Episode 61 - Self-Knowledge

Transcript

David: 0:16

Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:19

The podcast where two philosophers who are professors and longtime friends relate big ideas to everyday life.

David: 0:27

I am David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:29

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome. David, what do you got for us today?

David: 0:33

Ellie

Ellie: 0:37

That sounds intense. Okay. Continue.

David: 0:40

No, I was trying to set a scene in a mood, but I failed miserably.

Ellie: 0:44

I think that actually was extremely successful. The only thing is you kind of broke out, broke out of it. So get us in.

David: 0:49

So Ellie, imagine that you are an ancient Greek citizen bracket for a moment that you would be a second class citizen as a woman with no rights. Let's put that to the side.

Ellie: 1:00

Imagine I'm a Greek land owning man.

David: 1:03

And you've decided to make a trip to the shrine of Dephi. This is the most important shrine in all of Greece known by your compatriots as the navel of the world, the place from which the world was born. And this shine is built around a sacred spring. You've come to ask the priestess of Apollo, known as the Oracle, a question that you have about your own future. And as you go there filled with excitement, but also low key worried about what they're gonna tell you.

Ellie: 1:35

He's not the right man for you.

David: 1:37

Yes, you are not in fact, a Greek male citizen. And as you're approaching the doorway, you see an inscription written over it, which is know thyself or in the Greek, gnothi seauton.

Ellie: 1:52

Okay, so great story, David, love it. I'm imagine I'm imagining yourself, I'm picturing myself there. Because we decided we wanted to talk about the Oracle of Delphi in this episode. I did a little deep dive and actually I discovered that this was not the only maxim that was on the outside of the Temple of Apollo.

David: 2:15

Oh really?

Ellie: 2:16

So you're right that it would've been there. And in fact, it would've been at the lintel.

David: 2:22

What is that?

Ellie: 2:22

It's like the thing over the doorway.

David: 2:25

Oh, okay.

Ellie: 2:26

So it had, it had pride of place, but I went down a deep dive because I wanted to make sure that we weren't going to misinform our listeners about this in our episode. And so I took to Twitter to ask how many maxims were there at the Temple of Delphi. And I got a couple of answers. A classicist from Columbia mentioned that Stobaeus, the collector of extracts of ancient Greek writing and culture, says that there were 147 maxims total.

David: 2:53

Oh, whoa.

Ellie: 2:54

And then the host of the ancient myths podcast Myths, Baby! Pointed out, also on Twitter, that the temple probably had different numbers of maxims at different times because it existed, the temple, for like over a thousand years. And then I ran into my classics colleague earlier this week on campus and asked him about it. And he was the one who told me that this was the maxim that was over the lintel. And he actually took me downstairs to the classics department, showed me this giant mural of Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It was so fun.

David: 3:25

I just like, you're legit, like a modern day, Socrates, just like, harassing people on the street. Like tell me how many sayings

Ellie: 3:34

How many were there?

David: 3:36

How many maxims?

Ellie: 3:38

Yes. And so he was one who told me that this would've been at least the main maxim, although not the only one. And I think this makes sense because of all the maxims near the Temple of Apollo's entrance know thyself is the one that all philosophers can state off the top of our heads or in your case, give a, give a beautiful narrative around.

David: 3:55

With great scenery and ambience as we've established. But I actually really thought it was just the one that it just say gnothi seauton at the entrance of the temple. And I think part of the reason for my historical ignorance here is because as you say, it's the one that philosophers constantly reference. And Socrates mentions that numerous times in Plato's Dialogues, for instance, it's there in the Phaedrus.

Ellie: 4:20

Every hot person's favorite dialogue. Right?

David: 4:23

If you're not hot it's because that's not your favorite Dialogue, right? Like your hotness is a function of your relationship to this Dialogue.

Ellie: 4:32

I would've inverted it. I would say if you, if you're already hot, you're also going to like the Phaedrus.

David: 4:37

It's inevitable. No, I like that you become hot through liking the Phaedrus. I prefer that causal connection.

Ellie: 4:43

That is a much more Socratic view that that really plays into the symposium's narrative of how we gain knowledge. Okay. Okay. I'm

David: 4:51

Well,

Ellie: 4:51

gonna be quiet.

David: 4:52

No, but I mean, it's not only one of the sexiest ones. It's also, I think one of the best and Socrates mentions the inscription at Delphi to say that he first needs to know himself before he can busy himself trying to figure out anything else. So it seems that for Socrates, knowledge is really founded on self knowledge.

Ellie: 5:13

Mm. Okay. So I have thoughts on that for later in the episode, but I wanna get meta for a moment now, David, because this is reminding me a little too much of our process of developing this episode. And I feel like we should clue listeners in.

David: 5:30

Uh,

Ellie: 5:31

You and I met last week to discuss ideas that we had for this episode, for the topic of self knowledge. But instead we ended up having this two hour conversation about how we think our personalities come across on the podcast and how our podcast personas are the same and or different from ourselves in real life.

David: 5:48

Yeah, totally unexpected, but it was a two hour discussion about like, am I on the podcast really who I am in real life and how do I bridge that gap? And how am I ever in a position to know what the gap is just to let our, our listeners know, I was really worried that in the podcast I come across as this like dull, boring professor and that, that image doesn't live up to the image that I have of myself as a kind of funny, impromptu, go with the flow kind of guy. And I mean, you had a whole different take.

Ellie: 6:20

Well, yeah, because then my response was that as both co-host and listener, because of course we also listen to the episodes before they get released to make sure that they sound at least like relatively coherent, I think you come up as totally funny in the show. And so my response to you saying that was that I think your imagined idea of yourself as a state and buttoned up professor on the podcast is perhaps wrong because I don't perceive you that way. And I've also heard from a lot of our listeners that they don't perceive you that way either and that they recognize that of the two of us, you are the funnier one, which I would totally see.

