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Self-Knowledge and the Self
In this clear and reasoned discussion of self- knowledge and the self, the author asks whether it is really possible to know ourselves as we really are. He illuminates issues about the nature of self-identity which are of fundamental importance in moral psychology, epistemology and literary criticism.
Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama and psychology.
Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama and psychology.
- GenresPhilosophy
206 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 2000
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June 25, 2025
Jopling’s book is impressive on a number of fronts. First, his writing is readable by a lay audience and is surprisingly well balanced between detail (e.g., offering reasoning and dealing with objections) and breadth. While this is no mere pop philosophy book, it might still be very valuable to readers without academic philosophical training. The ease of reading Jopling’s book may be comparable to that of popular philosophy books like The Existentialist Cafe, but it is more detailed and substantive than like that.
Second, I’m impressed by how Jopling unifies the diverse thinkers on self-knowledge, which make up this breadth. He deals with thinkers across philosophical traditions (e.g. phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of language informed approaches), and even with literary criticism (e.g., he offers analyses of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Laurence’s The Stone Angel). Jopling presents these thinkers as each contributing a piece of the puzzle, and he lets we readers gradually see the ultimate picture that arises from the completion of this puzzle. The picture is that self-knowledge is essentially intersubjective and at the heart of ethics in a certain way, which I was equally surprised by and found compelling. I’ll get to that below.
Let me first sketch out some of the ideas that struck me. Jopling examines the implications of Sartre’s theory of bad faith for self-knowledge. According to Sartre, as soon as we cling onto belief of ourselves as certain kinds of people, or as having certain values, we may be said to have “bad faith.” That is, any value we have does not consist in facts of nature, but it essentially depends upon our practices and commitments for their constitution. As soon as we represent our values to ourselves in a proclamation of self-knowledge, we’ve “objectified” ourselves, such that we’re occluding from our vision these broader facts concerning our freedom and what we could otherwise be. Any self-ascription is akin to a description of us from another person’s perspective, which is partial and fails to pick out some essential parts of us, which are found in our freedom.
Jopling offers a fascinating comparison between the implicit ethical ideals of how to be an authentic person and to live meaningfully, found between Nietzsche and Rorty. On the surface, these two thinkers appear to agree that an ideal life should start from our understanding that the meaningfulness anything seems to have is in fact socially constructed, in some sense. But the two thinkers understand this social construction in different ways, which explains their recommendations on different paths forward for living. Rorty thinks we should constantly “self-fashion” or try out different ways of living, given that all are equally contingent, and to do this is in a sense to respect the fact of contingency. In contrast, Nietzsche does not hold this relativism of ways of life; rather, he thinks there is something built into our nature that limits which ways of life are good for a given person. Moreover, Nietzsche doesn’t view “self-fashioning” as merely a matter of being ironic or playing around. Rather, he thinks it should be governed by norms provided by the truth of the “eternal recurrence”; our action should be serious and decisive, such that we’d be willing to affirm a future in which we are forced to do that action again and again, for eternity, if our life were on loop.
Jopling introduces a thinker Tugendhat (whom I haven’t heard of before) and compares his account of self-knowledge with that of Charles Taylor (and also with a brief comparison with Stuart Hampshire and Sartre). Jopling compares these thinkers’ different answers to the question of how we can know whether a piece of apparent self-knowledge is indeed knowledgeable, or whether it rather involves self-deception. Tugendhat thinks we must turn to how others think of us to settle this issue, while Taylor offers an alternative path forward, which involves being especially open-minded and “radical” in interpreting oneself.
According to Jopling, Tugendhat also raises an interesting criticism of how we often understand this question. We often assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding some aspect of the self, where this fact can be manifest in proposition terms, e.g., in claims we raise in communication. Tugendhat, instead, proposes that some aspects of us, like our history, values, and character traits, might not meet those criteria, and so disagreement over facts concerning them, found between first- and third-person ascriptions for example, ought to be understood as akin to disagreement over practical ends. There are different practical ends that we could be committed to, and it is a matter of practical deliberation to decide which to uphold.
Jopling responds to this disagreement in a beautiful and compelling way. He argues that Tugendhat, Taylor, Hampshire, and Sartre all alike assume that the self is an individualistic affair. Regardless whether we think there are facts about the self that hold independently of our relations to others, or whether we think there are no such facts and rather there are ways to live that are up to one’s personal choice, it is assumed that the heart of the matter of what the self can exist or be settled in the absence of considering one’s relationships to others. Jopling proposes that, instead, we can think of the self as “inter-“ rather than as “intrasubjective.” He locates a starting point for this approach to self-knowledge in Levinas’s thought. Levinas holds that it interpersonal encounters, who we are, and our sense of who we are, are essentially shaped by the other person we’re encountering.
This takes us into what I found to be the most innovative and interesting chapter of the book. Jopling examines the novel The Stone Angel and uses its protagonist as an example for his argument for a certain essential aspect of self-knowledge that has been missing in much of the literature and that is implied by Levinas’s insights on intersubjectivity.
