an essay about know thyself

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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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The Encyclopedia Of Philosophy

What Is “Know Thyself” By Socrates? A Comprehensive Overview

Have you ever heard the phrase “know thyself”?

It’s a famous quote that has been attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. But what does it really mean?

Is it just a catchy saying, or is there more to it?

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of “know thyself” and why it’s still relevant today.

We’ll delve into the different interpretations of the phrase and how it can be applied to our modern lives.

So, sit back, relax, and let’s discover what Socrates meant when he said “know thyself.”

What Is Know Thyself By Socrates

Socrates was a philosopher who lived in ancient Greece and is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in Western philosophy. One of his most famous teachings is the phrase “know thyself.”

But what does it mean to know oneself? According to Socrates, it means to have a deep understanding of one’s own beliefs, values, and principles. It means to be aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and to be honest with oneself about them.

Socrates believed that self-knowledge was essential for living a good life. He believed that if we don’t know ourselves, we can’t make good decisions or live in accordance with our true nature.

The Origin Of Know Thyself

The phrase “know thyself” has its roots in ancient Greece and was inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, also known as the Oracle of Delphi. Legend has it that the seven sages of ancient Greece, philosophers, statesmen, and law-givers who laid the foundation for Western culture, gathered together in Delphi and encapsulated their wisdom into this command.

The saying was subsequently attributed to a dozen other authors, of which Thales of Miletus most commonly takes the honor. However, it was Socrates and Plato who popularized this phrase and grappled with the mysterious nature of knowledge and identity. Since Greek philosophy laid the foundation for subsequent Western thought, the influence of the Greek command “know thyself” expanded to many other schools of thought, permeating Western philosophical essays and inspirational poetry.

The call to self-knowledge also appears in the East, independently, as far as we can tell, from its Greek emphasis. The Hindu scriptures bring the self into prominence, speaking of its realization as the means to immortality. Along the same vein as Western philosophy, the Hindus claim that man is not naturally born knowing his self and that self-knowledge is a bold and challenging endeavor.

Even farther East, in Imperial China, Confucius draws from the ancient texts of the I-Ching and calls for a system of government based on self-government, which implies self-knowledge. Thus, the call to knowing oneself is universal historically and cannot easily be attributed to a single individual or even a single culture.

Socrates’ Interpretation Of The Phrase

Socrates’ interpretation of the phrase “know thyself” goes beyond just having a general understanding of oneself. He believed that true wisdom comes from recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge and understanding. In other words, to know oneself means to acknowledge what one does not know.

Socrates argued that people must know themselves before they can claim to know anything else. He believed that ignorance ultimately derived from a lack of self-knowledge, and that by remedying this deficiency, one could gain greater knowledge of oneself and others.

For Socrates, all knowledge must start with the individual and the cultivation of the rational part of their soul. Only then can one acquire knowledge of the world around them, including objects, things, and other people. Socrates believed that knowing oneself was the first step towards wisdom, and that it required courage to persevere, acknowledge failure, and live with the knowledge of one’s own ignorance.

Socrates also believed that knowing oneself meant recognizing one’s true nature as an immortal soul. He argued for the immortality of the soul in his Phaedo dialogue and believed that by knowing oneself as an immortal soul, one could live in accordance with their true nature and make decisions that align with their highest good.

The Importance Of Self-Knowledge

Self-knowledge is important because it allows us to understand our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It provides us with a deeper understanding of our own motivations and desires, which in turn allows us to make better decisions and live more fulfilling lives.

Without self-knowledge, we may be prone to making poor decisions that are not in line with our true nature. We may also struggle to understand why we feel the way we do or why we behave in certain ways. This lack of understanding can lead to feelings of confusion, frustration, and even depression.

Furthermore, self-knowledge is essential for personal growth and self-improvement. By understanding our own strengths and weaknesses, we can work on improving ourselves and becoming the best version of ourselves. We can identify areas where we need to grow and develop new skills or habits that will help us achieve our goals.

