ancients held true self-knowledge to be impossible. The soul is the self, and the self is always changing, so how is it possible to ever really ‘know’ oneself? Others claim that the saying is peripheral to Socrates’ wider philosophy.

Not everyone agrees. Various scholars have sought to illustrate how important self-knowledge is to Socrates’ philosophical project . Academics such as M. M. McCabe have argued that Socratic self-knowledge involves a deep examination of one’s principles and beliefs. We must judge ourselves honestly and openly in order to see where we might be flawed in our views. ‘Know thyself’ requires “the courage to persevere, to acknowledge failure, to live with the knowledge of one’s own ignorance” (McCabe, 2011). This is where we begin to see how self-knowledge, when done correctly, can become a tool for self-improvement.

Self-Knowledge: What Are We Actually “Knowing”?

We’ve already seen the word ‘self’ several times in this article. But what does it actually mean? As Christopher Moore points out, “the severe challenge in ancient philosophy is to identify the “self” of self-knowledge” (Moore, 2015). Is a self something universal that everyone possesses? And is it therefore an entity which can be discovered? Or is it something that doesn’t preexist an effort to know it i.e., does it need to be constructed rather than found?

According to Socrates, self-knowledge was a continuous practice of discovery. In Plato’s dialogues , for example, Socrates is portrayed as being dismissive of people who are interested in trying to rationalize things like mythology: “I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things”.

The self, according to Socrates , is best thought of as a ‘selfhood’ consisting of beliefs and desires, which in turn drive our actions. And in order to know what we believe, we first have to know what is true. Then we can reassess our preconceptions on a given topic once we have established the truth. Of course, this is much easier to say than to actually do! Hence why self-knowledge is portrayed as a continuous practice.

Self-Knowledge and the Importance of Conversation

Socrates was well-known for his love of conversation . He enjoyed asking questions of other people, whether they were philosophers or senators or merchants. Being able to answer a question, and also offering a coherent explanation for one’s answer, is an important component of self-knowledge. Socrates liked to test people’s beliefs, and in doing so try to establish truth about a particular topic.

Sometimes we confuse how certain we are of our opinions with whether they are actually true or not. Socrates pursued conversation because it helps to question why we believe certain things. If we don’t have a good answer to why we are fighting against climate change, for instance, then how can we continue to hold this as a principle? As Moore writes, “Being properly a self involves meaning what one says, understanding how it differs from the other things one could say, and taking seriously its consequences for oneself and one’s conversations” (Moore, 2015). We have to be able to account for our views on the world without recourse to circular reasoning and other weak forms of argumentation, since these things won’t help us to establish truth.

Michel de Montaigne and ‘Know Thyself’

The French Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne was another man who believed in the importance of conversation. He was also a proponent of self-knowledge. His entire purpose in writing the Essays, his literary magnum opus, was to try and commit a portrait of himself to paper: “I am myself the subject of this book.” In doing so, he ended up spending the last decades of his life writing and rewriting over a thousand pages of his observations on every topic imaginable, from child-rearing to suicide.

In many ways, Socrates would have approved of this continuous process of self-examination – particularly Montaigne’s commitment to honest and open assessment of one’s selfhood. Montaigne shares his bowel habits and sicknesses with his readers, alongside his changing tastes in wine. He commits his aging body to paper alongside his evolving preferences for philosophers and historians. For example, Montaigne goes through a phase of fascination with Skepticism, before moving on to Stoicism and thus adding in more quotes and teachings from Stoic philosophers to balance out his older Skeptic preferences. All of this revision and reflection helps to create a moving literary self-portrait .

Indeed, the Essays were constantly revised and annotated right up until Montaigne’s death. In an essay entitled “On Vanity” he describes this process thus: “Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper.” This is one of many quotes which reveals Montaigne’s belief that true self-knowledge is indeed impossible. Montaigne frequently complains about the difficulties of attempting to properly ‘pin down’ his own selfhood, since he finds that his beliefs and attitudes towards various topics are always changing. Every time he reads a new book or experiences a particular event, his perspective on something might well change.

These attempts at self-knowledge don’t entirely align with Socrates’ belief that we should attempt to seek out truth in order to know what we ourselves believe. For one thing, Montaigne is not convinced that finding even objective truth in the world is possible, since books and theories are constantly being published that contradict one another. If this is true, then what can we ever truly know?

Well, Montaigne is content to believe that knowing thyself is still the only worthy philosophical pursuit. Even though it’s not a perfect process, which seems to evade him constantly, he uses the Delphic maxim ‘Know Thyself’ to argue that in a world full of distractions, we must hold on to ourselves above all else.

Self-Knowledge and Socrates’ ‘Know Thyself’ in Modern Society: Following Montaigne’s Example

Of course, Socrates and Montaigne are not the only thinkers to ponder this phrase. Everyone from Ibn Arabi to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Samuel Coleridge has explored the meaning and importance of ‘Know Thyself’. Self-knowledge is also explored in non-Western cultures too, with similar principles found in Indian philosophical traditions and even Sun Tzu’s The Art of War .

So how can we begin to use self-knowledge in our everyday lives ? Thinking about who we are can help us to establish what we want, and what kind of person we would like to be in the future. This can be useful from a practical standpoint when making decisions about what to study at university, or which career path to follow.

We can also use self-knowledge to improve how we communicate with other people. Rather than simply believing what we think, without any further scrutiny, we should try and look more deeply at why we think that and be open to testing our assumptions. Analyzing our own opinions in this way can help us to defend our opinions and beliefs more convincingly, and perhaps even persuade other people to join our cause.

‘Know thyself’ has likely been treated as a valuable maxim within human society for thousands of years. Its inclusion on the walls of Apollo’s temple at Delphi cemented its reputation as a useful philosophical maxim . Socrates explored it in more detail and came up with his own interpretation, while thousands of years later, Montaigne attempted to put the aphorism into practice with his Essays. We can draw on these two influential figures to interpret ‘Know thyself’ for, well, ourselves and our own sense of selfhood.

Bibliography

M.M. McCabe, “It goes deep with me”: Plato’s Charmides on knowledge, self-knowledge and integrity” in Philosophy, Ethics and a Common Humanity, ed. by C. Cordner (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 161-180

Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien & Catherine Magnien-Simonen (Paris: Gallimard, 2007)

Christopher Moore, Socrates and Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin, 2005)

Where Was Ancient Greece Located?

By Rachel Ashcroft MSc Comparative Literature, PhD Renaissance Philosophy Rachel is a contributing writer and journalist with an academic background in European languages, literature and philosophy. She has an MA in French and Italian and an MSc in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Rachel completed a PhD in Renaissance conceptions of time at Durham University. Now living back in Edinburgh, she regularly publishes articles and book reviews related to her specialty for a range of publications including The Economist.

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Self-Consciousness

Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves as themselves ; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such .

A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves.

1.1 Ancient and Medieval Discussions of Self-Consciousness

1.2 early modern discussions of self-consciousness, 1.3 kantian and post-kantian discussions of self-consciousness, 1.4 early twentieth century discussions of self-consciousness.

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3.1 Consciousness of the Self

3.2 pre-reflective self-consciousness, 3.3 the sense of ownership, 4.1 self-consciousness and personhood, 4.2 self-consciousness and rationality, 4.3 self-consciousness and consciousness, 4.4 self-consciousness and intersubjectivity, 5.1 mirror recognition, 5.2 episodic memory, 5.3 metacognition, other internet resources, related entries, 1. self-consciousness in the history of philosophy.

A familiar feature of ancient Greek philosophy and culture is the Delphic maxim “Know Thyself”. But what is it that one knows if one knows oneself? In Sophocles’ Oedipus , Oedipus knows a number of things about himself, for example that he was prophesied to kill Laius. But although he knew this about himself, it is only later in the play that he comes to know that it is he himself of whom it is true. That is, he moves from thinking that the son of Laius and Jocasta was prophesied to kill Laius, to thinking that he himself was so prophesied. It is only this latter knowledge that we would call an expression of self-consciousness and that, we may presume, is the object of the Delphic maxim. During the course of the drama Oedipus comes to know himself, with tragic consequences. But just what this self-consciousness amounts to, and how it might be connected to other aspects of the mind, most notably consciousness itself, is less clear. It has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been the topic of considerable discussion since the Greeks. During the early modern period self-consciousness became central to a number of philosophical issues and, with Kant and the post-Kantians, came to be seen as one of the most important topics in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Although it is occasionally suggested that a concern with self-consciousness is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, originating with Descartes (Brinkmann 2005), it is in fact the topic of lively ancient and medieval debates, many of which prefigure early modern and contemporary concerns (Sorabji 2006). Aristotle, for example, claims that a person must, while perceiving any thing, also perceive their own existence ( De Sensu 7.448a), a claim suggestive of the view that consciousness entails self-consciousness. Furthermore, according to Aristotle, since the intellect takes on the form of that which is thought (Kahn 1992), it “is thinkable just as the thought-objects are” ( De Anima 3.4.430), an assertion that was interpreted by Aristotle’s medieval commentators as the view that self-awareness depends on an awareness of extra-mental things (Cory 2014: ch. 1; Owens 1988).

By contrast, the Platonic tradition, principally through the influence of Augustine, writing in the fourth and fifth centuries, is associated with the view that the mind “gains the knowledge of [itself] through itself” ( On the Trinity 9.3; Matthews 1992; Cary 2000) by being present to itself. Thus, on this view, self-awareness requires no awareness of outer things. In a similar vein, in the eleventh century, Avicenna argues, by way of his Flying Man thought experiment, that a newly created person floating in a void, with all senses disabled, would nevertheless be self-aware. Thus the self that one cognises cannot be a bodily thing of which one is aware through the senses (Kaukua & Kukkonen 2007; Black 2008; Kaukua 2015). On such views, and in contrast to the Aristotelian picture, basic self-awareness is neither sensory in nature nor dependent on the awareness of other things. This latter claim was accepted by Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, who can be seen as synthesising aspects of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions (Cory 2014). For not only does Aquinas claim that there is a form of self-awareness—awareness that one exists—for which, “the mere presence of the mind suffices”, there is another form—awareness of one’s essence—that, as Aristotle had claimed, is dependent on cognising other things and so for which “the mere presence of the mind does not suffice” ( Summa 1, 87, 1; Kenny 1993: ch. 10).

This ancient and medieval debate concerning whether the mere presence of the mind is sufficient for self-awareness is related to another concerning whether self-awareness is itself sensory in character or, put another way, whether the self is or is not perceptible. Aquinas has sometimes been interpreted as offering a positive answer to this question, sometimes a negative answer (see Pasnau 2002: ch. 11, and Cory 2014: ch. 4, for differing views). These issues were also discussed in various Indian (Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist) debates (Albahari 2006; Siderits, Thompson, & Zahavi 2013; Ganeri 2012a,b), with a variety of perspectives represented. For example, in the writing of the eleventh century Jain writer Prabhācandra, there appears an argument very much like Avicenna’s Flying Man argument for the possibility of self-awareness without awareness of the body (Ganeri 2012a: ch. 2), whereas various thinkers of the Advaita Vendānta school argue that there is no self-awareness without embodiment (Ram-Prasad 2013). There were, therefore, wide-ranging debates in the ancient and medieval period not only about the nature of self-consciousness, but also about its relation to other aspects of the mind, most notably sensory perception and awareness of the body.

Central to the early modern discussion of self-consciousness are Descartes’ assertions, in the second of his Meditations , that “ I am , I exist , is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes 1641: 80), and, in both his Discourse and Principles , that “I think, therefore I am”, or “ cogito ergo sum ” (Descartes 1637: 36, and Descartes 1644: 162; see the discussion of Reflection in the entry on seventeenth century theories of consciousness ). The cogito , which was anticipated by Augustine ( On the Trinity 10.10; Pasnau 2002: ch. 11), embodies two elements of self-awareness—awareness that one is thinking and awareness that one exists—that play a foundational role in Descartes’ epistemological project. As such, it is crucial for Descartes that the cogito is something of which we can be absolutely certain. But whilst most commentators are happy to agree that both “I am thinking” and “I exist” are indubitable, there is a great deal of debate over the grounds for such certainty and over the form of the cogito itself (Hintikka 1962; Wilson 1978: ch. 2, §2; B. Williams 1978: ch. 3; Markie 1992). Of particular concern is the question whether these two propositions are known by inference or non-inferentially, e.g., by intuition, an issue that echoes the medieval debates concerning whether one can be said to perceive oneself.

One philosopher who accepts the former, intuition-based, account is Locke, who claims that

we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence , and an internal infallible Perception that we are. In every Act of Sensation, Reasoning, or Thinking, we are conscious to ourselves of our own Being. (1700: IV.ix.3)

A similar claim can be found in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues (1713: 231–234; Stoneham 2002: §6.4). Further, Locke makes self-consciousness partly definitive of the very concept of a person, a person being “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (1700: II. xxvii.9; Ayers 1991: vol.II, ch.23; Thiel 2011: ch. 4), and self-consciousness also plays an important role in his theory of personal identity (see §4.1 ).

If Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley can be interpreted as accepting the view that there is an inner perception of the self, on this question Hume stands in stark contrast notoriously writing that whilst

there are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self […] For my part when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. (Hume 1739–40: bk.1, ch.4, §6; Pitson 2002: ch. 1; Thiel 2011: ch. 12; cf. Lichtenberg’s famous remark that one should not say “I think” but rather, “it thinks”, discussed in Zöller 1992; Burge 1998; Gomes 2024, Ch.3)

Hume’s view that there is no impression, or perception, of oneself is crucial to his case for the understanding of our idea of ourselves as nothing more than a “heap or collection of different perceptions” (1739–40: bk.1, ch.4, §6; Penelhum 2000; G. Strawson 2011a), since lacking an impression of the owner of these perceptions we must, in accordance with his empiricist account of concept acquisition, lack an idea of such. It is clear, then, that in the early modern period issues of self-consciousness play an important role in a variety of philosophical questions regarding persons and their minds.

Hume’s denial that there is an inner perception of the self as the owner of experience is one that is echoed in Kant’s discussion in both the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms, where he writes that there is no intuition of the self “through which it is given as object” (Kant 1781/1787: B408; Brook 1994; Ameriks 1982 [2000]). Kant’s account of self-consciousness and its significance is complex, a central element of the Transcendental Deduction being the claim that a form of self-awareness—transcendental apperception—is required to account for the unity of conscious experience over time. In Kant’s words, “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations” (Kant 1781/1787: B132; Keller 1998; Kitcher 2011; see the entry on Kant’s view of the mind and consciousness of self ). Thus, while Kant denies that there is an inner awareness of the self as an object that owns its experiences, we must nevertheless be aware of those experiences as things that are, both individually and collectively, our own. The representation of the self in this “I think” is then, according to Kant, purely formal, exhausted by its function in unifying experience.

The Kantian account of self-awareness and its relation to the capacity for objective thought set the agenda for a great deal of post-Kantian philosophy. On the nature of self-awareness, for example, in an unpublished manuscript Schopenhauer concurs with Kant, asserting that, “that the subject should become an object for itself is the most monstrous contradiction ever thought of” (quoted in Janaway 1989: 120). Further, a philosophical tradition stemming from Kant’s work has tried to identify the necessary conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, with P.F. Strawson (1959, 1966), Evans (1980, 1982), and Cassam (1997), for example, exploring the relation between the capacity for self-conscious thought and the possession of a conception of oneself as an embodied agent located within an objective world (see §4.3 ). Another, related tradition has argued that an awareness of subjects other than oneself is a necessary condition of self-consciousness (see §4.4 ). Historical variations on such a view can be found in Fichte (1794–1795; Wood 2006), Hegel (1807; Pippin 2010), and, from a somewhat different perspective, Mead (1934; Aboulafia 1986).

Fichte offers the most influential account of self-consciousness in the post-Kantian tradition. On the reading of the “Heidelberg School”, Fichte claims that previous accounts of self-consciousness given by Descartes, Locke, and even Kant are “reflective”, regarding the self as taking itself not as subject but as object (Henrich 1967; Tugendhat 1979: ch. 3; Frank 2004; Zahavi 2007). But this reflective form of self-awareness, Fichte argues, presupposes a more primitive form since it is necessary for the reflecting self to be aware that the reflected self is in fact itself . Consequently, according to Fichte, we must possess an immediate acquaintance with ourselves, “the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing” (Fichte 1794–1795: 97). Once more, this debate echoes ancient discussions concerning the nature and role of self-consciousness.

In the early twentieth century, Frege suggests a form of self-acquaintance, claiming that “everyone is presented to himself in a special and primitive way” (Frege 1918–1919: 333). In a similar vein, in early work Russell (1910) favours the idea that we are acquainted with ourselves, but by the 1920s (1921: 141) he seems to endorse a view more in line with Hume’s sceptical account. The same can be said of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus , who famously likens the self to the eye which sees but does not see itself (Wittgenstein 1921: 5.6–5.641; O’Brien 1996; Sullivan 1996). Husserl’s philosophical development seems to have taken the opposite trajectory to that of Russell, with his (1900/1901, Investigation V, §8) denial of the inner awareness of a “pure ego” being subsequently revised into something resembling Kantian transcendental apperception (Husserl 1913: §57; Carr 1999: ch. 3; Zahavi 2005: ch. 2). Continuing with the phenomenological tradition, Sartre (1937; Priest 2000) takes Husserl’s later view to task, arguing against the view that we are continually aware of a transcendental ego, yet in favour of the picture of consciousness as involving a “pre-reflective” awareness of itself reminiscent of the Heidelberg School view (Wider 1997: ch. 3; Miguens, Preyer, & Morando 2016). Questions about the nature of self-consciousness and, in particular, over whether there is an immediate, or intuitive, consciousness of the self, were as lively as ever well into the twentieth century.

2. Self-Consciousness in Thought

One natural way to think of self-consciousness is in terms of a subject’s capacity to entertain conscious thought about herself. Self-conscious thoughts are thoughts about oneself. But it is commonly pointed out that thinking about what merely happens to be oneself is insufficient for self-consciousness, rather one must think of oneself as oneself . If one is capable of self-conscious thought, that is, one must be able to think in such a way that it is manifest to one that it is oneself about whom one is thinking.

It is widely recognised that the paradigmatic linguistic expression of self-consciousness in English is the first-person pronoun “I”; a term with which one might be said to refer to oneself as oneself (Sainsbury 2011). Plausibly, every utterance of a sentence containing “I” is expressive of a self-conscious “I-thought”, that is a thought containing the first-person concept. Thus, discussions of self-consciousness are often closely associated with accounts of the semantics of the indexical term “I” and the nature of its counterpart first-person concept (e.g., Anscombe 1975; Perry 1979; Nozick 1981: ch. 1, §2; Evans 1982: ch. 7; Mellor 1989; O’Brien 1995a; Castañeda 1999; de Gaynesford 2006; Recanati 2007; Rödl 2007: ch. 1; Bermúdez 2016).

As Castañeda (1966; cf. Anscombe 1975) points out, there is an ambiguity in certain ascriptions of belief containing “he”, “she”, or “they”. I may say “Jane believes that she is F ” without implying that Jane realises that it is herself that she believes to be F . That is, there is a reading of “Jane believes that she is F ” that does not imply self-consciousness on Jane’s part. But, in some cases, we do intend to attribute self-consciousness with that same form of words. To resolve this ambiguity, Castañeda introduces “she*” for self-conscious attributions. I will use the more natural indirect reflexive “she herself”. Thus, “Jane believes that she is F ” does not imply that Jane self-consciously believes that she is F , whilst “Jane believes that she herself is F ” does. Before the dreadful revelation, Oedipus believed that he was prophesied to kill his father, but did not believe that he himself was so prophesied.

2.1 The Essential Indexical

First-personal language and thought is commonly taken to be sui generis , irreducible to language or thought not containing the first-person pronoun or corresponding concept (Castañeda 1966, 1967; Perry 1977, 1979, 2001). Arguments for this view have typically appealed to the essential role seemingly played by the first-person in explanations of action (see the entry on self-locating beliefs ). This point is supported by a number of well-known examples. Consider Perry’s case of the messy shopper,

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. (Perry 1979: 33)

As Perry points out, he knew all along that the shopper with the torn sack was making a mess. He may also have believed that the oldest philosopher in the shop (in fact himself) was making a mess, yet failed to check his own cart since he falsely believed that Quine was at the Deli Counter. Indeed, it seems that for any non-indexical term a that denotes Perry, it is possible for Perry to fail to believe anything naturally expressed by the sentence “I am a ”. If so, it is possible for Perry to rationally believe that a is making a mess without believing anything that he would express as “I am making a mess”. It was only when Perry came to believe that he himself was making a mess that he stopped the chase. Indeed, it would seem that only the first-personal content can provide an adequate explanation of Perry’s behaviour when he stops. If Perry had come to believe that John Perry is making a mess then, unless he also believed that he himself was John Perry, he would not have stopped. The first-personal content is “self-locating”, thereby enabling action, whereas the non-first-personal content is not. To use Kaplan’s (1977) example, if I believe that my pants are on fire, pure self-interest will surely motivate me do something about it. If, however, I believe that Smith’s pants are on fire, pure self-interest will only so motivate me if I also believe that I am Smith.

On this widely accepted picture, then, first-personal thought and language is irreducible to non-first-personal thought and language, and is essential to the explanation of action (Kaplan 1977: 533; D. Lewis 1979; McGinn 1983: ch. 6; Recanati 2007: ch. 34; Musholt 2015: ch. 1; Prosser 2015; García-Carpintero & Torre 2016; Ninan 2020). Importantly, on Perry’s view, what is irreducible is the first-personal way of thinking about ourselves, not the facts or states of affairs that make such thoughts true. So, whilst my belief “I am F ” is not equivalent to any non-first-personal belief, it is true if and only if Smith is F , this being the same fact that makes true the non-first-personal “Smith is F ”. Thus, whilst first-person representations are special, a special class of first-person facts are nowhere to be found (for views that do accept the existence of first-personal facts, see McGinn 1983; Baker 2013; Builes 2024; also see Nagel 1986).

Perry (1977, 1979) argues that terms such as “I” which are, as he puts it, “essentially indexical”, pose a problem for the traditional Fregean view of belief as a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition (cf. Spencer 2007). Fregean senses are, according to Perry, descriptive and as Perry has argued no description is equivalent to an essential indexical. Consequently, no Fregean proposition can be the thing believed when one believes first-personally. Essential indexicality, if somehow forced into the Fregean mould, means that we must implausibly accept that there are incommunicable senses that only the speaker (or thinker) is in a position to grasp (see García-Carpintero & Torre 2016); cf.Evans 1981; Longworth 2013). D. Lewis goes further than this, arguing, partly on the basis of his much discussed Two Gods example (1979), in which each God knows all the propositions true at their world yet fails to know which of the two Gods he himself is, that the objects of belief are not propositions at all but rather properties (or centred worlds). That is, since they already know all the true propositions, there is no true proposition the Gods would come to believe when they come to realise which God they are. Essential indexicality forces us away from the model of propositions as the objects of belief. Further, Lewis claims that not just the explicitly indexical cases, but all belief is in this way self-locating or, in his terminology, de se . On this account, every belief involves the self-ascription of a property and so, arguably, is an instance of self-consciousness (for discussion, Gennaro 1996: ch. 8; Stalnaker 2008: ch. 3; Feit 2008; Cappelen & Dever 2013: ch. 5; Magidor 2015; Jackson & Stoljar 2020).

Arguments such as Perry’s might be challenged on the grounds that it is not possible to rationally doubt that one is the subject of these conscious states , where that formulation involves an “introspective demonstrative” picking out one’s current conscious states. This, it might be claimed, constitutes a reduction of first-person content (cf. Peacocke 1983: ch. 5, although his goal is not reductive). Even if it is true, however, that one cannot doubt that one is the subject of these conscious states, it is not clear that this poses a significant challenge to Perry’s argument for the essential indexicality of the first-person. For one thing, the content itself contains a demonstrative, so indexical, element. Second, it has been argued that our capacity to refer to our own experiences itself depends on our capacity to refer to ourselves as ourselves (P.F. Strawson 1959: 97; Evans 1982: 253). That is, to think of these conscious states is to think of them as these conscious states of mine . If to demonstratively think of one’s conscious state is, necessarily, to think of it as one’s own conscious state, then the purported reduction of first-person thought to thought not containing the first-person will fail.

Cappelen and Dever (2013) present a sustained attack on the constellation of philosophical claims surrounding the “essential indexical”, including its purported relation to action, and both Perry’s and Lewis’s arguments for it (for alternative objections to Perry and Lewis, see Millikan 1990; Magidor 2015). A central element in their critique is the claim that cases, such as Perry’s shopper, that are often thought to show the special connection between self-consciousness (I-thoughts) and the capacity for action really only show that action explanation contexts do not allow for substitution salva veritate , but rather are opaque (Cappelen & Dever 2013: ch. 3). Just as, if I am at the airport waiting for Jones, I will only signal that man if I believe him to be Jones, so if I am looking for the shopper with the torn sack I will only stop when I believe that I am that shopper. On their view, despite the popularity of the view to the contrary, the capacity for self-consciousness does not possess any philosophically deep relation to the capacity for action. See the supplement: Scepticism About Essential Indexicality and Agency .