David: 6:58

Yeah. Way to woman-splain my truth to me, Ellie.

Ellie: 7:02

Well, but it was, it was a funny moment where I was like, I don't want to deny your experience of not coming across on the podcast, the way that you wish. And so I was, I was trying to hold open the possibility that maybe you are coming across to some extent that way to you, but also to say if what you really want is an outsider's perspective of how you sound on the podcast to other people, I don't think that tends to be what comes across. However, people who think that David is boring state and buttoned up. Let us know, maybe just not in a review, send us an email instead.

David: 7:32

No blast it all over Twitter and Instagram. I want, I want my perception of myself to be, validated by others' opinions. No, but it's true that then we went into philosophical mode and just started talking and chatting just like we would in the podcast about the limits of self knowledge, based on our own perception of ourselves on the podcast. And I really love that, that that's our friendship and that that's our relationship.

Ellie: 7:58

Well, and I mean, I think one of the, one of the things that I really value, especially having a former acting background, is people giving me feedback on how I'm coming across. And I think sometimes David, your inclination is not necessarily to do that because you want to be kind and I'm like, I don't want you to be kind I want you to be as objective, to use a very fraught word, as objective as possible. Like, how am I coming across? But it, it matters to me that I care about what you think. So for me, that idea of coming across in a quote, objective sense, it's not objective in the sense that I want your subjective take on it. And that of people I respect. That's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially as we've been getting more traction on places like the cesspools of YouTube comments, it's like, whose opinions about me do I actually value? And whose opinions do I not value? Because I don't think that they should contribute to my vision of myself.

David: 8:54

Yeah. And I mean, in your case, you've been getting a lot of really nasty comments around being a woman and being conventionally good looking.

Ellie: 9:01

I mean, I get, I get nice comments too guys, but hey, if you wanna go ahead and post a nice comment on our YouTube. Always welcome. Because, yeah, certainly the reading philosophy video that went viral a month or two ago, it's like "Tips for reading philosophy" and there were multiple comments that was like, tip one, don't listen to a woman. And I was just like what century

David: 9:21

Yeah. I know

Ellie: 9:21

is this? I don't care about your conception of me at all.

David: 9:24

Fourth century BC, you are a woman in ancient Greece walking to the Temple, uh, to speak to the Oracle of Delphi.

Ellie: 9:37

Today, we're talking about self knowledge

David: 9:40

Can we, as the ancient Greeks believed, truly gnothi seauton?

Ellie: 9:45

Is self knowledge gained by introspection or are there better ways of getting a sense of who we are?

David: 9:51

And what is the self that we're trying to get to know to begin with?

Ellie: 10:01

I want to start with the scene that the philosopher Krista Lawler gives in her 2009 paper, Knowing What One Wants. There's a young woman named Katherine who's standing next to her son's crib while he sleeps. She suddenly hears the words in her head "have another". And she startled. Was she thinking about having another? Does she wanna have another kid? She wonders where did that even come from, right? Was this directive coming from some part of her or perhaps it was a question that part of herself was raising to another part of herself. Or was it something else all together? Maybe it didn't come from her at all, but some internalized voice of the culture or somebody else. Here we have an example of inner speech that leads to a process of Katherine's introspection in which she's trying to find out an explanation for this phrase, "have another," by figuring out where it comes from, quote within herself. And arriving at this explanation might involve Katherine imagining different possibilities for herself. So what if she pictures a newborn baby in her arms? Does that make her feel happy or alienated, unhappy, et cetera, that might lead her to conclude that, hey, I actually really don't like that image. And so that injunction to have another probably comes from the fact that all society wants me to do, secretly, is have babies.

David: 11:30

Which might be true of the social order in, in connection to Katherine's case, even though she has an only hypothetical existence, but, you know, with these desires that we have, there are two different questions that we can separate. There is a question of the status of the desire. Is it truly an expression of who I am? Is it maybe something akin to Marxist false consciousness? Is it maybe an unconscious belief? Is it just an ephemeral conviction that I'm feeling right now, but is gonna go away by tomorrow? Is it a longstanding habit of thought that I can break with some meditation and training and reflection? So that's one question, right? What's the status of the belief? And then the second one is the question about method. How do I go about testing that status? And in this case, it seems like you're, you're suggesting Ellie, that imagination helps us do that. By imagining the scenario, then we compare our conviction or our belief to the emotions that the imagination insights in us. Is that correct?

Ellie: 12:36

Well, I don't know exactly about that last part. It may be, but I need to revisit the paper, but certainly the idea that imagination is key is Lawlor's view. And I think we could also add to this different ways that we might figure out whether a belief is quote us or is coming from some internalized voice somewhere else. I am fascinated by the idea that all of us have as part of our inner monologues or better our inner dialogues, various characters that play roles at different times. And I think you see this a lot in the tradition of depth psychology, for instance, and it's part of what motivates various kinds of therapy as well, too. Right? A key function of a lot of forms of therapy is to figure out where your beliefs and your thoughts are coming from and deciding whether to identify with those or not to identify with those. And I think in particular, this idea. The injunction to have children as a woman in my thirties is something that, that I do think about and does not have another, in my case, I don't have any kids, but there is a lot of really unconscious pressure, sometimes conscious pressure, I have a few friends who are like, when are you gonna have a baby? I'm just like, leave me alone. God, not everybody needs to have a baby.

David: 13:49

Have one, have one, have one.

Ellie: 13:53

If I have that thought, you know, if I have that thought, who is it coming from? I think is a really valid question because then that can lead us to an exploratory process about what our values are.

