On selfknowledge

On selfknowledge.

( An excerpt from : Monologue on the monologue.on www.kajgenell.se )

Philosophy and Self knowledge. - On the problem of Self knowledge.

A.)

The whole matter about self-knowledge is , in fact, a whole cluster of ( to philosophers huge.... ) problems. They partly cling together and they all are close to, or accomplish the central problems of Man. And they are problems, which one poses rather often to oneself, but seldom takes the time to,- or sees the advantage in - , extend into terms of discussion. They are problems, which we nearly always ignore ,so they are simply left hanging in the air... And we are very often inclined to let them pass over into questions concerning personal character and will-power, right or wrong ...

We generelly discard the problem of freedom ( simply ) by acting..Freedom is in it´s kernel - it´s punctum salis - completely unknown to us, - and we are doing the same thing over and over again with this knowledge: we renounce it, annihilate it, and proceeds directly to action. We are not solving the problem of investigating the nature of will and the nature of decision and acting, but we transcends it permanently in action. We do not transform the problem into action. We are neglecting it. Cutting off the Gordian knot. But it is still always there ( not just for philosophers I think...) . It is underlying many of our daily intercourse and controversies.Probably much more than we are aware of.
In our pretext here - and in many others, for many other persons - might the problem be described as the problem around what You might call "self-determination", the indisputable right to be and to protect a "Self". I am never talking about the right to exist, the right to be healthy, not hungry, the right to be happy or such things, since I am of the opinion that these rights are superficial. The right to be and protect a Self is not superficial, but it is a little diffuse. We are not so very sure of what this "Self" is, but we take it an evident truth, that we have some such Self of a kind, - a special kind, - mine.
( I will not in the forthcoming parts return to any "evident truths", since it is, in my eyes, bad philosophy to use evidence as a support to an argument.).

There is, which is alluded to above,- and what most people know -, something very problematic in the nature of self-knowledge and self-reflection. Yes, it is almost something immediate paradoxical, self-contradictory, aporic , in this "phenomenon" and in those various concepts and linguistic figures by which we are expressing ourselves in this, rather frequent, area. This has been pointed out by an endless row of writers beginning with Heraclit,"self has much to deep a Logos..." (Logos= "word", or "knowledge") Plato and St. Augustine. ( And it is an important field to bring some clarity in, because it is also a field , where now and then ( sure as x in y ) a charismatic quack stands up and easily seduces people with dizzy-talk about "Who else could You be?"..., putting a giant audience in an inner state of fright...).

It also seems to me that, ever since the time of Socrates, it remains a misunderstanding about what was meant by the famous inscription above the entrance of the Greek Delphi temple, the appalling "Know thyself!" ("gnosi seavton"), which - like an ambiguous oracle´s whisper - seems to be for ever hanging on to the name of Socrates,- Socrates the Proteus-like, the elusive half-anarchist, who longevity has been seen ( by the ruling philosophers of History )as the "Augur", inaugurator, of Western Culture . Numerous people has been, one at a time , claimed by others to have been "the first modern man", - the man with Self-consciousness. Socrates is certainly one of them. And partly because of a misunderstanding. The famous Delphi inscription does not have so much to do with introspection , as with the ability to know one´s limits as individual. It is a warning against the ultimate sin of the ancient Greek culture: the "hybris", presumptuousness. The Gods punishes those who challenges Fate and think of themselves as equal to the Gods. ---The olden Greeks were not a meditative people . But many classicists came by mishap to look upon the Greeks and their culture in a idealizing, romanticist mood. This I cannot naturally develop further here.

Now, thinking of self-reflection, to formulate oneself about it, is a daring thing, is to put language at risk, to go to the limits of language, and probably even pass these.... It is - as well - to expose oneself to a more or less severe up beating by language. Language - or our brain, - or the World - is not quite built - so to say - for questions of this here type.