2.2 First-Person Reference

Because of its connection with the first-person pronoun, it is often taken as platitudinous to say that self-conscious thought is closely associated with the capacity to refer to oneself as oneself . When I think self-consciously, I cannot fail to refer to myself. More than this, it has often been claimed that for a central class of first-person thoughts, there is no possibility of misidentifying myself: not only can I not fail to pick myself out, I cannot take another person to be me. But first-person reference, and indexicality more generally, has sometimes been thought to pose a challenge to theories of reference, requiring special treatment. Indeed, some have argued that the platitude itself should be rejected.

Terms whose function it is to refer can, on occasion, fail in that function. A use of the term “Vulcan” to refer to the planet orbiting between Mercury and the sun, fails to refer to anything for the reason that there is nothing for it to refer to. If I see the head of one dachshund protruding from behind a tree and the rear end of another protruding from the other side of the tree, and utter “that dog is huge”, my use of “that dog” has arguably failed to refer due to there being too many objects. It would seem that, by contrast, the term “I” cannot fail to refer either by there being too few or too many objects. “I” is guaranteed to refer.

As an indexical, the referent of “I” varies with the context of utterance (see the entry on indexicals ). That is, “I” refers to different people depending on who utters it. Following Kaplan (1977), it is common to think of the meaning of such terms as determining a function from context to referent. In the case of “I”, a natural proposal is the “Self-Reference Rule” (SRR), that the referent of a token of “I” is the person that produces it (Kaplan 1977: 491; Campbell 1994: ch. 3). “I” is thus, unlike “this” or “that”, a pure indexical, seemingly requiring no overt demonstration or manifestation of intention (Kaplan 1977: 489–91). SRR captures the plausible thought that “I” is guaranteed against reference failure. Since every token of “I” has been produced, the fact that “I” refers to its producer means that there is no chance of its failing to pick out some entity. This account of “I”, then, treats it as not only expressive of self-consciousness, but also guaranteed to refer to the utterer.

SRR is Kaplan’s specification of the character of “I”, which is fixed independently of the context of any particular utterance. This character is to be distinguished from the content of a tokening of “I”, which it has only in a context. On Kaplan’s account, the content of an utterance of “I am F ” will be a singular proposition composed of the person that produced it and F ness (Recanati 1993; for an account that attributes to the utterance both singular content, and the “reflexive content” the speaker of this token is F , see Perry 2001; for an alternative “Neo-Fregean” account in terms of object-dependent de re senses, see Evans 1981; cf. McDowell 1977; and Evans 1982: ch. 1).

Intuitively plausible as it is, SRR is open to a number of potential counterexamples. Suppose, for example, that you are away from work due to illness and I leave a note on your door reading “I am not here now”. Plausibly, whilst it was me that produced this token of “I”, it nevertheless refers to you . Or consider a situation in which I walk into a petrol station, point to my car, and say “I’m empty”. In this case, it might be suggested, my use of “I” refers to my car rather than myself (for these and related cases, see Vision 1985; Q. Smith 1989; Sidelle 1991; Nunberg 1993, 1995). If so, SRR cannot specify the character of “I” and so, arguably, some tokens of “I” fail to express the self-conscious thoughts of those that produce them. In light of such cases, a variety of alternatives to SRR have been proposed. Q. Smith (1989) suggests that “I” is lexically ambiguous; Predelli (1998a,b, 2002) offers an intention-based reference rule for “I”; Corazza, Fish, and Gorvett (2002) offer a convention-based account; and Cohen (2013) argues that the cases can be handled by a conservative modification of Kaplan’s original proposal (also see, Romdenh-Romluc 2002, 2008; Corazza 2004: ch. 5; Dodd & Sweeney 2010; Michaelson 2014; Åkerman 2017).

Although she didn’t have Kaplan’s formulation of SRR in mind, an earlier criticism of such a rule can be found in the work of Anscombe (1975) who argues that the rule cannot be complete as an account of the meaning of “I” (for discussion see O’Brien 1994). Anscombe considers a world in which each person has two names, one of which (ranging from “B” to “Z”) is printed on their chest, the other (in every case “A”) is printed on the inside of their wrist. Each person uses “B” to “Z” when attributing actions to others, but “A” when describing their own actions (Anscombe 1975: 49). Anscombe argues that such a situation is compatible with the possibility that the people in question lack self-consciousness. Whilst B uses “A” to refer to B, C uses “A” to refer to C, and so on, there is no guarantee that they are thinking of themselves as themselves , for they may be reporting what are in fact their own actions without thinking of those actions as things that they themselves are performing. They may treat themselves, that is, just as the treat any other. This is despite the fact that, in this scenario, “A” complies with SRR.

Can the Self-Reference Rule be reformulated in such a way as to entail self-consciousness on the part of those who use terms that comply with it? According to Anscombe it can, but any such reformulation will presuppose a prior grasp of self-conscious reference to oneself. For example, if we say, employing the indirect reflexive, that “I” is a term that a person uses to refer to she herself , we have travelled in a tight circle since “she herself” can be understood only in terms of “I” (Anscombe 1975; Castañeda 1966; for discussion, see Bermúdez 1998: ch. 1; Haddock 2019; Teichmann 2022, Part IV). This can be seen clearly in the first-person formulation of such a rule: “I” is a term that I use to refer to myself . For here the “myself” must itself be understood as an expression of self-consciousness, i.e., we should really say that “I” is a term that I use to refer to myself as myself .

In response to Anscombe’s argument, it has been argued that SRR is not intended to explain the connection between self-consciousness and the first-person (O’Brien 1994, 1995a; Garrett 1998: ch. 7; cf. Campbell 1994: §4.2; Peacocke 2008: §3.1). On this view, all that the example of “A” users shows is that self-consciousness has not been fully accounted for by SRR, not that SRR fails as an account of the character of “I”. Kaplan himself, however, does appear to be more ambitious than this, claiming that the “particular and primitive way” in which each of us is presented to ourselves is simply that each “is presented to himself under the character of ‘I’” (Kaplan 1977: 533). This claim, it would seem, is indeed open to Anscombe’s challenge.

Anscombe’s (1975) paper is perhaps most notable for her claim that “I” is not a referring expression at all. Assuming that if “I” refers it must be understood on the model of either a proper name, a demonstrative, or an abbreviation of a definite description, Anscombe argues that each of these kinds of referring expression requires what she calls a “conception” by means of which it reaches its referent. This conception must explain the seemingly guaranteed reference of “I”: the apparent fact that no token of “I” can fail to pick out an object. However, she argues, no satisfactory conception can be specified for “I” since either it fails to deliver up guaranteed reference, or it succeeds but only by delivering an immaterial soul. Since we have independent reason to believe that there are no immaterial souls, it follows that “I” cannot be understood on the model of a proper name, demonstrative or definite description, so is not a referring expression (for positive appraisals of Anscombe’s position see Kenny 1979; Malcolm 1979; Haddock 2019 and 2022. Criticisms can be found in White 1979; Hamilton 1991; Brandom 1994: 552–561; Glock & Hacker 1996; McDowell 1998; Harcourt 2000; Noonan 2022).

That “I” does not function as either a name or an abbreviated definite description is widely accepted. The more contentious aspect of Anscombe’s case for the view that there is no appropriate conception for “I” is her claim that “I” does not function like a demonstrative. Her argument for this claim is highly reminiscent of Avicenna’s Flying Man argument (see §1.1 ), with which she was surely familiar. We can, she tells us, imagine a subject in a sensory deprivation tank who has been anaesthetised and is suffering from amnesia. Such a subject would, claims Anscombe, be able to think I-thoughts, perhaps wondering, “How did I get into this mess?”. Since such a subject can think self-consciously in the absence of any presented referent, it follows that “I” cannot mean something like “this person”, since demonstratives require the demonstrated object to be presented to conscious awareness. Treating “I” on a demonstrative model, then, fails (cf. Campbell 1994: §4.2; O’Brien 1995b; see Morgan 2015 for a defence of a demonstrative account).

According to Evans (1982: ch. 7), the problem with Anscombe’s argument is that it fails to appreciate that “I” can be modelled on “here” rather than “this”. According to Evans’ account, the similarity between what he calls “I”-Ideas and “here”-Ideas shows up in their functional role (for an alternative broadly functional account, see Mellor 1989; for an argument that, far from being amenable to a functional analysis, self-consciousness poses a threat to the coherence of functionalism, see Bealer 1997). Once we see how both “I”-Ideas and “here”-Ideas stand at the centre of distinctive networks of inputs (ways of gaining information about ourselves and our locations respectively) and outputs (including the explanation of action), we can see how to model “I” on “here”, thus escaping Anscombe’s argument. For further discussion, see the supplement: Evans on First Person Thought .

2.3 Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

In The Blue and Brown Books , Wittgenstein distinguishes between two uses of the term “I” which he calls the “use as subject” and the “use as object” (1958: 66–70; Garrett 1998: ch. 8; cf. James’ distinction between the I , or pure ego, and the me , or empirical self (1890: vol. 1, ch. X)). As Wittgenstein describes the difference, there is a certain kind of error in thought that is possible when “I” is used as object but not when “I” is used as subject. Wittgenstein notes that if I find myself in a tangle of bodies, I may wrongly take another’s visibly broken arm to be my own, mistakenly judging “I have a broken arm”. Upon seeing a broken arm, then, it can make sense to wonder whether or not it is mine. If, however, I feel a pain in the arm, and on that basis judge “I have a pain”, then it makes no sense at all for me to wonder whether the pain of which I am aware is mine. That is, it is not possible for me to be aware, in the ordinary way, of a pain in an arm but mistakenly judge it to be my own arm that hurts. On this picture, self-ascriptions of pain, at least when based on the usual introspective grounds, involve the use of “I” as subject and so are immune to this sort of error of misidentification.

Immunity to this sort of error should not be conflated with another sort of epistemic security that is often discussed under the heading of self-knowledge (see entry on self-knowledge ). Some philosophers have held that, for a range of mental states, one cannot be mistaken about whether one is in them. Thus, for example, if one sincerely judges that one has a pain, or that one believes that P, then it cannot turn out that one is not in pain, or that one does not so believe. That the kind of immunity to error described by Wittgenstein differs from this sort of epistemic security follows from the fact that one may be sceptical of the latter while accepting the former. That is, one may reject the claim that sincere judgements that one has a pain cannot be mistaken (perhaps it is possible to mistake a sensation of coldness for one of pain), whilst nevertheless maintaining that if one is introspectively aware of a pain, then that pain must be one’s own. Immunity to errors of this sort has been taken, by a number of philosophers, to be importantly connected to self-consciousness.

Under the influence of Shoemaker (1968) this phenomenon has become known as immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM. On Shoemaker’s formulation, an error of misidentification occurs when one knows some particular thing, a , to be F and judges that b is F on the grounds that one mistakenly believes that a is identical to b . To this it is important to add that IEM is not a feature that judgements possess in virtue of their content alone but only relative to certain grounds (perception, testimony, introspection , memory , etc.). Thus, the judgement that I am jealous of a might be IEM when grounded in introspection, but not when grounded in the overheard testimony of my analyst. For I may have misinterpreted my analyst’s words, wrongly taking his use of “Smith” in “Smith is Jealous of a ” to refer to me (“Smith” after all is a common name). IEM is always relative, then, to the grounds on which a judgement is based. Which grounds might give rise to first-person judgements that are IEM is a contested matter, see the supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification .

On this account, first-person thoughts will be IEM relative to certain grounds just in case errors of misidentification are not possible with respect to them. That is, they will be IEM relative to grounds G if and only if it is not possible that one knows, via G , some particular thing, a , to be F and judges oneself to be F in virtue of mistakenly believing that a is identical to oneself. Whilst precise formulations differ in various ways, this can reasonably be thought of as the standard account of IEM (see, for example, Shoemaker 1968, 1970, 1986, 2012; Brewer 1995; Bermúdez 1998: §1.2; Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; 2008: §3.2; 2014: §5.1; Coliva 2006; Recanati 2007: part 6; Perry 2012; most of the papers in Prosser & Recanati 2012; Musholt 2015: ch. 1).

An alternative way of formulating IEM can be found in the work of variety of philosophers. On this view, a judgement “ a is F ” is IEM if and only if it is not possible to undercut one’s evidence for judging that a is F without thereby undercutting one’s evidence that someone is F (for variations on this idea, see Hamilton 1995; Wright 1998; Pryor 1999; Campbell 1999a; 2002: ch. 5; for discussion see Coliva 2006; Smith 2006a; McGlynn 2016 and 2021). As Wright puts it, a claim

made on a certain kind of ground involves immunity to error through misidentification just when its defeat is not consistent with retention of grounds for existential generalization. (1998: 19)

The idea is that, for a wide range of judgements it is possible that one knows that something is F but wrongly supposes that a is F . That is, one has misidentified which thing is F. For other judgements, perhaps including the introspection based judgement that one has a headache, this sort of identification error is not possible. After Pryor’s (1999) influential discussion, this is typically known as immunity to which -misidentification, or wh -IEM.

That wh-IEM is a distinct phenomenon from IEM as it is standardly formulated is shown by the fact one may consistently claim that a form of experience, for example memory, does not put one in a position to think, of some a distinct from oneself, that a was F , yet nevertheless does put one in a position to think that someone was F . That is, it might give rise to judgements that are IEM but not wh -IEM. The converse, however, is not possible. For since “ a was F ” entails “ someone was F ”, it will not be possible for a judgement, relative to some grounds, to be wh -IEM without it also being IEM. If a judgement is based on an identification, it will be subject to errors of wh -misidentification. For this reason, wh -IEM might legitimately be considered the more fundamental notion (as it is by Pryor 1999).

What is the philosophical significance of IEM? First, consider what it would take for a form of experience to ground thoughts that are IEM. Suppose that a form of experience, introspection for example, itself has first-personal content. That is, suppose that the content of introspective awareness is not adequately conceptualised as pain but rather requires the first-personal form, my pain . If so, then there would be no need for an identification of some object as oneself, for the identity of the subject of pain is already given as oneself. On this way of thinking, to determine which forms of experience ground judgements that are IEM would be to determine which forms of experience have first-personal content. And that, according to some philosophers, is to determine which forms of experience are themselves forms of self-consciousness (see, for example, Bermúdez 1998: 144). This issue is further discussed in §3 .

Second, Wittgenstein suggests that the phenomenon of IEM is responsible for the (in his view, mistaken) opinion that the use of “I” as subject refers to an immaterial soul (1958: 66). This is for the reason that one may be tempted to suppose that if introspectively based self-ascriptions of psychological predicates do not rely on an identification of a bodily entity, they must rely on the identification of a non-bodily entity (1958: 70; for related discussion, see Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; Coliva 2012). Wittgenstein’s view, of course, is that they rely on no identification at all. As Evans puts it, they are identification-free. Essentially the same point is made by Strawson in his diagnosis of “the fact that lies at the root of the Cartesian illusion”, which is that “criterionless” self-ascription gives rise to the idea of a “purely inner and yet subject-referring use for ‘I’” (P. F. Strawson 1966: 164–166). In short, the fact that a certain class of first-person thoughts depend for their reference on no identification of myself as some publicly presented object (they are identification-free) gives rise to the idea that they pick out a private object, a soul. There is a clear connection between this idea and Anscombe’s (1975) argument for the non-referential character of “I”.

3. Self-Consciousness in Experience

Some philosophers maintain that, in addition to its manifestation in first-personal thinking, self-consciousness is also present in various forms of sensory and non-sensory experience (Bermúdez 1998; Hurley 1998: ch. 4; Zahavi 2005; Peacocke 2014; Musholt 2015). After all, self-consciousness is presumably a form of consciousness (see entry on consciousness ). On the view that experience, like thought, has representational content, this can be understood as the view that experiences, like thoughts, can have content that is first-personal. On the further view that the content of experience is non-conceptual (see the entry on non-conceptual mental content), the claim is that there is non-conceptual first-person content (for a conceptualist response, see Noë 2002). Bermúdez also argues that there is a non-conceptual form of self-conscious thinking that arises from non-conceptual self-conscious experience, which he calls “protobelief” (Bermúdez 1998: ch. 5; cf. Bermúdez 2003).

The claim that there is a form of self-consciousness in experience, one which arguably grounds the capacity to entertain first-personal thought, can be understood in a number of ways. According to one view there is a perceptual, or quasi-perceptual, consciousness of the self as an object of experience. On another, there is a “pre-reflective” form of self-consciousness that does not involve the awareness of the self as an object. A third claims that various forms of experience involve a distinctive “sense of ownership” in which each of us is aware of our own states as our own . In each case, the question is whether the mode of experience in question can, in Peacocke’s (2014: ch. 4) words, act as the “non-conceptual parent” of the first-person concept and associated phenomena, in particular that of immunity to error through misidentification.

It is natural to suppose that self-consciousness is, fundamentally, a conscious awareness of the self. On such a view, one is self-conscious if, when one introspects, one is aware of a thing that is, in some sense, presented as oneself. This is the view, mentioned in §1.2 , that Hume seems to be rejecting with his claim that when he introspects he can never catch himself, but only perceptions (Hume 1739–40: bk. 1, ch. 4, §6). Whilst Hume’s claim has been very influential, it has not found universal acceptance. Those siding with Hume include Shoemaker (1986), Martin (1997), Howell (2010; 2023, Ch.3), and Prinz (2012) (for a related, Jamesian perspective, see Flanagan 1992: ch. 9). Those opposing him include Chisholm (1976: ch. 1), Cassam (1995), G. Strawson (2009), Damasio (2010) and Rosenthal (2012).

As with first-person thought, the issue is not whether one is, or can be, conscious of what is in fact oneself. If that were sufficient for self-consciousness then, on the supposition that one is identical to one’s body, seeing oneself in a mirror would be a case of self-consciousness, even if one were unaware that it was oneself that one saw. Rather, the issue is whether one is, or can be, conscious of oneself as oneself , a form of awareness in which it is manifest to one that the object of awareness is oneself. If there is such an awareness then this is philosophically significant, since one might expect it to ground certain cases of self-knowledge, first-person reference, and the immunity to error of certain first-person thoughts (Shoemaker 1986; see the entry on self-knowledge ). The inner consciousness of the self as F , for example, would account for one’s capacity to refer to oneself as oneself , one’s knowledge that one is F , and the fact that such a thought cannot rest on a misidentification of another thing as oneself. On the other hand, the claim that there is no such conscious awareness of the self is philosophically significant, not only because it undermines the possibility of such explanations but also for the reason that it plays an important role in various well known arguments: for example, in Kant’s First Critique (1781/1787), most obviously the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms, and in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds (Kripke 1982: Postscript).

A simple argument for the claim that we are introspectively aware of ourselves is that in introspection one is perceptually aware of one’s own mental properties, and that when one perceives a property one perceives that which has that property, i.e., oneself. Shoemaker (1984b, 1986) agrees that if there is an introspective awareness of the self as an object, then it should be understood as a form of self -perception . He argues, however, that, on a plausible account of perception, introspection is not a form of perception, so we do not introspectively perceive anything, including the self. As such, we cannot conclude in this way that we are introspectively aware of the self (cf. Martin 1997; Rosenthal 2012).

Shoemaker further argues, in a way reminiscent of the Heidelberg School (Frank 1995; Musholt 2015: ch. 1), that the postulation of an introspective awareness of the self as the self would not be in a position to explain all self-knowledge. According to Shoemaker (1984b: 105), if inner perception revealed an object to be F , then I would only be in a position to judge that I am F if I already took myself to be that object that I perceive. But this both presupposes some (non-perceptual) self-knowledge (i.e., that I am the thing perceived via inner sense), and also implausibly opens up introspection based first-person thought to the possibility of errors of misidentification, since such a view would entail that introspective self-knowledge is based in part on an identification of the self.

A number of philosophers have maintained that, even if Hume is right that introspection does not reveal the self as an object, there is another form of perceptual experience which does: bodily awareness (see entry) . Versions of this claim can be found in P.F. Strawson (1966: 102), Evans (1982: ch. 7), Sutton Morris (1982), Ayers (1991), Brewer (1995), Cassam (1995, 1997), Bermúdez (1998, 2011). On this view, through bodily awareness I am aware of my body “from the inside” as a bodily self, as me . Brewer (1995), for example, argues that since bodily sensations are both manifestly properties of oneself and are perceived as located properties of one’s body, it follows that in bodily awareness one perceives one’s body as oneself.

If one’s body is presented as oneself in bodily awareness then, as mentioned above, we might expect this bodily self-perception to ground first-person thought about one’s bodily states. As pointed out in §2 , it is plausible that first-person thoughts cannot fail to refer to their thinker and further that this is manifest in the thinking of them. Martin (1995, 1997) argues on the basis of these two claims that if bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness, then one’s body as presented in bodily awareness must manifestly be oneself. That is, if a form of awareness is to ground judgements which are manifestly about myself, then that form of awareness must manifestly be an awareness of myself. But this is arguably a condition that it does not meet, since it is perfectly coherent to wonder whether or not one is identical to one’s body, just as Descartes famously did in the Meditations (for a different, imagination-based, argument against bodily awareness as a form of self-awareness, see Smith 2006b; see Bermúdez 2011 for a response; for discussions of the relation between self-consciousness and imagination see B. Williams 1973; Reynolds 1989; Velleman 1996).

Another way in which it can be argued that the self figures in sensory experience is in the self-locating content of perceptual experience, most notably vision. Visual experience is perspectival, containing information not only about perceived objects but also of their spatial relation to the perceiver: I see the wall as in front of me , the bookcase as to my left, and so on. The (bodily) self, it might be argued, is experienced as an object in the world, the point of origin of egocentric perception (Cassam 1997: 52–53; Hurley 1998: ch. 4; Bermúdez 1998: ch. 5, 2002, 2011; Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; Schwenkler 2014). On an alternative view, one consistent with the rejection of any sort of awareness of the self as an object, visual perception does not present the self at its point of origin, but rather represents the locations of perceived objects in monadic terms, as ahead , to the left , and so on, without specifying what it is that they are ahead, or to the left, of (Campbell 1994: §4.1; 2002: §9.3; Perry 1986; also see Mitchell 2021; Skrzypulec 2023).

If first-person thought is not grounded in an awareness of the self as an object, then some other account is arguably required to account for the capacity to entertain self-conscious thought (O’Brien 1995a). One suggestion is that subjects possess a form of “pre-reflective self-awareness” as a necessary condition of consciousness (Sartre 1937, 1943: Introduction; Zahavi 2005, 2007; Legrand 2006; cf. Kriegel 2009; Borner, Frank & Williford 2019; Howell 2023, Ch.5. For criticism, see Schear 2009; also see the entry on phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness ). On this view, all conscious experience involves an implicit awareness of oneself as its subject without explicitly representing the self as an object of awareness (cf. Musholt’s distinction between “self-representationalist” and “non-self-representationalist” accounts of non-conceptual self-consciousness (2015: chs. 3–4)). Indeed, it might be argued that the necessity of an active agent’s possessing some form of self-awareness follows from the connection between action and self-consciousness that many suppose to have been established by considerations of the essential indexical discussed in §2.1 (cf. Bermúdez 1998).

These views are closely associated with theories that explain consciousness in terms of self-consciousness ( §4.3 ). Pre-reflective self-awareness is “pre-reflective”, according to its proponents, in the sense that it does not require one to explicitly reflect on one’s own mental states, or to otherwise take them as objects of attention. Rather, pre-reflective self-awareness is manifest even in those situations in which one’s attention is directed outwards toward worldly objects and events. Pre-reflective self-awareness, then, is implicit in all consciousness, providing one with a continuous awareness of oneself as the subject of one’s stream of experience.

One way in which such views can be understood is as maintaining that experience involves self-consciousness in the mode, rather than the content, of conscious experience (Recanati 2007: part 5; 2012; O’Brien 2007: ch. 6). This can be fleshed out by analogy with the case of belief: one might claim that the concept of truth figures in the mode, but not the explicit content of every belief. That is, whilst every belief is a holding true, it is not the case that every belief has the content that such and such is true. Similarly, whilst every experience is an experience of one’s own, it is not the case that every experience has the content that such and such is experienced by oneself. Rather, the mode of conscious experience (introspection, bodily awareness, etc.) includes an implicit awareness of the self. A related view is that the self can be considered an “unarticulated constituent” of the experience, just as some claim that “here” is an unarticulated constituent of “It is raining” (Perry 1986; Recanati 2007: parts 9 & 10; for scepticism about unarticulated constituents, see Cappelen & Lepore 2007). So, just as the person who believes “It is raining” is implicitly aware of the fact that it is here that it is raining, so the subject of self-conscious experience is implicitly aware of the fact that it is she herself who is undergoing that experience.