In addition, self-knowledge is important for healthy relationships with others. When we know ourselves well, we are better able to communicate our needs and boundaries to others. We are also more empathetic and understanding towards others because we have a greater awareness of our own emotions and experiences.

Applying Know Thyself In Modern Life

In modern life, the concept of “know thyself” is still highly relevant. It means understanding who we are as individuals and what motivates us. It means recognizing our own limitations and knowing when to ask for help.

One way to apply this concept is by practicing self-reflection. This involves taking time to think about our actions, thoughts, and feelings. By doing so, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our motivations. We can also identify patterns in our behavior that may be holding us back or causing us problems.

Another way to apply “know thyself” is by seeking feedback from others. This can be difficult, as it requires us to be open to criticism and willing to learn from our mistakes. However, it can also be incredibly valuable, as it allows us to see ourselves from a different perspective and identify areas for improvement.

Finally, “know thyself” means being true to ourselves and living in accordance with our values and principles. This may require making difficult decisions or standing up for what we believe in, even if it’s not popular or easy.

Challenges In Achieving Self-Knowledge

Despite the importance of self-knowledge, achieving it is not an easy task. There are several challenges that make it difficult for individuals to truly know themselves.

One challenge is the tendency to deceive ourselves. It’s common for people to have a distorted view of themselves, either by overestimating their abilities or downplaying their flaws. This self-deception can prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly and hinder our ability to make good decisions.

Another challenge is the influence of external factors. Our beliefs and values are often shaped by the society and culture we live in, and it can be difficult to separate our own thoughts and feelings from those that have been imposed on us. This can make it challenging to understand our true selves and what we really want out of life.

Additionally, emotions can cloud our judgment and make it difficult to see ourselves objectively. Fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions can prevent us from confronting our weaknesses and acknowledging our mistakes.

Finally, achieving self-knowledge requires a willingness to be introspective and reflective. It takes effort and courage to examine oneself honestly, and many people may avoid doing so out of fear or discomfort.

Despite these challenges, achieving self-knowledge is possible with practice and dedication. By being honest with ourselves, seeking feedback from others, and engaging in introspection, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and live more fulfilling lives.

Tools And Techniques For Self-Discovery

Knowing oneself is a lifelong journey, and there are many tools and techniques available to help with self-discovery. Here are a few:

1. Self-reflection: Taking the time to reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and actions can help you gain insight into who you are and what you value. Journaling, meditation, and mindfulness practices are all great ways to cultivate self-awareness.

2. Personality assessments: There are many personality assessments available that can help you understand your strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. These assessments can provide valuable insights into your personality type and how you interact with others.

3. Feedback from others: Sometimes, it can be difficult to see ourselves clearly. Asking for feedback from trusted friends or colleagues can provide a different perspective and help us see ourselves more objectively.

4. Therapy or counseling: Talking to a mental health professional can be a powerful way to gain insight into yourself and your patterns of behavior. A therapist can help you identify areas for growth and provide support as you work through challenges.

5. Mindful self-compassion: Being kind and compassionate toward yourself is an important part of self-discovery. Practicing mindful self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same kindness and care that you would offer to a good friend.

Ultimately, the key to self-discovery is to approach it with curiosity and openness. By being willing to explore our inner selves, we can gain a deeper understanding of who we are and what we want out of life.

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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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Boris Hennig, Socrates and Self-Knowledge, The Philosophical Quarterly , Volume 68, Issue 271, April 2018, Pages 421–424, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqx019

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The idea of this book is to closely examine all passages where Socrates talks about the Delphic precept, ‘Know Thyself’, and see what picture of self-knowledge emerges. Given that Socrates is a key figure in the transmission of this precept, it is very likely that such a project leads to significant results.

