If you have gained real self-knowledge, you suspect that others have not.

You could redeem most of your faults or misfortunes if you used them to learn what you are. But most rob you of the will to do so.

We learn by doubting. And our self is the one thing that we can’t doubt.

The self is its own language. Self is its noun, bustling self-interest is the verbs, vanity the epithets, personality the adverbs, and convenience the conjunctions. And, as with a language, you don’t grasp your own self till you’ve studied others.

The classic mode of avoiding self-knowledge is to identify the self with the norms of its society. And the romantic mode of avoiding self-knowledge is to inflate, dramatize and idealize the solitary self, while identifying it with the spirit of nature.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

1 Self-knowledge by knowing others

You gain self-knowledge by knowing others.

Nothing is so unlike you that it can’t help you to learn what you are. You are able to get to know your true self because you are like others. But you are spurred to get to know it because you differ from them.

The human race has grown in self-awareness, because there have been a few rare seekers, such as Nietzsche, who have dared to anatomize their own souls, and who are therefore in no way like the rest of our self-oblivious kind.

The sole thing that some people have to teach you is what they don’t know about themselves.

You get to know what you are by observing those who don’t know what they are.

2 The proud alone can afford self-knowledge

If your aim is to know yourself, you must call on your dignity to overrule your vanity. Self-knowledge is the victory of pride over conceit. You have to sacrifice some of the moral vanity which assures you of your innocence to your intellectual pride which is intent on mastering such an unpleasant theme. It costs a great deal, and you must be rich in self to afford it. The defeated are too poor, and the conceited don’t wish to pay.

Those who have gained self-knowledge have climbed the peak of pride and have plunged into the pit of humiliation. In order to know yourself, you must sink all the way to the bottom, where it’s too murky to see a thing.

Pride and self-disgust plait the ropes by which you have to haul yourself up to self-knowledge. Only the proud feel enough shame to learn who they are and have enough dignity to bear it.

How could we endure the awareness that makes us think poorly of ourselves, if we didn’t dare to think still worse of others? And by a happy chance nature here stands us in good stead.

Those who win self-knowledge look with envious contempt on the rest who never meet with the same misfortune.

3 Shame inculcates self-knowledge

The good have too much guileless innocence to want to know who they are, and the powerful have too much brazen cunning.

Melancholiacs and cynics best know themselves, the first because they’re so shut up in their own hearts, and the second because they burrow into the hearts of others. Shame flays you so that you can see what lies beneath your own skin. And malice gives you the passion and detachment to dissect your fellow patients.

If you set out to learn what you are, you have to dare to think as shamelessly as you see others act. But most of us fool ourselves shamefully, so that we won’t have to feel ashamed.

A shameless age such as our own is an Eldorado for an explorer of silliness and vanity.

Shame goads us to know ourselves, and self-knowledge makes us more ashamed. And yet we are proud that we know ourselves so well. ‘I know my heart,’ crowed the incorrigible self-deceiver Rousseau.

Self-knowledge is embarrassment recollected in anxiety.

In order to reach self-awareness, you must first cross the valley of abjection. Disgrace shows us the best but most unwelcome truths. When he plucked the pernicious apple of self-reflection, Adam learnt to feel shame and to hide from the Lord who knew him.

Most of us are too self-intoxicated to sober up to the dry truth of our condition.

4 Guilt leads us to self-knowledge

How could the human race have grown so perceptive, if it had not been plagued by its penchant for making moral judgements? But how could it have plumbed its depths, if it had not freed itself from their shallowness? You can dive deep enough to locate the heart’s murky treasure only if shame weighs you down. But you can’t rise to the air with what you have found if you have not shrugged off its load. You can afford to learn who you are, if you possess a rich fund of guilt but feel no duty to keep up a dear-bought faith in your own probity.

Guilt is morally infertile but creatively fruitful, quickening our invention of sins and our ingenuity in excusing them.

5 Self-knowledge through sin

Christianity scourged the instincts till they quivered with an excoriated sentience. Its depraved angels have more to teach us than the innocent nymphs and spotless satyrs of pagan cults. Only such a sick surgeon could probe our morbid souls. Faith was the serpent which tempted us to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It uncovered the hell that we keep hidden within us. It brought sin into the world. And sin taught us what we are, and made us more perverse and more profound.