Accounts of self-consciousness as involving unarticulated constituents, or as implicit in the mode of consciousness, will need to explain how the transition is made from such implicit self-awareness to the explicit representation of the self in first-person thought. One option is to appeal to the idea that certain sources of information are self-tracking or, in Perry’s (2012) words, “necessarily self-informative”. A form of experience is self-tracking if it is a way of coming to know of the instantiation of properties of a certain type and, necessarily, a subject can come to know, in that way, of the instantiation of her own states only. For example, if it is true that a subject can only remember conscious episodes from her own past, then episodic memory is self-tracking. If so, then the subject may legitimately think the first-person thought “I was F ”, on the basis of her episodic memory of being F . This account may also be used to explain IEM, since if a form of experience is self-tracking, then it will not be possible for me to know, in that way, that a is F but mistakenly think that it is me that is F on the grounds that I mistakenly believe myself to be identical to a (Perry 2012; Recanati 2012; cf. Campbell 1999a; Martin 1995). Here we have an architectural feature of a given form of experience (that it is necessarily an awareness of oneself) being employed in an explanation of an epistemic feature of self-ascriptions based on such experience (that they are not partly grounded in an identity judgement). If I know, in the relevant way, that a is F , then it must be the case that I am a . On this view, making a first-person judgement grounded in a given form of experience is a matter of articulating the unarticulated self. The experience itself is not explicitly first-personal, representing the self as oneself . Nevertheless, it “concerns” the subject, in that it is necessarily tied to the self (see Musholt 2015: ch. 5 for an alternative account).

Pre-reflective, or implicit, accounts of the place of self-consciousness in experience are often associated with the so-called “sense of ownership”, or “sense of mineness” (Flanagan 1992; Martin 1995; Dokic 2003; Marcel 2003; Zahavi 2005: ch. 5; de Vignemont 2007, 2013 and 2018; Tsakiris 2011; Zahavi & Kriegel 2015; de Vignemont and Alsmith 2017, Part II; García-Carpintero and Guillot 2023). According to some, a fundamental aspect of conscious experiences is that they seem, in each case, to be mine . In being aware of a thought, action, emotion, perceptual experience, memory, bodily experience (and also my body itself), I am aware of it as being my own . This sense of ownership arguably does some work in explaining why it seems difficult to conceive of what it would be like to experience a thought as located in another’s mind, or a pain as located in another’s body (Martin 1995; Dokic 2003). For such an experience would involve being aware of a thought that seemed to be mine but as located in a mind that did not seem to be my own. The sense of ownership is also a candidate for explaining immunity to error through misidentification since if conscious experiences seem to be one’s own, then there is presumably no need for any identification of the experience’s subject as oneself.

Whilst the sense of ownership would, presumably, be accounted for by an introspective awareness of the self, it can also arguably be explained with the more minimal commitments of the implicit view. The sense of an experience as my own can be understood as nothing over and above the fact that the self is implicitly given in the mode of conscious awareness (Musholt 2015: §4.2). Thus the focus on the sense of ownership might be thought to provide a minimal answer to Humean scepticism about self-perception. As Chisholm points out, for example, although Hume complained that he could find no self in introspection, he reported his findings in first-personal terms. That is, he was aware not only of his mental states, but also aware of them as his own (Chisholm 1976: ch. 1; cf. P.F. Strawson’s 1959: ch. 3, attack on the “no-ownership” view).

Even within the context of an implicit account of self-consciousness in experience, we can further distinguish between reductive and non-reductive construals of the sense of ownership (Bermúdez 2011; Zahavi & Kriegel 2015; Alsmith 2015). For example, Zahavi and Kriegel (2015; cf. Kriegel 2003, 2009; Zahavi 2014) defend a non-reductive understanding of the sense of ownership as a distinct aspect of the phenomenal character of experience. By contrast, a reductive account will explain the sense of ownership in terms of cognitive and/or experiential states whose existence we are independently willing to endorse. For example, Bermúdez (2011: 161–166) argues in favour of a reductive account of the sense of ownership over one’s own body, according to which it consists in nothing more than the phenomenology of the spatial location of bodily sensations alongside our disposition to judge the body in which they occur to be our own (cf. Dainton 2008: §8.2; Prinz 2012). Bermúdez’s argument for the reductive view is, in part, based on the claim that, despite appearances, the non-reductive sense of ownership is not in fact able to explain first-personal judgements of ownership (cf. Schear 2009; for a response see Zahavi & Kriegel 2015).

It is sometimes claimed that the variety of ways in which self-consciousness can break down poses a challenge to the claim that the sense of ownership is a universal characteristic of experience (e.g., Metzinger 2003: §7.2.2). Thought insertion, anarchic hand, alien limb, anonymous memory, and anonymous vision, all seemingly involve subjects who are aware of their own conscious states, actions, or body parts, but without being aware of them as their own (for references, see the supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification ). It has also been claimed that the sense of ownership, along with other aspects of self-consciousness, is degraded in both certain meditative practices (Letheby & Gerrans 2017; Millière 2017; Millière et. al. 2018) and psychedelic experience (Millière et. al. 2018; MacKenzie 2022; cf. Stone 2024). Such subjects may disown their experiences or attribute them to others. For example, in cases of thought insertion, a symptom of schizophrenia, subjects report that they are aware of the thoughts of other people or objects entering their own minds (see, for example, Saks 2007: ch. 2; for general discussion of schizophrenia and self-consciousness see Parnas & Sass 2011). On the assumption that such subjects are actually aware of what are, in fact, their own thoughts, this might seem to be a case of a conscious experience that lacks the sense of ownership. Thus, either the sense of ownership is not a necessary feature of experience, or perhaps there is no sense of ownership at all (see, for example, Chadha 2017; for some reasons to be generally sceptical towards the sense of ownership, see McLelland 2023).

A common response to this line of thought involves, first, distinguishing between the sense of ownership and the sense of agency and, second, claiming that subjects of thought insertion lack the latter whilst retaining the former (Stephens & Graham 2000; Gallagher 2004; Peacocke 2008: §7.8; Proust 2013: ch. 12). The sense of agency is the awareness of being the source or the agent of some action or activity, including mental agency. It is the sense that it is me that is thinking a given thought (Bayne 2008; O’Brien & Soteriou 2009; Proust 2013: ch. 10). According to this standard view, cases of thought insertion or anarchic hand, for example, can be wholly explained by postulating a lack of a sense of agency. The usual sense of being the agent of a thought is lacking, but the sense of ownership remains since the thought seems to the subject be taking place in their own mind.

We might, however, wish to make a three-way distinction between the sense of agency (the sense that one is the author of a mental state), the sense of ownership (the sense that one is the owner of a mental state), and what we might call the sense of location (the sense that a mental state is located within one’s own mind). The sense of location might be understood as being possessed if one is aware of a mental state in the ordinary way, i.e., introspectively. Crucial, it would seem, for evaluating the significance of thought insertion and related cases, and so of the standard view, will be determining which, if any, of the senses of agency, ownership, or location remain intact. For it might be argued that what such subjects retain is in fact the sense of location, rather than the sense of ownership. That is, it may be possible to take their descriptions at face value when they deny, in thought insertion for example, that the thoughts in question are their own (or were thought by them), whilst nevertheless accepting that the inserted thought occurs within the boundary of their own mind (for criticisms of the standard view, see Bortolotti & Broome 2009; Pacherie & Martin 2013; Fernández 2013: ch. 5; Billon 2013).

4. The Conditions of Self-Consciousness

Much of the philosophical work on self-consciousness concerns its relation to a variety of other phenomena. These include the nature of personhood, rationality, consciousness, and the awareness of other minds. In each case we can ask whether self-consciousness is a necessary and/or sufficient condition for the phenomenon in question.

As was mentioned in §1.2 , Locke characterises a person as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (1700: II.xxvii.9). On such a view, self-consciousness is essential to personhood. In particular, on Locke’s view it is the capacity to reidentify oneself at different times that is important, a claim which is in keeping with the central role of memory in his account of personal identity (see Ayers 1991: vol. II, chs. 22–25; Thiel 2011: ch. 4; Weinberg 2011; G. Strawson 2011b; Snowdon 2014: ch. 3; entry on personal identity ). As such, Locke considers the capacity for self-conscious thinking to be a necessary condition of personhood. What is less clear is whether, on this view, self-consciousness is sufficient for personhood. One reason for doubt on this score is that since it is concerned with self-conscious thought the account provides no reason to suppose that creatures that enjoy non-conceptual self-consciousness are persons. A second is that the requirement of being able to reidentify oneself over time is not one that we need consider met by all self-conscious creatures for, we can suppose, it is possible for a self-conscious subject to lack the conceptual sophistication to understand the past and future tense.

An alternative conception of personhood that also gives a central role to self-consciousness can be found in Frankfurt’s claim that it is essential to persons to have a capacity for reflective self-evaluation manifested in the possession of what he calls “second-order volitions” (Frankfurt 1971: 110). Second-order volitions involve wanting a certain desire to be one’s will, that is wanting it to move one to action. A subject with second-order volitions has the capacity to evaluate their first-order desires and this, it would seem, involves being aware of them as (potentially) their own. Thus persons, thought of as subjects with second-order volitions, are self-conscious (for discussion, see Watson 1975; Dennett 1976; Frankfurt 1987; Bratman 2007: chs. 5 & 11).

An account of persons that would appear to distance that notion from self-consciousness is that offered by P.F. Strawson in chapter 3 of Individuals ,

the concept of a person is the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation &c. are equally applicable to a single individual of that type. (1959: 101–102; for discussion, see Ayer 1963; Hacker 2002)

Frankfurt points out that this is inadequate as a definition of personhood since “there are many entities beside persons that have both mental and physical properties” (Frankfurt 1971: 5). It may be, however, that Strawson’s formulation here is somewhat loose, and that his central idea is that persons are those entities that self­ -ascribe both types of predicate, a condition that perhaps rules out at least most non-human animals. After all chapter 3 of Individuals , entitled “Persons”, is primarily concerned with the conditions of such self-ascription, with “the use we make of the word ‘I’” (P.F. Strawson 1959: 94).

Strawson’s primary goal is to argue for the claim that the concept of a person is primitive, a position that he contrasts, on the one hand, with Cartesian dualism and, on the other, with what he calls the “no-ownership view”: a view according to which we don’t really self-ascribe states of consciousness at all, at least not with the use of “I” as subject (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: §244; 1958: 76; Anscombe 1975; it is controversial whether Wittgenstein ever really held this view, for discussion see Hacker 1990: chs. 5 & 11; Jacobsen 1996; Wright 1998). To say that the concept of a person is primitive is, on Strawson’s account, to say that it is “logically prior” to the concepts subject and body ; persons are not to be thought of as compounds of subjects and bodies. Strawson argues that the primitiveness of the concept of a person is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-consciousness (P.F. Strawson 1959: 98–103). His argument is that one can only self-ascribe states of consciousness if one is able to ascribe them to others (for more on this theme see §4.4 ). This rules out Cartesian dualism, since ascribing states of consciousness to others requires that one be able to identify others, and one cannot identify pure subjects of experience or Cartesian egos. The condition that one must be able to ascribe states of consciousness to others also rules out the “no-ownership view” because such a view is inconsistent with the fact that psychological predicates have the very same sense in their first and third person uses.

Closely related to the no-ownership view are a family of claims about persons that Parfit dubs “reductionism” (Parfit 1984: §79). Two prominent members of this family are the claim that

[a] person’s existence consists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental event, (1984: 211)

[t]hough persons exist, we could give a complete description of reality without claiming that persons exist. (1984: 212)

Parfit’s reductionism, and its relation to Buddhist views of the self, has been widely discussed (see for example, Stone 1988; Korsgaard 1989; Cassam 1989, 1993, 1997: ch. 5; Garrett 1991, 1998: ch. 2; Siderits 1997; McDowell 1997; Blackburn 1997; Lee 2017 defends a view closely related to that of Partfit). As is the case with the “no-ownership view” it has sometimes been argued that reductionism is incompatible with self-consciousness so, since we are indisputably self-conscious, reductionism must be false. Against the claim that the (continued) existence of a person consists merely in the (continued) existence of brain, body, and interrelated physical and mental events that do not presuppose anything about persons as such, McDowell (1997) for example, argues from a broadly Evansian position on self-consciousness (see the supplement: Evans on First Person Thought ) that there simply are no such “identity-free relations” (1997: 378) to which a person’s identity could be reducible. That is, there is no way of characterising memory and the other psychological phenomena relevant to personal identity without invoking the identity of the person whose memory it is. As McDowell puts it,

[i]n continuity of “consciousness”, there is what appears to be knowledge of an identity, the persistence of the same subject through time. (1997: 361)

Memory, at least, cannot be employed in a reductive account of persons (for discussion of McDowell’s argument see Buford 2009; Fernández 2014; for related arguments from self-consciousness to the falsity of reductionism, see Cassam 1997: ch. 5).

Is self-consciousness a necessary condition of rationality? A number of philosophers have argued that rationality requires self-knowledge which itself implies self-consciousness (see Shoemaker 1988, 1994; Burge 1996; Moran 2001; Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009, 2011; for a general discussion of this approach to self-knowledge, see Gertler 2011: ch. 6). In his case against perceptual theories of self-knowledge, Shoemaker (1994) argues against the possibility of self-blindness; against, that it is, the possibility that a rational creature with all the necessary concepts might be simply unaware of its own sensations, beliefs, and so on. A rational creature that is in pain, Shoemaker argues, will typically desire to be rid of her pain, and this requires that she believe that she is in pain. As Shoemaker puts it, to see rational responses to pain

as pain behavior is to see them as motivated by such states of the creature as the belief that it is in pain, the desire to be rid of the pain, and the belief that such and such a course of behaviour will achieve that result. (Shoemaker 1994: 228)

This belief, that she is in pain, is a self-conscious one; it is a belief that she herself is in pain. This connection between rational behaviour and first-person thought is, of course, the one highlighted by Perry’s (1979) case of the messy shopper in his discussion of the essential indexical (see §2.1 ).

The connection between rationality and self-knowledge (and so self-consciousness), Shoemaker argues, is even more pronounced in the case of our awareness of our own beliefs. Rational subjects should abide by certain strictures on the contents of their beliefs, updating them in line with new evidence, removing inconsistencies, and so on. And this, Shoemaker argues, requires that they not be self-blind with respect to their beliefs. It requires that they are self-conscious. As Shoemaker writes,

in an important class of cases the rational revision or adjustment of the belief-desire system requires that we undertake investigations aimed at determining what revisions or readjustments to make […] What rationalizes the investigation are one’s higher-order beliefs about what one believes and has reason to believe. (Shoemaker 1994: 240; also see Shoemaker’s discussion of Moore’s Paradox in Shoemaker 1988, 1994; for critical discussion of Shoemaker’s arguments in the context of theories of self-knowledge see, for example, Macdonald 1999; Kind 2003; Siewert 2003; Gertler 2011: ch. 5)

The connection that Shoemaker sees between the requirements of rationality, on the one hand, and self-awareness, on the other, is also stressed in so-called “rationalist” accounts of self-knowledge, most prominently in the work of Burge (1996) and Moran (2001; for critical discussion of the rationalist approach as an account of self-knowledge see, for example, Peacocke 1996; O’Brien 2003; Reed 2010; Gertler 2011: ch. 6). Burge focuses on the notion of the critical reasoner . He writes,

[t]o be capable of critical reasoning, and to be subject to certain rational norms necessarily associated with such reasoning, some mental acts and states must be knowledgeably reviewable. (Burge 1996: 97; for a fuller argument for the same conclusion, see Burge 1998)

On Burge’s account, the critical reasoner must be in a position to recognise their reasons as reasons, and that requires “the second order ability to think about thought contents or propositions, and rational relations among them” (1996: 97). This is for the reason that belief involves commitments and such commitments involve meeting certain standards—providing reasons, reevaluating where necessary, and so on.

A similar line of thought can be found in Moran’s account of the role of reflection on one’s own state in practical deliberation about what to do and how to feel (Moran 2001: ch. 2). Here the focus is not so much on critical reasoning but rather practical deliberation as that which requires self-consciousness. This is an idea that is also central to much of Korsgaard’s work (see, in particular, Korsgaard 1996, 2009). A central concern of hers is to distinguish between the sort of action of which all animals are capable and the sort of autonomous agency of which we self-conscious subjects are capable. The difference lies, on her broadly Kantian view, in simply having one’s most powerful desire result in action, on the one hand, and counting that desire as a reason for action, on the other. It is the latter that is constitutive of autonomous, deliberative action understood from the perspective of practical reason. As she writes,

[w]hen you deliberate it is as if there were something over and above all your desires, something which is you , and which chooses which desire to act upon. (Korsgaard 1996: 100)

Self-consciousness, on this view,

is the source of reason. When we become conscious of the workings of an incentive within us, the incentive is experienced not as a force or a necessity but as a proposal, something we need to make a decision about. (Korsgaard 2009: 119; for discussion of Korsgaard’s account of the relation between self-consciousness and the perspective of practical reason, see, for example, Nagel 1996; Fitzpatrick 2005; Soteriou 2013: ch. 12).

Self-awareness, on these views, is a necessary condition of rationality (conceived as the capacity for critical reasoning or practical deliberation). Burge also makes it clear that he regards the capacity for critical reasoning to be a necessary condition of (conceptual) self-consciousness, since to master and self-ascribe psychological concepts such as belief, one must be able to recognise their role in reasoning, and so employ them (Burge 1996: 97, n.3). As he puts it,

[a]cknowledging, with the I concept, that an attitude or act is one’s own is acknowledging that rational evaluations of it which one also acknowledges provide immediate […] reason and rationally immediate motivation to shape the attitude or act in accordance with the evaluation […] The first-person concept fixes the locus of responsibility. (Burge 1998: 253)

The claim that there is a constitutive connection between self-consciousness and rationality has been met with scepticism by Kornblith (2011, 2012: ch. 2; for a related line of thought, see Doris 2015: ch. 2). Regarding the sort of responsiveness to reason involved in updating one’s beliefs in accordance with new evidence—one of the capacities emphasised by both Shoemaker and Burge—Kornblith argues that “[w]hile such responsiveness may be achieved, at times, by way of reflection on one’s beliefs and desires, it does not require any such reflection” (2012: 49). Rationally revising beliefs in the face of evidence, Kornblith is keen to point out, is a capacity enjoyed by non-reflective animals. He further presents the rationalist view with a challenge: if one thinks that (first-order) beliefs are not themselves responsive to reason, how does adding (second-order) beliefs help? One response to this challenge is to point out that the connection between self-awareness and rationality that Shoemaker finds is intended to hold only for “an important class of cases” (Shoemaker 1994: 240), that is it holds for those cases of belief revision that themselves qualify as exercises in rational investigation. On this view, whilst non-reflective creatures may have some degree of rationality, their lack of self-consciousness means that they are not, as we are, capable of fully rational deliberation (for discussion of Kornblith’s scepticism concerning the role of self-consciousness in rationality, see Pust 2014; M. Williams 2015; Smithies 2016).

Central to the history of the self-consciousness sketched in §1 is a concern with the relation between self-consciousness and consciousness. Since self-consciousness is itself a form of consciousness, consciousness is, of course, a necessary condition of it. But is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? Positive answers to this question come in both reductive and non-reductive varieties.

One way in which consciousness might entail self-consciousness is if the former is reducible to the latter. One such family of views are higher order theories of consciousness which maintain that a psychological state is conscious if and only if it is represented, in the right way, by a higher order state (Gennaro 2004; for a very different account that nevertheless posits a tight connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, see O’Shaughnessy 2002: ch. 3). A natural assumption is that this higher order state is distinct from that which it represents. Higher Order theories that accept this assumption fall into two camps: Higher Order Thought (HOT) theories (Rosenthal 1986, 2005; Carruthers 2000, 2005), which maintain that the higher order state is a thought or belief, and Higher Order Perception (HOP) theories (Armstrong 1968; Lycan 1996, 2004), which by contrast maintain that the higher order state is a perception-like sensory state—an exercise of the sort of inner perception, or “inner sense”, that was extensively debated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Thiel 2011; see §3.1). Since, however, we can be aware that someone else is in some conscious state, it seems that simply being aware that a thought is occurring is insufficient to render that thought conscious. Arguably, what is required is that one be aware that one is in the relevant first-order state. That is, one represents oneself as being in the state in question. Since this seems to involve a form of self-awareness, the HOT and HOP theories can be understood as holding that consciousness entails self-consciousness (Gennaro 1996). Given this, it is natural to think of the distinction between HOT and HOP theories of consciousness as closely related to that between conceptual and non-conceptual self-consciousness.

An alternative to HOT and HOP theories that still maintains the ambition to reduce consciousness to self-consciousness is the self-representational view (Kriegel & Williford 2006; Kriegel 2009; Caston 2002), according to which a psychological state is conscious if and only if it represents itself. Such accounts are higher-order views that deny that the first and second-order states are distinct. As with both HOT and HOP, self-representationalism can be thought of as supporting the view that a form of self-consciousness is a necessary condition of consciousness. Kriegel (2003) dubs this “intransitive self-consciousness”, the phenomenon purportedly picked out by phrases of the form “I am self-consciously thinking that P”, and distinguishes it from the “transitive self-consciousness” purportedly picked out by phrases of the form “I am self-conscious of my thought that P”. This is a version of the distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness discussed in §3.2 (and the views of Fichte and Sartre mentioned in §1 ; cf. Kapitan 1999). If conscious states are those that represent themselves then, it might be argued, consciousness entails intransitive self-consciousness, since one’s conscious states do not only represent themselves but also (in some way implicitly) represent oneself as having them (Kriegel 2003: 104).

Aristotle, considering a version of the HOP theory, argued that the view suffered from a regress problem since the higher-order perception must itself be conscious and so be accompanied by a HOP, which would itself be conscious, and so on ( De Anima 3.2; Caston 2002). The standard way to diffuse such a worry is to deny that the higher order state, be it perception or thought, need be conscious. An alternative, of course, is to endorse a self-representational account. There are other objections to higher order views, however, each of which applies to one or more versions of the view. They include worries about the possibility of objectless and non-veridical higher order states (Byrne 1997; Block 2011), worries about whether it can account for the conscious states of infants and non-humans (Dretske 1995: ch. 4; Tye 1995: ch. 1), the complaint that the postulation of a distinct higher-order state for every conscious state leads to an unnecessarily “cluttered picture of the mind” (Chalmers 1996: 231), and the fundamental worry that no form of higher-order view has the resources to explain consciousness at all (Levine 2006; cf. Kriegel 2012). As such, higher-order and self-representational theories of consciousness, that posit a necessary connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, are far from being established.

If consciousness cannot be reduced to self-consciousness, perhaps the latter is nevertheless a necessary condition of the former. Some non-reductive views, already mentioned, see pre-reflective consciousness (see §3.2 ), or the sense of ownership (see §3.3 ) as necessary conditions of consciousness (see Zahavi 2005). A different non-reductive, and broadly Kantian, argument for the claim that self-consciousness is a necessary condition of consciousness first of all claims that conscious experience is necessarily unified and, second, that this unity of consciousness in turn depends on self-awareness. Of primary interest here is the second step which is articulated by Strawson in his discussion of Kant’s transcendental deduction as the claim that,

if different experiences are to belong to a single consciousness, there must be the possibility of self­ -consciousness on the part of the subject of those experiences. (P.F. Strawson 1966: 93; for discussion of Kant’s views of the matter, see Henrich 1989; Powell 1990; Brook 1994; Keller 1998; Kitcher 2011; Allison 2015; for detailed discussion of whether consciousness is necessarily unified, see Bayne 2010; see also entry on unity of consciousness ).

One reason for supposing that there is a connection between self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness is given by Kant, who writes,

only because I can comprehend their manifold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations; for otherwise I would have as multi-coloured diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious. (Kant 1781/1787: B134)

That is, a single self must be able to “comprehend” its own experiences together, otherwise they would not really be its own. Such “comprehension” would seem to involve self-consciousness. As Kant famously puts it,

[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. (Kant 1781/1787: B131–132)

On this view, it is the unity of the self that guarantees that co-conscious experiences are jointly self-ascribable; that unity requires self-consciousness (there is a question as to whether self-consciousness is here supposed to explain the unity of consciousness; cf. Dainton’s strong and weak “I-thesis” (2000: §2.3)). This Kantian picture is associated with the claim that unified self-consciousness requires a conception of the world as objective; as transcending the perspective that one has on it. The idea here is that to self-ascribe an experience one must have some grasp of the distinction between one’s (subjective) experience that the (objective) condition of which it is an experience (these issues are explored in P.F. Strawson 1966; Bennett 1966; Evans 1980; Cassam 1997; Sacks 2000; also see Burge 2010: ch. 6; Gomes 2016 and 2024).

The claim that the unity of consciousness requires self-consciousness can be criticised in a number of different ways. How one evaluates the claim will depend on whether one has conceptual or non-conceptual self-consciousness in mind. As Bayne (2004) points out, the claim that the unity of consciousness requires that one possess the concept of oneself seems, implausibly, to imply that conceptually unsophisticated infants and non-human animals could not possess a unified stream of consciousness (of course, this worry applies quite generally to views that connect consciousness with self-consciousness). The view that non-conceptual self-consciousness is a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness would appear to be vulnerable to the objection that it implausibly rules out the possibility of cases such as Anscombe’s (1975) subject in a sensory deprivation tank, a case in which the forms of experience typically classed as forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness are lacking (for related cases see Bayne 2004; also see G. Strawson 1999). A different worry about the connection between self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness is the “just more content” objection (B. Williams 1978: ch. 3; Hurley 1994; and 1998 Part I). The concern is addressed to the view that self-consciousness is not merely a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness but is that in virtue of which it is unified. For if the self-ascription of experiences is taken to be that which is responsible for the unity of consciousness, how can we account for the fact that the self-conscious thoughts are themselves unified with the first-order experiences that they supposedly unify? As Hurley puts it,

self-conscious or first-person contents […] are just more contents , to which the problem of co-consciousness [i.e., the unity of consciousness] also applies (1998: 61)

To appeal to the third-order self-ascription of the self-conscious thought would appear to invite a regress.