David: 14:04

And I think that exploratory process can involve a number of, let's say faculties, right? It can involve imagination where I imagine the scenario and then see how it feels to me at first sight. But it also invokes memory because I, I need to think about previous experiences that I've had to see if I can trace the origin of that belief, maybe to my childhood, to my background, to the influence of a teacher, to friendships, whatever the case might be. And ultimately it also incorporates or involves critical assessment where I have to take that belief and try to assess the place that it occupies within the larger web of beliefs and convictions that I take to be my worldview, to see how it fits or doesn't fit in that web, you know? And so that labor of interpretation and trying to make everything cohere, it's never going to cohere perfectly or even by and large, but we can nonetheless treat it as a Kantian regulative ideal where we aspire to make our beliefs cohere.

Ellie: 15:07

Yeah. An interesting point about memory David, because I think you're so right about that in particular, one thing I often find, not necessarily guiding my actions, but at least a source of reflection is thinking about what former versions of myself would think about achievements, activities, and decisions that I have in the present day. So for instance, I have ever, since, you know, in the past couple of years, gaining more professional successes, I've had the tendency sometimes to think back on my struggling deeply, deeply doubtful self, who wasn't sure I had any good ideas or any ability to actualize my dreams in the world. And to imagine how proud of me she would be. Even though at the same time, I still have so many unrealized goals and dreams.

David: 15:56

Yeah. When I think about my past self, my past self is just disappointed. It's like, it's like nothing but unrealized dreams for this future, David, yeah.

Ellie: 16:05

I, I had a point in my life where I really felt that.

David: 16:07

Oh, really? Um, yeah, I'm, I'm sorry to hear that. And I mean, I knew that, I'm not hearing this on air for the first time, but it is also true that your current projection of what that past self would say is itself an imaginative act rooted in the concerns of your present self. So it's a kind of retroactive creation that you would never have in pure unadulterated form, if that makes sense. So even, you know, like in my research on mind and consciousness, I don't really believe that there is a fast and hard line between memory and imagination. Uh, because I do think all memory is fundamentally imaginative and a lot of imagination has a memorial component to it. And so maybe we can just think about those to us together that we imagine slash remember as ways of creating alternative worlds to test our desires.

Ellie: 17:07

Well, and I think what you're getting at in thinking about those dynamics is the nature of reflection. So I want us to think about that more here, like who is the self reflecting and who is the self reflected on what is the nature of the self that we can really know to begin with? And so when thinking about self knowledge, I think we often presume that the self is a thing and it is a thing that can be known in the sense we treat it in the same way that we treat objects in the world. So I can know this cup in my hand, by observing its properties. It is hard. It is a container for liquid. It is purple, whatever it might be. You know, I have a purple mug. That's my favorite. That's why I say that. But this kind of knowledge presumes some distance from the subject. I am not the cup. There is a knower and a known and observer and an observed. And philosopher, Richard Moran points out that this model of self knowledge is based on perception. We treat self knowledge as a directing of an inner eye onto ourselves, but the weird thing about the self is that we can't get this kind of knowledge of it. For one, we lack the requisite distance, knower and known here are the same thing. And so questions arise about whether we can even have access to this self. Wouldn't those outside of us, for instance, other people be able to know ourselves better than we do, kind of in the way that I feel like I have a better access to your podcast, persona David than you do.

David: 18:42

Yeah.

Ellie: 18:42

But then there's a second issue, which is what kind of thing we're taking the self to be. So this isn't an issue about our access or lack of distance from the self. It is the question of whether the self is a thing at all. Even if we could get the right distance on ourselves, we might find that the self is not a thing in the way that a cup is a thing.

David: 19:04

It's for me to ask a question, because it seems like on this philosopher's view, what was the name of the philosopher you said,

Ellie: 19:13

Moran

David: 19:14

Moran's view, the problem is that our way of approaching self knowledge is based on perception. Like you're seeing an object that is the eye. And so that seems to lead to the conclusion that we cannot have self knowledge in general. Is that correct? Or is it only that we cannot have self knowledge on the model of perception?

Ellie: 19:36

Moran's own view, which, uh, is a little too detailed to get into here is the latter. He thinks that we can have self knowledge, but we have to reenvision self knowledge, not in a perceptual way. But I think

David: 19:47

Okay.

Ellie: 19:49

there have been a lot of philosophers who have concluded that you actually can't have self knowledge because the self is not something that you can know. So they take the same premise of Moran which is that introspection doesn't work the same way that perception does and conclude that that means that there's no possibility of self knowledge at all.

David: 20:08

Yeah. And that seems roughly right to me that the self is not an object that we can perceive internally by turning the minds. Quote, unquote,

Ellie: 20:16

Yeah.

David: 20:16

inward in the same way that I can gain perceptual access to the cup or to the microphone that is in front of my face right now, as I'm recording. But it seems like maybe there is one possibility left for perceptual knowledge of the self, because I think you can know yourself or let's say I can know myself in better and worse ways. And mostly I think I can get to know myself through a kind of perception of how I am reflected in the eyes of others. So here I'm not turning the eye inward, I'm turning it outward. So for example, I know as an adult that I think certain things about myself, for instance, I think I am an okay writer. I am a decent friend. I am a superb tennis player, whatever those things might be. Those properties about myself

Ellie: 21:09

Are you're out actually a superb tennis player. Are you?

David: 21:12

Actually. I'm pretty good. Yes.

Ellie: 21:13

So you're, you're, you're a good-ish.

David: 21:15

I am a 4.0 on the USTA association, the US tennis association, uh, ranking scale.

Ellie: 21:23

I have no idea what that means, but it sounds impressive.