After a discussion of the inscription itself, Moore discusses the relevant passages in the Charmides , the Alcibiabes I, the Phaedrus , the Philebus , Xenophon's Memorabilia , and other texts. A detailed discussion of the Apology is missing; however, it might have been helpful. There are far more things to be praised than questioned in the book. In its details, it is rich, well crafted, and largely convincing. The reader of this review should keep this in mind while I concentrate on a couple of things I am less than fully satisfied with.

Socratic self-knowledge is not simply a sort of introspective, first personal knowledge (p. 2). Moore captures this by arguing that it amounts to self-constitution (p. 140). He is right, but I think his insight is compromised in three ways.

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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.

• Supplement: Scepticism About Essential Indexicality and Agency
• Supplement: Evans on First Person Thought
• Supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

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 and Burge 1998)

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 transcendent 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” or “she”. 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. 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). 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; 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).

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 an 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).

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). 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 (see Kenny 1979 and Malcolm 1979 for positive appraisals of Anscombe’s position. Criticisms can be found in White 1979; Hamilton 1991; Brandom 1994: 552–561; Glock & Hacker 1996; McDowell 1998; Harcourt 2000).

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; Joel Smith 2006a; McGlynn 2016). 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), 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 Joel 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).

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. 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; Tsakiris 2011; Zahavi & Kriegel 2015). 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 ). They may disown them 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).

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 familiar 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 it’s 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). 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, once 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), 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).

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). Since knowledge of other minds is typically considered to be open to sceptical doubt, and self-consciousness is not, such lines of reasoning are transcendental arguments and so potentially open to general criticisms of that form of argument (Stroud 1968; R. Stern 1999, 2000). 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).

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

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Essay on Man, Epistle II

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Pope's Poems and Prose

By alexander pope, pope's poems and prose summary and analysis of an essay on man: epistle ii.

The subtitle of the second epistle is “Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to Himself as an Individual” and treats on the relationship between the individual and God’s greater design.

Here is a section-by-section explanation of the second epistle:

Section I (1-52): Section I argues that man should not pry into God’s affairs but rather study himself, especially his nature, powers, limits, and frailties.

Section II (53-92): Section II shows that the two principles of man are self-love and reason. Self-love is the stronger of the two, but their ultimate goal is the same.

Section III (93-202): Section III describes the modes of self-love (i.e., the passions) and their function. Pope then describes the ruling passion and its potency. The ruling passion works to provide man with direction and defines man’s nature and virtue.

Section IV (203-16): Section IV indicates that virtue and vice are combined in man’s nature and that the two, while distinct, often mix.

Section V (217-30): Section V illustrates the evils of vice and explains how easily man is drawn to it.

Section VI (231-294): Section VI asserts that man’s passions and imperfections are simply designed to suit God’s purposes. The passions and imperfections are distributed to all individuals of each order of men in all societies. They guide man in every state and at every age of life.

The second epistle adds to the interpretive challenges presented in the first epistle. At its outset, Pope commands man to “Know then thyself,” an adage that misdescribes his argument (1). Although he actually intends for man to better understand his place in the universe, the classical meaning of “Know thyself” is that man should look inwards for truth rather than outwards. Having spent most of the first epistle describing man’s relationship to God as well as his fellow creatures, Pope’s true meaning of the phrase is clear. He then confuses the issue by endeavoring to convince man to avoid the presumptuousness of studying God’s creation through natural science. Science has given man the tools to better understand God’s creation, but its intoxicating power has caused man to imitate God. It seems that man must look outwards to gain any understanding of his divine purpose but avoid excessive analysis of what he sees. To do so would be to assume the role of God.

The second epistle abruptly turns to focus on the principles that guide human action. The rest of this section focuses largely on “self-love,” an eighteenth-century term for self-maintenance and fulfillment. It was common during Pope’s lifetime to view the passions as the force determining human action. Typically instinctual, the immediate object of the passions was seen as pleasure. According to Pope’s philosophy, each man has a “ruling passion” that subordinates the others. In contrast with the accepted eighteenth-century views of the passions, Pope’s doctrine of the “ruling passion” is quite original. It seems clear that with this idea, Pope tries to explain why certain individual behave in distinct ways, seemingly governed by a particular desire. He does not, however, make this explicit in the poem.