What is the connection between self-consciousness and the awareness of others? On some views self-consciousness requires awareness of others, on another view the awareness of others requires self-consciousness. In each case we can distinguish between those accounts according to which such awareness is merely an empirical condition from those according to which it is a strictly necessary/sufficient condition. There is also a distinction to be made regarding the sense of “awareness of others” that is in play: whilst some philosophers are concerned with knowledge of other minds, others are content with the representation of others, veridical or not.

A familiar account of our knowledge of others takes the form of an argument from analogy (Slote 1970: ch. 4; Avramides 2001: part I). The argument from analogy presents an account of our justification for moving from judgements about others’ observable behaviour to judgements about their unobservable mental states. I am aware from my own case that, say, wincing is the result of pain so, on seeing another’s wincing, I am justified in judging them to be in pain. On this picture, self-awareness, as manifest in the judgement about my own case, is a necessary condition of knowledge of other minds. In this respect the view is related to contemporary simulation theory, standard versions of which see our capacity to attribute mental states to others as dependent on our capacity to attribute them to ourselves (Heal 1986; Goldman 2006: ch. 9; for a simulationist theory that differs in this respect, see Gordon 1996). Associated with the argument from analogy is a view according to which our grasp of mental state concepts is an essentially first-personal affair. That is, we understand what, for example, pain is first from our own case (Nagel 1986: §2.3; Peacocke 2008: ch. 5–6; it has sometimes been claimed that this view gives rise to the conceptual problem of other minds, see Wittgenstein 1958: §302; McGinn 1984; Avramides 2001: part II).

In opposition to this package stand views on which our grasp and application of mental state concepts is neutral between the first and third-person cases. Theory theorists, for example, claim that we attribute mental states to both ourselves and others by means of a (tacitly held) psychological theory. They may also hold that possession of such a theory constitutes our grasp of mental state concepts (Carruthers 1996, 2011: ch. 8; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997; for an account that combines elements of theory with elements of simulation, see Nichols & Stich 2003). While such views accord no priority to the first-person case, they may see a tight connection between self-consciousness and our capacity to think about others: these are simply two aspects of the more general capacity to think about the mind. A distinct, though related, family of views see both self-consciousness and awareness of others as emerging from a primitive “adualist” state in which self and other are not distinguished (Piaget 1937; Merleau-Ponty 1960; Barresi & Moore 1996; Hurley 2005; Gallese 2005; also see D. Stern 1985: part II). Against such “adualist” views, it is often claimed the phenomena of neonate imitation, joint attention, and emotion regulation show that infants display an awareness of others as others from the very beginning of life (Meltzoff & Moore 1977; Trevarthen 1979; Hurley & Chater 2005; Eilan et al. 2005; Legerstee 2005; Reddy 2008). One empirical proposal is that it is from this early form of social interaction and capacity to understand others that self-consciousness emerges as a self-directed form of mindreading (Carruthers 2011; Carruthers, Fletcher, & Ritchie 2012; for an early such account, see Mead 1934). On such a view the first-person case is treated as secondary, reversing the traditional picture associated with the argument from analogy.

A more ambitious version of this approach to the relationship between self-consciousness and awareness of others, prioritizing the awareness of others, is to argue that knowledge of other minds is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-consciousness. Well known examples of such arguments can be found in the work of P.F. Strawson (1959: ch. 3) and Davidson (1991; for the related Hegelian view that various forms of self-consciousness depend on intersubjective recognition, see Honneth 1995; also Sartre’s 1943, Part 3, Ch.1, view that awareness of oneself as an object is mediated by the ‘look’ of the other). Since knowledge of other minds is typically considered to be open to sceptical doubt, and self-consciousness is not, such lines of reasoning can be thought of as transcendental arguments and so potentially open to general criticisms of that form of argument (Stroud 1968; R. Stern 1999, 2000; see the entry on transcendental arguments ). Strawson’s argument hinges on his claim that

the idea of a predicate is correlative with that of a range of distinguishable individuals of which the predicate can be significantly, though not necessarily truly, affirmed. (P.F. Strawson 1959: 99; cf. Evans’ generality constraint, 1982: §4.3)

This means, Strawson claims, that one can only ascribe mental states to oneself if one is capable of ascribing them to others which, in turn, means that I cannot have gained the capacity to think of others’ mental states by means of an analogical reasoning from my own case. This, Strawson argues, shows that others’ observable behaviour is not a “sign” of their mentality, but is a “criterion” of it. In short, we must have knowledge of others’ minds if we are self-conscious (for the full argument, see P.F. Strawson 1959: 105ff; for critical discussion, see R. Stern 2000: ch. 6; Sacks 2005; Joel Smith 2011).

Davidson’s transcendental argument—the triangulation argument—connects self-consciousness, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world. At its heart is the claim that for my thoughts to have determinate content there must exist another subject who is able to interpret me. As Davidson puts it,

it takes two points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus to define its content […] Until a base line has been established by communication with someone else, there is no point in saying one’s own thoughts or words have a propositional content. (Davidson 1991: 212–213)

Since self-conscious subjects are aware of the contents of their thoughts, they must know that there are other minds, since the sort of intersubjective externalism that Davidson endorses guarantees it. Self-knowledge, on this view, entails knowledge of others (for discussion, see R. Stern 2000: ch. 6; Sosa 2003; Ludwig 2011; Myers and Verheggen 2016).

5. Self-Consciousness in Infants and Non-Human Animals

At what age can human infants be credited with self-consciousness? Is self-consciousness present beyond homo sapiens ? Some theorists, for example Bermúdez (1998), claim that various forms of perceptual experience constitute a non-conceptual form of self-consciousness (see §3 ). Others, for example Rosenthal (2005), claim that phenomenal consciousness entails self-consciousness. If either view is correct then self-consciousness, of some kind, can plausibly be attributed to creatures other than adult humans. But when it comes to more sophisticated forms of self-awareness, matters are less clear. What is required is some empirical criterion for judging a creature self-conscious even if, as with infants and non-human animals, they are unable to provide evidence via their use of the first-person pronoun. Such evidence, if available, may reasonably be thought to shed light on both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of self-consciousness (Ferrari & Sternberg 1998; Terrace & Metcalfe 2005; see the entries on animal consciousness and animal cognition ).

It has sometimes been claimed, most forcefully by Gallup and colleagues, that the capacity to recognise oneself in the mirror is a marker of self-consciousness (Gallup 1970; Gallup, Anderson, & Platek 2011; Gallup, Platek, & Spaulding 2014; Gallup & Anderson 2020). It is easy to see why this might seem to be so since, if first-person thought involves thinking about oneself as oneself , then it is natural to suppose that a capacity to recognise that a subject seen in a mirror is oneself involves such a thought. In Evans’s (1982) terminology such thoughts involve an “identification component”.

Gallup (1970) devised a test for mirror self-recognition: surreptitiously placing a red mark on a subject’s forehead before exposure to a mirror, then observing whether they touch the relevant spot. It is well established that chimpanzees pass the mirror test while other primate species fail (Anderson & Gallup 2011). It has also been claimed that dolphins and some elephants pass the test (Reiss & Marino 2001; Plotnik et. al. 2006). With respect to human infants, the consensus is that success in the mirror test begins at around 15 to 18 months of age, and that by 24 months most children pass (Amsterdam 1972; M. Lewis & Brooks-Gunn 1979; Nielsen, Suddendorf, & Slaughter 2006).

It is not universally accepted, however, that success in the mirror test is an indication of self-consciousness. For example, Heyes (1994) presents an influential critique of the claim that it is a marker of self-awareness, arguing that all that is required for success is that subjects be able to distinguish between novel ways of receiving bodily feedback in order to guide behaviour, on the one hand, and other forms of incoming sensory data, on the other. Such a view, however, needs to explain why it is that passing the mirror test seems to be connected with the phenomena arguably associated with self-consciousness, such as experiencing shame and embarrassment (M. Lewis 2011). There remains, then, significant controversy concerning what success in the mirror test really shows, and so whether it can shed light on the development of self-awareness (see, for example, Mitchell 1993; Suddendorf & Butler 2013; Gallup, Platek, & Spaulding 2014. For related philosophical discussion, see Rochat & Zahavi 2011; Peacocke 2014: ch.8).

Another potential marker of self-consciousness is episodic memory, the capacity that we have to recollect particular episodes from our own past experience (see Tulving 1983; Michaelian 2016; entry on memory ). As Tulving describes it, episodic memory involves “autonoesis” or “mental time-travel”, the experience of transporting oneself in time (which also has a future oriented dimension in expectation, planning, and so on; see Michaelian, Klein, & Szpunar 2016). The connection between memory and self-consciousness is one that is often made (see §2.3 , §3 , and §4.1 ). If it is correct that episodic memory essentially involves a form of self-consciousness, and we are able to test for the presence of episodic memory in non-linguistic infants and animals, then we have a way of detecting the presence of self-conscious abilities. Since, however, episodic memory is not the only form of self-consciousness, the lack of it does not indicate that a creature is not self-aware. Indeed, the much discussed case of K.C. seems to be one in which, due to an accident, someone has lost episodic memory but appears to remain otherwise self-conscious (see Rosenbaum et. al. 2005).

Tulving himself argues that only humans possess episodic memory, and only when they reach the age of around 4 years (2005; also see Suddendorf & Corballis 2007). Whilst human infants and non-human animals possess non-episodic forms of memory such as semantic memory (remembering that such and such is the case), they lack the “autonoetic” consciousness of themselves projected either back or forwards in time. For example whilst most 3 year old infants can remember presented information, most are unreliable when it comes to the question of how they know—did they see it, hear it, etc. (Gopnik & Graf 1988). The suggestion here is that the development of the reliable capacity to report how they know some fact reflects the development of the capacity to episodically remember the learning event.

In the case of animals perhaps the most suggestive evidence of episodic memory derives from work on scrub-jays, who can retain information about what food has been stored, where it was stored, and when (Clayton, Bussey, & Dickinson 2003). This evidence coheres with the “what, where, when” criterion of episodic memory originally proposed by Tulving (1972). It is, however, widely accepted that this content-based account of episodic memory—episodic memory is memory that contains information about what happened, where it happened, and when—is inadequate, since non-episodic, semantic memory often involves the retention of “what, where, when” information. Due to the difficulties in finding a behavioural test for “autonoetic” consciousness, it is often, though not universally, claimed that there is no compelling evidence for episodic memory, and thus this particular form of self-consciousness, in non-human animals (Tulving 2005; Suddendorf & Corballis 2007; Michaelian 2016: ch. 2; for discussion relating to apes, see Menzel 2005; Schwartz 2005; for an alternative perspective suggesting that episodic memory abilities come in degree, see Breeden et. al. 2016).

Another body of research pertaining to the question of self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals is the work on metacognition (and metamemory). The term “metacognition” typically refers to the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive states, and is manifest in one’s judgements (or feelings) concerning one’s own learning and consequent level of certainty or confidence (J.D. Smith 2009; Beran et al. 2012; Proust 2013; Fleming & Frith 2014). The suggestion is that if a creature is able to monitor their own level of confidence, they are to that extent self-conscious. One common paradigm for testing metacognitive abilities involves presenting subjects with a stimulus that they must categorise in one of two ways. Crucially, they are also given the opportunity to opt out of the test, with correct categorisation resulting in the highest reward, opting out resulting in a lower reward, and incorrect categorisation resulting in no reward. The assumption is that the opt-out response reflects a meta-cognitive judgement of uncertainty. Evidence gathered from such a paradigm has been taken to show metacognitive abilities in some birds (Fujita et. al. 2012), dolphins (J.D. Smith et. al. 1995), primates (Shields et. al. 1997), and children from the age of around 4 years (Sodian et. al. 2012).

The view that success on metacognitive opt-out tests is indicative of self-consciousness is not uncontroversial, however. For example, it has been suggested that the uncertainty response is indicative not of metacognitive uncertainty monitoring but rather of first-order, environmental judgements concerning a third category between the intended two (Kornell, Son, & Terrace 2007; Hampton 2009; also see Carruthers 2008; Kornell 2014; Musholt 2015: ch. 7). On such an interpretation, the research on metacognition does not provide compelling evidence regarding self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals (but for critical discussion see J.D. Smith 2005; J.D. Smith, Couchman, & Beran 2014; also relevant is the distinction between “evaluativist” and “attributivist” accounts of metacognition outlined by Proust (2013)). The question of the significance of opt-out tests for attributions of self-consciousness remains controversial.

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• –––, 2014, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Zahavi, Dan and Uriah Kriegel, 2015, “For-Me-Ness: What It Is and What It Is Not”, in Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou, and Walter Hopp (eds.), Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology , Oxford: Routledge: 36–53.
• Zahn, Roland, Jochen Talazko, and Dieter Ebert, 2008, “Loss of the Sense of Self-Ownership for Perceptions of Objects in a Case of Right Inferior Temporal, Parieto-Occipital and Precentral Hypometabolism”, Psychopathology , 41(6): 397–402.
• Zöller, Günther, 1992, “Lichtenberg and Kant on the Subject of Thinking”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 30(3): 417–441.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Self-Consciousness , bibliography at PhilPapers.org.
• Self-Consciousness , entry at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

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History of Greece and Rome

1001 anecdotes and curiosities of the ancient world

“Know thyself ( Know yourself)”, γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnóthi seautón), Nosce te ipsum, Conócete a ti mismo, Connais-toi toi-même, Conosci te stesso, Erkenne dich selbst.

This ancient Greek phrase, “know yourself” is the simplest invitation to reflect on oneself

This phrase, which has a high ethical value and a religious value for some people, is a forceful and disturbing order, because it makes the men, curious beings, face the fact that we need to know, to understand and to accept ourselves; it also makes us face with the evidence of the lack of that self-knowledge and awareness of oneself.

Once again are the ancient Greeks, who developed the rational knowledge of nature, who also focused their reflection in man and therefore in themselves.

Pausanias , the famous tourist of the II century A.D., in his " Description of Greece ", in Book X dedicated to Phocis, in chapter 24, paragraphs 1-2 , tells us that in the courtyard of the temple of Apollo at Delphi there were registered (Pliny says that in gold letters) useful phrases for the life of men, which are in the mouth of all Greeks (Εν δέ τώ προνάω τά έν Δελφοίς γεγραμμένα, έστιν ώφελήματα άνθρώποις εἰς βίον = En de to pronao ta en Delfois gegrammena estín ofelémata anthropois eis bion ), such as:

          " know thyself "  (Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnóthi sautón ),

          “ nothing too much ” (Μηδέν άγαν, medén ágan ).

According to the same Pausanias, these phrases, receiving those who consulted the oracle, were attributed to the Seven Sages (Cleobulus of Lindos, Solon of Athens, Sparta Quilon, Bias of Priene, Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth ).

Already Plato had said in his dialogue Protagoras (343 b ), that the Seven Sages showed his admiration for the Lacedaemonian know " when meeting in Delphi, they wanted to offer to Apollo, in his temple Delfico, the first fruits of their wisdom, and consecrated inscriptions  that everyone repeats: Know thyself and nothing in excess ".

Many of these statements have not ceased to be used and to encourage reflection of men from then until today.

Probably the most successful of them is " know thyself ", especially since Socrates himself used it many times, especially as stated in the Platonic dialogue " Alcibiades " when facing the ambitious young Athenian politician with his own ignorance. This is the reason why the phrase is wrongly attributed to Socrates.

Naturally, the Romans, rulers of Greece but captured by their culture, immediately adopted the maxim in the form " nosce te ipsum " or less used “ temet nosce ”.

If there are infinite thinkers and philosophers who take as their own " nosce te ipsum " or one of its variants, there are also infinite ways in which it was used.

The phrase continues to be an enigma from the beginning. Does it mean just remember the men their vulnerability and deadly?, perhaps the meaning is to tell us that we need to know well ourselves, that we must know our intellectual and rational soul to guide our life right?, or maybe that the phrase owns itself the treasure of treasures, and who knows himself knows the universe and the gods?, as Hermes Trismegistus intended.

The same idea is expressed by Saint Augustine , directing the judgment in the Christian sense, when he says " do not want to pour out; fall within yourself, because inside of man lies the truth " (From True Religion 39,72 ), thus inaugurating the so called " Socratic Christian " spoken by Gilson.

In any case " knowing oneself " is a difficult task, the most difficult, as Thales of Miletus said, according to Diogenes Laertius ( Lives and opinions of eminent philosophers, Book I, 12,15 ) or according to the dialogue of Plato Alcibiades, 130 ,:

 " I often thought, Socrates, that it was available to everyone, but in other times I also found it very difficult. "

For other authors the task is impossible and the man is doomed not to know " who he is, where he comes from and where it goes " or at least to have a meager knowledge of himself and a slight self-consciousness.

Actually this " Delphic order " constitutes one of the pillars of philosophical reflection of all time, ethics and mysticism; infinite authors since antiquity, as we saw, through the Middle Ages of Peter Abelard (1079-1142 ), who used it as the title for his treatise " Ethica seu liber dictus: scito te ipsum ", or Petrarch.

Among others, our Spanish moralist Gracián (1601-1658) said in his book Faultfinder , part one, chap. IX entitled " Moral anatomy of man ": " He who begins ignoring oneself, badly can learn other things. But what is the good in knowing everything while not knowing oneself? ".

Closer to our time, the same idea is repeated by many:

Hegel:" self-consciousness is the fount of truth ".

Fichte: " Look at yourself, shift your gaze from everything around you and direct it to your interior. This is the first request that philosophy makes to his apprentice. You are not going to talk about anything outside of you, but only of yourself ".

Cassirer: " the autognosis is the supreme purpose of philosophical inquiry ".

Montaigne: " every man contains within himself the entire form of the human condition ".

There is no philosopher who is inspired by the inscription of the temple of Delphi.

Even today in our hyperactive culture, little given to reflection and peace of mind, the highest Greek inspired numerous self-help books looking for the north in self acceptance or self-identity.

Necessary books that are not always valuable. Also here the consumer society and the bestsellers found a good opportunity for business.

I hope this short article is used for guide the reader, in the sense that he considers most appropriate, of course.

• ← I hate and I love (odi et amo)
• The Roman state helps the starving citizens with the “annona” →

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Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge

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What does “know thyself” actually mean?

I’d like to share a chapter from my book Hurry Up and Meditate which explores this intriguing question. I hope you find it useful!

Since ancient times, the wisdom of self-knowledge has been held above all other.  Some believe that it is the real purpose of our life’s journey.  In ancient Greece, when seekers visited the Temple at Delphi (pictured above) to ask what the future held, they would see etched above the door the words which gave the implicit answer to their question: “Know thyself.”  Later, Socrates identified this as the pinnacle of human wisdom, and became famous for his words: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

But what is really meant by “Know thyself?”  When I first heard the phrase I used to puzzle over what it suggested.  Applying it personally, I wondered if there was really that much to know?  After all, the facts of my life, like most people’s, are easily summarised.  I have some awareness of my own strengths and failings.  In the past I’ve undertaken psychometric testing and a personality assessment.  What else is there to know?

As it happens, it is in this area of self-knowledge that the benefits of meditation are, for me, the most significant.    For as I’ve come to discover, the practice of meditation provides an inner pathway – in a sense a road less travelled – which I know I will continue to follow until at least the end of this particular lifetime.

In trying to explain why, the best starting point is probably the definition of ‘knowledge.’    Generally speaking, we think of knowledge as a linear, single dimensional thing.    A school leaver may have a certain level of knowledge about human biology.    Seven years later, graduating from medical school, she will know much more.       We take our faulty car to the garage because we trust the mechanic has greater knowledge than ourselves to identify and repair the problem.    And so on.

  But I don’t believe this is the kind of knowledge referred to in the phrase “Know thyself.”    This form of knowledge, involving the accumulation and assimilation of information, is essentially intellectual.    And there are other forms of knowledge, specifically conceptual and non-conceptual which, in this context, are of far greater value.    The differences between these three forms of knowledge are perhaps best described by illustration.

Suppose we came across a man from a landlocked country who had never been to the sea, but who wanted to know what it was like.    For the purposes of this example, we’ll also assume he’d never seen the sea on TV or at the movies either.

One way to explain the sea would be to sit him down and tell him all about the chemistry of the saline environment, the biology of the sea – flora and fauna – as well as the physics of the ocean, with the effects of the wind and gravity on the waves and tides.    After such a lesson, the man would have an  intellectual  knowledge of the sea.    If any of his fellow land-locked friends had the temerity to suggest that the sea was brown in colour, or that cattle grazed contentedly on the ocean bed, he could soon put them straight.    But despite this intellectual knowledge would he really have very much idea what the sea was really like, or would it still be largely an intellectual abstraction?

A different way to deal with his request would be to suggest he visualise the biggest lake he’d ever seen, and then imagine the lake extending all the way to the horizon.    We could describe waves forming and breaking, water rushing up a beach to where he is standing in his imagination, the smell of ozone and the calls of seagulls overhead.    Using all the sense perceptions available, we could encourage him to build up an image as vivid as possible so that he developed a good  conceptual  knowledge of the sea.  

His experience would naturally depend on the power of his imagination.    Though his conceptual knowledge would be quite different from the intellectual approach.    He would experience a similitude of the sea far more like the real thing.    But when he opened his eyes, his conceptual vision of the sea would disappear, and he’d once again find himself in landlocked reality.

The best way, by far, to satisfy his curiosity, would be to put him on a plane, fly him to the nearest coastal resort, and book him into a beachside chalet for a fortnight.    By the end of his stay he would know exactly what the sea is like, and his knowledge would be direct and first hand:  non-conceptual .

It’s easy to see the advantages of non-conceptual knowledge over alternative approaches.    Both intellectual and conceptual knowledge are dependent on other people and therefore unreliable.    What if, a short time after our biology, chemistry and physics lesson, someone else turned up and refuted our description of the sea saying it was deeply flawed?    We were having him on with our descriptions of dolphins, whales and fish – the sea is so salty there’s no life in it at all.

The fact that this new expert lived near the Dead Sea, and was therefore perfectly correct in terms of his own limited experience, only underlines the serious limitations of intellectual knowledge, which is necessarily restrictive and subject to instant revision.

Applying these three ways of knowing things to the injunction “Know thyself,” we make the unsettling discovery that most of what we take to be self-knowledge tends to be at the intellectual level.  

We can, if prompted, rattle off our biographies, our work and family lives, our likes and dislikes, our fears and aspirations.  We might describe our personal quirks, hobbies and prejudices.  But how meaningful is any of that information?  Just because we can give a comprehensive factual account of the entity labelled ‘me,’ ‘myself,’ or ‘I,’ like the man with the intellectual knowledge of the sea, do we really have very much idea what this ‘I’ is really like?

This may seem a shocking, if not outrageous idea.    But let’s be honest about where all these facts and beliefs about me came from in the first place.    Did we discover them for ourselves, or did we get them second hand?    At a very young age, when we overheard Dad telling someone that we couldn’t hit a ball to save our lives, did that start the beginning of a self-fulfilling idea that we’re hopeless at sport?    When the Maths teacher we secretly admired congratulated us on our quadratic equations, did this spur us on to tackle more advanced calculations with greater confidence?

And how firmly held are these ideas about ourselves?    By the time we reach middle age, most of us have experienced enough ups and downs in our personal, marital or professional lives to know how profoundly a turn of events can change long-held ideas about who we are and what’s important to us.    Even without major personal earthquakes, little by little our priorities and attitudes naturally shift as we negotiate our way through different life stages.

It has become a cliché that the erstwhile bad boys of art and pop over time become members of the very establishment they once rebelled against.    Die-hard socialists become the most venal capitalists.    Carnivores become vegetarians – and back again.    Pillars of society decamp to sunny, coastal resorts with their executive assistants.

And what’s going on when we say we believe certain things, then behave in a completely contradictory way?  We say we want to lose weight, but don’t stop stuffing our faces with comfort food.  We claim that world peace is important, but are always giving our spouse, kids and colleagues a hard time.  Do our actions negate our sincerity, or is there some other explanation for our behaviour?

What I’ve tried to do in these few paragraphs – and it would be easy to go on – is simply to illustrate how it’s possible for us to have the most detailed and coherent ideas about who we are, but like all intellectual abstractions, these beliefs may not be very relevant, accurate or could be subject to abrupt change.    How much value do they really have?

Meditation provides an entirely different approach.  Instead of intellectual elaborations, it provides us with the means of knowing ourselves both conceptually, and ultimately, non-conceptually.  Just as a whole load of facts and figures about the sea are not the sea, so too all the thoughts we have about me are not me.  The label is not the product.  If we really want to know me, we have to clear our minds of all conceptions, interruptions and distractions and find out what’s really there.

This is why when we sit on our cushions and focus our minds on just one thing, we are doing something unique that goes against all our usual mental behaviour.    We are allowing our minds to settle.  

