When a person’s true self comes out
Joshua Knobe notes a complicated question:
How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?
The philosophical tradition says
that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.
Which sounds right, in a way. But…
But when I mention this view to people outside the world of philosophy, they often seem stunned that anyone could ever believe it. They are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression. To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them.
That’s interesting. The last bit seems slightly odd to me. Those times are extreme, and rare, so it seems odd to think they reveal the true self. Surely the duller homeostatic self that eats breakfast and picks fights on the internet is just as real as the one who is drunk.
Then again, there is another kind of being “overcome” or caught up, which is Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s flow. I used to be unsure whether I sometimes got that when concentrating on a piece of writing or not, until one day I worked on a piece for Comment is Free on a flight to San Jose and was literally incredulous to look out the window and see we were almost over San Francisco. I had thought we were maybe crossing the Oregon border. Maybe that’s the real self. But that’s the opposite of being drunk, in fact – it’s thinking in such a focused way that time gets swallowed.
Anyway; Knobe thinks neither is right.
But it seems that the matter is more complex. People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living.
Well yes. I choose writing over being drunk.
I’d be interested in hearing from some philosophers what they think of experimental philosophy. I can’t decide how potentially interesting it is, or whether it’s just old psychology reheated.
I remember someone telling me once that the “real you” is the person you are when no one’s looking. Maybe in some sense that includes yourself, in moments where you’re not being self-conscious or self-aware or all up in your own head. Being drunk can get you there I guess, but you’re also sort of an altered version of yourself. I think if there’s judgment involved, it comes in the stretches of time between the “real” moments. That’s where you make the sort of choices about what sort of person you are and build the mental framework that guides you when you’re “in the zone.”
Socrates believed the unexamined life is not worth living, and I agree with that. However, there is a bewildering variety of ways by which such examinations can be brought to bear on life itself.
I would say that I can’t fully agree with either view. I have a pair of thought experiments to explain why:
Imagine two people. They have the exact same thoughts and urges. One acts on those thoughts and urges, while the other does not. Are these the same person? I would say the very fact that one supresses these thoughts and urges while the other does not is a major difference. In fact, overall a person’s ability to control their insticts and baser urges is a major factor in that person’s personality.
Now imagine two people, one who has certain urges and supresses them, and one who lacks those urges. I would say, based on the same criteria, that these are once again different people, because one still supresses his or her urges while the other does not.
So I think neither is a valid perspective because both neglect the impartance of self-control, and the decision about what to control and when, which I consider to be key components in a person.
“… To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them.”
The last bit seems slightly odd to me.
‘In vino veritas’? If you take the Wikipedia page as correct, that not only goes back to Roman times, but to the Greeks, Chinese and Babylonian Talmud too. It seems a fairly common idea.
Surely, if anything is the “true self” it must be true over time, so pointing at one specific time or feeling or event is necessarily excluding at least part of what makes up the “true self”. In that sense, I can understand pointing at rationality as representing the true self, but if the capacity for reflection is the criteria then it excludes the marginal cases (children, mental patients, etc.), and it also, in a way, excludes the concept of the self: there is nothing to distinguish between identities, rationality is not only ahistorical, it’s impersonal.
So, I think, the true self isn’t anything definite, it’s the totality of all things about a person, or to put it in another way, it is the things that distinguish between individuals.
The point is that you can talk about the true self without making judgements about what sort of life is worth living. I did not place an emphasis on any one thing for that reason, to show that the criteria for “self” are principally defined by the self in question, rather than any general fundamental rule.
Personally I’m not convinced there is such a “thing” as “true self”. But if there is it’s most likely the sum total of a person’s attributes – kind and not-kind, brave and not-brave etc etc rather than the either-or, one or the other of which must be somehow “true self” and the opposite “not true self”. Whatever it is or isn’t I doubt it will ever be identified by the mental masturbation of philosophy unless we can all agree on a specific set of attributes that constitute the “self”. Good luck with that!
I agree, Ophelia. Only a fool would base what is ‘fundamental’ to a man on the passion he is unable to suppress when drunk. I’m also not happy with Knobe equating inebriation with being overcome with passion. Ignoring the tautology (‘overcome with passion’ = ‘unable to suppress’), being overcome with passion is ultimately the psychological point that is reached in all of us just before every decision we commit to. Passion is what motivates us to act. Without it, we don’t move, in a sexual direction or any other.
Going with the notion of self for a moment, every thought one has and every action one takes reflects the self and is true. The thing you think during quiet reflection is as true as the drunken action you thoughtlessly take. It all counts. If some want to discard certain of these thoughts and actions in declaring a true self or if they want to weigh up all these thoughts and actions in doing so, then good luck; but it seems a tad futile to me.
Oph, I think you’re right to suggest that the continuous life of everyday routine is as much a part of the self as is the inner passions or one’s considered projects. The phrase “true self” and its cognates are persuasive definitions, a One True Scotsman fallacy. A better approach would be to just lay out what is roughly meant by “self” in the most general sense, which will include the stuff you mentioned.
I think the self is just a way of talking about personhood, and personhood has to be understood in terms of the conditions under which a person may survive. And a person survives just in case two out of these three conditions are satisfied: bodily survival, survival of memory/consciousness, and survival of the person’s legacy. Dull routines, bodily and mental, seem to be clear parts of the self.
Though dull routines are not part of what people want to talk about when they ask about the “true self”, or at least not what Knobe wants to talk about in that regard. He wants to talk about how to make sense of identity crises. So if we wanted to make sense of Knobe’s puzzling cases, we do seem to need to investigate particular aspects of the self that we find especially valuable. But what we can’t do is make any particular aspect of the self (the body, mind, legacy) out to be any more important than the others. If Mark Pierpont’s legacy as a Christian conflicts with his psychology and somatic drives, then his Christian legacy cannot be plausibly thought to be a true expression of his person. If (as is more likely) his psychology is uncommitted, then there is no sense in talking about his “true” self either way — all answers are equally implausible. It doesn’t matter what we want to investigate; all answers are unreasonable pseudo-answers.
Ken, I’m a sometime proponent of x-phi. I particularly appreciate the fact that they put philosophical intuitions under scrutiny, which is a valuable service to the discipline, because there is a lot of bad philosophy out there that rests its arguments only on intuition-pumping.
Still, a lot of philosophers dislike x-phi. However, the animus tends to be based on reasons that are of varying quality. TPM actually had a recent issue on X-phi not too long ago that had some great and fun articles, you might want to check it out.
Comment in moderation? Bah! Bah I say!
It seems to me that the the impassioned view of the ‘true self’ is usually the one promoted in most religion (western and eastern), and is one of the ways they maintain control and adherence. Without the control the religion provides, what manner of atrocities might you commit? It’s part of the reason why conversion stories are so popular in evangelical circles.
I have to wonder if the idea of a one true self is complete nonsense, though. A relic of the idea of incorporeal spirits animating our bodies? Isn’t that what separating ourselves from our instincts is attempting to do?
This is so interesting that I’m afraid I may have to blog about it – especially as I’m currently reading Sandel on Kant on things like this. Damn!
I have to wonder if the idea of a one true self is complete nonsense, though. A relic of the idea of incorporeal spirits animating our bodies? Isn’t that what separating ourselves from our instincts is attempting to do?
That sounds about right. However, I can kind of understand the position that surprised Knobe so much, although for different reasons than his partners in conversation have given. The whole point of rational reflection is, in my eyes, that, if done correctly, there is only one way to do it. If everybody had the same information and acted entirely rationally, they should all arrive at the same conclusions about empirical reality – but not necessarily about what should be done, because that depends on values which may be just personal preferences (e.g., how much inequality would we be comfortable with). So what makes people different from each other is not reason as such.
There is no true self. There is no essence. We are all the things we are. Deluding ourselves that those characteristics we most admire or desire in ourselves is some how truer or more quintessential is the same type of self-centered myopia that leads we humans to see beings like us behind everything in the universe. While it is good to want thing and judge the value of things relative to yourself, that “want” plays no part of the universe outside your mind.
Comment out! Sorry Ben. Nobody miss Ben’s rich comment.
‘True self’? Another one of those insoluble questions that philosophers seem to delight in asking, there is simply the ‘self’- a product of nature and nurture that responds to stimuli.
#1 Ken Pidcock,
I’d be much more interested in what psychologists think of “experimental philosophy”, the term seems to be an oxymoron.
“True Self” sounds like confused dualistic woo to me…
I think that Shakespeare made a profound contribution when he equated the ordinary normal person with an actor. (Choose your quote & insert here.)
Unfortunately character acting has all but died out from the modern stage and screen, but a consummate actor like say Alec Guinness, Meryl Streep or Dustin Hoffman can do a personality/character switch before your very eyes, to literally become a different person. In my view this tells us quite a bit about all personality formation.
For my own part, I think that I am the sum total of the roles I have played and gambits I have tried that have worked for me, and got a good critical response. Those that I tried out but found didn’t get me anywhere (especially in my adolescence) are now in the bin, occasionally remembered with a bit of a shudder. Those go along with all the forks in the road and choices made, as a result of which I can look at others’ situations and say to myself ‘perhaps’ if they are better in my view, and ‘there but for the grace of Whoever…’ if they are worse.
Like, when on the toilet with a finger up your nose?
I read this and was struck that a Yale philosophy professor writing in the New York Times would just assume the existence of a “true self,” as if that were something we all agreed on. Is this dumbing-down for the masses, or is contemporary philosophy really so stupid?
Invigilator, it’s watering-down, I think. The canonical views on personal survival and selfhood don’t really assume such things, or at least they make a case that is prime facie plausible. Hume, for instance, understood the self to be the unity of conscious experience, but was also a skeptic of this very idea. Others, called the somatic theorists, have tried to identify the self in our bodies alone. And our bodies might in fact be our “true self”, in a sense, though in that case “true” turns out to be a lot less sexy-sounding than one might have hoped.
Stanford’s EP has a serviceable intro to contemporary philosophy of personal identity: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ I say “serviceable” because that entry seemed pretty high on analytical gobbledygook and low on comprehensiveness. e.g., SEP leaves out constructionist ideas of the self, which are closer to the Ian-Shakespeare vision of selfhood. But it’s an informative place to start.
“True”?
This is that familiar No True Me routine.
Excuse me, but bullshit.
Now where did I put my mysteriously, ooo, empty singular fullnesses? I need to figure out why their dancing affects doughnuts.
People think having your mind altered by alcohol is the right way to discovere yourself? Really? Why not LSD?
I think I agree with the people who are saying that it’s the wrong question: there is no one true self, therefore we cannot say any specific aspect of a person is their true self.
Deepest desires <i>and goals</i> are relevant, I think: if there are impulses someone thinks are wrong, but occasionally still thinks about and has to fight, and others that they’re actively working on, I wouldn’t give them equal status.
http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2011/06/more-on-true-self.html