Let us first try to have a look at self-knowledge regarded as a common form of knowledge in classical philosophical meaning of the word. We can then easily (!) see this:
Let us , for example, look at the proposition: a.) "There is an "I" , who has knowledge about Mabel." This proposition is not especially problematic, if You do not take into consideration such facts as the impossibility to know another person thoroughly, that I am changing, my capability of knowledge, that Mabel changes and that we all can have different opinions , that there probably is no absolute knowledge about Mabel ever to be had, i.e. that knowledge is imperfect and relative. But these are minor problems now, because we know what we do mean by uttering this. Let us proceed to the exact analogue ( propositional ) statement: b.) " There is an "I" , who has knowledge about itself." ( ....ordinarily :"I have knowledge about myself." ).

It would not be fair, not to point out immediately the problems connected with these propositions, and not to mention that they have been issue to many books and papers. These propositions lies at heart of much of the philosophy - and psychology - of the former century, and there are few philosophers, that has not given any comment upon them. ( Cf. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre .... the anthology The Mind´s I, S. Cavell´s The claim of reason., in Sweden for instance Eva Mark´s Självbilder och jagkonstitution.(diss.), only to name a few of them...) But we do not presuppose any "learned" philosophical knowledge from our reader, and we will - like the elders of these authors - give it another shot.
An oak is not brought down by one stroke from a little axe....

We can pose the question: Does the statement "There is an "I", that has knowledge of itself." mean, that this knowledge is a new one. That it has not always been there? We will assume , quite frankly, for the sake of argument,( since we are mainly in search for the meaning of the propositions:" I know myself." and " I (truly) am myself.".... ), that this is the case.

- Thus: , formally expressed, : ( - xKx) - ( where the horisontal stroke - .... You are most likely familiar with this....- means "not", and in the sequel: the sign " ^ " means "and",, the "v" stands for "or" .short for latin "vel", meaning "or" ) , otherwise expressed: " It is not the case, that x has any knowledge about x.".The assertion b.) is very difficult to make exact. What strikes us first is, I think, that it is a big difference between what I can know about Mabel on one hand, and what I can know about myself on the other. Is it even any likeness in substance, in form, any "family-likeness" between those two propositions ? Is it the same kind of knowledge ( with a.) and with b.) at stake here . We can reformulate a. and b. thus aa. ) Ex( xKm). ( Where the letter "E" stands for the statement "It exists..."and "m" stands for Mabel. ) and bb.) "Ex (xKx ).

In the concept of knowing oneself lies an implication: To know yourself ,You have to know that You know. ( This is not analogous to the other issue: "to be oneself". You do not necessarily have to know that You are yourself, to be it. This being could be "executed" , "performed" , -so to say -, spontaneous .)

( Socrates became famous because of the Oracle had uttered about him ,that he was the only man, who knew, that he did not know. He then, by the philosophers of History came to be inserted i a "holy row" of non-knowers. He was followed, and maybe superseded, by Juan de la Cruz,( in his book on the climbing of the Karmel mountain ) by ancient monks of many kinds, the magnificent anonymous book about The cloud of not-knowing, the work of papal delegate N. Cusanus, who wrote De Docta ignorantia .... The old skeptics ( Sextus E. and esp. pyrrhonists :"Knowledge is impossible.") never did achieve the same lofty status. We will discuss Socrates at greater length below.... ) .

The knowledge of this knowledge of oneself can be formalized accordingly: c.) " Ex (xKx ^ ( xK(xKx)). But would it be proper to say that the knowledge of my self is of the same kind as the knowledge of my knowledge of this. The concept mentioned above, "self-consciousness" should according to this kind of reasoning perhaps consist of two kinds of knowledge. The formalization of self-knowledge - (Ex (xK(xKx)- could at least not be right then if we did not separate the K,s into K´and K´´. - Then we must take in to consideration the time factor. bb. precedes c. ( In the Mabel case it could be more of a simultaneously... ). We discard time and concentrate on the alleged different two kinds of knowledge.