David: 21:25

Which means I travel for tournaments.

Ellie: 21:26

For tennis? I thought it was just volleyball.

David: 21:29

No, volleyball and tennis.

Ellie: 21:30

Okay. So now my, my vision of you is being shaped and thereby you can receive a vision of yourself in my eyes as a good tennis player. Not that I'm qualified to make that judgment.

David: 21:41

Well, but that's right. And, and the case of tennis is a good example because I cannot know that about myself, that I have this ranking or that I am decent at tennis, unless that is reflected in the perceptions and behaviors of other people, right? Like nobody's a good tennis player in a vacuum because you cannot even play tennis in a vacuum. And so where I'm heading here is that I worry that emphasizing too much the quote unquote unknowability of the self can lead to a pretty strong form of skepticism about some basic forms of self knowledge that I not only take to be important, but that I take to be fundamental for social life.

Ellie: 22:23

Yeah. I mean, I do think that there would still be questions we could raise around what kind of access you have to others' views of you. Right. And so to what extent can you really know yourself through the eyes of others? If you can't actually be in the position of the other. But I, I think that's maybe a little bit of a bad faith argument, because I do think that the perceptions that others have of us are often mediated in your case of tennis, it's mediated through institutions. And so it's not just like, oh, I don't know exactly what David thinks about me. It's like, oh, hey there are different people and different institutions who are kind of collectively giving rise to an image of myself that has gotta have some kind of accuracy. Right. And we certainly know those people who seem to really not know themselves at all, because they're delusional about who they are. I think that's a test case that shows you that there is some level of accuracy that is required, but I also think that one of the words I just used was image. And I think what we are talking about here in what we can know through the eyes of others is maybe less quote the self, right? It's not some core self thing and is more self image or a set of self images.

David: 23:40

Yeah, but I think that's because neither you, nor I believe the self is a thing. So it follows naturally that we're unlikely to say that we gain knowledge about that kind of self that we don't think is really there. The question for me is whether that kind of knowledge that we gain through others can be properly described as perceptual or not in connection to Moran's view that's what would be at stake. And I do think that a lot of our relationships to others, the knowledge that we gained is perceptual. Right. I sort of see that I am a bad friend in the grimaces that another person makes to my advances or in the body language that somebody makes in response to how I am behaving. So those perceptions that are fundamentally social and relational and embodied, I think count as perceptions. And they give us an intimate kind of knowledge of the kind of person that we are, even if I also don't think that they necessarily exhaust who we are.

Ellie: 24:41

Okay. Remind me of this argument. If in a year or two, when I have a draft of the long standing project I'm doing on self relation, I end up denying this perceptual knowledge because I was just pretty convinced by that David, my, my usual view is that the perceptions that others have of us have to be mediated through our imaginations to go back to that imaginative capacity that we talked about earlier, where we are sort of adopting imaginative perspectives on ourselves. As a phenomenologist, I do think I agree with you that we have to have some pretty capacious notion of perception, such that we can directly perceive the way that others are responding to us. That's something that I, that I used in my article on sexual consent that came out recently, this notion of direct perception of others that we get in phenomenology. Not to plug past and future work in the same thought

David: 25:34

But also to do it and then to disavow it.

Ellie: 25:37

Yeah, classic.

David: 25:39

But I mean, I grant that my image of intersubjective perception here rests on something like an image of refraction or reflection where like I send out an image of myself in that it then bounces back in some way, maybe with some twists and edits from other people. And I like thinking about the duality of the term, reflection and reflexivity, um, and, and maybe even refraction, because one way to think about reflection, the kind of reflection that gives us self knowledge is, is that turning inward and looking inside. But reflection also is what happens to light when it bounces off a surface, right. Like the light that gets reflected off of the mirror. And that means that it takes a deviation. It's not light folding onto itself. It's actually being reflected back to itself through, through a third party. And I think that's the kind of model of perception that I'm working with maybe a little too optical and too visual. But I see other people as active surfaces who bounce back to us, the light or the image that we put out. And it's through that reflection from those other surfaces that we synthesize a kind of rough image of who we take ourselves to be. So think about like a, like a house of mirrors almost when you get a lot of reflections from yourself and then you kind of unify them as a way of establishing an eye.

Ellie: 27:11

Yeah, this reminds me a little bit of William James's notion of different layers of the self, where he says that we have a social self and we actually have as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize us and carry an image of us in our mind. So we have many social selves, but then the social self interacts with sort of different aspects of the self, the most core aspect of which is the pure ego, which he says isn't even necessarily the stream of consciousness, but what he calls "sciousness."

David: 27:44

What?

Ellie: 27:45

It's conciousness, but with the con taken off, because con means with, so consciousness specifically means knowing with, and sciousness means knowing.

David: 27:54

Oh, wow.

Ellie: 27:55

Yeah, I know. It's, it's very strange. So I think from, from his perspective, the social self and the other elements or layers of the self interact with this fundamental aspect that we would call sciousness which is itself, not a kernel or core because it, it takes the form of a process.

David: 28:15

Okay. Yeah. And it's the process of knowing something that there is something at a minimal level? Is that true or am I projecting my own view onto, uh, this person?

Ellie: 28:25

Yes. Uh, this person? Good old, good old William James.

David: 28:29

Oh my gosh. Yes. William James. I lost track of like the founder of psychology.

Ellie: 28:33

He's not, he's not a rando. He's not a rando. He says it it's basically what we usually call the stream of consciousness, but he just wants to call it stream of sciousness so we get rid of that idea that it is internally dual.