Pagan virtue was far more stupefying than christian depravity. Since we have been saved, at least sin stings, attracts and instructs us more than it used. Faith forced the strong to turn hypocrite, and so gave them the poisoned fruit of self-dissection. It urged them to vivisect their sick souls. And this showed them that they are made not for charity or faith but for concupiscence and self-conviction. It flayed some, such as Augustine, Pascal, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky or Flannery O’Connor, and pricked them to catalogue each graze in a throbbing knowledge of the infernal heart.

Only a misshapen mind can focus the rays of truth in one penetrating beam.

COSTS OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

6 The cost of self-knowledge

If I knew myself better, I might not wound myself so sorely, though I might not be able to bear my wounds so well. Self-knowledge seems to cause you no hurt, till it has demolished your life. Like an unexploded bomb, it does no damage till it’s been detonated by calamity. It’s as much use as an umbrella in a lightning storm.

Consciousness complicates our pain, and keys up our natural fears to a nameless dread. It adds to our unreal troubles, but is no help in healing our real ones. While telling us that we each have a measureless worth, it reminds us that we are zeroes. It roots in our remembrance all that we have lost, and whispers to us that we are soon to die.

Self-knowledge is like a bad smell which you can’t wash off. It makes you offensive both to yourself and others.

It’s those who don’t know themselves that assume they would be gainers if others saw them as they are.

To gain self-knowledge is to lose not only the whole world, but your own soul as well.

One of the things that those who come to know themselves fail to learn is what fools their self-knowledge will make of them.

7 The hell of self-knowledge

Life is fraught with disasters, but none more dire than self-discovery.

Self-knowledge, as Socrates said, may make life worth living, but it also makes it so hard to live.

The only people who find happiness are the ones who fail to find themselves. Happiness forecloses on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge drives out happiness.

The light of self-knowledge is a lurid hellfire. Heaven is bathed in the soft glow of self-approval.

If we knew ourselves as God knows us, we would be in hell. So where is God, who knows us all?

Beware of those who know themselves. Once they have seen that the moral law would damn them, what can they do but reject it?

In order to be honest, you would have to know yourself. But to know yourself is to know that you can’t be honest.

The self is a shallow bog. Try to fathom it, and it will drag you down to the muddiest death.

8 Self-knowledge is the enemy of the self

Self-knowledge would disintegrate the self. But self-deception keeps it whole.

We are at once the maze, the monster and the seeker. And our self-recognition turns out to be a self-consuming. The heart is a cramped labyrinth. Find its inmost chamber, and a pygmy minotaur will devour you.

Self-knowledge is a fifth columnist. It knows all that you want to keep dark, and colludes with the world to bring you down. It opens a crack in your happiness for your anguish to seep through. So it skins you, and leaves you tingling at each blow the world deals you.

Your self-knowledge tempts you to doubt your own self and to mistrust others. And both these lead them to mistrust you. What reveals you to yourself will estrange you from those near you. And what estranges you from them will reveal you to yourself.

Self-knowledge may be a disease, but no one seems to have died of it. Like the worst ills, it may be disabling, but it does not kill you.

9 We fear others’ self-knowledge

We relish fictional characters who know their depths as much as we are repelled by real people who do so. It is only figures in books who can bear to know the hell that burns in their hearts, or whose knowledge we can bear. And it is only in books that dissemblers, like Iago or Satan, fool their gulls but own the truth to themselves.

We curse those who tell lies about themselves, but we shrink still more from those who blab the truth about themselves, for fear that they might do the same to us. It’s their self-understanding that we dread and not our own. If they can’t believe their own delusions, how could you hope that they’ll swallow yours? And if they are so indecent as to pry into their own hearts, how much less would they scruple to pry into ours? They are like bees that can sting but not have their bowels torn out, since they have torn out their own.

The world won’t want to know you, if you are so foolhardy as to know yourself.

People don’t fear what they don’t know. But they may avoid knowing what they fear, so that they won’t fear it more.

SELF-DECEPTION

10 We do not know ourselves

Most of us know our hearts so partially that we don’t doubt that we know them in full. ‘So it is with this knowing about oneself,’ writes Montaigne. ‘The fact that all see themselves as satisfactorily analyzed and as sufficiently expert on the subject are signs that no one knows anything at all about it.’ It’s hard to tell which we have more need of, to misapprehend who we are, or to assume that we comprehend who we are.

When you set out to know yourself, the first lesson that you have to learn is that you never will. As Kant wrote, ‘I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.’

