Why do we sometimes fail to recognize ourselves?

( Original article published in Good Young Man’s Poison Room-Philosophy Department )

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According to legend, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece was engraved with a motto: "Know Thyself." Knowing yourself is the most important and difficult task in life. The task is so difficult that some philosophers are downright pessimistic. For example, Nietzsche once exaggeratedly said, "We must be strangers to ourselves...the person farthest from ourselves is ourselves." He can be described as a pessimist in understanding himself. But some philosophers are much more optimistic about the prospects of knowing ourselves. They think it is easy to know themselves. Optimists believe that our various psychic qualities are "transparent" to ourselves. As long as we are feeling happy, we should also know that we are feeling happy. Even if we don't know that we are feeling happy, the feeling is not really happy. Being recognized by the self is a mark of the quality of the soul. On the other hand, our understanding of ourselves cannot be wrong. As long as I think I feel happy, then we really feel happy. In other words, the qualities of our mind are always known to us, and our perceptions are always infallible.

Are psychic qualities "transparent"? Are psychic qualities always self-recognized? Is it possible that our self-understanding is wrong? These are deep, interesting, and hotly debated philosophical questions. In his book "Self-Knowledge for Humans", the philosopher Quassim Cassam believes that the above optimism about self-knowledge is wrong. Descartes, he said, was a major contributor to this misconception. Under the influence of this optimism, the contemporary philosophical community has long forgotten the question "know yourself" raised by ancient Greece: Since people can easily know themselves, or it is impossible not to know themselves, then "know yourself" ”There is nothing left to discuss about this issue.

Cassam believes that it is indeed possible for people not to know themselves. One of the questions he hopes to answer in his book is: Why do we sometimes fail to recognize ourselves? The most popular theory for this question is the Freudian answer. Cassam calls this answer the “motivational approach” because it focuses on appealing to psychological triggers from our ignorance or misunderstanding of ourselves.

Recognizing that you are such and such, that you have certain immoral desires, can sometimes be painful, embarrassing, or anxiety-provoking. In order to avoid these negative states, we will choose to ignore these desires (self-ignorance), or mistakenly judge that we do not have these desires (self-deception). Imagine if you had a sexual desire for a member of your family. It would be extremely embarrassing and uncomfortable to admit that you have this desire. This desire is so against our moral values, so in order to avoid this embarrassment and discomfort, we tend to ignore or deny that we have this desire. Although self-knowledge may seem valuable, this is when self-ignorance and self-deception can actually keep our souls healthy.

This repressive mechanism for self-protection seems reasonable, but Cassam disagrees. In addition to the lack of empirical evidence in psychology, Cassam points out that this explanation has limited explanatory power: there are many other cases of self-ignorance or self-deception that cannot be explained by motivation theory. In other words, the effective scope of "motivation theory" is very narrow. The problem with "motivation theory" is that there are actually many cases of self-ignorance that do not involve some embarrassing facts, and there is no need to suppress these facts about ourselves. For example:

You haven't watched a football game for a long time, and one day your friend asks you to watch it. Although one of the teams is your childhood favorite, because you haven’t watched it for so long, you believe that you don’t care about the result. But at the end of the game, you find yourself feeling sad that the team lost. Only then did you realize that you still like this team.

In this example, unlike "having sexual desire for family members", "I like a certain team" is not a fact that is difficult to admit (OK, maybe some teams are, like Manchester United or the Lakers/Editor's note: It does not mean poison chamber position), but there's still a chance we don't know anything about it. This shows that we do not necessarily suppress ourselves and understand ourselves out of mental health, but simply out of ignorance. This type of ignorance is very common in our lives. It can be as simple as what to eat for dinner, or as serious as what subjects to choose in college. They all belong to this kind of self-ignorance that has nothing to do with repression. In general, why is it so painful to realize what you want to eat or which university subject you like? But sometimes we just get it wrong about who we are.

So why does this ignorance occur? Cassam thinks this is because our thought processes about ourselves are faulty, just as we make inferences about what other people are like. In other words, Cassam's boldest and most counterintuitive statement in the book is that there is actually no essential difference between how we know ourselves and how we know others.

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