David: 29:06

The philosopher that is most identified with the process of introspection is the father of modernity, good old French philosopher, René Descartes, who captures the spirit of modernity precisely through this turning inward of the self, where the self begins. A process of inquiry that is supposed to found knowledge or place all knowledge on a secure foundation, precisely by beginning with something inside the self that is going to serve as the first stepping stone in that process. And you see this in discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy where Descartes lays out his method and spoiler alert, he concludes that the only thing that we can ever be sure of is the thinking activity of the cogito, the fact that we are thinking beings and that as such, we must necessarily exist.

Ellie: 30:00

Yeah. I mean, then there's all that weird stuff that he does actually say. We can know all these other things with certainty too, but you're right, David, that the, the core thing he's setting out to prove is the cogito. This, I think, although interestingly, Augustine arguably came up with this idea of the cogito before Descartes. So our idea of Decartes as the father of modern philosophy is a bit overly simplistic, but it's certainly what we get from the tradition. And I think what's particularly interesting about Descartes' meditations is that the introspective process that you get in them is a process of whittling away at what we think of as the self and trying to find what is most essential to it. In his quest to figure out what he can know with certainty, Descartes tries doubting all kinds of things that we usually consider key features of ourselves to see whether he could plausibly exist without them. What if he had no body, no hands, no senses? To him that seems possible um, he thinks I could be deceived into thinking that I have a body. How about memory? It's possible that all of his memories, his very life story is made up of lies. So he can't be certain of that either. He can't even be certain of perceiving the world around him because it could all be a Truman Show put on by an evil demon.

David: 31:20

Actual phrase by Descartes, it could be the Truman Show.

Ellie: 31:24

Oh, oh, I thought you meant the evil demon and I was like, yeah le malin génie.

David: 31:28

Yeah, well, and the evil demon is brought in, in particular as a way of getting rid of the subjective certainty that we have in mathematical truths. Right? So like we think we can be certain of two plus two equals four. And that's where he says no, because an evil genius could have used his divine power to give me this deeply held conviction that that's a, a logical truth or a mathematical truth when in reality it's just an illusion. I've never really understood that argument, to be honest with you. But, I mean, don't you think it's kind of related, but yes, I agree. And then, you know, after he goes through this process of, as you say, whittling away at the self, what do we get at the end dun, dun, dun.

Ellie: 32:12

He finds that even if he has no memory, no body, no senses, no mathematical knowledge and so on. He cannot doubt that in the very moment that he is thinking, he exists. I can doubt what I think, but I cannot doubt that I think.

David: 32:32

That is that he exists us a thinking being, because the whole proof or the existence of thinking is well thinking itself. So self founding.

Ellie: 32:43

Yes. So he is not like, oh, I proved myself as the body of a man named René Descartes I have just proven myself as a thinking thing as maybe what William James would call sciousness, the pure ego. And so you see here, the Descartes method of introspection is a method of subtraction to get to the core of what he is. And this core is a thinking thing. Nothing more.

David: 33:03

Yeah, and it's a fundamentally analytic method. Again, you break something down to its simplest element. And once you have a secure foundation, you rebuild the whole enterprise of knowledge on the basis of that and this whole process of introspecting and trying to find that core ultimately culminates for Descartes in an intuition. And this is what he calls a clear and distinct idea, which is largely the intuition that I am a thinking being, and that, that can never be doubted. It has absolute certainty and that certainty that. je pense que je suis. That was the French articulation that then gets translated as I think I am, which is what it means. But the point here is that that intuition of this clear and distinct idea gives me, as the thinking subject, a certain kind of self knowledge, because I learned something important about who and what I am. And that's what Descartes calls the res cogitans. I am a thinking substance rather than, a res extensa, an extended body necessarily in space. My primary identity is a thinker.

Ellie: 34:18

Put differently. I am not a cup.

David: 34:21

Yes, I am not a cup. And I am not this body either, which is much more like the cup. I am again, I am the cogito. But notice that this insight that we get through Descartes, method of introspection is fundamentally an intellectual insight. I learn a new fact or new information about who I am, and I can describe it in language, I can share it with others, I can philosophize about it. And that means that for Descartes introspection is important as a method for philosophizing principally, because it gives way to rational intellectual, cognitive intuitions, again, intuitions of clear and distinct ideas. And that's where Henri Bergson who is a French philosopher deeply influenced by Descartes and also a very close reader of him.

Ellie: 35:13

One of your main buds as well?

David: 35:15

Yeah. One of my main buds I've written about him. I've put some videos about him on our YouTube channel.

Ellie: 35:21

Yes. I mean like he's long dead. He's not a literal bud of David's, but, he's intellectual bud of yours.

David: 35:26

Yeah, he is, an influence on me and Bergson disagrees with Descartes on this point. So there is this major tension between these two thinkers around the kind of intuition that we're supposed to get from the process of introspection. And in a sense, Bergson makes the argument that the father of modernity, Descartes, was half right and half wrong in his approach to philosophy. He says Descartes was right in thinking that introspection is a very powerful method for doing philosophy, but he was wrong in his assessment of what this method ultimately yields. Introspection surely gives us a kind of self knowledge, but Bergson says this knowledge that I gain through genuine introspection is not rational. It is not cognitive. It is not intellectual. If anything, it is arational, maybe irrational even, and it is fundamentally embodied. And he says, when I turn inward and I tried to follow Descartes in his method of doubt, I actually end in a very different place than where Descartes thinks I'm going to end, rather than coming to the conclusion that I am this res cogitans, this thinking substance. I actually get to an intuition of what Bergson calls my own duration. So whereas Descartes foregrounds thought as the destination of introspection, Bergson, foregrounds time and temporality. I ultimately learn that I am a being who exists in time and is himself or herself or themselves temporal.