Pope’s discussion of the passions shows that “self-love” and “reason” are not opposing principles. Reason’s role, it seems, is to regulate human behavior while self-love originates it. In another sense, self-love and the passions dictate the short term while reason shapes the long term.

Pope’s Poems and Prose Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Pope’s Poems and Prose is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

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Study Guide for Pope’s Poems and Prose

Pope's Poems and Prose study guide contains a biography of Alexander Pope, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pope's Poems and Prose
• Pope's Poems and Prose Summary
• Character List

Essays for Pope’s Poems and Prose

Pope's Poems and Prose essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Alexander Pope's Poems and Prose.

• Of the Characteristics of Pope
• Breaking Clod: Hierarchical Transformation in Pope's An Essay on Man
• Fortasse, Pope, Idcirco Nulla Tibi Umquam Nupsit (The Rape of the Lock)
• An Exploration of 'Dulness' In Pope's Dunciad
• Belinda: Wronged On Behalf of All Women

Wikipedia Entries for Pope’s Poems and Prose

• Introduction
• Translations and editions
• Spirit, skill and satire

Know Then Thyself By Alexander Pope Summary and Questions and Answers

Table of Contents

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is considered to be the most outstanding literary figure of the 18th century (neo-classical age). He was born to catholic parents in London. On account of his religion, he was an outsider in the protestant dominated society and was barred from seeking admission to public schools and universities. He was largely self-educated as he said ‘he had dipped into a great number of English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek poets’. He was largely influenced by Roman poets.

As a poet, he was an intellectual personality. He wrote in the chaste and flawless language. He aimed to achieve absolute correctness. He brought the heroic couplet to perfection dealing with social and intellectual themes; his poetry exposed the social hypocrisies and vanities of his contemporaries. His important works are Pastorates, The Rape of the Lock, An Essay on Man, Imitation of Horace etc.

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The poem ‘Know Then Thyself’ is an extract taken from An Essay on Man: Epistle II. This long poem ‘An Essay on Man’ has four Epistles. It is considered to be a sublime work of poetry. This extract ‘Know Then Thyself’ argues that human beings should learn to look at themselves and try to learn about their own nature, power, limitations, and weakness. It is a plea to look inward to gather knowledge about oneself. It is in fact a scientific inquiry propagated by enlightenment.

• Thyself –Yourself

• Deem -Consider in a specific way

• Alike –Similar

Presume – to be arrogant to examine closely; Scan – to examine closely; Isthmus – a narrow strip of land with water on either side; Darkly wis e – foolishly wise; Rudely great – great and yet mean; Stoic – a person who is not disturbed by pain or not excited by joy; Hangs between – neither a god nor a beast; in doubt – not sure; Doubt …. prefer – pulled apart by rival forces of the body and the mind; Born … die – once he is born, he can not escape death; Reasoning – able to think logically; alike – same (remaining equally ignorant); Chaos – completely confused; Abused – deceived, misled; Disabused – self enlightened; Half to rise – to succeed partially; Great Lord – the crown of creation; Sole – man is the only being gifted with powers to know the truth from untruth; Glory – crown; Jest – laughing stock; Riddle – puzzle.

Summary of the Poem

‘Know Then Thyself’ is a poem written by Alexander Pope, the famous poet of the eighteenth century. He was a famous satirist of his time. He wrote a number of philosophical poems also. The present selection is an extract from the Second Epistle of Pope’s long argumentative poem, ‘An Essay on Man’. It is commonly believed to have derived its underlying idea from Lord Boling broke, to whom it is dedicated. Written in four Epistles, The Essay tries to ‘vindicate the ways of God to man’, based on the doctrine that whatever is, is right.