An illustration of this point, which I particularly like, is the jar of swirling grey storm water.  Allow it to rest for half an hour and the sediment falls to the bottom, providing perfect clarity.  In much the same way, when we consciously focus our minds in meditation, if we are able to free ourselves from all the usual discursive thinking, we can start to see ourselves for who and what we really are.

Or as Dr Kabbat-Zinn puts it: “Dwelling in stillness and looking inward for some part of each day, we touch what is most real and reliable in ourselves and most easily overlooked and undeveloped.    When we can be centred in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.”

Of course the best way to encounter ourselves is directly or non-conceptually, in a state of deep meditative equipoise.  But this takes a lot of practise.  Most of us can only hope to catch brief glimpses of our true state of being in our early years of meditation before, like clouds concealing a mountain peak, agitation or dullness get in the way. 

Which is why we need to continue in our efforts, inspired by a conceptual account of our ultimate nature.    Just as we might encourage the land-locked man to create a vivid image of what the sea may be like, so too when we start to meditate it helps to imagine how it might be if our mind was undistracted.

Some of the inspiration for what we are trying to experience non-conceptually tells us that our ultimate nature is like a cloudless sky: boundless, perfectly clear, undisturbed by any form of agitation.  It is a state of peacefulness and bliss, paradoxically both empty of anything as well as offering the potential for everything – because all things begin with thought.  This “open field” state is one in which our usually tightly-held sense of me-ness dissolves into a more panoramic vista that things simply are, without subject or object, self or other.

To me, even just to catch a glimpse of this ‘self’ is the most important benefit of meditation.  I know of no other practice which has the potential to transform my understanding of who, or what, I am – and, by contrast, what I am not. 

For like the once land-locked man emerging from the waves onto the beach at the end of his first day in the sea, once we have experienced the reality of who we are at a direct, non-conceptual level, no one can take the experience away from us.  And we can never go back to believing ourselves to be merely a collection of intellectual beliefs and abstractions.  We know that all that stuff is merely transient, ever-changing – the clouds rather than the sky. 

The self with its personal quirks, hobbies and prejudices is not the subject of the edict “Know thyself.’    Rather it is the self that is subject to no boundaries, that experiences the unity of all, that abides in a state of blissful transcendence, which it is our life’s true purpose to discover.

I hope you found this blog useful!  Here’s a few things you can do:

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Self-Knowledge  • Know Yourself

Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge

In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. Asked to sum up what  all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘ Know yourself .’

Knowing yourself has extraordinary prestige in our culture. It has been framed as quite literally the meaning of life.

This sounds, when one hears it, highly plausible, yet so plausible it’s worth pausing to ask a few more questions. Just why is self-knowledge such a prestigious good? What are the dangers that come with a lack of self-knowledge? And what do we in fact need to know about ourselves? How do we come to learn such things? And why is self-knowledge difficult to attain?

When we speak about self-knowledge , we’re alluding to a particular kind of knowledge – generally of an emotional or psychological kind. There are a million things you could potentially know about yourself. Here are some options:

• On what day of the week were you born?
• Were you able to pick up a raisin between your fore-finger and thumb when you were five months old?
• Are you more an introvert or an extrovert?
• How does your relationship with your father influence your career ambitions?
• What kind of picnic person are you: morning or evening? River-bank, park or hill?

Most of us would recognise that questions 3 and 4 are ones worth knowing; the others, not so much.

In other words, not everything that we can know about ourselves is all that important to find out. Here we want to focus on the areas of self-knowledge that matter most in life: the areas concerned with the inner psychological core of the self.

The key bits of self-knowledge we’ll be interested in are:

• — What kind of person are you characteristically attracted to in love
• — What difficult patterns of behaviour are you prey to in relationships
• — What are your talents at work
• — What problems do you have around success/failure
• — How are you about feedback
• — What do you do when you have been frustrated by life
• — What kind of taste do you have
• — Can you distinguish between your passing bodily-based emotions and your more rational thoughts

If you have solid answers to these issues, you’ll be able to speak of yourself as someone with an adequate degree of self-knowledge.

1. Why and Where Does Self-Knowledge Matter?

Self-knowledge is important for one central reason: because it offers us a route to greater happiness and fulfilment.

A lack of self-knowledge leaves you open to accident and mistaken ambitions.  

Armed with the right sort of self-knowledge, we have a greater chance of avoiding errors in our dealings with others and in the formulation of our life choices.

Let’s look at some examples of areas where self-knowledge matters

Without self-knowledge, all sorts of problems may occur:

1. We choose the wrong partners, trying to get together with people who don’t really suit us, because we don’t understand our own needs

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured often by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures.

On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with. With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

2. We repeat unhealthy patterns from childhood, always latching on to people who will frustrate us in familiar but grievous ways

We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite that simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness. We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering. As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways. We get together with the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.  

• — We fail to explain our feelings to our partners – because we don’t understand ourselves well enough. We act out our feelings rather than spell them out, often to destructive effect. (we break the door rather than explain we are mad with anger).
• — We are unaware of the effects of our words on others. We don’t notice how often we say critical things to them.
• — We can’t anticipate and signpost our feelings: when we start to get over-excited and talk too fast, we should know it’s time to go for a walk round the block because otherwise there’s liable to be an explosion…
• — We project, that is, we respond to events in the here and now according to patterns laid down in childhood; in our heads, our partners become mixed up with other people from our emotional history (a humiliating mother, a distant father etc…).
• — We’re governed by the past: old unfortunate habits keep their grip. We don’t see what’s happening and so we can’t do anything about it.

There’s a lot we can do once people are able to tell us what’s problematic about themselves. We don’t need people to be problem free – we need people to be able to explain where the problems are.  

We only have a few short years in which to come up with a convincing answer about what we want to do with our lives. Then, wherever we are in the thought-process, we have to jump into a job in order to have enough money to survive or appease society’s demands for our productivity.

Without self-knowledge, we are too vague about our ambitions; we don’t know what to do with our lives and – because money tends to be such an urgent priority – we lock ourselves into a cage from which it may take decades to emerge.

• — We are too modest: we miss out on opportunities: we don’t know what we are capable of.
• — We are too ambitious: we don’t know what we shouldn’t attempt. We lack a clear sense of our limitations, wasting years trying to do something we’re not suited to.
• — We don’t grasp the ways in which we are difficult employees or bosses. We might – among other problems – be crazily defensive, or resistant to trusting anyone or too eager to please.
• — We don’t perceive our hidden attitudes to success and failure. It may be that we see ourselves (wrongly) as not cut out for the bigger roles or when things start to go well, we become manically prone to make a blunder. Perhaps we’re unconsciously trying to avoid rivalry with a parent, or a sibling by tripping ourselves up. Family dynamics have an enormous, subterranean influence on how effectively we operate at work.

LIVING WITH OTHERS

Without self-knowledge, we are, in general, a liability to be around:

• — We don’t realise the effect we tend to have on other people: without at all meaning to, we might come across as arrogant or cold, or as tending to hog attention or as needlessly shy and hesitant or as getting furious in dangerous ways.
• — We may fall prey to unnecessary loneliness: not understanding what we really need and what makes us hard to get to know.
• — Difficulties of empathy: not acknowledging the more vulnerable or disturbed parts of oneself; means not seeing oneself as being ‘like’ other people in crucial ways. It’s hard to understand the deeper bits of others without having explored oneself first.

SPENDING MONEY UNWISELY

Most of what we spend money on is a hunch about what will make us happy. But without self-knowledge, we’ll have a hard time figuring out the relationship between what we purchase and how we feel.

• — Holidays and travels will leave us disappointed.
• — Impulsive purchases will soon be regretted.
• — We’ll be prey to fashion: not knowing ourselves, we’ll be at the mercy of what consumer society tells us to want.
• — We might become inadvertent snobs: liking things because others like them rather than for deeper personal reasons.

Self-knowledge has always been important. But now it’s more so than ever. This is a result of political and social progress. When life was much more constrained by tradition, rigid social hierarchy and rigorous codes of manners, there was less need for self-knowledge to guide action. Now, if we are to exploit the independence and freedom we’ve been offered (in love, work and social lives), there is all the more reason to get to know ourselves in good time.

2. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY?

We pay a high price for lack of self-knowledge. So why is it in short supply? Why is it hard for us to know ourselves in these ways? It’s not laziness or stupidity that explains it. There are several huge cognitive frailties that make it hard for us to have certain kinds of insight about ourselves. There are seven reasons why self-knowledge is tricky for creatures with the kinds of minds we have.

i. The Unconscious

Human beings have evolved into creatures whose minds are divided into conscious and unconscious processes. Digesting lunch is unconscious; reflecting on what you’d like to do this weekend is conscious.  

The reason for this division is bandwidth. We simply couldn’t cope if everything we did had to be filtered through the conscious mind.  

Also, we start off as children with fierce difficulties around self-awareness. Nature has structured us so that self-awareness comes very late on: you only have to study how children are to know that an awareness of self is a very late evolution of character.

In general, we can argue that we suffer because a little too much of how we behave happens unconsciously – when we would benefit from a closer grasp on what was going on. The default balance between conscious and unconscious tends to be wrong, we are incentivised to let too much of who we are happen in the unconscious.

As a general point, we need to make heroic efforts to correct the imbalance and bring more of our lives into the conscious realm.

ii. The Emotional and Rational Mind

A traditional way of conceiving of our minds is that there’s a small rational bit and a far larger, more dominant emotional bit.

Plato compared the rational bit to a group of wild horses dragging the conscious mind along.

Nowadays, neuroscientists tell us about three parts of the brain:

• – The reptilian
• – The limbic
• – The neocortex

The reptilian is, as the name sounds, the earliest and the most primitive. It’s interested in basic survival and responds immediately, in knee-jerk ways, unconsciously and rather aggressively and destructively. It’s what’s engaged if a lion surprises you in the jungle.

The limbic part of the brain, a later development is concerned with emotions and memories.

The neocortex, a very late development, is where our higher reasoning faculties lie.

We don’t have to buy into the precise terminology here to understand the drift: a lot of our lives is dominated by automatic, over-emotional, distorting responses by the ‘lower’ parts of the mind; and only occasionally can we hope to gain rational perspective through our higher faculties.

iii. Freudian Resistance

However, it isn’t just the case that things are unconscious by accident. It was Sigmund Freud’s great insight that they remain unconscious because of a squeamishness on our part: there is – in his term – extraordinary ‘resistance’ to making a lot of our unconscious material conscious.  

The unconscious contains desires and feelings that deeply challenge a more comfortable vision of ourselves. We might discover – if we got to know ourselves better – that we’re attracted to a different gender, or have career ambitions quite different from those our society expects of us. We therefore ‘resist’ finding out too much about ourselves in many areas. It shatters the short-term peace we’re addicted to.

But, of course, for Freud, we pay a high price for this. Short-term peace is unstable, it is, to use another word of his, ‘neurotic’, and cuts us off from the benefits of long-term honesty about aspects of our identity.

Too often we say of thoughts, it’s ‘safer not to go there’. One simply pushes feelings and ideas aside. Resistance means we are escaping the humiliation of admitting to particular appetites and desires – especially when these are at odds with what we’d like to be like or how others want us to be. We reduce our immediate suffering. But the cost is that we can’t properly aim for what would truly make us happy.

iv. Other People Won’t Tell Us

There are many aspects of our identities that it is simply hard for us to see without the help of another person. We need others to be our mirrors, feeding back their insights and perspectives on the elusive, hard-to-see parts of ourselves.

However, getting hold of data from others is a very unreliable process. Very few people can be bothered to undertake the arduous task of giving us feedback.

Either they dislike us too much and therefore can’t be bothered. Or they like us too much, and don’t want to upset us.

Our friends are too polite; good intentions lead them to keep their less pleasant observations to themselves. Our enemies have so much to tell us: it’s not always the people we like who see certain aspects of us most clearly. It might be someone we’re at loggerheads with who has the sharpest sense of what’s not quite going right in our character (a way, for instance, of letting people down after a long period of seeming to go along with their plans; a very annoying habit of sitting on the fence). But they are not likely to be good at sharing their wisdom with us. They either won’t take the trouble, or will brush us off with the sort of sharp insults that will make us defensive and closed to the wiser aspects embedded within their harsh assessments.

v. We Haven’t Lived Enough

Many bits of self-knowledge only come through experience. Think of ourselves as being like a biscuit mould: it’s only by pressing ourselves against the dough of life that we get to see what shape we actually are.  

Self-knowledge therefore isn’t something we can always do in isolation, retreating from the world to look into ourselves.

We acquire knowledge dynamically, by trying things out and colliding with others – which always carries a risk, and takes time.

In careers, for example, we can’t know what we might want to do with our lives simply by asking ourselves this question. We need to head out into the workplace and try things out. We need to spend a week at an architect’s office, or go and meet someone in the diplomatic service etc.

Self-knowledge can only evolve as a result of dialogue with the world.

vi. We Are Fatefully Vague About Stuff

Our thoughts about many things are marked first and foremost by vagueness. Our intellectual muscles are – by nature – rather weak. Our initial reactions to things are frequently of the order of ‘yum’ or ‘yuk’. We have pronounced pro or contra feelings towards something but struggle to say more. We say things like:

• — I want to be creative
• — I loathe big business
• — I’m feeling out of sorts
• — He annoys me

These reports might be true, but they are not very high-quality items in terms of self- knowledge. They’re not accurate enough to help guide action. It’s not that they are wrong, the problem is they are too vague. They don’t get to grips with what is really the issue. They circle in the big, general territory but don’t land anywhere specific.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s universal. The first reports from our conscious minds are just by nature horribly vague – and in need of sustained analysis.

vii. Introspection is Low on Prestige and Unfamiliar

Introspection is the name we give to the close study of one’s feelings and ideas.

Unfortunately, it isn’t given high prestige in our society. We’re rarely encouraged to unpack our thoughts. The notion of what it means to have a conversation with a friend rarely includes trying to make progress in sorting out feelings. Psychotherapy – the prime arena for analysing oneself – interests barely 1% of the population.

Part of increasing the self-knowledge of a society is to help make the idea of introspection a little more glamorous; it should be thought of as a very plausible concept to spend a weekend on or host a dinner party around.

3. HOW TO GET MORE SELF-KNOWLEDGE — AND IN WHAT AREAS

Relationships, i. repetition compulsion.

We’re not terribly flexible when it comes to falling in love. We have types. There are patterns: each of us tends to have a characteristic sort of person we go for – a more or less sketchy template of the sort of person we find very attractive.

The template is highly individual, but if we could open up people’s heads we might find things like:

The B yronic type — dark hair (frequently tousled), reserved but intense; naughty

The serene type — calm, unruffled, angst-free

The cheeky type — bouncy, unpretentious, free  

We’re used to seeing our types in terms of the positives. But, in fact, every type also carries a lot of negatives as well. The people we tend to go for may be attractive to us not only for some very nice reasons but also because they bring with them some special kind of trouble or difficulty to which we are especially prone. Most of us are involved in the compulsion to repeat kinds of suffering in our personal lives, normally based on a suffering in early childhood.

Putting the same templates in darker terms, it might turn out that someone is drawn to:

A chaotic, selfish, volcanic person who seems always to be on the verge of losing their temper and is never on time ( Byronic ).

Someone who will be wrapped up in themselves and slightly depressed ( serene ).

An infantile person with poor self-management skills who needs a lot of looking after ( cheeky ).

We need self-knowledge in love because were so prone to repeat unhealthy patterns. We leave a relationship hoping to leave behind a particular set of problems – which we find again in the next relationship. These patterns normally derive from childhood experience whereby love was mixed in with various kinds of suffering. The father whose attention and affection we craved was also often annoyed (annoyance, ever since, has proved desperately interesting to a part of us); the mother who we loved was often preoccupied and always heading out to do more exciting things while leaving us behind (our partner is in a high stress job and doesn’t often call…)

Now when we’re searching for affection and closeness we look out for some quite negative, even damaging things, since we have learned to think that this is how love works. We don’t notice it, so the pattern keeps on guiding our behaviour in unfortunate ways. The psychoanalytic theory of repetition compulsion means that you’re also being drawn to something problematic. For example:

• — They are rather bossy
• — They are critical
• — They are in some way rather inadequate and in need of help
• — They are agitated and irritable<

Self-knowledge means first of all seeing the pattern. It means understanding the negative aspects of the type of person we tend to get involved with.

Culturally we are resistant to this kind of self-knowledge. We’re not used to the notion that we might be drawn to people for bad reasons. We want to say: I hate it when people don’t listen or I really don’t like irritable and agitated individuals. And of course that is true. We don’t like it when people behave these ways.

But we do much too often end up with them!  

Think of a celebrity or actor that you find attractive.

• – What are some good things you find attractive about them?
• – What might be the bad reasons you are drawn to them?
• – What are the difficult sides of people you’re oddly rather drawn to?
• – Sketch a ‘type’ you find attractive.
• – What are the bad reasons you find this type attractive?
• – What have the consequences been in your life?

Gaining self-knowledge about the darker aspects of one’s own pattern of attraction allows us to be more strategic.

When looking for a new relationship:

• — Realise that emotional appeal is not necessarily – for us – the best guide to who we could have good relationship with.
• — Pick up at a much earlier stage that one might be making this mistake and recognising that it is a mistake.

In a long-standing relationship:

• — Accept that we shouldn’t simply blame the other person for certain annoying characteristics – such as their distance or irritability. We can admit that this was part of what drew us to them in the first place.
• — It helps identify the kind of compensating maturity one needs; if you are drawn to quite critical people, you can’t always then blame them for being critical.

ii. Projection

Our minds have a strong natural tendency to projection , that is, to elaborate a response to a current situation from incomplete hints – drawing upon a dynamic set up in our past and indicative of our unconscious interests, drives and concerns.  

Take a look at this image, which appears as part of a famous projection test:

If you ask, what’s going on here, we all could read different things into the image. People might say something like:

• — It’s a father and son, mourning together for a shared loss, maybe they’ve heard that a friend of the family has died.
• — It’s a manager in the process of sacking (more in sorrow than in anger) a very unsatisfactory young employee.
• — I feel something obscene is going on out of the frame: it’s in a public urinal, the older man is looking at the younger guy’s penis and making him feel very embarrassed.

One thing we do know – really – is that the picture doesn’t really show any of these things. It is an ambiguous image.

The picture simply shows two men rather formally dressed, one slightly older. The elaboration is coming from the person who looks at it. And the way they elaborate, the kind of story they tell, may say more about them than it does about the image. Especially if they get insistent and very sure that this is what the picture really means. This is projection.  

We don’t just do this around images; the same thing happens with people. In relationships, projection kicks in when there are ‘ambiguous situations’.  

For instance, your partner is quietly chuckling at a text message. They don’t offer to share it with you. They quickly send a reply. You start to feel very agitated. It looks like your partner is having an affair. They have just received a message from their lover reminding them of some very intimate joke (which might even be about you and your failings); you partner eagerly responds. They don’t love you. You are abandoned, betrayed. You are now very angry with you partner; you feel victimised. But actually, nothing like this is really going on at all. The message was from an over-conscientious colleague at work, and your partner found it comic they should be bothering about such trivia and didn’t think it was even worth mentioning. In fact, the distress you felt derived from when you were at school: you discovered that the person you thought was your best friend was actually saying mean things about to others. You are still wounded by this, though you hate to admit it.

The structure is

• — We observe something but in honest truth it’s not entirely clear what it means.
• — We read into the situation a set of motive, intentions, attitudes – which are usually distressing to us and give rise to anxiety and anger.
• — The anxiety or fear actually relate to an earlier experience. But we don’t realise this.
• — We are frightened by, or angry about, what’s happening now. Even though really we shouldn’t be.

Projection is always about telling ourselves a story in answer to the question: what did that really mean? That might be, for instance, be a situation as well as a person.

When we are projecting it doesn’t FEEL as if we are doing anything complicated or special. On the contrary it feels just as if we are seeing things as they are. So, typically we dislike the suggestion that we are ‘projecting’. It feels as if it is an insult to our ability to perceive how things really are. Admitting the possibility that one might be projecting is humbling. But it could be worth it because projection brings a lot of trouble into our lives. We’re venting our anger on the wrong individual. And maybe in the process hurting someone very unfairly. We are afraid of the wrong person. Our fear of someone in the past gets in the way of making a friend or ally of someone today.

Self-knowledge means recognising one’s projections and attempting to repatriate. The active issue isn’t here and now: it’s some unfinished business from the past that’s still bugging us.

In the images below what do you think is going on?

– Say (without thinking too much) what you believe is happening. Write it down on a piece of paper, while others do the same.

– Then, as a class, go around and compare.

– Then ask yourselves what your possible explanation says not about the picture – it’s ambiguous – but about you. What parts of you have ‘projected’ into the ambiguous image?

ii. Confrontation and Criticism

Another area where a lack of self-knowledge bites is around how we characteristically behave with others, friends, family and colleagues. There are a number of themes here.

i: Confrontation Styles 

Daily life offers us constant frustrations where we have a choice as to how we might respond. All of us exhibit a variety of ‘confrontation styles’, but we’re often unaware which kind we generally go in for – and what the costs and consequences are.

Imagine that:

– Someone promised you a document by midday. It’s now 1pm.

– It’s your birthday next week, but your partner hasn’t said anything about it. You’d ideally love to go out.

– There’s a drilling sound coming from next door – again.

–  A work colleague has been muscling in on one of your clients.

How do you feel? And how would you typically react?

There are 4 key varieties of possible responses: passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive or assertive:

• — PASSIVE: You feel it’s just how life goes, some things you have to accept; if you make a fuss, it just makes everything worse. After all, it’s not that bad really. Sometimes you really resent these things, but you make yourself put up with them.
• — AGGRESSIVE: “I’m bloody annoyed. Where is that document? Why hasn’t my partner mentioned a party? Why should I suffer because the neighbours are incompetent, stupid, greedy or too lazy to do their DIY at some reasonable hour? If they don’t get their act together you’re really going to show them who’s boss.” They can shape up or ship out as far as you are concerned.
• — PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE: A curious toxic mixture of passivity and more aggressive feelings. One tells oneself things like: ‘I don’t make a big fuss about my birthday – and of course my partner has a lot on their plate always.’ But secretly one is fuming. Or one thinks, ‘X is a perennially unreliable fool,’ but when their document eventually comes in at 5pm, one says, ‘Great to get this!!’ and leaves it at that… There’s a lot of hostility around but it is indirect. The passive aggressive person keeps their anger veiled just enough so as to be able to deny it to others and to themselves. They don’t feel they are being negative or aggressive. They see themselves as hard done by. What they hate most of all is to make a fuss – but that doesn’t prevent them being very upset. Often, the upset which hasn’t emerged with the person who caused it will later find a way out with a more innocent party. Passive aggressive people who didn’t make their feelings clear in the office will, when they get home, frequently take it out on the kids, the partner or the dog. Passive-aggression has its roots in low self-esteem. One simply doesn’t feel one is allowed to make a direct critique. Direct criticism takes confidence. At the same time, one can’t be happy either. Therefore, the compromise is a veiled compromise attack.
• — ASSERTIVE: you are clear about when someone has behaved badly towards you or is causing a problem. You aren’t happy about it. But your main aim is to fix the problem. You don’t need to take revenge or try to get the other person to feel guilty. You can go up to them and confidently make your point. You aren’t ashamed of yourself or guilty for making a fuss. You think it’s normal to treat people well – you do – and if someone else falls below your standards, you’re not embarrassed to tell them so in plain terms. It won’t be a catastrophe, just a few unpleasant moments, but that will allow the relationship to improve over the long-term. No festering wounds here.

Very few of us are assertive. One estimate is that no more than 20% of the population manage to be direct in a mature way about their ailments. That means there’s a lot of subterranean anger, a lot of people who are being shouted at even though they aren’t really responsible.  

The reason why passive-aggression is something we’re not aware of doing – and therefore need to increase our self-knowledge around – is that there are lots of inhibitions to being ‘straight’ around things one’s annoyed about:

– One might feel one doesn’t deserve to make a fuss.

– One might have a sense of shame/inner conviction of being bad which prevents one from taking the high ground ever, even when one deserves to.

– One might feel that other people will respond volcanically and catastrophically if one makes any complaint against them.

These assumptions are all worth questioning.

This is from something called the Ascendance-Submission study by the American psychologist Gordon Allport:

1. Someone tries to push ahead of you in line. You have been waiting for some time, and can’t wait much longer. Suppose the intruder is the same sex as yourself, do you usually:

– Remonstrate with the intruder

– ‘Look daggers’ at the intruder or make clearly audible comments to your neighbour

– Decide not to wait and go away

– Do nothing

2. Do you feel self-conscious in the presence of superiors in the academic or business world?

– Not at all

3. Some possession of yours is being worked upon at a repair shop. You call for it at the time appointed, but the repair man informs you that he has “only just begun to work on it.” Is your customary reaction:

– To upbraid him

– To express dissatisfaction mildly

– To smother your feelings entirely

Another American psychologist, Dr Saul Rosenzweig, came up with the Picture Frustration test, which shows a number of frustrating situations and invites us to fill in the blanks:

How might you respond to this scenario? 