Ellie: 37:17

I love this. As you know, David, Bergson is kind of a lacuna for me. I haven't delved into his work nearly as much as I would like to. And you're making me think that I need to, for my work on selfhood, because I, I think one of the main critiques that people have of Descartes' meditations is precisely the move that he makes from the cogito to the res cogitans, this idea that the act of thinking implies a substance, a thinking thing. And I personally agree with those critiques. Like I think that's a terrible move. I think Descartes is really onto something with the idea of the cogito, but that we shouldn't make the leap to the res cogitans. And this is what most existentialists and phenomenologists that I am sort of in the same tradition with, believe as well, but this notion of duration or what some people might call perdurance like enduring as a self in time, I think is, is really fascinating. And I'd be curious to learn more. So when Bergson ends up in my book, don't be surprised.

David: 38:16

Inevitably.

Ellie: 38:17

You, you all heard it here first, you heard my exposure to this idea of Bergson.

David: 38:21

And that means that I'm gonna be cited in your book as your influence on this point.

Ellie: 38:26

Yeah. Or not because you didn't cite me in your book.

David: 38:29

Uh, moving on very quickly from this hypersensitive subject in our friendship.

Ellie: 38:33

I know how many times have I, have I mentioned that in episodes.

David: 38:35

No, but I think the term that you used here is important because you talked about essence and one way to differentiate between Descartes and Bergson is precisely along the essence non essence continuum, because Descartes believes that there is an essence at the end of this journey or this paragrimage of the mind

Ellie: 38:56

Is paragrimage an English word or are you thinking

David: 38:59

Pilgrimage, pilgrimage

Ellie: 39:00

Okay, I was like, that sounds like Spanish and French

David: 39:03

Actually, that sounds like French. It's the French. It's not even the Spanish that's.

Ellie: 39:05

Yeah, pèlerinage, it's peregrinaje

David: 39:08

Um, oh my gosh.

Ellie: 39:10

There's um, one of the most famous works of Latina feminist philosophies, Peregrinages.

David: 39:15

Yes, it's with an R and I think in French with an L, no?

Ellie: 39:19

No, pèlerinage.

David: 39:21

Oh my gosh, okay.

Ellie: 39:22

Yeah, and the, the book I was thinking of is the Maria Lugones book

David: 39:25

Okay. So great. So at the end of this pilgrimage the mind would Descartes really get an essence and that essence is thought with Bergson, you get what he says is only a becoming it is not an essence. And the becoming is the temporal self because by definition, time is just a constant brew of change that does not stay in any one place in order for it to be described as an essence. So it's essence versus becoming.

Ellie: 39:55

Yeah. And when we're talking about time here, we're talking about lived time. A subjectively felt sense of time. I'm thinking about didn't you tell me in another episode about how Bergson had an infamous showdown with Albert Einstein over the nature of time, because he believed that physics couldn't capture the first person subjective aspect of time, but only focus on the third person.

David: 40:19

Yeah, that's right. And the philosopher, Jimena Canales wrote a whole book about this face off called The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, which I recommend. But actually some people have said that one of the reasons that Bergson had this fall from fame, because he was super famous during his life, one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century.

Ellie: 40:45

Women in particular would flock to his lectures.

David: 40:48

Yeah. Did you know that he caused New York's first traffic jam at the start of the 20th century when he gave a lecture at I think it was NYU or some other university, New York, the first ever traffic jam.

Ellie: 41:00

David, the reason I know that is because you talked about it in another episode.

David: 41:03

Okay. Well, I've also written about it. So, um, but the, the point being that, that debate with Einstein, some people say it actually cost him his fame and notoriety because after that debate, he started seeming anti-science and kind of irrational. And so it stamped his philosophy in a particular way from which his reputation couldn't really recover.

Ellie: 41:27

That seems a little bit unfair, but I, I mean, I guess you did say that Bergson was looking for unlike Descartes, a fundamentally, arational intuition.

David: 41:37

Yeah, no. And there is definitely a truth to that. He is in some ways an irrationalist in some ways, he also isn't. And, I wrote an article about this question. Is he a rationalist or an irrationalist philosopher, but that's neither here nor there. The point that I want to make here is that for Bergson, the intuition of our own duration is a kind of self knowledge that we gain through introspection through this inward turn of modernity. The difference is that it's not cognitive and it's not intellectual. It is embodied and effective. Bergson explicitly says it is a supraintellectual intuition. So it's beyond intellect. One way to think about it is to say that it's, it's an experience. And more than that, it's an experience that is highly fruitful and generative. And in fact, Bergson says that that experience that we have of our own temporality is the source of all our creative imagination. So when we intuit our duration, he says, we come into direct contact with what he calls the elan vital, that is a Bergsonian concept, which just means the principle of life. So we come into contact with this and we become hyper creative.

Ellie: 42:59

It's just got real "woo woo" all of the sudden.

David: 43:01

Yeah.

Ellie: 43:02

It's like, it's like William James' sciousness but on steroids.

David: 43:07

Or on, on life.

Ellie: 43:08

Yeah, on life. Right. you know, Bergson of course is a vitalist. So he thinks that there's a metaphysical principle that separates the living from the non-living and this would be exactly the elan vital, the elan vital is what living things have, but non-living things don't have. And it's interesting that I, that he thinks we could contact this through introspection. I, I didn't know that.

David: 43:34

Yeah. And if you think about that, the reason is because the elan vital is the principle of life and where do we find life? Well, we find it in ourselves because we are living beings. And so in our subjectivity, I don't wanna say in our bodies, although that might also be true for him, in our subjectivities, we find the elan vital, we carry it in our breast. And so by turning inward, we can tap into it and

Ellie: 44:00

I don't know why, but that just made me, fix my posture.