We’re able to veridically understand how another person sees the world only to the extent that we’re able to open ourselves up to them, which in turn depends on the extent to which we have self-knowledge and have overcome self-deception.
How is this supposed to work? If I am self-deceived about some aspect of my character (e.g., say that I believe that I’m a good philosopher, but in fact I am not), I will have to be on the lookout for finding evidence that affirms this view I have of myself and for avoiding threats to this view. Belief in a view that is in fact false might be understood as a fragile matter, constantly subject to being overturned; in contrast, belief in true things is robust, for it is supported by and aligned with reality. When I’m self-deceived in this way, when I interact with other people, I’ll be fearful that they might see who I really am, that which I’m trying to ignore about myself. Other people become threats to me, for they might be bearers of truths my knowledge of which would force me to let go of my fantasies about who I am. In this fearful or alert state in interacting with others, I’ll be unable to interpret what they say, or engage my imagination into exploring and unearthing who they in fact are, because I sense that doing this carries with it the threat of finding something that undermines the apparent self-knowledge I have, which I must maintain by virtue of its fragility and its being in fact false at the end of the day.
I was particularly excited to read this chapter because it helped me make sense of a philosophical idea I’ve been tracking with a while now, Nietzsche’s conception of resentiment and slave morality. Nietzsche proposed that when one is in fact weaker and more sickly than another, and this other perhaps wields power over one, one will be driven to invent or endorse a set of values, by the lights of which this powerful other would be bad or inferior to one. For example, Nietzsche thought certain Christians are weak, and they invent the values that stealing and adultery is evil, so that the more powerful people around them who do these things can be thought of as inferior to them.
Jopling’s last chapter gives me the idea that Nietzsche’s resentiment might be just one variety of a deeper phenomena at the heart of the human condition. Being weak and being driven to see others as inferior to oneself is just one local case. The more basic or fundamental case is being self-deceived and being driven to interpret others in ways that ensure that others will not carry counter-evidence to one’s view about oneself. For example, I’m not necessarily weak if I’m self-deceived in thinking that I’m a good philosopher, and being in this state doesn’t necessarily make me want to view other people as inferior to me (perhaps as shoddy at philosophy), but it will make me want to interpret them as having misunderstood me (e.g., if it seems that they’ve undermined an argument I’ve offered), or I must misunderstand what they’ve said, if they’ve said something that is philosophical astute and would reveal me as a bad philosopher.
Here’s a quote from the last paragraph of the book. “The response to the question ‘Who am I?’ therefore has a triadic structure: it is for the self, of the self, and before the other. It involves encountering the other person in a face-to-face dialogue that, because it takes the form of injunction, attestation, and avowal, carries the self beyond its narrow first-personal boundaries, and beyond the naive egoism that places it at the center of the world, as the measure of all things.”
In other words, having self-knowledge and avoiding self-deception is tantamount to the project of veridically understanding other people, or being open to them and having empathy for them, as opposed to being on the defense.
Second, I’m impressed by how Jopling unifies the diverse thinkers on self-knowledge, which make up this breadth. He deals with thinkers across philosophical traditions (e.g. phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of language informed approaches), and even with literary criticism (e.g., he offers analyses of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Laurence’s The Stone Angel). Jopling presents these thinkers as each contributing a piece of the puzzle, and he lets we readers gradually see the ultimate picture that arises from the completion of this puzzle. The picture is that self-knowledge is essentially intersubjective and at the heart of ethics in a certain way, which I was equally surprised by and found compelling. I’ll get to that below.
Let me first sketch out some of the ideas that struck me. Jopling examines the implications of Sartre’s theory of bad faith for self-knowledge. According to Sartre, as soon as we cling onto belief of ourselves as certain kinds of people, or as having certain values, we may be said to have “bad faith.” That is, any value we have does not consist in facts of nature, but it essentially depends upon our practices and commitments for their constitution. As soon as we represent our values to ourselves in a proclamation of self-knowledge, we’ve “objectified” ourselves, such that we’re occluding from our vision these broader facts concerning our freedom and what we could otherwise be. Any self-ascription is akin to a description of us from another person’s perspective, which is partial and fails to pick out some essential parts of us, which are found in our freedom.
Jopling offers a fascinating comparison between the implicit ethical ideals of how to be an authentic person and to live meaningfully, found between Nietzsche and Rorty. On the surface, these two thinkers appear to agree that an ideal life should start from our understanding that the meaningfulness anything seems to have is in fact socially constructed, in some sense. But the two thinkers understand this social construction in different ways, which explains their recommendations on different paths forward for living. Rorty thinks we should constantly “self-fashion” or try out different ways of living, given that all are equally contingent, and to do this is in a sense to respect the fact of contingency. In contrast, Nietzsche does not hold this relativism of ways of life; rather, he thinks there is something built into our nature that limits which ways of life are good for a given person. Moreover, Nietzsche doesn’t view “self-fashioning” as merely a matter of being ironic or playing around. Rather, he thinks it should be governed by norms provided by the truth of the “eternal recurrence”; our action should be serious and decisive, such that we’d be willing to affirm a future in which we are forced to do that action again and again, for eternity, if our life were on loop.