Explain with Reference to the Context:

Known then thyself …………………………. The stoic’s prid e

Reference to Context:-

These lines quoted above have been taken from the well-known poem ‘Know Then Thyself’ written by Alexander Pope. In this poem, the poet says that man is a strange combination of opposite qualities. He advises man to study himself. Man’s disability prevents him from taking any single direction: one aspect of his nature cancels out another

Explanation:-

In these lines, the poet advises man that he should not try to study God. He advises man to limit himself only to the study of his own nature and existence and not try to investigate the power of judging the schemes of universe propounded by God. If he wants to study mankind, he should study himself. Man is a very complex creature and occupies a paradoxical position in this world. Man is a link between God and animal. Pope relates man on the muddled ‘middle state’, which on the one hand endows him with godlike qualities and on the other, levels him down with the animals. Man is a mixture of contrary qualities. He is ignorant as well as wise. He is rude and great he has so much knowledge that he cannot be a sceptic. He has so much weakness that he cannot be indifferent to pain and sufferings. Man is like a ‘Trishanku,’ dangling between heavenly aspirations and earthly existence. Thus these lines sum up the living contradiction of man’s nature.

He hangs between ………………….. or too much

These lines have been taken from Pope’s poem ‘Know Then Thyself’. The poet says that man is a very complex creature and is a paradox of the world. He is a combination of opposite qualities. He occupies the middle position between God and animal.

Explanation :-

In this stanza, the poet says that man is a strange creature full of contrary qualities and feelings of wisdom and folly, greatness and pettiness, reason and passion, love and hate. He always remains in doubt. He cannot decide whether to work hard in life or to be satisfied with his present position. Man is forever caught in the conflicting claims of body and soul. He fails to decide whether he should prefer the physical pleasure of the intellectual things of life. He is born to die. Man has the gift of reason, even then the commits mistakes. Either a man thinks too little or too much, he cannot overcomes his ignorance. In other words, Pope sums up the paradoxical nature of man by pointing out that his birth is nothing but the beginning of his end and reasoning nothing but an instrument of erring.

Chasos of thought ……………………….riddle of the worlds.

These lines have been taken from Alexander Pope’s well-known poem ‘Know Then Thyself’. The poet tells us about the middle position of man in the world. Man is a combination of contrary qualities. He often remains confused and fails to decide between different courses of action. Man’s disability prevents him from taking any single direction: one aspect of his nature cancels out another

In this stanza, the Pope says that man is a complex mixture of thoughts and feelings. The poet further expands the idea of man shuttled and torn between opposites. He is always being self-deceived or undeceived. In simple words, he can realise what is good or bad for him. He is the master of the universe because he is blessed with the power of reason by God. But even then he becomes a victim of all things around him. He is the only judge of truth, yet he makes countless mistakes. He is the glory of the world because God has given him the gift of knowledge and wisdom. But at the same time, he is also a jest of the world as he commits many mistakes in his life. He is a riddle also as he does not know whether he belongs to the category of angels or to the animals.

Important devices

• Use of rhyming couplets (2 lines rhyming together)

• The poet is particularly skilled at pulling his ideas into epigrams

‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’

• Use of repetition/ alliteration

Endless – errors

Sceptic- side

• Use of paradox darkly wise and rudely great

• All these devices helped the poet reiterate his point of view.

Questions -Answer (Essay Type)

Q.1. Sum up in your own words Pope’s conception of man.

Ans.: In this poem ‘Know Then Thyself’, Alexander Pope sums up man’s position in this world. Man is the supreme creature in the world. God has made him such a way that he can rise and be equal to the gods. But this seldom happens. There are number of limitations on man’s knowledge and capabilities. According to pope man has placed himself in the middle state, which on the one hand endows him with godlike qualities and on the other levels him down with the animals. He wants to develop a stoic attitude to pain and suffering but then there are so many weaknesses in him that he fails to be a stoic. He always remains in doubt and cannot decide what to choose. In his doubts, he can not decide whether to do work or take some rest. He fails to understand his position in this world. He cannot decide whether he is a god or is a beast. He thinks that he is the master of this universe but falls victim to everything. Thus there are a number of limitations on man.

