Self‐knowledge and the self

Abstract

AbstractAs several historical examples are adduced to show, different theories of self‐knowledge take shape in response to different conceptions of the sort of beings we are. This leads to the question of what underlying notion of the self motivates, in particular, the dominant modern idea that self‐knowledge consists primarily in grasping whatever beliefs, desires, thoughts, and feelings make up our mental life. The answer is that the self‐constitutive relation to itself has been conceived as one of an intimate, pre‐reflective acquaintance with our own minds and that only so can we be understood as being responsible for whatever we think or do. Against this view it is then argued that all our self‐knowledge really rests on reflection of an essentially third‐person kind, since the self's constitutive relation to itself consists instead in our guiding ourselves by what we take to be reasons in all that we think and do and in thereby counting as responsible for our thought and action, whatever may be the extent of our knowledge of our own minds. This alternative account implies, contrary to the modern view and in company with certain ancient views, that self‐knowledge can prove to be the most difficult kind of knowledge to acquire.