Try this out + discuss what other moments in life you respond in similar ways…

ii: Criticism  

Criticism is always challenging,  but people respond to it in a variety ways.

It can be hugely beneficial to get a better grip on your characteristic response/behaviour around criticism – in order to be able to modulate it, and advance towards the more mature varieties.

Possible Responses to Criticism

1. They must be entirely wrong:

This is the response colloquially known as ‘defensive’ – whereby a criticism unleashes a disproportionately strong defence against it. The original criticism isn’t heard, for its destinee is so taken up with shoring up their position.

One thinks: “I am OK, I don’t generally make mistakes. If they are annoyed with me, it’s likely that they are being too demanding, or they’re jealous, or they’re trying to kick me down. The problem is theirs.”  

2. They must be entirely right and I don’t deserve to exist:

Here one thinks that a local criticism (of a book, a document, something one said over dinner) is in fact pointing to a global problem. Very quickly, the local criticism brings about a crisis:

“I don’t deserve to exist. I am a wretch. They have seen through the facade. It is true, I am meaningless, petty, stupid and dull…’

3. They might be right AND I can be OK

Here one is able to contain the criticism to the issue at hand. One is able to distinguish between a criticism of some aspect of oneself and a wholehearted assault on one’s identity. 

One of the most popular forms of self-knowledge exercises among psychologists involve an invitation to finish sentence stubs.

The idea is to answer fast, without thinking too much, thereby allowing the unconscious mind to have its say before it is censored.  

Here are some sentence stubs to complete around the issue of criticism:

– When someone points out a piece of work of mine is less than perfect, I…

– When my boss says something to me, I think…

– Bosses who criticise typically…

Try to work out your Criticism style:

– are you defensive

– or do you feel globally attacked

– or locally attacked?

One’s response to criticism is formed in childhood.  

It is the task of all parents to criticise their children and break bad news to them about their wishes and plans – but there are evidently different ways of going about this.

The best sort of criticism leaves a child feeling that the criticism is local – but that they remain loved and adored.

Moreover, the suggestion is that everyone makes mistakes, especially the parents, and that criticism is a well-meaning and in no way threatening aspect of daily life.  

But there are also scenarios where the child is criticised and no one notices that the criticism cuts too deep. There is no suggestion that this is ONLY a limited criticism. The child falls prey to the belief that they are entirely worthless. Throughout adulthood, the slightest critique can re-evoke this perspective.

What did you learn about criticism in your childhood?

How did your mother/father make you feel when they criticised you?

iii. Career

i: Vagueness around one’s ambitions

When thinking about aspirations, hopes and what it would be good to do, there’s a very strong tendency to end up saying things like:

• — I want to help other people
• — I want to do something that matters

The statements might be very true and the sentiments admirable. The problem with them is that they are vague. They don’t point in any particular direction: they don’t guide action or do much to help make a decision. Vagueness is a sign of the difficulty we have around self-knowledge. It shows that in some important aspect of life we don’t yet know ourselves very well.

How do we improve self-knowledge around ambitions?

1. Dare to name some people you envy and or admire – however grand and implausible. One of the causes of vagueness is that (after the age of about eleven) we feel embarrassed to mention very high status individuals as inspiration; we sense that we’ll be seen as pretentious or naive. But it’s important to list them because they are the grandest version of the person you want to be. It could be Michelangelo or Lady Gaga or Goethe or Bill Gates. The point isn’t that you necessarily want to be them or just like them. It’s that there is something about them that you want to learn from.

2. Moving from person to trait. Analyse what it is about them that you admire…

It needn’t be the thing they are most famous for. The cause of vagueness here is that we get hung up on people. We focus on the person – and there are so many different things about them that are impressive. So simply naming them leaves it vague what it is we’re trying to learn from this person’s example.

3. How could that quality be more present in your life…

Another cause of vagueness is inflexibility. We can see how that quality played itself out in that person’s life. But what we really want to know is what else can be done with it. The person we’re thinking about is only giving a hint.  

ii: Attitudes to ambition

There are many obstacles to doing well at work , getting the kind of partner we feel we deserve; or getting on top of our financial and creative lives: competition from able rivals, not enough room at the top, prejudice, limited talents. But some of the most serious barriers to success come from within our own heads. We suffer from problematic attitudes to success.

We are held back by anxiety around success. These anxieties mean that we are not purely seeking to succeed. Without realising it, we are also quite invested in aspects of failure.  

— Success makes you envied. They’ll think I’m showing off, big-noting myself. I really don’t want to be the target of other people’s envy. Better to remain on the sidelines.

— Inner feudalism: there are sorts of people who are allowed to succeed and do big things in the world; unfortunately, I’m not one of them; things like that just don’t happen to people like me.

There is also the danger of over-investment in the idea of ‘success’. It’s natural to want to do well-enough around work. But career can be a magnet for other hopes that don’t really belong in this area. One comes to believe that if only things go well in terms of career or money, many other problems will be solved too. It’s a line of thought that is strongly encouraged by contemporary society. Meritocratic attitudes invite the misleading thought that how you do at work is a measure of your global worth; advertising relentlessly projects the thought that psychological qualities like friendship, good relationships, serenity and a sense of fun are tied to financial prosperity (and hence to career success). These kinds of thoughts are not explicitly running through our heads but reflection on our behaviour may indicate that we act as if we believe such things as:

“If I succeed at work, I will deserve to be loved.”

“I will stop feeling lonely when I’ve made it.”

“The holiday will be great – if only we stay in luxury.”

“High status means happiness.”

Once such beliefs have been made explicit they can be put to the test. For instance: other people can succeed, but not me. Is it true? Examine it like a statement in court. What evidence supports this? What are all the things that could be said in its favour and assess their plausibility.

— S ome people are born lucky – this can’t be right.

— Talent is unequally distributed – true, but many of the people who you think are successful are not more talented than you.

— There are prejudices which favour some and disadvantage others – yes, but (usually) only to some extent, they are not decisive .

— If I succeed, what will happen is… (both negative and positive)  

— By succeeding, I’d love to please…

— The person who might (secretly) be most dismayed by my success would be…

— People who are successful are typically…

— I wouldn’t want to be a success because..

iii: The meaning of your life

In the middle of daily life, impressed by the expectations of other people and bombarded with ideas from the media and advertising (which are unlikely to have one’s own best interest at heart), it’s completely unsurprising that we get confused about how much something really matters to us.

If you were on your deathbed, what would you regret not doing…

The exercise is designed to tease out underlying ambitions that you are reluctant to explore. They might seem too challenging or embarrassing to admit to anyone else. The point isn’t necessarily to explain them to others but to give them more attention in the privacy of your own head.

• Why, in fact, do you hold back from doing these things?
• How might those obstacles be addressed?
• What specific practical steps you could take?

The death-bed exercise also helps reveal the true hierarchy of our needs.

• Things that have only a very limited contribution to make to our flourishing come to seem much more important than the really are.
• We underrate the importance of things that are familiar or maybe not especially exciting.

iv. What Others Can Know of Us

When it comes to other people, we are all a bit like mind-readers. Mind-readers astonish their customers by telling them things about their lives – you have had a quarrel with your parents recently; you were close to a sibling when you were a child, but in recent years you have drifted apart and that makes you sad. And the visitor is left wondering: how did they know this about me. It must be magic. They can sometimes tell us after a minute things that it’s taken us years to find out about ourselves. They might note that we react defensively when mentioning our parents – as if we feel we are about to be accused of something; though this characteristic is one we are reluctant to recognise in ourselves. Mind-reading just shows up that knowledge about us is surprisingly obvious and easy for an outsider to get hold of – much easier than for us inside. Strangers are surprisingly good at guessing things about us.

One consequence is that we find it difficult to grasp how other people see us. The gap between self-perception and the point of view of others is richly comic: pomposity for example occurs when someone can’t see that other people don’t share their high opinion of their own merits; and there’s a satisfaction in seeing this person being forced by events to a much lower and more accurate picture of themselves. But mostly, of course, it doesn’t seem especially funny:

You don’t realise

— That you are taxing other people’s patience

— Other people often feel you hog the limelight

— You come across as arrogant

— You seem excessively diffident

— You are often trying to hint that you have done everything anyone else has done; as if it would be painful to you to be impressed by anyone

The point isn’t that other people are always right. The point isn’t that one should feel cross with other people for not rightly appreciating one’s better intent. (‘Of course, I didn’t mean to be arrogant? Can’t they tell the difference between honest assertion and showing off?’)  It’s just that it is really helpful to know how we impact on other people since this allows for strategic adjustment. Once we know we can try to change for the sake of getting on better with others – being a little less assertive at certain points or making an effort to ask other people questions about themselves.

Pair up with someone.

Get them to say 5 nice things about this person, based on very little knowledge.

Then, one negative thing.

How did they know this negative thing?

Swap roles.

– Write down the kind of animal you might see yourself as being. And list three attributes that you feel you share to some extent with this kind of creature.

— Then ask another person to draw the animal they see you as being, and to pick out three characteristics that help explain why.

— What do you learn from their choice and their reasons?

v. Family Dynamics

i: Overall Picture: How you feel about your family

What do you really feel about your family? Especially the things that you don’t say for all sorts of reasons: you might hurt particular people; you feel guilty because, after all they have been very good to you in some ways; you feel disloyal; you fear that people will feel sorry for you in ways that make you awkward; you fear that people will regard you with contempt. Such thoughts are likely to remain shadowy. We have unconscious – or barely unconscious attitudes in relation to family that are liable to play serious havoc with our lives. Possibilities include:

>Attitudes to a younger brother are governing one’s feelings about never having enough.

>Feelings about an older sister have led to problems around envy.

>A general tendency to be deferential around authority might be traced to an excessive need to please one’s parents.

A key psychological exercise is to draw your nuclear family; putting in parents + siblings + house + a sun + a tree.

Then examine the drawing. 

Draw your family.

Ask: Who is big?

Who is small?

Where is everyone standing?  

Some typical themes in analysis:

– who you draw yourself next to is who you are closest to.

– who are you are most distant from is put faraway.

– the size you have drawn yourself is the size of your self-esteem.

– the house is an extension of yourself: it is the ego. Is it in good shape? Optimistic? Ordered?

Windows imply a degree of communication/passage. Does it have a door?

This is only a start, and it’s not science – but the exercise is useful nevertheless, trying – like the sentence stubb exercise – to catch our unconscious slightly unawares in order to reveal its structure.

ii: Blame and self-knowledge:

We may not be aware of the extent to which we assign problems in our lives to our parents.

1. What do you blame your parents for?

Here we are looking for an ego response: how they hurt me, the mistakes they made etc.

2.   Why do you think they were the way they were?

This is a very different sort of question. It asks you to step outside of yourself and ask not, how did they hurt me or disappoint me – but rather, what were the pressures and difficulties they were under. It interrupts the circuit of hurt-blame, replacing it with hurt-understanding.

Blaming one’s parents isn’t – of course – always a mistake. It’s just that doing so can get in the way of a better understanding of the nature of a problem. And hence of what it is possible to do about it.

vi. Taste and your idea of happiness

We aren’t used to the idea that interior decoration can tell us anything very intimate about ourselves. But aesthetic preferences can yield revealing insights. That’s because personal taste reflects other things about us.

We may be disturbed by unfortunate associations to certain kinds of objects or environments. At a particular age you might have seen a film in which a character who deeply appealed to you, lived in rather grand classical mansion; ever since then you’ve had quiet – but quite strong – positive feelings about such places. Understanding the attraction leads back to the prior question: what it was about that character that you found so appealing? Or it may be that a rather fearsome relative was very critical of mess, which touched off a rebellious opposite in you; you find a bit of clutter and a confusion of colours homely and endearing (which that person definitely was not). Analysing the response helps uncover the further concerns – the loves, antipathies, hopes and fears – that helped to shape your taste.

We are drawn to things we don’t have enough of. Aesthetic preference is often connected to the pursuit of balance. If we are typically stressed and anxious, we might be very attracted to serene environments. A person who has been assailed too often by boorish people, might be very attracted to things that suggest refinement, order and harmony: the lack of which has been painfully brought home to them.  

We find neglected parts of ourselves in objects: in daily life we may give little attention or respect to aspects of our own nature that – however – hint at their existence in our tastes. The thrilled response to a grand interior in another wise demure individual suggest a bolder, more ambitious side to them.

Consider these different interiors:

cosy clutter

Which one do you hate?

Which one are you drawn to?

The underlying theory is that we are drawn to visual styles which capture what is MISSING in our psyches.

In other words, the person attracted to calm-minimalism doesn’t feel calm inside. They feel on the verge of being overwhelmed – and look to a taste that can CORRECT their inclinations.

Similarly with the bohemian style – this is favoured not by bohemians, but by people deeply frightened of their native impulses towards conformity and rigidity.

We use visual decoration styles to correct/rebalance ourselves.

vii. Wisdom and the Search for Moments of Higher Consciousness

Often, self-knowledge is concerned with describing more accurately how one feels. It follows the path of introspection. You try work out what you actually feel when you look at the sky or watch a film or feel bored in a meeting.  

But there’s another side to self-knowledge: becoming more aware of how the self-machine works: of how your mind operates and distorts things. For instance, you learn that eating a lot of chocolate makes you feel a bit queasy afterwards. Eating chocolate doesn’t feel as if it will do that. It’s so delicious you can’t resist another square. But gradually you just learn that this is how your particular machine work: if you put in a lot of chocolate it starts to create problems. Just as we can learn how the body works, we can also learn how the mind works.

One of the major implication of evolutionary theory is that the human brain itself has evolved over a very long period of time. The body, we readily accept, carries many indications of its long, long developmental story. The kind of eyes we have, the way our knees work or how our lungs extract oxygen from the air are not unique to humans. These kinds of organs and joints evolved long before humans were around.  

So too with our brains. Hence the usefulness of talking about a ‘ reptilian’ part of the brain, even though it isn’t absolutely correct scientifically (we don’t literally have the brain of lizard encased within our skulls). We have instincts and response patterns that evolved to suit being chased by predators or needing mate no matter what, that are more suited to existence in the pleistocene era than to life in a modern metropolis (or rural farming community).  

The reptilian brain is interested only in survival and responds instinctively and fast. It is out for itself, it has no capacity for empathy or morality. It is deeply and constitutionally selfish.  

But we also have a more evolved mature brain (scientists call it the neocortex ) which is able to gain a distance from immediate reptilian demands. It can observe rather than submit to the sexual impulse: it can study, rather than obey, selfish desires etc.  

The picture of ourselves – as having a sophisticated mind sitting on top of a primitive one – is very helpful because it makes sense of some of our troubles and of our potential for addressing them. The primitive brain is very concerned with safety and reproduction. It is impatient. It’s violent in asserting itself. It has no interest in reasons and explanations. It cannot comprehend what an apology is. In some of our worst moments, the primitive brain is doing the work. From its point of view, smashing a glass on the table might be an ideal way of getting someone to agree with you; being insulting, aggressive and boorish might look like a great way of getting to have sex with someone.

That we can behave very badly is, therefore, entirely unsurprising. But it means also that such bad behaviour cannot possible be the whole story about us. Having a divided brain – a reptilian and non-reptilian mind – means that the task is always to get the higher part of the mind to be more in charge and to take over whenever things get complicated. If we understand this about ourselves than we don’t have to go around thinking that we are totally worthless and awful because we did a genuinely very stupid and pretty nasty thing. The evolutionary story gives a more helpful explanation. You are not thoroughly bad at all. You just have a current problem: your modern brain is not as strong as it needs to be – and your reptilian brain is far too strong.  

It defines the nature of the task: I need to get my non-reptile brain to be more prominent. And I need to learn to distinguish which of my hopes, fears and desires belong to the reptilian mind – and which are soundly founded in the higher rationality of the more evolved mind.  

What we can call higher-consciousness occurs as we flex the muscles of our modern brain; and manage to free ourselves from the hold of the reptilian brain, gaining perspective over our immediate impulses and moods.

In another kind of language, we’d say we had been able to ‘free ourselves’ from the ego and to survey our lives and the world free of the immediate imperatives of being ourselves.

There are FIVE key ways this happens.

One: Fostering a capacity to observe one’s cruder impulses

Very occasionally, perhaps late at night, when the pressures of the day have receded, we have access to what feel like moments of wisdom – they usually don’t last very long but for a short period of time we have access to crucial ideas or insights about the way we operate, which is free of the normal subjectivity, defensiveness or self-justification.

In the morning – and for pretty much the whole day – you are in a rush. At dinner, your partner makes a comment about how you eat too fast or how you tune out when they are talking about their work – and immediately you get defensive; you insist you don’t do these things, you say they are hypercritical, that they don’t care and are always coldly judging you. You are furious and might slam the door.

Then lying awake in the middle of the night you have a powerful sense that quite often you move too fast defend yourself whenever your partner says anything a bit critical. You can picture yourself doing it. They start to speak, it’s so familiar, and immediately you are crouching, ready to deflect the blow. And so you don’t really hear what they have to say. You admit – very, very privately – that you do quite often stop paying attention when they talk about work; it’s not merely that you have stopped listening to all the ins and outs of life in their office; it’s that you have stopped paying attention to the way they are speaking, to what it means to them and why.

So, they’ve got a point. But you feel compelled to say they don’t. And truth be told you know you do eat too fast. Yes, it’s annoying to have it pointed out. But you realise that being a bit critical is a way your partner tries to show affection and care; it’s a possessive gesture on their part. You want to say you’re sorry, hug them, do it differently. In the dark it all makes sense.

The midnight insight was right. It was a moment of self knowledge. It was a moment of ‘higher consciousness’ when it was possible to stand back from experience and see it more clearly. You felt sufficiently safe and calm to observe your own behaviour without rushing to either condemn or defend it. You became wiser about yourself.

Such states of mind are, however, intermittent. Most of the time we have to be very intent on defending our patch, on fighting our cause. We lack the calm to observe our primitive mind in action.

Two: Developing a capacity to interpret the behaviour of others, rather than merely react to it automatically  

Most of the time, we respond immediately (and rather powerfully) to the behaviour of others.

They honk the horn at us, we get furious and honk back.

They say something mean-sounding, we insult them right back.

The natural instinct is to meet the primitive with the primitive. Our own reptile nature wants to attack their reptile selves and beat them back into their hole.

But there is, of course, another option – one of the great marvels of evolution and civilisation (morality and religion too).

The civilised, higher move is to understand that they are behaving badly for a reason which they are in no position to tell you about, so under pressure are they from their more primitive minds.

Maybe they have had a hard day. Maybe they are worried about something. Perhaps they have felt squashed and sidelined in their career and now having someone squeeze in in front of them on the road is too much to bear. Instead of simply seeing them as the dangerous enemy, we can recognise that they are distressed and that their bad behaviour (the impatient horn the swearing behind the windscreen) is a symptom of hurt rather than of ‘evil’.

It’s an astonishing gradual evolution to develop the ability to do this – to explain other people’s behaviour as caused by their distress, rather than simply to see it in terms of how it affects us. There must have been a first time in human history this happened. And in each life there is perhaps a similar awakening. But often it is so hard for this higher consciousness to break through; we are so deeply caught up in our own troubles that we find it almost impossible to be generous in our assessment of why others are causing us trouble:

Try out these ideas (they sound foreign); they are examples of higher consciousness:

• the sales assistant is being curt with your request, perhaps because his relationship is breaking up. It isn’t about you.
• the snobbish person at the party is, ultimately, insecure (although they look self-confident and have just ignored you).
• the lout who scratches your car is terrified of being exposed as sexually inadequate.
• the boaster at the bar is convinced that he can never be loved.

Three: Developing a capacity for universal love

Once we are able to interpret someone’s pain-inducing behaviour as having roots in their own pain, we’re on the threshold of a remarkable steps. It then appears that in truth, no one in this world is ever simply ‘nasty’. They are always hurt – and this means that the appropriate response to humanity is not fear, cynicism or aggression, but love.

Once we relinquish our egos, and loosen ourselves from the grip of our primitive defensive and aggressive thought-processes, we are free to consider humanity in a much more benign light. We might even, at an extreme (this might happen only very late at night once in a while), feel that we could love everyone, that no human could be outside the circle of our sympathy.  

We attain a state reported by certain yogis, christian ascetics and buddhist monks – wherein we feel that we have loosened ourselves from the self: we are looking at the world as if we were not ourselves, without the usual filter of our interests, passions and needs.

And the world, at that moment, reveals itself as quite different: a place of suffering and misguided effort, a place full of people striving to be heard and lashing out against others.

The fitting response is universal sympathy and kindness.  

We have taken self-knowledge in a new and interesting direction. Being so aware of ourselves that we can remove the ‘lower self’ from the windscreen through which we look at things – and therefore look at things in a truer and unegoistic way.

For years you have had to fight your corner: you have had to grab at every opportunity, defend yourself, look out for your interests. You have to feed and clothe yourself, pay the bills, manage your education, deal as best you can with your own moods and demons. You have to assert your rights, justify your actions and your choices. Being alive is all there is. You are understandably obsessed with your own life – what option do you have?

But there are moments when one’s own life feels less precious, or less crucial – and not in a despairing way. And without the support of any imagined afterlife.  It might be that the fear of not-existing is – if only for a little while – less intense. Perhaps looking out over the ocean at dusk or walking in woodland in winter, or listening to a particular piece of music Bach’s double violin concerto, that it would be alright not to exist; one can contemplate a world in which one is no longer present with some tranquility and still feel appreciative of life. In such rare moments of higher consciousness, one’s mortality is less of a burden; one’s interests can be put aside;  you can fuse with transient things: trees, wind, waves breaking on the shore. From that higher point of view, status doesn’t seem important, possession don’t seem to matter, grievances lose their urgency; one is serene. If certain people could encounter you at this point they be amazed at the transformation.  

These higher states of consciousness are short lived. We have to accept that. We shouldn’t aspire to make them permanent – because they don’t sit so well with many of the very important practical tasks that we need to attend to. We don’t need to be always in them. But we do need to make the most of them. We have to harvest them and preserve them so that we can have access to them when we need them most. The problem is that when we are in these higher states of mind we have highly important insights; but we lose access to them when we return to the ordinary conditions of life. And so we don’t get the benefit of the insight that was there in those special moments.

In the past, religions have been very interested in this move. The Christian churches, for instance, cottoned onto the fact that at times we can recognise that we have been unfair and disloyal to others. It’s a huge triumph over the primitive mind which has little time for such possibilities. They established rituals designed to intensify, prolong and deepen these fragile insights. There was, for example, highly charged words of a special prayer, the Confiteor:

I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sister

that I have sinned through my own fault, in thoughts and in my words, in what

I have done and in what I have failed to do…

So that, ideally, on a very regular basis people would have a powerful experience of recognising that they might have been cruel, harsh, thoughtless, greedy or mean. It didn’t necessarily always work, of course, but the idea is highly significant. It’s an attempt to make this kind of experience less random. To give it more power in our lives and to make the best use of it.

The ideal, which is obviously separable from Christianity and involves not occult belief, is that the higher parts of the mind should be more reliable and more powerful.

Four: Developing a suspicion about your own feelings

Normally we are used to the idea of gaining self-knowledge by asking ourselves ever more closely: how do I feel about this?

The idea is that you know ‘who you really are’, by studying your feelings.

But this suggestion here is something different, indeed the opposite.

What we advise is a capacity to stand aside from feelings in order to recognise their potentially deceptive nature. It means acknowledging a fundamental distinction between what we might feel about a situation – and what it might actually be.  

The classic example of this historically is when humans learnt for the first time to accept that even though the earth feels flat, it is in fact round. In other words, when humans learnt to be suspicious about their feelings, trusting instead to the data of their rational minds – overruling feeling for the sake of reason. This has come very very late on in human evolution, and in day-to-day life, most of us operate in a pre-Copernican way, especially as regards our emotional lives.

One exception though, from which we can learn a lot, is children. When we deal with small children, we rather easily override our reptilian responses and aim for a higher interpretation. We look beyond what seems, and try to picture what is.  

Imagine a child who is whiny and then goes up to its parent and hits it and says, I hate you.

The primitive response is to hit back. The more sophisticated one is to ask: what is going on beneath what I can see of the child’s behaviour?

And, because it’s 6pm and they haven’t had a nap and had a bit of a cold, one will quite naturally ascribe the bad mood to these factors. The higher mind will have interpreted the situation.

However wise this might be, we find it hard to perform the exercise on ourselves.

We too might be feeling tired and hungry. But we don’t ask ourselves what role this might be playing in our sudden sense that everyone hates us and that our careers are a disaster.  

These seem like entirely reasonable conclusions to draw from real facts. But, in reality, they are the outcome of a very tired and hungry mind trying to deal with existence. After a snack and a lie down, our views will be very different.

In other words, our minds are filled with ideas that seem to be rationally founded but actually are not, that owe much to lower physical processes that are denied or unrecognised.  

Self-knowledge means becoming much better at realising how many of our mental processes (extending to things like our views on politics and our assessments of our careers and our lovers) can be explained by:

– not having drunk enough water

– not having had enough sleep

– lacking something to eat

If you haven’t slept well for a few nights and you’ve been working too hard, a few not too tactful comments from your partner can leave you considering divorce. It feels as if your relationship is in tatters, that you need to take a life-changing, dramatic and risky step; that the compromises, accommodations and love of the last few years have all been wasted. The problem looks enormous. But actually it isn’t. All that’s wrong is that you are tired. It’s shockingly hard for us to distinguish between a need of the body and a harrowing emotional conflict.