Q.2. Where, according to Pope, does the root of man’s confusion lie?

Ans.: Pope says that man is a strange creature full of contrary qualities and feelings of wisdom and folly, greatness and pettiness, reason and passion, love and hate. He is a bundle of contradictions. His life is paradoxical. He is wise as well an ignorant. He is great as well as rude. He is too wise to be a sceptic. He is at the some time so weak that he cannot be a stoic. He stands halfway between being a God and being an animal. He fails to decide whether he should consider himself a God or a beast. Man is forever caught in the conflicting claims of body and soul. He cannot decide whether he should prefer his body or his mind. He is always found in his doubts. In his doubts, he fails to make proper decision whether he should lead a life of rest or a life of action. He considers himself the only judge of truth. But he commits countless errors. He thinks that he is the master of everything. Pope says that his birth is nothing but the beginning of his end and his reasoning nothing but on instrument of earning. His reasoning power also leads him to error. In this way man is like a ‘Trishanku’, dangling between heavenly aspirations and earthly existence. Man always suffers from a number of contradictions.

Questions -Answer (Short Type)

Q.1. Explain the meaning of the first two lines of the poem ‘Know Then Thyself’.

Ans.: In the first two lines, the poet advises man to study himself. He says that man should be limited only to the study of his own nature and existence and should forget about the power of judging the scheme of universe propounded by God. Man should not try to investigate the ways of God. That is beyond his powers. It is proper for man to study himself and know himself because man himself is too difficult to understand.

Q.2. What does paradox mean? Give examples from the poem.

Ans.: A paradox is a self-contradictory statement, which seems on its face to be absurd, yet turns out to have a valid meaning. Pope in this poem ‘Know Then Thyself’ uses a number of paradoxes for examples he calls man “darkly wise”. Secondly, he says that man is “lord of all things, yet a prey to all”.

Q.3. What do you think pope means by the following phrases:-

a) ‘hangs between’

b) ‘chaos of thought and Passion’

c) ‘ a prey to all’

Ans. a) ‘hangs between ‘:- Pope says that man is a confused being. He is always found in the state of doubt whether to lead a life of rest or a life or action. So he hangs between.

b) ‘Chaos of thought and Passion’: – In man’s mind there is a complex mixture of thoughts and feelings. He fails to decide whether of follow mind or heart.

c) ‘a prey to all’:- Man is a victim of everything in this world.

Q.4. Find out Pope’s use of proverbial expression in the poem.

Ans.: Pope is considered the master of proverbial use of language. He has given many famous proverbs or sayings such as

“ A little learning is a dangerous thing” “For Foals rush in where angels fear to tread? “To err human, to forgive divine” .

In this poem also, Pope uses a number of proverbial expressions. ‘Know Then Thyself’ is a proverb which advises man to recognize his true self. Then the poet says, ‘The proper study of mankind is man”. The last line of the poem is also proverbial. The poet says that man is “The glory, jest and riddle of the world”.

Extra Questions

Answer the following questions in a word/ phrase/ sentence

Q. What should man not presume to scan? A. The ways of God.

Q. Who is the glory, jest and riddle of the world? A. Man

Q. What according to the poet is the proper study of mankind? A. The study of man

Q. What doubt does man hang between? A. Whether to act or rest

Answer the following question in 20-30 words

Q. Explain ‘the glory, jest and the riddle of the world’? A. Man is the sole judge of truth on this earth. Yet, his own life is a history of endless errors. Sometimes he performs deeds worthy of pride. Thus man is a glory, a jest and riddle of the world.

Q. How is man a confused being? A. Man is a confused being because he does not know what or who is he. He has knowledge but is ignorant of many things. Thus he remains a confused being

Q. What is a paradox? Find the two instances of paradox? A. A paradox is a statement that contains two opposite ideas. For example, Pope calls man darkly wise and rudely great. Thus man, according to him, is a paradox.