David: 44:04

Like, yeah, you, you don't want your elan vital to like be off center

Ellie: 44:09

You were like, it's located in your breast and I'm like instantly, like shoulders back and elan vital out.

David: 44:16

She is channeling life. Um, no. And when thinking about more philosophically here, the elan vital for Bergson is the absolute. He says that very explicitly. And this is really interesting from the standpoint of the history of metaphysics, because historically philosophers who talk about the absolute usually will use it to refer either to the universe or to God, or to some transcendent realm that is unaffected by what happens in, in the world that we inhabit. And so for example, with the ancients it's being itself, that is the absolute for Christian philosophers, definitely it's God. So on and so forth, but Bergson, who is a vitalist says, no, the absolute is life itself. And so internal to his philosophical system, touching the elan vital through introspection is analogous to seeing God in a religious tradition.

Ellie: 45:22

That's pretty hardcore. Touching me, touching the elan vital.

David: 45:32

I dunno what to do with you. Um, and I mean, yes, and touching. Okay. Hold on. Let me, let me gather my thoughts here, Ellie, because you're singing just through my posture off my elan vital is off, is off balance.

Ellie: 45:49

It wasn't even that good. Oh, sorry. My elan vital was just coming out, but I think I might've been slightly flat on that last note. I, I wasn't, I wasn't trying hard enough. I forgot. We have thousands of people listening to this.

David: 46:00

Including some scouts for, you know, the music industry, um, okay. Back to the elan vital and Bergson. Bergson says that once you touch the principle of life, the experience is so revolutionary and so radical and so explosive that it produces what he calls a philosophical idea, which is an intuition that is so generative that it's the basis of an entire philosophical system. So if you touch the elan vital in the right way, I guess you basically come up with your own philosophy. That's what Plato did. That's what, that's what Kant did. That's what Bergson himself. According to himself, did.

Ellie: 46:55

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David: 47:14

We have seen some reasons why philosophers don't seem to think that the self is a thing that we can know by perception. Now, what does this mean for introspection, which traditionally has been thought of as the key route to self knowledge? Do we have to throw out introspection or do we get to keep it in some form?

Ellie: 47:36

I mean one form of keeping it, of course would be that Bergsonian form that you so nicely laid out for us a little bit ago, David, but I think there's also another tradition of taking what we would usually think of as introspection and drawing attention to the fact that it is actually quite outer directed. So I think one of the funny things about introspection is that when you actually introspect, unless you're doing the kind that Bergson was talking about, which seemed a little bit different from what I usually think of as introspection. But if you're thinking about like, hey was I an asshole to that cashier at the sushi restaurant? Or did I wrong my friend recently? And what would that say about my personality if I did? You find yourself already caught up in thinking about all kinds of things that seem, quote outside of you? You can think about ancient stoic practices of self knowledge here, because these often involved writing invent inventories of what a person did throughout the day, as well as jotting down quotes from sages or writings that the subject found inspiring. And so in these ancient stoic practices of diary writing, we see that a lot of the contents of the diary have to do with acts and behaviors in the world, as well as the ideas of other people. In addition, a major related practice of self knowledge and ancient stoicism was writing letters to friends. And what you see in these letters is also really detailed accounts of what one did throughout the day. Even though the person themselves is taking stock and writing about their experiences, the content of what they're writing about brings in all kinds of elements of their daily life, by virtue of the fact that when these people are themselves taking stock and writing about their experiences, they're also writing about their daily lives. I think we see that self knowledge is actually knowledge of world in the sense that it involves assessing the self's relation to the world.

David: 49:29

Well, and with this example, it seems like it's not just the practice of assessing our relationship with the external world, but it's also the technique or the technology of writing about it, of putting it in written form that is essential. And I think that this practice of making the self through writing continues well after the stoics. I mean, you find it in the epistolary tradition.

Ellie: 49:54

And in my diaries today,

David: 49:57

Yes. In in the epistolary tradition of Ellie personally.

Ellie: 50:01

Well, you know, I've been a lifelong diary writer, and I think that drives a lot of my interest in the self. But in any case, I don't think that that's probably where you were going with this, David

David: 50:08

Well, no. I mean, when I think about the epistolary tradition, I think about letter writing, more so than diary writing, but for something that resembles diary more so than letter writing, you also have in the early modern period, the Essays of Montaigne, who wrote a series of essays, reflecting upon his experience, his relationship to others, his position in the world. And what is philosophically salient about these essays is that they foreground him as an individual. That is, that is the philosophical subject matter of the essays, it's the self, his fears, his interests, his interactions, his failures, even.

Ellie: 50:47

His erectile dysfunction. If I'm recalling correctly,

David: 50:50

Oh yeah. He, he has an essay about discussing his erectile dysfunction.

Ellie: 50:54

Kidney stones.

David: 50:56

There's one where he says that like these thieves were going to rob him, but then when they saw him, they saw his goodness through his face and they just couldn't rob him, I guess it would be such an affront to humanity. So kind of like really weird, like humble brags.

Ellie: 51:11

That reference was very out of left field.

David: 51:13

Yeah, humble, brags all over the place. And the point here is that you can philosophize by taking the self and taking your individuality as a starting point. And I think this is what Montaigne does through this practice of writing the self in the form of essays. And in fact, the word essay in, in French has a double meaning. It means obviously to write an essay like the one that our students submit to us at the end of the semester, but it's also a verb in French, meaning to experiment, to try something new. And both of those meanings are implicated in Montaigne's practice of writing the self.

Ellie: 51:54

Strictly speaking that that first meaning comes from because Montaigne is the inventor of the essay. So he, he does these attempts, these essai, he calls them essays. Right. And then that becomes the new genre. Like he's inaugurating the genre of the essay.

