Self-Constitution
Self-knowledge in the contemporary scene has its debates most fully developed in three important sub-disciplines of philosophy:
(i) epistemology (Schwitzgebel, Byrne, O’Brien, Moran)
(ii) practical rationality (Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman)
(iii) authenticity and sincerity (Trilling, Williams, Varga)
The debates have their relative autonomy for, of course, some good reasons. The most important reason is their understanding of what self-knowledge is for. For epistemologists, self-knowledge is an intriguing kind of knowledge, seeming non-inferential, immediate, and authoritative. But more than that it is unique and intriguing, epistemologists might assume that its connection to self-awareness and self-consciousness means that self-knowledge is (biologically, evolutionarily) important for attention-setting and self-regulation. So self-knowledge, for epistemologists, is for whatever self-consciousness is for: more successful living in the world. For theorists of action, by contrast, self-knowledge is for constituting oneself as an agent. Agency requires endorsement of certain of one’s desires as reasons for action, or requires preference that some desires be long-term, structural, and otherwise decisive, or requires that intentions form ramified networks among themselves. And all these processes require self-knowledge. For theorists of authenticity, self-knowledge contributes importantly to virtue, the mitigation of anxiety, and even, if counterintuitively, to a salutary depth.
But these debates also have their relative autonomy for less-choiceworthy reasons. They differ, I argue, also in their respective understanding of the term “self-” in “self-knowledge.” (They may differ less — or less than they should! (?) — in what they mean by “knowledge.”) Often this disagreement is not observed or appreciated in the course of their intra- or inter-subdisciplinary exchanges. I have argued elsewhere that Plato’s Charmides diagnoses the faults of inadequate thematization of this “self-.” What Plato saw in his generation holds in ours. My work now, post-Socrates and Self-Knowledge, is to diagnose especially those debates between so-called empiricist and rationalist views of self-knowledge, and, with effort and luck, to redirect them. These are the debates one sees in, e.g., Brie Gertler, Self-Knowledge, or Quassim Cassam, Self-Knowledge for Humans. The problem making this debate intractable and unsatisfactory has — to put it most briefly — two parts:
1) an inadequate care to define the nature of belief, as a mental item (or disposition, or some other constellation of bodily, psychological, and linguistic elements) or as, by contrast, a normative commitment
2) a general silence about whether it ought to be the “self” (normatively construed) that we take as the object of self-knowledge’s knowing.
The outcome of this work is a paper called “Self-Knowledge as an Ethical Concept.” Not surprisingly, the concept of self-constitution is integral to its development.
Curricular significance
For some, the central question of philosophy is “who am I?” where this question is not to be taken anthropologically or biographically per se, but as a question of one’s ideal: “who ought I to be?” This question is answered, I think, through discussion of the gnomic “Know yourself”; and making sense of this injunction takes investigations in the three subdisciplines of philosophy concerned with self-knowledge, listed above. These questions range broadly enough for any Introduction to Philosophy class. They are even more closely suited for courses on “selfhood,” “self-knowledge,” or “normativity.”