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Know Thyself: An Essay on Social Personalism Kindle Edition

• ISBN-13 978-0739146187
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• Publication date November 25, 2011
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Editorial Reviews

How do we know who we are, what we are and what are we to be? According to one of the leading philosophers of Personalist tradition, the answers will not be found in Naturalism, Idealism or Rationalism, all of which are forms of the impersonal that lead us to a dead-ends of Objectivism or Subjectivism, thereby shortchanging the full range of human experience. This fascinating essay offers a creative approach to self-understanding as "persons in triadic relationships," which in addition to trust, includes obligation and transcendence.

The author skillfully utilizes images of "suspicion", "master narrative", "I-Thou-It triad", "dancing", "broken dances," "the Personal" that update and bring the Personalist tradition to a new level. This narrative provides an imaginative way to consider human experience, enabling us to move beyond individualism or collectivism.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore imaginative approaches to self-reflection, which is always done in a social context. — Norman J. Faramelli, Boston University School of Theology

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lexington Books (November 25, 2011)
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Summary of Know Then Thyself and its Explanations

Published by sirafzal72 on january 24, 2021, summary of know then thyself.

This extract ‘Know Then Thyself’ taken from An Essay on Man: Epistle II written by Alexander Pope argues that human beings should learn to look at themselves and try to learn about their own nature, power, limitations, and weakness. It is a plea to look inward to gather knowledge about oneself. It is in fact a scientific inquire propagated by enlightenment.

The poet says that man should know himself. The proper study of mankind is the man himself. He should not try to scan the ways of God. The mysteries of God are beyond the scope of human intellect. Therefore, a man should concentrate on his own study. In the third line, the poet says that man is a curious paradox. He stands on the isthmus between divinity and animality. He has in him the elements of a God and a beast as well. He is a mixture of the opposite. He is wise (intelligent) and has a lot of knowledge but still, there are a lot of things of which he is ignorant. He is crude as well as civilized. In other words pope considers man a great riddle.

Man has a great deal of knowledge yet he remains sceptic (a sceptic is a person who is full of doubts and can’t be called enlightened. he has great power over material things but he is a slave of his own passion. So he is too weak to be called stoic (stoic is a person who remains unaffected by any emotions like pain, suffering, happiness etc. Man every remains in a state of uncertainty. According to the poet, a man hangs in doubt whether he should lead a life of action or of rest. He doesn’t know whether he should consider himself a god or a beast. Man is indeed a big riddle.

Explanations

1. Reference To The Context

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

2. Reference to the Context

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;

Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

Explanation – The poet says that man always remains in a state of uncertainly. He is not able to decide whether he should give preference to his body or his mind. He doesn’t know which of the two is more important. Another enigma about man is that he is born only to die. The end of the man’s life is death. Birth and death are two extremes. He becomes intelligent but intelligence is followed by errors. Logic and errors ae another set of extremes but all these extremes coexist. Whether he should think too much or too little, it’s a big question before man because his reasoning is always imperfect.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and a half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Explain the following stanza with reference to the context

1. Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and a half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

2. With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast

Reference – These lines have been taken from the poem ‘Know Thy Themselves’, written by Alexander Pope. This poem is an extract from his long poem ‘An Essay on Man’. In this poem, the poet emphasizes that the proper study of mankind is the man himself.

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Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship

Vibrant essays from the author of The Argonauts touch on art, inspiration, and many of the central dilemmas of our times

“A s a child I had so much energy I’d lie awake and feel my organs smolder,” Maggie Nelson wrote in 2005’s Jane: A Murder . She was a dancer before she was a writer and you can feel the commitment to the fire of bodily motion in her masterpieces: the shimmeringly brutal excavation of girlhood and violence in Jane , the story of her aunt’s killing at the hands of a rapist; the clear-headed yet ecstatic celebration of the transformations of pregnancy and top surgery, and the new kind of family she and her trans partner brought into being in The Argonauts (2015). Her dedication to the material finds the forms it needs; I don’t think she sets out to bend genres. Instead, her high-stakes eviscerations of body settle into radically new forms.