Jopling introduces a thinker Tugendhat (whom I haven’t heard of before) and compares his account of self-knowledge with that of Charles Taylor (and also with a brief comparison with Stuart Hampshire and Sartre). Jopling compares these thinkers’ different answers to the question of how we can know whether a piece of apparent self-knowledge is indeed knowledgeable, or whether it rather involves self-deception. Tugendhat thinks we must turn to how others think of us to settle this issue, while Taylor offers an alternative path forward, which involves being especially open-minded and “radical” in interpreting oneself.
According to Jopling, Tugendhat also raises an interesting criticism of how we often understand this question. We often assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding some aspect of the self, where this fact can be manifest in proposition terms, e.g., in claims we raise in communication. Tugendhat, instead, proposes that some aspects of us, like our history, values, and character traits, might not meet those criteria, and so disagreement over facts concerning them, found between first- and third-person ascriptions for example, ought to be understood as akin to disagreement over practical ends. There are different practical ends that we could be committed to, and it is a matter of practical deliberation to decide which to uphold.
Jopling responds to this disagreement in a beautiful and compelling way. He argues that Tugendhat, Taylor, Hampshire, and Sartre all alike assume that the self is an individualistic affair. Regardless whether we think there are facts about the self that hold independently of our relations to others, or whether we think there are no such facts and rather there are ways to live that are up to one’s personal choice, it is assumed that the heart of the matter of what the self can exist or be settled in the absence of considering one’s relationships to others. Jopling proposes that, instead, we can think of the self as “inter-“ rather than as “intrasubjective.” He locates a starting point for this approach to self-knowledge in Levinas’s thought. Levinas holds that it interpersonal encounters, who we are, and our sense of who we are, are essentially shaped by the other person we’re encountering.
This takes us into what I found to be the most innovative and interesting chapter of the book. Jopling examines the novel The Stone Angel and uses its protagonist as an example for his argument for a certain essential aspect of self-knowledge that has been missing in much of the literature and that is implied by Levinas’s insights on intersubjectivity.
We’re able to veridically understand how another person sees the world only to the extent that we’re able to open ourselves up to them, which in turn depends on the extent to which we have self-knowledge and have overcome self-deception.
How is this supposed to work? If I am self-deceived about some aspect of my character (e.g., say that I believe that I’m a good philosopher, but in fact I am not), I will have to be on the lookout for finding evidence that affirms this view I have of myself and for avoiding threats to this view. Belief in a view that is in fact false might be understood as a fragile matter, constantly subject to being overturned; in contrast, belief in true things is robust, for it is supported by and aligned with reality. When I’m self-deceived in this way, when I interact with other people, I’ll be fearful that they might see who I really am, that which I’m trying to ignore about myself. Other people become threats to me, for they might be bearers of truths my knowledge of which would force me to let go of my fantasies about who I am. In this fearful or alert state in interacting with others, I’ll be unable to interpret what they say, or engage my imagination into exploring and unearthing who they in fact are, because I sense that doing this carries with it the threat of finding something that undermines the apparent self-knowledge I have, which I must maintain by virtue of its fragility and its being in fact false at the end of the day.
I was particularly excited to read this chapter because it helped me make sense of a philosophical idea I’ve been tracking with a while now, Nietzsche’s conception of resentiment and slave morality. Nietzsche proposed that when one is in fact weaker and more sickly than another, and this other perhaps wields power over one, one will be driven to invent or endorse a set of values, by the lights of which this powerful other would be bad or inferior to one. For example, Nietzsche thought certain Christians are weak, and they invent the values that stealing and adultery is evil, so that the more powerful people around them who do these things can be thought of as inferior to them.
Jopling’s last chapter gives me the idea that Nietzsche’s resentiment might be just one variety of a deeper phenomena at the heart of the human condition. Being weak and being driven to see others as inferior to oneself is just one local case. The more basic or fundamental case is being self-deceived and being driven to interpret others in ways that ensure that others will not carry counter-evidence to one’s view about oneself. For example, I’m not necessarily weak if I’m self-deceived in thinking that I’m a good philosopher, and being in this state doesn’t necessarily make me want to view other people as inferior to me (perhaps as shoddy at philosophy), but it will make me want to interpret them as having misunderstood me (e.g., if it seems that they’ve undermined an argument I’ve offered), or I must misunderstand what they’ve said, if they’ve said something that is philosophical astute and would reveal me as a bad philosopher.
Here’s a quote from the last paragraph of the book. “The response to the question ‘Who am I?’ therefore has a triadic structure: it is for the self, of the self, and before the other. It involves encountering the other person in a face-to-face dialogue that, because it takes the form of injunction, attestation, and avowal, carries the self beyond its narrow first-personal boundaries, and beyond the naive egoism that places it at the center of the world, as the measure of all things.”
In other words, having self-knowledge and avoiding self-deception is tantamount to the project of veridically understanding other people, or being open to them and having empathy for them, as opposed to being on the defense.
August 6, 2014
Philosophical and academic look at the 'self', what can be known about it, and perspectives from some different philosophers. Intellectual and requires a good deal of concentration in order to digest the wordiness of it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews