On Substantial Self-knowledge

The professionalization of the subject has made philosophers of self-knowledge far too comfortable with the idea that their job is to discover technical solutions to technical problems generated by background philosophical assumptions about the nature of knowledge and mind. They may insist that what is philosophically worthwhile can’t be decided by what non-philosophers think is worthwhile, and that it is of no consequence if their questions strike the uninitiated as odd. Philosophy has its own concerns, and all that matters is whether their concerns have a philosophical rationale....

There has to come a point at which philosophy has to address wider concerns, and if self-knowledge is not the kind of thing which philosophers can think about in ways that resonate with the world at large then one fears for the future of the subject. It’s easy for professional philosophers to sneer at popular accounts of self-knowledge in self-help books, but philosophically curious readers of such books are entitled to ask what philosophy has to offer instead. The answer had better not be “Nothing.”--Quassim Cassam writing in the New York Times. [HT Thomas Jacobi]

I think of myself as a cheerleader for analytical existentialism something akin to what Prof. Cassam -- a philosopher I have admired from a distance -- calls "“substantial” self-knowledge." Even so, when he writes "To know yourself would be to know such things as your deepest thoughts, desires and emotions, your character traits, your values, what makes you happy and why you think and do the things you think and do," I notice at once that he leaves out what one might call the 'political self' or the self in (embedded, if not constituted by) society. If these social forms of self-knowledge are present in his remarks they are lurking in the implicit shadows of Cassam's substantial conception. I return to this below.

First, I quoted the first paragraph above because it exemplifies my point of partial agreement with Cassam. It's not difficult to discern a conception of philosophy in it that is most vigorously (and rigorously) articulated by Oxford's Timothy Williamson in the contemporary scene (see the "Methodological Afterword" of his Modal Logic as Metaphysics [recall], where in the name of clarity, philosophy as a professional and esoteric subject is joyfully embraced.) Because of my analytical egalitarian commitments, I am no friend of philosophy as a purely esoteric discipline even though I advocate the need that some philosophy should be allowed to pursue highly technical, trivial questions pushed along by some inner necessity.

Even so, against Cassam, I recognize that esoteric, technical philosophy can be concerned with substantial self-knowledge (you try making sense of, say, Spinoza's Ethics part V without a specialist guide who has mastered extremely technical jargon and conceptual distinctions). In particular, for much of the twentieth century there have been professional philosophers that have used extremely esoteric language to discuss substantial self-knowledge: I mean, of course, so-called 'continental' philosophers who deployed a highly technical language to speak to and teach substantial self-knowledge to different souls/audiences at once (recall my treatment). That is to say, there are political dimension internal to philosophy (the magister and her student will get different things out of the text) and external to philosophy (outsiders get a certain image of philosophy) alongside a potentially politicized conception of self that may or may not be destabilizing to individuals or society.

So, to be precise: it's not so much the professionalism of philosophy, but (i) the division of intellectual labor with a method of problem-solving alongside (ii) a set of noxious distinctions about what genuine philosophy is or is not that removed the pursuit of substantial self-knowledge from the mainstream of analytical philosophy (recall my posts on Russell on Spinoza's vision got treated as somehow not philosophical), including the forgetting of Stebbing.  (I say 'mainstream' because there have always been analytical philosophers who have quietly pursued substantial self-knowledge (recall my post on Jeff McConnell).)

I know that Cassam knows all of this, but it is very important that we recognize the blocks and path-dependencies that prevent professional (analytic) philosophy from simply jumping into articulating a substantial self-knowledge. After all, we are -- if we take "starting points" seriously -- historically and politically situated selves (recall the first thing I noticed above), even if we, in our cosmopolitan moments, aspire to speak to souls of all ages. Not to ruin a joke: this is why Quine's comment about the meaningless of starting points in Ohio is so important (recall).

"Methodological Afterword,"

Second, and following up on the previous paragraph, I am suspicious of the idea that philosophy must 'resonate' with the world at large if this means we must operate "with a realistic picture of what real human beings are like." This is a dangerous status quo bias, especially when it is coupled with a purportedly depoliticized conception of substantial self-knowledge. Philosophy's demand on us is to articulate not what our self-knowledge is, but rather what our self-knowledge might be, perhaps, after emulating some sage's path to wisdom or, more plausibly, a creative re-modelling of institutions.*

 

*I thank L.A. Paul and Thomas Jacobi for discussion.