Is this the energy of the rebel or the valedictorian? For decades, Nelson has parted her hair, fastened her top button, won the right grades and grants while throwing herself voluptuously into the counterculture, dreaming of being an “ electric ribbon of horniness and divine grace ” like one of her inspirations, Prince . It’s an American energy – expansive, new, full of power, pleasure, change and motion; a frontier energy, even when she’s writing about New York. We can hear Whitman behind her, and Emerson. “Power ceases in the instant of repose,” Emerson pronounces in Self-Reliance ; “it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim.”

A decade after The Argonauts became the bible of English graduates everywhere, the essays in Like Love arrive to help us understand Nelson’s place in a culture where, to her half-delight, she has become such a powerful voice. Spanning two decades, they range from appreciations of influences including Prince and Judith Butler , to wild, freefalling conversations with figures such as Björk, Wayne Koestenbaum and Jacqueline Rose. There is a passionate, wondering account of her formative half-erotic friendship with the singer Lhasa de Sela . The writing isn’t consistent, any more than her books are. But I like to take my thinkers and writers whole, as she does. The essays offer a kind of composite self-portrait, and illustrate how she thinks, sometimes painstakingly, sometimes with casual jubilance, about some of the central dilemmas of our time.

In the face of the climate crisis, how to avoid “giving in to the narcissistic spectacle of the slo-mo Titanic going down”? In the face of the crisis in feminism, how and whether to move beyond sexual difference? The written exchanges show her interlocutors thinking it through, too. “ You dare to step into the future like no one else atm ,” Björk says. It’s true. This is where all that restless energy is leading. This is why she’s an Emersonian, shying away from nihilism. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” Emerson wrote in Nature , discarding the “dry bones” of his ancestors; “Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

In her powerful piece on the artist Carolee Schneemann , Nelson posits her as a female incarnation of Emerson’s self-reliant man. But it’s Nelson herself who proffers new laws and worship – whose project amounts to a practical philosophy of contemporary American culture. In The Argonauts she offers the gift of a future we can somehow share; one that acknowledges the miseries of the present, that has space for dreams, but is obstinately material and in our world. Here, in dialogue with Jacqueline Rose, she proposes that “ Everybody deserves the kind of non-stultifying internal breathing space of fluidity or instability that is attributed to queers, or to women, or whatever.”

Like Love’s title comes from writer and theatre critic Hilton Als ’s vision of a group on the subway not as white women or black men but as mouths that need filling “with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love”. Nelson, too, is drawn to mouths – to orifices in general – as organs of pleasure and pain, and as portals enabling a radical openness.

Because Nelson likes writing about her friends, there’s a kind of homogeneity to much of the book that cumulatively left me feeling a little claustrophobic, longing especially for the roominess of time travel. With the exception of 2009’s Bluets , Nelson’s writing is so located in the postwar world that the past can feel entirely absent. This is her affinity with Emerson and Whitman again – her song to the future – but I wonder if I’m alone in wishing that, alongside those two often acknowledged ancestors, her future could have artists, activists and libertines from earlier centuries informing it, too.

Which is not to say that she’s wrong to write about the people in her circle. The brutality of the present moment may require us precisely to batten down the hatches and commit to extreme solidarity. At a time when institutional life is collapsing, when the pandemic privileged family over friends, when work expands in ways that leave many too exhausted to socialise, Nelson demonstrates what it means to dedicate yourself to a cohort with seriousness and strenuousness. “You, to me, quickly became an inspiration,” she tells the poet Brian Blanchfield , “a brother, a support in times of seriously dark waters, an editor, a lender of excellent and pivotal books, a cheerleader, a colleague, a couch sleeper (and couch mover), a fellow swimmer … a corrupting gambler, (queer) family.” Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have.

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