Or it might be that, having skipped breakfast, a tricky work meeting leaves you determined to resign. Things will be tough, certainly, but anything is better than continuing to sell your soul to these mindless fools. The problem looks as if it is huge – one’s career has taken a calamitous turn. Yet the real cause may be no more than depleted blood-sugar levels.

Being told that one’s view of existence is – at this moment – not the product of reason but of indigestion or exhaustion, is utterly maddening. Especially when it is true. We want to believe our woes are essentially all high flown – intellectual, moral and existential – when they are often no more, but also no less, than a disturbance of the body.

We should be careful of over-intellectualising. To be happy, we require big things (money, freedom, love), but we need a lot of semi-insultingly little things too (enough sleep, a good diet, a sunny sky). Babies know this well. They’re usefully unintellectual. They’re on hand to remind us of some profound truths.

The operative question, then, isn’t always ‘how do I feel?’ Self-knowledge might equally derive from asking: how do I function? What role are emotions playing in my life? And it can lead us, crucially, at times to discount them despite their strength. This is the higher capacity to stand aside from one’s feelings.

When you are tired, dehydrated or hungry, stressed or frightened these states of mind alter your perception of reality. The sense become misleading. Other people’s behaviour is liable to look more menacing than it is; we find it harder to grasp their more complex motives. Threats look bigger than they are; sources of security or pleasure look smaller, more fragile and more distant than in truth they are.

The higher position is to recognise that this is a way the self functions. This is what tiredness, dehydration and such states do to us. So we know to be suspicious of certain states of mind, we have to learn not to act on them. Wisdom means getting better at asking: is this reality or might I be seeing things in a distorted way, due to a lack of lunch or 2 hours less sleep.

PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION

Ordering our minds rather than emptying them.

Even though our minds ostensibly belong to us, we don’t always control or know what is in them. There are always some ideas, bang in the middle of consciousness, that are thoroughly and immediately clear to us: for example, that we love our children. Or that we have to be out of the house by 7.40am. Or, that we are keen to have something salty to eat right now. These thoughts feel obvious without burdening us with uncertainty or any requirement that we reflect harder on them.

But a host of other ideas tend to hover in a far more unfocused state. For example, we may know that our career needs to change, but it’s hard to say much more. Or we feel some resentment against our partner over an upsetting incident the night before, but we can’t pin down with any accuracy what we’re in fact bitter or sad about. Our confusions sometimes have a positive character about them but are perplexing all the same: perhaps there was something deeply ‘exciting’ about a canal-side cafe we discovered in Amsterdam or the sight of a person reading on a train or the way the sun lit up the sky in the evening after the storm, but it may be equally hard to put a finger on the meaning of these feelings.

Unfocused thoughts are constantly orbiting our minds, but from where we are, from the observatory of our conscious selves (as it were), we can’t grasp them distinctly. We speak of needing to ‘sort our heads out’ or to ‘get on top of things’, but quite how one does something like this isn’t obvious – or very much discussed. There is one response to dealing with our minds that has become immensely popular in the West in recent years. Drawn from the traditions of Buddhism, the practice of meditation has gripped the Western imagination, presenting itself as a solution to the problems of our chaotic minds. It is estimated that 1 in 10 adults in the US has taken part in some form of structured meditation.

Adherents of meditation suggest that we sit very quietly, in a particular bodily position, and strive, through a variety of exercises, to empty our minds of content, quite literally to push or draw away the disturbing and unfocused objects of consciousness to the periphery of our minds, leaving a central space empty and serene. In the Buddhist world-view, anxieties and excitements are not trying to tell us anything especially interesting or valuable. We continuously fret without good purpose, about this or that random and vain thing – and therefore the best solution is simply to push the objects of the mind to one side.

Buddhist meditation has been so successful, we are liable to forget another effective and in some ways superior path to finding peace of mind, this one rooted in the Western tradition: Philosophical Meditation. Like its Eastern counterpart, Philosophical Meditation wants our thoughts, feelings and anxieties to trouble us less, but it seeks to sort out our minds in a very different manner. At heart, it doesn’t believe that the contents of our minds are nonsensical or meaningless. Our worries may seem like a nuisance but they are in fact neurotically garbled but important signals about how we should direct our lives. They contain complex clues as to our development. Therefore, rather than wanting simply to empty our minds of content, practitioners of Philosophical Meditation encourage us to clean these minds up: they want to bring the content that troubles us more securely into focus, and thereby usher in calm through understanding rather than through evacuation.

How does one bring the confused objects of the mind into focus? There are instructions for Philosophical Meditation, just as there are for Buddhist Meditation (a little artificiality in these matters may just be what we need to lend the process discipline). The first priority is to set aside a bit of time, ideally 20 minutes, once a day. One should sit with a pad of paper and start by asking oneself a very simple set of questions: what is it that I am regretful, anxious or excited about at present? One is invited to download the immediate contents of one’s mind. One will by nature be a little unsure of what our feelings mean, so it is best simply to write down – without thinking or censoring ourselves – one or two words around each feeling. It’s a case of tipping out the contents of the mind onto the paper as unselfconsciously as possible. One might, for example, write down: Darren, Cologne trip, weekend, shoes, Mum, face at train station… The task is then to try to convert each of these words from an ambiguous and silent worry, regret or thrill into something one can understand, grasp, order and eventually better control. Success in this meditation relies on a skilful process of questioning. Imagine these thoughts as ineloquent and muddled strangers, who are full of valuable ideas, but whom one has to get to know in a roundabout way, by directing just the right questions at them. [See the link at the end of this piece for a more complete Guide to Philosophical Meditation]

Philosophical Meditation brings us calm not by removing issues, but by helping us to understand them, thereby evaporating some of the paranoia and static that might otherwise cling to them. When confused objects of consciousness become clearer, they stop bothering us quite so much. Problems don’t disappear, but they assume proportion and can be managed. For example, we may make ourselves at home with an array of administrative worries that had been clumsily concealed under the vague title of ‘the Cologne trip’. The word ‘Darren’ might disclose someone we envy, but who holds out a fascinating run of clues as to how we might make a new move in our career. The word ‘weekend’ yields feelings towards one’s partner which are both resentful and yet capable of being discussed and perhaps worked through in the evening. Sorting out our minds doesn’t just feel comforting (like tidying our homes), it also spares us grave errors.

Confused excitement can be highly dangerous when it involves career ambitions. Imagine someone with a tendency to experience excitement when reading Vogue or Gourmet Traveller – and who then declares, without much attempt to analyse the feeling, that they want ‘to work in magazines’. It may seem reasonable enough for them to send off a CV to the magazine company HQ. After many efforts, they may be offered a lowly internship. It might take a few years and a lot of heartache before they realise that it wasn’t really the magazines themselves that were the true object of their attraction to begin with. Actually what was really speaking to this person was the idea of working in a close-knit team in an area that wasn’t finance (where Mum, a caustic and forbidding figure, puritanical in matters of sex and money, spent her career). Philosophical Meditation can, among other things, save us a lot of time.

Similar dangers play out when one is upset or anxious. Imagine that yesterday you had dinner at the house of a conspicuously successful friend. They’d just got back from a holiday in the Maldives and were telling you about their latest business venture in pharmaceuticals. You left feeling restless and annoyed, but you didn’t know why. Your own life felt flat and dispiriting. Vague plans about what to do swirled around in your head. Maybe you could have a brilliant idea and start a business. Somehow you wanted your life to be more like your friend’s. But what is a brilliant idea in business? How does one get going?

Then your partner said something about having set up a dinner with her mother. At that moment, from somewhere mysterious in you, you felt a wave of anger – and shouted something about the house always being left in such a mess. After all, there was a set of dirty plates in your field of vision. But your partner said you were crazy, the house wasn’t that messy anyway, and how long would it take to tidy away a few plates in the first place…? She walked out of the room crossly and so tonight, you’ll be sleeping on the sofa again for a whole set of reasons that it’s now becoming very hard to disentangle, let alone discuss with any degree of maturity.

Countless agonies and mistakes stem from not properly analysing our confused inner experiences. We pick the wrong job; get together with the wrong person, run away from the right person; spend our money on the wrong things and don’t do justice to our talents and deeper aspirations. Acting without Philosophical Meditation is like being allowed to embark on a trip without checking the equipment or the map. We trust the feelings without duly acknowledging that they may prompt us in some catastrophic directions.

The longing to empty the mind, to calm turbulent thoughts isn’t completely opposed to the exercise of cleaning up the mind, decoding, analysing and ordering its contents. It’s just that at the moment, as societies, we have allowed ourselves to get overly seduced by the promise of tranquility, so that we always strive to empty the mind, instead of attempting to understand its contents. We see our agitation as the result of thinking too much, rather than of not having – as yet – thought enough. It’s time for our societies to take on board the promises and advantages of Philosophical Meditation.

For a step-by-step guide to Philosophical Meditation, see here .

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

How can one improve and speed up self-knowledge.

One of the key ways in which we can get to know ourselves and others is through conversation. Unfortunately, we tend to have a ‘Romantic’ conception of conversation. We believe that in the right setting – distressed old wooden tables, food from Liguria, bruschetta – conversation will flow naturally, without special effort.

The reality is that conversation is an achievement, something we might need to learn. Key to it is having the right questions to hand.

Approach self-knowledge as a game. It can be fun.

Let’s look at some very good questions to ask via the 100x question packs done by the School of Life.

For example:

What would you most like to be complimented on in a relationship? Where do you think you’re especially good as a person?

Which of your flaws do you want to be treated more generously?

What would you tell your younger self about love?

What is one incident you would like to apologise to a lover or friend for?

Finish the following sentences:

When I am anxious in a relationship, I tend to….

The other then tends to respond by….

which makes me…

When I argue, on the surface I show ……, but inside I feel….

Without thinking too hard, let’s finish these sentence stems about our feelings towards one another:

I am puzzled by…

I am hurt by…

I am afraid that…

I am frustrated by…

I am happier when…

I appreciate…

WHAT DOES THE WISE PERSON END UP KNOWING ABOUT THEMSELVES?

Of course, what individuals know is specific to them. But we can still identify the kind of things they know. If someone gains a lot of self-knowledge how would this show up in their behaviour? How would self-knowledge impact on their lives? Self-knowledge isn’t so much a set of statements that one gives assent to. Rather it’s a set of capacities for dealing better with one’s needs and weaknesses and generally being better at handling oneself. The wise, self-knowing person …

— Would be less prone to blame others for their troubles. They get upset, they get bothered, they feel anxious; things still go wrong. But self-knowledge admits the full extent of responsibility. So annoyance doesn’t get channelled into being angry with the wrong person – who isn’t really to blame.

— They’d likely be less frustrated at work: it’s not that they have the perfect job. They know themselves well enough to seek out the kind of work they can do comfortably; they don’t push needlessly to get ahead; they can cope fairly well with criticism, so they don’t get unduly anxious in a competitive environment.

— They’d panic a bit less: panic is caused by fear; and mostly the fear is psychological, rather than physical – fear of humiliation of rejection or being bored. Great self-knowledge diminishes these fears.

— They’d be less prone to envy – because envy often comes from not quite knowing what you really need.

—They don’t stress quite so much about money; that’s because they are more alert to what really matters to them; they are less given to impulse spending; they are better at saving.

— They might have fewer crushes. They don’t project wildly onto others and so are less likely to suppose that a stranger glimpsed on a train or at the next table is their ideal soul-mate.

— They are good at apologising, partly because they can fully appreciate that they are at times very annoying – even if unintentionally so – to others. They can mull over the fact that they might be in the wrong, without getting too defensive.  

— They tend to be good conversationalists. Because they are alert to why they do things as they do – and don’t merely assert what they do think. They’re also slow to assume that others automatically think as they do. They can identify widely with different kinds of people because they can pick up on many different aspects of their own experience at different stages of life.

Full Article Index

• 01. Ostracism Anxiety
• 02. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 03. Why the world can seem so frightening - and how to make it feel less so
• 04. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 05. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 06. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 07. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 08. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 09. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 10. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 11. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 12. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 13. Auditing Our Worries
• 14. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 15. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 16. The Age of Agitation
• 17. How to Sleep Better
• 18. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 19. On Being 'Triggered'
• 20. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 21. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 22. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 23. On Skin Picking
• 24. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 25. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 26. After the Storm
• 27. Thoughts for the Storm
• 28. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 29. Preparing for Disaster
• 30. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 31. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 32. What Everybody Really Wants
• 33. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 34. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 35. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 36. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 37. On Anxiety
• 38. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 39. On Being Scared All the Time
• 40. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 41. On Asking for Help
• 42. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 43. On Panic Attacks
• 01. A Place for Despair
• 02. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 03. How to Make It Through
• 04. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 05. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 06. When I Am Called to Die
• 07. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 08. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 09. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 10. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 11. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 12. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 13. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 14. Building the Cathedral
• 15. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 16. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 17. How to Endure
• 18. Everything Is So Weird
• 19. Escaping Into History
• 20. The Inevitability of Choice
• 21. What Would Jesus Do?
• 22. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 23. You Still Have Time
• 24. I Will Survive!
• 25. On Trying to Control the Future
• 26. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 27. No One Knows
• 28. There is No Happily Ever After
• 29. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 30. There is Always a Plan B
• 31. The Consolations of History
• 32. The Lessons of Nature
• 33. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 34. On the Sublime
• 35. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 36. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 37. On Flowers
• 38. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 39. The Wisdom of Animals
• 40. The Lottery of Life
• 41. Untranslatable Words
• 42. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 43. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 44. The Faulty Walnut
• 45. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 46. On the Wisdom of Space
• 47. Memento Mori
• 48. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 49. On Calming Places
• 50. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 51. The Consolations of a Bath
• 52. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 53. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 54. On Sunshine
• 01. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 02. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 03. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 04. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 05. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 06. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 07. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 08. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 09. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 10. Daring to Be Simple
• 11. Haikus and Appreciation
• 12. The Call of Calm
• 13. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 14. How to Process Your Emotions
• 15. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 16. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 17. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 18. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 19. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 20. How to Live in a Hut
• 21. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 22. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 23. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 24. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 25. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 26. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 27. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 28. On Soothing
• 29. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 30. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 31. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 32. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 33. Hypervigilance
• 34. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 35. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 36. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 37. The Pursuit of Calm
• 38. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 02. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 03. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 04. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 05. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 06. Rethinking Divorce
• 07. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 08. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 09. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 10. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 11. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 12. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 13. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 15. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 16. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 17. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 18. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 19. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 20. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 21. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 22. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 23. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 24. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 25. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 26. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 27. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 28. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 29. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 30. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 31. How to Break Up
• 32. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 33. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 34. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 35. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 36. Coping with Betrayal
• 37. Can Exes be Friends?
• 38. How to Get Over Someone
• 39. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 40. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 41. How to End a Relationship
• 42. Stay or Leave?
• 43. How to Get Divorced
• 44. On Forgetting Lovers
• 45. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 02. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 03. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 04. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 05. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 06. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 07. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 08. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 09. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 11. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 12. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 13. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 14. Should I Be With Them?
• 15. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 16. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 17. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 18. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 19. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 20. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 21. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 22. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 23. Can People Change?
• 24. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 25. The Stranger You Live With
• 26. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 27. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 28. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 29. On Rescue Fantasies
• 30. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 31. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 32. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 33. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 34. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 35. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 36. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 37. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 38. How to Love Ugly People
• 39. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 40. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 41. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 42. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 43. The Partner as Child Theory
• 44. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 45. Meet the Parents
• 46. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 47. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 48. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 02. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 03. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 04. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 05. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 06. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 07. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 08. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 09. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 10. A Role for Lies
• 11. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 12. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 13. When Love Isn't Easy
• 14. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 15. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 16. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 17. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 18. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 19. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 20. On Gaslighting
• 21. Why We Play Games in Love
• 22. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 23. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 24. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 25. Do You Still Love Me?
• 26. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 27. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 28. The Art of Complaining
• 29. The Challenges of Communication
• 30. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 31. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 32. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 33. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 34. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 35. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 36. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 37. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 38. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 39. A History of Arguments
• 40. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 41. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 42. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 43. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 44. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 45. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 46. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 47. How to Argue in Relationships
• 48. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 49. Be the Change You Want To See
• 50. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 51. Love and Sulking
• 52. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 53. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 54. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 55. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 56. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 57. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 58. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 59. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 60. If It Wasn't for You...
• 61. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 62. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 02. Being Honest on a Date
• 03. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 04. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 05. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 06. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 07. A Brief History of Dating
• 08. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 09. Existentialism and Dating
• 10. What to Talk About on a Date
• 11. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 12. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 13. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 18. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 19. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 20. Loving and Being Loved
• 21. Romantic Realism
• 22. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 02. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 03. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 04. Rethinking Gender
• 05. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 06. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 07. Desire and Intimacy
• 08. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 09. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 10. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 11. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 12. On Still Being a Virgin
• 13. Love and Sex
• 14. Impotence and Respect
• 15. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 16. The Excitement of Kissing
• 17. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 18. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 19. On Art and Masturbation
• 20. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 21. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 22. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 23. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 24. Sexual Liberation
• 25. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 26. On Porn Addiction
• 27. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 28. Why We Go Off Sex
• 29. On Being a Sleazebag
• 30. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 02. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 03. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 04. The Fear of Being Touched
• 05. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 06. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 07. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 08. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 09. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 10. How to Be Less Defensive
• 11. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 12. You Might Be Mad
• 13. Fears Are Not Facts
• 14. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 15. Am I a Bad Person?
• 16. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 17. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 18. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 19. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 20. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 21. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 22. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 23. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 24. The Roots of Paranoia
• 25. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 26. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 27. How to Be Beautiful
• 28. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 29. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 30. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 31. On Despair and the Imagination
• 32. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 33. The Fear of Death
• 34. I Am Not My Body
• 35. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 36. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 37. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 38. The Problem of Shame
• 39. On Feeling Ugly
• 40. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 41. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 42. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 43. On Being Hated
• 44. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 45. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 46. On Self-Sabotage
• 47. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 48. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 02. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 03. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 04. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 05. How to Make It Through
• 06. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 07. The Breast and the Mouth
• 08. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 09. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 10. The Origins of Sanity
• 11. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 12. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 13. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 14. Locating the Trouble
• 15. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 16. Beyond Sanctimony
• 17. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 18. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 19. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 20. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 21. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 22. Self-Forgiveness
• 23. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 24. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 25. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 26. The Importance of Adolescence
• 27. How to Love Difficult People
• 28. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 29. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 30. Becoming Free
• 31. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 32. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 33. Can People Change?
• 34. When Home is Not Home...
• 35. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 36. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 37. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 38. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 39. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 40. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 41. On Bittersweet Memories
• 42. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 43. The Importance of Atonement
• 44. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 45. On Consolation
• 46. The Inner Idiot
• 47. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 48. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 49. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 50. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 51. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 52. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 53. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 02. How to Recover the Plot
• 03. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 04. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 05. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 06. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 07. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 08. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 09. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 10. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 11. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 12. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 13. Questioning Our Conscience
• 14. A Bedtime Meditation
• 15. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 16. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 17. In Praise of Introspection
• 18. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 19. What is Mental Health?
• 20. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 21. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 22. No One Cares
• 23. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 24. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 25. On Knowing Who One Is
• 26. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 27. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 28. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 29. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 30. Emotional Identity
• 31. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 32. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 33. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. We Are Made of Moods
• 02. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 03. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 04. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 05. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 06. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 07. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 08. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 09. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 10. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 11. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 12. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 13. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 14. The Window of Tolerance
• 15. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 16. Our Right to be Miserable
• 17. How to Manage One's Moods
• 18. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 19. On Disliking Oneself
• 20. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 21. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 22. On Depression
• 23. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 24. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 25. On Not Being in the Moment
• 26. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 27. Twenty Moods
• 28. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 29. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 30. On Feeling Depressed
• 31. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 32. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 33. Our Secret Thoughts
• 34. The Psychology of Colour
• 35. On Self-Pity
• 36. On Irritability
• 37. On Anger
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. Detachment
• 01. On Those Ruined by Success
• 02. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 03. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 04. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 05. Self-Forgiveness
• 06. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 07. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 08. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 09. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 10. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 11. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 12. The Perfectionist Trap
• 13. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 14. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. Intergenerational Trauma
• 02. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 03. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 04. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 05. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 06. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 07. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 08. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 09. The Healing Power of Time
• 10. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 11. On Parenting Our Parents
• 12. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 13. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 14. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 15. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 16. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 17. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 18. How Music Can Heal Us
• 19. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 20. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 21. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 22. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 23. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 24. The Agonies of Shame
• 25. How Trauma Works
• 26. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 27. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 28. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 29. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 30. On Projection
• 31. Self-Archaeology
• 32. It's Not Your Fault
• 33. If Our Parents Never Listened
• 34. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
• 35. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
• 36. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
• 37. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 38. How We Should Have Been Loved
• 39. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
• 40. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 41. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 42. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 43. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 44. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 45. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
• 46. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
• 47. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
• 48. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
• 49. Sharing Our Early Wounds
• 50. Trauma and How to Overcome It
• 51. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
• 52. The Golden Child Syndrome
• 53. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
• 54. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
• 55. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
• 56. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
• 57. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 58. On Suffering in Silence
• 59. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
• 60. Daddy Issues
• 61. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
• 62. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
• 01. The Need for Processing 
• 02. The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
• 03. The Art of Good Listening
• 04. Becoming More Interesting
• 05. In Praise of Small Chats With Strangers
• 06. Why We Should Listen Rather Than Reassure
• 07. How We Can Hurt Without Thinking
• 08. Leaning in to Vulnerability
• 09. How to Become Someone People Will Confide in
• 10. How To Write An Effective Thank You Letter
• 11. How to Be a Good Listener
• 12. How to Comment Online
• 13. Listening as Editing
• 14. The Importance of Flattery
• 15. How to Narrate Your Life Story
• 16. The Art of Listening
• 17. How to Narrate Your Dreams
• 18. How to Talk About Yourself
• 19. Communication
• 20. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 21. On How to Disagree
• 22. On the Art of Conversation
• 01. On Feeling Painfully Different
• 02. Abandoning Hope
• 03. How to Leave a Party
• 04. On Becoming a Hermit
• 05. How to Have a Renaissance
• 06. Think Like an Aristocrat
• 07. Van Gogh's Neglected Genius
• 08. How to Be Quietly Confident
• 09. How to Live Like an Exile
• 10. How to Cope With Bullying
• 11. Stop Being So Nice
• 12. The Origins of Shyness
• 13. On Friendliness to Strangers
• 14. What to Do at Parties If You Hate Small Talk
• 15. How to Approach Strangers at A Party
• 16. How to Be Comfortable on Your Own in Public
• 17. Akrasia - or Why We Don't Do What We Believe
• 18. Why We Think So Much about Our Hair
• 19. Aphorisms on Confidence
• 20. How Knowledge of Difficulties Lends Confidence
• 21. How Thinking You’re an Idiot Lends Confidence
• 22. How to Overcome Shyness
• 23. The Mind-Body Problem
• 24. The Impostor Syndrome
• 25. On the Origins of Confidence
• 26. Self-Esteem
• 27. On Confidence
• 28. On Not Liking the Way One Looks
• 02. Why Losers Make the Best Friends
• 03. Our Very Best Friends
• 04. The Difficulties of Oversharing
• 05. Is It OK to Outgrow Our Friends?
• 06. Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely
• 07. On 'Complicated' Friendships
• 08. The Friend Who Can Tease Us
• 09. Don't Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends
• 10. The Forgotten Art of Making Friends
• 11. The Friend Who Balances Us
• 12. The Purpose of Friendship
• 13. Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely
• 14. How to Lose Friends
• 15. Why Misfits Make Great Friends
• 16. How to Handle an Envious Friend
• 17. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 18. Companionship and Mental Health
• 19. How Often Do We Need to Go to Parties?
• 20. Virtual Dinners: Conversation Menus
• 21. The Cleaning Party
• 22. On Talking Horizontally
• 23. Dinner Table Orchestra
• 24. On Sofa Jumping
• 25. On Studying Someone Else's Hands
• 26. What Women and Men May Learn from One Another When They are Just Friends
• 27. How to Say 'I Love You' to a Friend
• 28. How to End a Friendship
• 29. What Can Stop the Loneliness?
• 30. Why Men Are So Bad at Friendship
• 31. What Would An Ideal Friend Be Like?
• 32. 'Couldn't We Just Be Friends?'
• 33. On Acquiring an Enemy
• 34. Why Old Friends Matter
• 35. Why Not to Panic about Enemies
• 36. What Is the Purpose of Friendship?
• 37. Friendship and Vulnerability
• 38. On Socks and Friendship
• 39. The Teasing of Old Friends
• 01. The Boring Person
• 02. The Loveliest People in the World
• 03. The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
• 04. The Origins of Shifty People
• 05. The Many Faults of Other People
• 06. Why Nice People Give Us the 'Ick'
• 07. How to Become a More Interesting Person
• 08. The Challenges of Hugging
• 09. Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People
• 10. The Origins of People Pleasing
• 11. The Eyes of Love
• 12. Kindness Isn't Weakness
• 13. Why We're All Capable of Damaging Others
• 14. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 15. What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters
• 16. The Need for Kindness
• 17. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 18. What to Do When a Stranger Annoys You
• 19. How to Choose A Good Present
• 20. How to Be a Good Guest
• 21. How To Make People Feel Good about Themselves
• 22. How To Tell When You Are Being A Bore
• 23. What Is Empathy?
• 24. How Not to Rant
• 25. How Not to Be Boring
• 26. On Eggs and Compassion
• 27. How to Become an Adult
• 28. People-Pleasing: and How to Overcome It
• 29. Why Truly Sociable People Hate Parties
• 30. How to Be Diplomatic
• 31. Sane Insanity
• 32. Charity of Interpretation
• 33. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 34. The Solution to Clumsiness
• 35. How to Be a Man
• 36. Political Correctness vs. Politeness
• 37. Aphorisms on Kindness
• 38. Why We Don’t Really Want to Be Nice
• 39. The Charm of Vulnerability
• 40. The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills
• 41. How to Be Open-Minded
• 42. Why Kind People Always Lie
• 43. How to Be Warm
• 44. The Problem of Over-Friendliness
• 45. How to Forgive
• 46. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 47. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 48. On Charm
• 49. On Being Kind
• 50. On Gratitude
• 51. On Forgiveness
• 52. On Charity
• 53. On Wisdom
• 01. How to Fire Someone
• 02. Diplomacy at the Office
• 03. How to Tell a Colleague Their Breath Smells
• 04. How to Screw Up at Work
• 05. In Praise of Teamwork
• 06. How to Become an Entrepreneur
• 07. The Need for Eloquence
• 08. The Nature and Causes of Procrastination
• 09. In Praise of Networking
• 10. Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists
• 11. How to Survive Bureaucracy
• 12. Machismo and Management
• 13. What Art Can Teach Business About Being Fussy
• 14. On Novelists and Manuals
• 15. How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life
• 16. How to Sell
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• 18. Innovation and Creativity
• 19. Innovation and Science Fiction
• 20. The Acceptance of Change
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• 22. Towards Better Collaboration
• 23. How To Make Efficiency a Habit
• 24. On Raising the Prestige of 'Details'
• 25. Monasticism & How to Avoid Distraction
• 26. How to Dare to Begin
• 27. On Meaning – and Motivation
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• 29. On Feedback
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• 01. What Should Truly Motivate Us at Work
• 02. Nature as a Cure for the Sickness of Modern Times
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• 13. Sentimentality in Art - and Business
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• 15. First World Problems
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• 17. Good vs Classical Economics
• 18. What Is a Good Brand?
• 19. Good Economic Measures: Beyond GDP
• 20. What Good Business Should Be
• 21. On the Faultiness of Our Economic Indicators
• 22. On the Dawn of Capitalism
• 23. Utopian Capitalism
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• 01. Do We Need to Read the News?
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• 01. On Small Talk at the Office
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• 01. The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
• 02. Giving Up on Being Special
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• 04. Winners and Losers in the Race of Life
• 05. Being on the Receiving End of Pity
• 06. Shakespeare: 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state...'
• 07. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
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• 10. You Are Not What You Earn
• 11. Artistic Philanthropy
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• 15. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 16. On the Dangers of Success
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• 18. Success at School vs. Success in Life
• 19. Why We Look Down on People Who Don’t Earn Very Much
• 20. What Is 'Success'?
• 21. On Children and Power
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• 25. On Envy
• 26. A Philosophical Exercise for Envy
• 27. On the Envy of Politicians
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• 01. Why Humanity Destroyed Itself
• 02. How Science Could - at Last - Properly Replace Religion
• 03. Our Forgotten Craving for Community
• 04. Why isn't the Future here yet?
• 05. On Changing the World
• 06. What Community Centres Should Be Like
• 07. On Seduction
• 08. The Importance of Utopian Thinking
• 09. Art is Advertising for What We Really Need
• 10. Why the World Stands Ready to Be Changed
• 11. On the Desire to Change the World
• 12. Utopian Collective Pride
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• 14. Utopian Artificial Intelligence
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• 26. The Future of the Banking Industry
• 27. The Future of the Communications Industry
• 28. The Future of the Hotel Industry