The easiest of the two kinds is certainly, though it is not easy, the latter form ( K´´ ). It is much more easy to know, that You know something, than to know it, ( or come to know it.). In K´we have the kernel , and it seems that we now shall come to the point when, in regarding the algorithm :(xKx), we have to ask ourselves, if x on the left side is the same as x on the right side of the K.. And this question, naturally, is the real crux ! ( I told You above, that it was several huge problems involved in my project..... ) Cavell, to name an Anglo-Saxon -,- among others has readily pointed this out. ( This problem is so commonly spread, that it even appears in the title of an English evergreen : "Me, myself and I.", and many sayings is playing with the paradox underlying.)

In order not to get caught by the difficulties, we will try to be a bit radical, and pronounce the knowledge about knowledge K´´,"Metaphysical knowledge",- compare it with the metaphysical problem concerning human knowledge of chairs, trees and other people. Thus, what we regard as easy, K´´, we name metaphysical. What name could properly ( heuristic ) be assigned to the knowledge of oneself K´ ?? "Physical" would not be quite right, I think. ( Maybe to M. Merleau-Ponty and his special form of phenomenology...). But would it really be a right thing to do, to differ K´from K´´ completely. It is a bit like, what we will come to discuss later put monologue an dialogue in absolute opposition to each other. You could not possibly know yourself without knowing anything else. Thus K´´precedes K´ , like dialogue "by necessity" precedes monologue. ( When using expression "by necessity", I always mean:"That is the way it is, simply." And I do not think the phrase has any other meaning at all, but often has been used to mislead. ) Now we have ( hopefully ) reached to the one conclusion that we must use K´´ in K´,- that in the knowing about ourselves we will be forced to use different methods and aspects of our knowledge of external things and try to transform these methods and chose applicable aspects, if we want to come to knowledge about ourselves. Something like an "aspect-knowledge" comes to my mind.( Cf .L. Wittgenstein´s Philosophische Untersuchungen.)
But it is not as simple as that. We now have to take into consideration the real big problem, the one pointed our by Proust above -, that the seeker and that what is sought seems to be very much the same entity , - the paradox of K´.

C.) Some notes concerning paradoxes in Philosophy of Mathematics and self reference:

We hear, and utter - in daily life - propositions about propositions ( i.e. propositions about themselves ). An example from the Greek Eubulides, :"I am lying!" (i.e."not telling the truth."). It is usually called the paradox of Zeno from Elea in southern Italy ( 495-445 B.C.) .

In antiquity it was very popular , and went by various names, among them the Epimenides´ proposition:

The cretenser E. asserts: "All cretensians are lying." .

This antinomy has been handled differently in modern philosophy. After having found numerous paradoxes of the same structure as the Liar paradox ( Richards, Berry´s, and maybe Grelling´s and Nelson´s ), one has reached a conclusion that all logical and semantic paradoxes more or less directly are referring to themselves, or, - more correctly : they are self-referring . One way to handle this was ( and is )

A.) the A. Tarski way: A language free from antinomies may not be allowed to be semantically closed : it may not include means of expressing the formulation of the semantic of the language itself. Tarski is forbidding expressions like ordinary propositions about language.

Other people B.) have been trying to use this paradox to question different propositions in different systems. We might call them the paradox-likers, the paradoxicians. The most famous one of these in modern time is unquestionably Kurt Gödel. His paper,"Uber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Matematica und verwandter Systeme"(1911) ( On formally Undecidable propositions .(transl.1962.) is known by almost every student of mathematics, and it makes the unexperienced ... (!) to put in question the whole bulk of human thought.

The work of Gödel cannot be characterized very shortly with accurancy ( by me ), but : by arithmatizing the syntax Gödel - and by creating a parallell ( Gödel-propositions, maybe pseudo-prpositions ) - managed to show a.: that within every axiomatically built mathematical theory ( for example the Russel/Whitehead's Principia Matematica) always exists assertions, which in a certain way is part of the system, but which can not by proven true or false within the theory ( the so called proposition of incompleteness or proposition of unprovability , and b.: that the freedom from antinomy with every axiomatic system not can be proved , lest You do not use principles of conclusions so complicated that the question whether they themselves are free from antinomies is quite as open.