David: 52:09

Do you think people would not have used the term essay to refer to the act of writing before?

Ellie: 52:14

He is the inventor of the essay.

David: 52:16

Really? Oh my gosh. Thanks for that reference. I didn't, I didn't actually put those two things together.

Ellie: 52:22

Totally. And in fact Montaigne's practice of essay writing, now that, you know, I have like a pet interest in Montaigne is a direct adaptation of stoic letter writing. He was extremely inspired by stoic letter writing and he used to write letters before Montaigne invented essays. He wrote letters to his BFF Etienne de la Boétie and then la Boétie tragically passed away and Montaigne started writing essays because he could no longer write letters to his friend. And so the practice of essay writing originates as something to replace the act of letter, writing to the dead friend, the imagined addressee is the dead friend.

David: 53:03

Oh, wow. So there's also a difference here between the genres at the level of life and death.

Ellie: 53:08

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

David: 53:09

I mean, as I mentioned before, I think that one way that we know each other is through the bouncing back to us of our reflections off of the surfaces that other people are. And I think that's what writing also can do because when we write the self, we externalize the self in the form of a written text, turning parts of ourselves, essentially into an object, let's say, that can come back to you, especially as it is seen by others, especially in the case of letter writing, right, where you put yourself into the letter, that letter is seen by others. And then they write a letter back to you in a literal case of reflection and refraction.

Ellie: 53:53

And these aren't just any others either. Right? I, I think it's important that in the stoic case and in Montaigne's case they're intimate friends, because I think friends and loved ones in particular are key sources of self knowledge for us. And as you know, this has been a longstanding research topic for me, and I've been sort of hibernating with my ideas about self identity ever since my dissertation, which was on self relation. And I will write a book about this sometimes soon. And I have some working hypotheses specifically about what you just said, but because my own ideas on this are still in hibernation, which means they're just quite half baked and I'm not willing to put them on the air, let alone in writing. I wanna tell you about a theory that I think is super interesting on this and some implications that I think arise from it. And this is the view that comes from the Australian philosopher, Catriona MacKenzie, about what she calls self-conception. So MacKenzie thinks that the imagination plays a key role in the formation of self-conception, which picks up on some themes we addressed earlier. And self-conception is basically just how we define or identify ourselves. In a sense, your self-conception gives you a view of yourself as a person in the world, and it is distinct from your point of view, which refers just to your point of view on the world. James' sciousness again, we're seeing it, or maybe duration, Bergson's sense. And Mackenzie says that we shape our self concepts by reflecting on different aspects of our points of view. And these aspects might include our desires, our habits, our character traits. So I find that I have a longing to read, Hegel and noticing this longing contributes to self-conception as an intellectual, right.

David: 55:37

A longing that is burning in your loins. Wait is loins a part of the body?

Ellie: 55:42

I think it might refer to,

David: 55:45

Thighs?

Ellie: 55:45

Male genetalia.

David: 55:46

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Ugh. Oh my gosh. It's like, yeah. Nevermind. Ignore that.

Ellie: 55:51

Do have longing to read Hegel I really love reading Hegel and I've spent much of the past year rereading The Phenomenology of Spirit, but any case. So we figure out who we are by imaginably reflecting. And one other part of this to pick up on, David, which goes back to something you said earlier, is that we reflect on our past. And then we also reflect on potential pasts or futures because these show us what our values are, what stays stable are in fact, our key values. And so for instance, I might reflect back on myself and imagine what my life would be like if I had majored in theater and I can pretty easily picture some possibilities for what that might look like, which reveals that maybe majoring in theater was a live possibility for me, that corresponds with my values. Obviously I don't know exactly what my life would be like, but I, I know what some of the steps that I would've taken would be like. I cannot at all imagine my life. As a dermatologist, because I don't think that going to medical school would have really played to my talents and, or been of interest to me, you know, no disrespect, obviously to, to doctors whom I have an immense amount of respect.

David: 57:01

Oh, no, this is that. This is that dig. This is that dig on philosophers. It's like what knowledge that is very rigorous and demanding, not my talent.

Ellie: 57:10

Well, and for her too, this process of imagination is really affectively-laden. So I just don't have any feelings about what it have been like for me to be a doctor. I do have feelings about what it would have been like for me to be an actor. And so she thinks that the imagination catalyzes, reactive emotions that lead to evaluative judgements.

David: 57:31

Yeah. I like that this conception of the self includes who I am now, plus all the now dead, but once a life possibilities of what I could have been, all of that kind of laid out on an affective spectrum.

Ellie: 57:46

That is hauntology for you to use a Derrida term.

David: 57:49

Yes. Like we are haunted by these past possibilities that never were, but maybe could have been. The ghosts of Ellie's past.

Ellie: 58:01

I really like that image David, perhaps unsurprising, because I like the idea of of ghosts as part of the self. In fact, part of my dissertation argued that the self was a ghost of a self, a trace of a self, which is partly why my ideas are in hibernation because that sounds kind of fun and sexy, but I'm not sure if it means anything. Um, I do think what you just said though, means something right? The self, not a cup, therefore we can't know it by observation, more like a host of ghosts that we are constantly relating to imaginatively refracted through the eyes of others.

David: 58:35

And God knows you don't see ghosts, but you feel them.

Ellie: 58:41

Can't you see them sometimes?

David: 58:43

In the movies, you have to visualize them. But I think the way in which people describe ghost-like experiences, isn't it more like the focus on the bristling of the hairs in the back of the neck?

Ellie: 58:55

Cut us off. There's your Bergsonian reading of ghosts.

David: 59:02

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Ellie: 59:10

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David: 59:15

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Ellie: 59:25

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David: 59:32

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