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• Socrates and Self-Knowledge

Socrates and Self-Knowledge

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Book description

In this book, the first systematic study of Socrates' reflections on self-knowledge, Christopher Moore examines the ancient precept 'Know yourself' and, drawing on Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and others, reconstructs and reassesses the arguments about self-examination, personal ideals, and moral maturity at the heart of the Socratic project. What has been thought to be a purely epistemological or metaphysical inquiry turns out to be deeply ethical, intellectual, and social. Knowing yourself is more than attending to your beliefs, discerning the structure of your soul, or recognizing your ignorance - it is constituting yourself as a self who can be guided by knowledge toward the good life. This is neither a wholly introspective nor a completely isolated pursuit: we know and constitute ourselves best through dialogue with friends and critics. This rich and original study will be of interest to researchers in the philosophy of Socrates, selfhood, and ancient thought.

‘Christopher Moore presents a new and insightful perspective on [an] old philosophical theme. He invites his readers to rethink the Socratic concept of self-knowledge and the Delphic oracle to know thyself. The upshot of his analysis is an original and important interpretation of the ancient philosophical and literary sources on these topics, especially the Platonic dialogues.'

Paul Schollmeier - University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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Socrates and Self-Knowledge pp i-ii

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Socrates and Self-Knowledge - Title page pp iii-iii

Copyright page pp iv-iv, dedication pp v-v, dedication pp vi-vi, contents pp vii-viii, preface pp ix-xv, acknowledgements pp xvi-xviii, 1 - introduction: socrates and the precept “know yourself” pp 1-53, 2 - charmides: on impossibility and uselessness pp 54-100, 3 - alcibiades: mirrors of the soul pp 101-135, 4 - phaedrus: less conceited than typhon pp 136-184, 5 - philebus: pleasure and unification pp 185-215, 6 - xenophon’smemorabilia4.2: owning yourself pp 216-235, 7 - conclusion: challenges and a defense pp 236-248, bibliography pp 249-265, index pp 266-275, bibliography, altmetric attention score, full text views.

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• Emotional Intelligence

What's So Great About Self-Knowledge?

5 reasons why understanding ourselves is essential for psychological growth..

Posted May 25, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

The maxim “Know thyself” is so ubiquitous that it has become a personal development cliché. But knowing ourselves – truly understanding who we are – is by no means easy. The ancient Greeks knew this well and carved the motto above the portal of the Temple of Apollo. Socrates (470–399 BCE) went even further, declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living. While he put it rather starkly, it is true that if we remain in the dark about our natural preferences, our core strengths and weaknesses, our values, and our hopes for the future, we will find it very hard to live coherent and fulfilling lives. Above all, we will be lacking in control: If we do not understand our basic motivations and fears, we will be tossed around by our emotions like small vessels helplessly adrift on a choppy sea. Ruled by forces that remain incomprehensible to us, we will not be able to navigate towards the shore.

How can we best acquire this most precious form of knowledge? First and foremost, we can rationally analyze our cognitive processes. CBT-style approaches will give us a good indication of our recurring negative thoughts and the areas in which our cognitions may be distorted. Mindfulness -based techniques are particularly useful for honing our emotional intelligence , and for disinterestedly observing our emotional reactions. The psychologist Daniel Goleman understands emotional intelligence as a form of meta-cognitive awareness that is manifest in “recognizing a feeling as it happens.” The “inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy,” he writes.[1] There is a vital difference between simply being caught up in a feeling and developing an awareness that we are being submerged by this feeling. Objective self-observation is therefore crucial for knowing both our cognitive and emotional selves.

We can also travel into the past to conduct some existential detective work, in order to understand how our experiences may shape our reactions in the present. The founding father of psychoanalysis , Sigmund Freud , argues that our mind is like an iceberg – only a small part of it is above the waterline, whilst the rest drifts in the murky depths of our unconscious . Only when we pull our darkest fears and desires into the light of the conscious mind, where we can examine them calmly and analytically, will they begin to lose their monstrosity, and much of their influence. What we do not know consciously – the repressed – is the true “other” to genuine self-knowledge.

To gain a basic understanding of our natural preferences and core strengths and weaknesses, we can also study personality -type theories and fill out psychometric tests. The idea that we can be classified according to our temperamental type can also be traced all the way back to ancient Greece, and, more precisely, to the physician Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BCE). We can still feel the repercussions of Hippocrates’ typology today, in Jungian-inspired psychometric personality tests such as the MBTI and Insights Discovery Profiles, for example. These can be starting points in our quest for self-knowledge, helping us to understand our inclinations and natural powers, and pointing to areas we might wish to develop further.

Finally, we can of course enlist the help of others, such as therapists, analysts, and coaches, on our quest to make better sense of our past and our present. By working with transference or asking us challenging questions that encourage us to view our problems from a new perspective, they can transform our negative narratives about ourselves into kinder and more productive ones.

The crucial question, however, remains: Why should we aspire to self-knowledge in the first place? There are five core reasons:

• Self-knowledge directly relates to one of our basic needs, the desire to learn and to make sense of our experiences. This includes acquiring as much knowledge about our own patterns, preferences, and processes as we can. As in other domains, the more deeply we understand something, the better we can master it. And who doesn’t want to be master in their own house?
• The opposite of self-knowledge is ignorance – about who we really are, our true motives, our deeper patterns, and how we come across. Self-knowledge prevents a discord between our self-perception and how others perceive us. Delusional assessments of our skills and qualities, in the form of “unrecognized ignorance,” can be the cause of great embarrassment when they are unmasked.[2] If our perception of ourselves rests on unsound foundations, we will invest much of our energy in defending our self-image against the threat of cognitive dissonance . Because we have much to hide, and much to lose, we will find it hard to relate to others authentically and openly.
• Freud would argue that self-knowledge emancipates us from being a slave to our unconscious and its many seemingly so irrational whims. Only when we know our patterns, and where they came from, can we manage them effectively. Understanding our histories keeps us from blindly repeating unproductive past patterns. It can also result in a kinder and more compassionate view of what we may regard as our failures.
• Crucially, self-knowledge enables us to be more proactive in response to external events. If we truly know our patterns, our triggers, and our pleasures, and if we have the emotional intelligence to recognize our feelings as they happen, we are much less likely to be dominated by them.
• Finally, self-knowledge is also the necessary first step for initiating positive change. Only by taking stock of what is – in as objective a way as possible – can we plan what we want to change and work towards it.

Self-knowledge, then, quite simply improves our chances of making wiser choices. It turns us into better pilots of our lives, yielding mastery and realism, as well as congruence and alignment. It will also make us more humble. For as Socrates knew well, a vital part of self-knowledge is also knowing what we don’t know and openly acknowledging our ignorance.

[1] Goleman, Daniel (1996). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ . London and New York: Bloomsbury, p. 43.

[2] See Loren Soeiro's excellent post “Why You Might Not Know Yourself as Well as You Think: Understanding the Dunning-Kruger effect is valuable for psychological insight.” Psychology Today, 22 May 2020.

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Ph.D. is a burnout and executive coach and the author of Exhausted: An A-Z for the Weary .

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Essay Papers Writing Online

Tips for crafting a compelling and authentic personal essay.

Writing an essay about yourself can be a daunting task, but when done right, it can be a powerful tool to showcase who you are and what makes you unique. Whether you’re applying for college, a scholarship, or a job, a well-crafted essay can help you stand out from the crowd and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

When writing a personal essay, it’s important to strike a balance between being informative and engaging. You want to provide the reader with insight into your background, experiences, and goals, while also keeping them interested and invested in your story. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of writing a compelling essay about yourself, from brainstorming ideas to polishing your final draft.

Essential Tips for Crafting

When crafting a compelling essay about yourself, it is important to think about your audience and what message you want to convey. Here are some essential tips to help you create an engaging and authentic essay:

A Powerful Personal Essay

Writing a powerful personal essay is a way to express your unique voice and share your personal experiences with the world. By weaving together your thoughts, emotions, and reflections, you can create a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience. To craft a powerful personal essay, start by reflecting on your own experiences and exploring the themes that matter to you. Pay attention to the details and emotions that make your story come alive. Be honest and vulnerable in your writing, as authenticity is key to connecting with your readers. Additionally, consider the structure of your essay and how you can effectively organize your thoughts to engage your audience from beginning to end. By following these tips and staying true to your voice, you can create a powerful personal essay that leaves a lasting impact on your readers.

Choose a Unique Aspect

When writing an essay about yourself, it’s important to focus on a unique aspect of your personality or experiences that sets you apart from others. This could be a specific skill, talent, or life experience that has had a significant impact on your life. By choosing a unique aspect to highlight, you can make your essay more compelling and memorable to the reader. It’s important to showcase what makes you different and showcase your individuality in a way that will capture the reader’s attention.

of Your Personality

When writing about your personality, it’s important to showcase your unique traits and qualities. Describe what sets you apart from others, whether it’s your creativity, resilience, sense of humor, or compassion. Use specific examples and anecdotes to illustrate these characteristics and provide insight into who you are as a person.

Highlight your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses – this shows self-awareness and honesty. Discuss how your personality has evolved over time and mention any experiences that have had a significant impact on shaping who you are today. Remember to be authentic and genuine in your portrayal of yourself as this will make your essay more compelling and engaging to the reader.

Reflect Deeply on

When writing an essay about yourself, it is crucial to take the time to reflect deeply on your life experiences, values, beliefs, and goals. Consider the events that have shaped you into the person you are today, both positive and negative. Think about your strengths and weaknesses, your passions and interests, and how they have influenced your decisions and actions. Reflecting on your personal journey will help you uncover meaningful insights that can make your essay more compelling and authentic.

Your Life Experiences

When it comes to writing an essay about yourself, one of the most compelling aspects to focus on is your life experiences. These experiences shape who you are and provide unique insights into your character. Reflect on significant moments, challenges you’ve overcome, or memorable events that have had a lasting impact on your life.

• Consider discussing pivotal moments that have influenced your beliefs and values.
• Share personal anecdotes that highlight your strengths and resilience.
• Explore how your life experiences have shaped your goals, aspirations, and ambitions.

By sharing your life experiences in your essay, you can showcase your individuality and demonstrate what sets you apart from others. Be genuine, reflective, and honest in recounting the events that have shaped your journey and contributed to the person you are today.

Create a Compelling

When crafting an essay about yourself, it is essential to create a compelling narrative that captures the attention of the reader from the very beginning. Start by brainstorming unique and engaging personal experiences or qualities that you want to highlight in your essay. Consider including vivid anecdotes, insightful reflections, and impactful moments that showcase your character and achievements. Remember to be authentic and sincere in your writing, as this will resonate with your audience and make your essay more relatable. By creating a compelling narrative, you can effectively communicate your story and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Narrative Structure

The narrative structure is crucial when writing an essay about yourself. It helps to create a compelling and engaging story that showcases your unique qualities and experiences. Start by introducing the main theme or message you want to convey in your essay. Then, build a coherent storyline that highlights significant events or moments in your life. Use descriptive language and vivid details to bring your story to life and make it more relatable to the readers. Include a clear beginning, middle, and end to ensure that your essay follows a logical progression and captivates the audience throughout.

Emphasize the lessons you’ve learned from your experiences and how they have shaped your character and outlook on life. Connect these insights to your personal growth and development, demonstrating your resilience, determination, and self-awareness. End your essay on a reflective note, highlighting the impact of your journey on who you are today and what you aspire to achieve in the future. By following a strong narrative structure, you can craft a captivating essay that showcases your authenticity and leaves a lasting impression on the readers.

Highlight Your

When writing an essay about yourself, it is essential to highlight your unique qualities and experiences that set you apart from others. Consider including personal anecdotes, achievements, strengths, and challenges that have shaped your identity. Focus on showcasing your authenticity and individuality to make your essay compelling and engaging.

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1 Introduction: Know Thyself

Dr. Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist in private psychotherapy practice in Oxford, UK, and an associate of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Oxford. He convenes the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, the Oxford Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis, and the Making the Unconscious Conscious seminar series. His research interests lie in psychoanalysis, psychosis, existential phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.

Dr Michael Lacewing is a former Vice-Principal Academic and Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London, an Honorary Reader in Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College, London, and a teacher of philosophy and theology at Christ's Hospital School, Sussex. He has published widely in philosophy of psychoanalysis, metaethics and moral psychology, alongside writing textbooks for A level philosophy and training in Philosophy for Children (P4C).

• Published: 07 November 2018
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This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.

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The importance of knowing yourself: your key to fulfillment

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What does it mean to know yourself?

The importance and benefits of knowing one's self, how to know yourself better, how to improve your self-knowledge, how coaching can help.

Think of the most eccentric person in your life. You know the one. 

The one who either shows up in a disheveled leather jacket or an all-black outfit and a beret. They’re somewhat aloof but always energetic. Unapologetically flamboyant, but always kind and understanding. This person chooses to be themselves, not who they’re expected to be. 

They don’t care about the world’s expectations. This sometimes gets them into trouble or attracts judging glares from nearby strangers. But, you have to admit, it would be nice to have that kind of self-confidence . And you can!

In a world rife with expectations, living authentically can feel impossible. It feels easier to have your path planned for you. But, in the long run, this will only hold you back from living a fulfilling life.

The great philosopher Socrates said it himself: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” 

So if you’re wondering whether authenticity is worth pursuing, the short answer is “yes.” And, for the detail-oriented among you, here’s everything you need to know about the importance of knowing yourself — so you too can find your true self.

Knowing yourself is about discovering what makes you tick. Among other things, it means:

• Learning your likes and dislikes
• Unearthing your beliefs and values
• Knowing your personal boundaries
• Accepting your personality traits
• Being a better team player
• Having a clearer path in your professional life
• Understanding how you interact with others
• Recognizing your core personal values
• Increasing your capacity for self-compassion
• Having a clearer idea of your life’s purpose
• Knowing what it takes to be self-motivated
• Being more adaptable  

Ultimately, all of these things will increase your self-awareness . Being more self-aware lends to enhanced self-development, acceptance, and proactivity while benefiting our overall mental health .

We’ll be more confident, make better decisions, have stronger relationships, and be more honest .

Knowing yourself is about knowing what makes you tick. It means identifying what matters to you, your strengths and weaknesses, your behaviors, tendencies, and thought patterns. This list describes the importance and benefits of knowing one's self:

1. Despite your quirks, flaws, and insecurities, you learn self-love and acceptance. Once you do, you can walk through the world with more confidence and care less about what people think. 

2. You can change your personality flaws and improve on your weaknesses. You are empowered to become who you want to be. This will help you become a better, more well-rounded person.

3. You’ll have more emotional intelligence , which is key to knowing others. You’ll be more conscious of your own emotions and feelings, making it easier to understand another person's point of view.

4. You'll be more confident. Self-doubt disappears when you know and accept yourself, and others won't influence you as easily. It'll be easier to stand your ground .

5. You’ll forge better relationships. It’s easier to share yourself when you know yourself. You’ll also know what kind of people you get along with, so you can find your community .

6. You’ll be less stressed. Self-awareness will help you make decisions that are better for you. And when this happens, you become less stressed about what people think or whether you made the right choice. 

7. You’ll break patterns of disappointment. Y ou'll find repetitive behaviors that lead to poor outcomes when you look inward. Once you name them, you can break them.

8. You’ll be happier. Expressing who you are, loud and proud, will help you improve your well-being.

10. You'll have more self-worth. Why is self-worth important? Because it helps you avoid compromising your core values and beliefs. Valuing yourself also teaches others to respect you.

11. You'll understand your values. We can’t understate the importance of knowing your values. They will help you make decisions aligned with who you are and what you care about.

12. You'll find purpose in life. Knowing purpose in life will give you a clear idea of where you should go and what you should do. 

Getting to know yourself is hard. It involves deep self-reflection, honesty, and confronting parts of yourself you might be afraid of. But it’s a fundamental part of self-improvement .

If you need help, try working with a professional. BetterUp can help you navigate your inner world.

Now that we’re clear on the importance of knowing yourself, you might not know where to get started. Let’s get into it.

Check your VITALS

Author Meg Selig coined the term VITALS as a guide for developing self-knowledge. Its letters spell out the six core pillars of self-understanding:

These are your guides for decision-making and setting your goals. Understanding them will help you make decisions aligned with your authentic self. Here are some example values:

• Being helpful
• Trust 
• Wealth 

You can see how each of these might lead to different life choices. For example, if you value honesty, you might quit a job where you have to lie to others.

2. I nterests

Your interests are what you do without being asked, like your hobbies, passions, and causes you care about. You can then try to align your work with these interests. Here are some examples:

• Climate change. If you’re passionate about this issue, you might choose to work directly on the problem. Or you can make choices that allow for a more sustainable lifestyle, like owning an electric car.
• Audio editing. Perhaps you’re an amateur musician, and you spend your time recording and editing audio. You can start working as a freelance editor or find a job that uses these skills.
• Fitness. If you love working out and value helping others, you might consider becoming a trainer at your local gym or leading a running group.

Not all of your interests need to be a side-hustle . But being aware of them can help you make decisions that better suit your desired life. It is really about knowing your priorities.

3. T emperament

Your temperament describes where your energy comes from. You might be an introvert and value being alone. Or, as an extrovert, you find energy being around others.

Knowing your temperament will help you communicate your needs to others. 

If you’re a meticulous planner going on a trip, you should communicate this to your more spontaneous travel buddy. They might feel suffocated by your planning, leading to arguments down the road. Bringing it up before your trip will help talk it out to avoid conflict later.

4. A round-the-clock activities

This refers to when you like to do things. If you’re a writer and you’re more creative at night, carve out time in the evening to work. If you prefer working out in the morning, make it happen. Aligning your schedule with your internal clock will make you a happier human being.

5. L ife-mission and goals

Knowing your life mission is about knowing what gives your life meaning. It gives you purpose, a vocation , and something to strive for.

To find your life mission, think about what events were most meaningful to you so far. For example:

• Leading a successful project at the office
• Influencing positive change through your work
• Helping someone else succeed

There are many ways to fulfill a life mission. You can fulfill your goals with the skills and resources you have. For example, “helping someone succeed” could mean becoming a teacher or mentoring a young professional.

6. S trengths and weaknesses

These include both “hard skills” (like industry-specific knowledge and talents) and “soft skills” (like communication or emotional intelligence ).

When you do what you’re good at, you’re more likely to succeed, which will improve your morale and mental health.

Knowing your weaknesses and toxic traits will help you improve on them or minimize their influence on your life.

Are you ready to get started? There are many ways to understand your inner self:

• Write in a journal
• Step out of your comfort zone
• Track your progress
• Choose smart habits

A professional coach will encourage you to reflect on and reframe your inner thoughts and patterns. They understand that, in many cases, impulsivity holds you back from attaining your full potential.

The amygdala — an almond-sized region of the brain partially responsible for emotions — releases dopamine to reinforce impulsive behavior . This happens every time you open Facebook instead of working, eat chocolate while on a diet, or get angry at your colleagues instead of helping solve the problem.

Self-awareness can help you overcome your impulsivity. Armed with the right tools, you can break unhealthy or unwanted behaviors. 

A coach can help you meet these ends. They can teach you:

• Mindfulness: the acceptance that nothing is inherently good or bad 
• Metacognition: the awareness that your mind is the root of your actions
• Reframing: the power to react differently to an event or circumstance

These three elements can help you strengthen your self-control . You'll keep a cool head in stressful situations, communicate more effectively with others, and become a better leader overall.

In other words: by checking in with yourself, you avoid wrecking yourself.

At BetterUp , our coaches are trained in Inner Work® and understand the importance of knowing yourself. This is a lifetime journey. But together, we can make your life better.

Discover your authentic self

Kickstart your path to self-discovery and self-awareness. Our coaches can guide you to better understand yourself and your potential.

Allaya Cooks-Campbell

With over 15 years of content experience, Allaya Cooks Campbell has written for outlets such as ScaryMommy, HRzone, and HuffPost. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and is a certified yoga instructor as well as a certified Integrative Wellness & Life Coach. Allaya is passionate about whole-person wellness, yoga, and mental health.

The benefits of knowing yourself: Why you should become your own best friend

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I don't know how to write about myself

I feel like I have absolutely no sense of self or ability to introspect when it comes to writing my personal statement. I've come up with and written almost 5 or 6 different Common App essay ideas, and I've scrapped each one because they say nothing about me. Somehow I always end up going off into a tangent about whichever event, experience, or hobby that I've focused the essay on without ever saying anything about myself or who I am (which is the whole point of the essay!).

I have tried to correct this by rewriting and attempting to center myself and my development, but I always feel that it comes off in an artificial or forced way, with me saying things I honestly don't believe are true or resonate with. I had some ideas that I was excited about going into the essay writing process, but I've abandoned most of them because I can't get anything meaningful to come out. As a side note, this whole experience has triggered some sort of existential crisis where I suddenly feel as though I have no hobbies, no personality, and have simply been roaming the earth as a hulk of flesh and bone going through the motions for the past 17 years.