Gödel´s discovery has been verified a couple of times using other systems as object of investigation,- for example the Zeno paradox -, -. We are now aware of that the mathematic theorem is in a weaker position than before, something which does not concern the mathematical proposition, since this does not express itself about itself. ( A mathematic theorem always contains both the proposition and it´s proof. Cf. Euclid and his Elementa.) - ( Bertrand Russell were not very much disturbed by "the discovery", because he saw that it had no practical implications regarding the efficiency of mathematics. I don´t think he ever directly commented upon Gödel´s paper,- and R.s production were vast... A. Einstein invited Gödel in the U.S.A. to conversations and they became friends.) (Those who are interested in the paradox and in Kurt Gödel´s more than remarkable essay may find D. Hofstadter´s Pulitzer Prize -awarded book Gödel, Escher, Bach illuminating, but I also recommend the more concise Gödel´s proof , by E. Nagel and J.R. Newman. Cf. El.Goldmann.(2006)

Now is the question whether the proposition:" I know myself." is a paradox in the same way as Zeno´s . ( and thus connected to Gödel´s reasoning.) It is not. But it does contain self-reference, which appears to me to be close to the problem around the "exact" paradoxes. It is not a semantic paradox. We are never put into perplexity the way we are by The Liar. We will return to the problem of self-reference as taken up by philosophers of several schools and from different backgrounds. We can often see that it varies between the Anglo-Saxon, the roman and the Gothic/Germanic spheres.

D.) Some light on the behaviorists.

We can also regard positivism and behaviorism as protests against the possibility of asserting:"I know myself.". Introspection was not part of the ideal of Auguste Comte´s Cour de la philosophie Positive -(1830-42).
Behaviorism arouse out of functionalism, a branch of transatlantic pragmatism, where William James and John Dewey played the central roles in connection with the brilliant Ch. S. Peierce. W. James´ The Principles of Psychology ( 1890 ) was mostly centered around showing that behavior and mental processes were possible to alter. The mental process was still , according to J. , a possible object for study, - J.s book The variety of religious experience (1902) was important. Functionalism arouse explicitly with John B. Watson and his Behaviorism ( 1925 ).

The perhaps most famous and upright among the behaviorist, B.F. Skinner expresses himself thus: " Without help from the verbal collective all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product. It is not enough to be aware of that consciousness not is a field for the autonomous Man; consciousness is completely out of reach for the lonely individual... ( from B.F. Skinner, Beyond freedom and dignity, chapt. What is a human being? ). He continues: " It is neither within reach for any the exact knowledge of any human being." ( Ib. ) With S. there is very little of the belief in the future. the openness to ideas and belief in human progress, which is so strong with and important to Peirce. ( to be continued.....) /Some of Peirce´s smaller works could be found on the Internet as PDF-files. /

E.) Some light on the analytical philosophers.

" I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can I observe anything but the perception." ( D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.) " The word " I " does not denote a possessor." ( L. Wittgenstein.) "...I could not know it was myself I had found." ( Shomaker ) But it would be extraordinary to find somebody else...! "It is relatively seldom that we observe ourselves in the ways in which we observe others." ( Shomak. p.80.) S. Shomaker wrote ( influenced by J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein ) a fine essay in 1970, important to us titled Self-Reference and Self-Awareness : Philosophers who have reflected on the use of the subject.

" The I does not create anything else than the movement which succeeds it." ( M. de Biran ) ( A psychologist, an excellent such, Rollo May, who among other things ,wrote the excellent books Love and will , The courage of creation and The Meaning of Anxiety fails completely in his (smaller) book , Man in search for himself. He gets caught in circles , and is in the end he seems to be forced to refer back to Heraclitus (Cf. above!), the son of a king..., and the deep and cloudy Logos in which the elusive, mysterious Self dwells......) Comment: It is open - certainly - to question weather we shall treat knowledge about oneself in such a manner, that the reflective construction "I "( or "me") - "self" denotes an identity. Maybe it is all a question about identity and difference and of the "no", the negation...( Cf. Hegel, Adorno , etc.), because we all know, it is obvious to all of us, that we can be fighting ourselves, or do what we don´t want to do, and: are we , then, splitting an identity, or are we to entities ? We could, in fact, say both, without getting into greater trouble. The construction, the formula xKx , could be questioned, and we might replace it with another, - like eKa ( ego and alter ), but then we will choose to omit the central kernel dynamic of difference and identity ( Cf. M. Heidegger´s Identity and difference.).

We must halt here for a moment to bring at least some clarity to what is at hand. It is obvious, that sometimes it is not at all about identity. In some clean grammatical phrases, as, for example ( A.) ."Paete killed himself.", it is pure identity. In another ." I learned (myself) English.", it is equally identical. But, in our main case here, ( B. ):" I came to learn about myself." we have a difference of quality. It is a possibility to evade the truth about oneself. It is not a clearcut thing as killing oneself or learning a language.
We also have to recognize that it is not quasi constructions we are using. Some philosophers , like J.L. Austin , H.-N. Castaneda indicators and quasi indicators, ( not the novel writer ) and P.F. Strawson ( in his book Individuals are trying to get to grips with these formulas. Strawson points out, that there is a certain kind of assertions that has psychological attributes, certain fields within the mental area, of which only the person talking can know something. Strawson names these predicates "P-predicates".

Sometimes we can feel that the word "myself" or "himself" is covering a bit of illusion, - we are often not at ease with the word, since we feel that it is meaningless in a logical sense ( in the same way as the concept "class" - in some way - is meaningless to the member of the class ) .It seems that we are dealing with a necessary incomplete construction. We will soon come to the conclusion that, as far as self-knowledge is concerned we have no immediate such. ( Cf. Edm. Husserl & P. Ricoeur, in Theory of Interpretations, Chapt. The Question of the Subject.)
( It is a complicating factor that languages are not alike when it comes to talking "reflectively". Some languages are richer than others, or, should we say, more complicated in structure. In french "soi" is the reflexive pronoun, while "meme" is a word coming from a latin root "egomet ipse" meaning "the same". "Le soi" is close to ger. "Das Selbst" and eng. "The Self", sw. "Självet", but Hegel could declare that a flower had a "sich" but not a "Selbst", because only a human being, a person, can have such a thing, meaning self consciousness. The french word "autre" comes from lat. "alter", and "autrui" from "alter" plus "lui" -" another him"....) Self- Knowledge does not appear without a foregoing process,- or it is this process-, and we can thus see how the conversation of the Ego with it´s Alter at the same time is a coming together of Ego and Alter, where Alter changes, something which has it ´s immediate consequences for the Ego ..... We have here a time factor,( t ), and xt always have K about xt , if we might say so... But we will certainly not be a lot wiser be this insight.

F. Existentialists.

The lonely ( after the death of his wife ) French thinker Maine de Biran, who left a lot of speculation around our subject behind, once wrote:" The "I"does not objectify itself into a picture,; naturally not either by an ontological abstraction. The very existence of it lies in the conception and the perception of effort ( "l´apperception de l´effort"....), to which it feels itself as subject or cause." ( Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée,1 ,pp.144-148. ) We intend to return to the "dialectic" of lack and super flue later on... It may be worth reflecting upon weather self-knowledge involves effort or not - maybe not in the meaning of de Biran - but an effort to get rid of the very first impulse.

Dealing with oneself is , or ought to be, a critical occupation. If you do not question yourself you will probably not come to know yourself .One of Kierkegaard´s main insights was, that it was essential to deal with oneself "as a suspect". A person. who in no part of himself is in conflict with himself could not possibly be up to making any important choices, and is a person of rigid stature. We could easily make this distinction: a person , that does not have a conflict with himself appears to others very distinctly as a caricature. He or she will be easily recognized as a person who is exactly the person of whom you could say: he ( or she ) could have become a "......". A human being without an inner conflict is on his ( or her ) way right away from himself ( herself ). The ideal of our time is a person without conflicts inside. It is - according to my view - a false ideal. It is quite clear an ideal that does not promote personality , growth, meaningful action and self-knowledge.

You must become if not your worst enemy, the strongest critic of yourself .:)

Kaj Genell 2006.