Most fools have too much sense to want to know themselves better than they do.

I don’t learn who I am, since there is no one that could teach me. It is the one subject that I would have to get to know by my own introspection. ‘You are the problem,’ Kafka warns. ‘No scholar to be found far and wide.’

I predict my own moods no more presciently than anyone else would, and I interpret them no more perceptively. And it’s from these slippery surmises that I form my sensations and feelings. And what course they take will be due in part to the misjudgements I make about what caused them.

Self-knowledge may be the beginning of wisdom, as Aristotle said, but if that is so, we never begin to be wise.

A tree does not know that it is wretched, as Pascal said. But how many of us know how wretched we are?

11 Self-deception

The mind is a finely-tuned instrument for playing itself false.

‘We are never deceived,’ says Goethe, ‘we deceive ourselves.’ How is it that we are such shallow beings, yet such deep enigmas to our own selves?

When the heart knows itself, it is perforce double. When it does not, it is a far more duplicitous organ.

I’m glad to hear anything of myself, so long as it’s not the truth. And I’m glad to hear the truth about everything else.

I’m too lazy to get to know my real self. But how doggedly I toil to burnish the brazen figurine of my sham one.

The motives of our own acts are no less mysterious to us than are their repercussions.

12 Self-interest makes us deceive ourselves

There’s no lie that some people won’t tell themselves to justify doing whatever they think they have to do to get whatever they think they want.

‘The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?’ I have so many ways of not knowing it, and such strong incentives not to want to. I want too many other things too much.

We can’t see ourselves as we are, because our vision is filled with the external things that we crave. And we can’t see things as they are, because all that we care to look at is ourselves.

Latch on to the right illusions, and you are well on the way to fulfilling your dreams.

You get to what you want more quickly if you’re not saddled with self-knowledge. But if you don’t know who you are, you will want what won’t satisfy you, and you will get what you don’t want. But you will be spared this knowledge too, and you will be left free to go on wanting.

We are saved from the ravages of self-knowledge by the buffer of our smugness and by the simple expedient of not thinking.

I can’t know myself in full, since some outcrop of ambition or vanity always blocks my sight. I try to dupe my rivals to gain a start on them, and I have to dupe myself so as to enjoy the fruits of it.

13 Self-regard makes us deceive ourselves

We flee self-awareness, for fear that it might cost us success. And yet there are times when we would choose to go under rather than grasp who we are.

Some people mistake their self for the half-truths that they hold about themselves, and some for the half-truths that their admirers hold about them.

I love myself too well to wish to know myself better.

Our illusions play a wide repertoire of tunes, but all in the swelling key of our conceit. Whatever tincture dyes them, we weave them from the unbreakable threads of our self-belief.

Most people are so full of rot because they are so full of themselves.

We shroud our motives in mystery, since most of them are so mean.

Self-love makes a life of self-deception absolutely essential. If we knew what we were, we might not find it quite so easy to love ourselves as we do. We know others better than we know ourselves, which is why we can’t love them so much. And if we knew ourselves better, we might find that we don’t love others as much as we think we do.

We have good reasons not to know ourselves. And we have good reason not to know what these reasons are.

I think I know others because I see their weak points. And I think I know myself because I don’t see my own.

14 We love our false self-image

We surround ourselves with mirrors, so that we won’t have to see what we are. They reflect back to us what we have made up our minds we look like. We want to gape at our gorgeous image, but not come face to face with our true self. If they showed us the truth, we would have smashed them all long ago.

We live in the eyes of others, which is why we can never see what they see. We look at the world through the eyes of our own conceit, and all we see is the eyes of others looking back at us.

There are two ways to hate a thing, by hating it for what it is or by hallowing its fake effigy. And is this not what people do with the image of their own self? They love it more than all the world. But since they know it so distantly, isn’t it a mere shifty similitude that they adore?

We so dote on this self of ours of which we know so small a part. Our self-love burns with a queer kind of ardour. We can’t bear to spend a moment alone with its object divested of our jangling distractions.

We set up our own self as the god of our idolatry, and like any deity we revere it from afar in fog and mystery. The less we know of it, the more devoutly we worship it.

15 The world, the friend of self-deception

The world throbs with deception and self-deception, like the systole and diastole of the heart. Few things are dearer to us than the cheap self-deceits which we hope to pass off on the world for a high price.

The world, which knows nothing but the outermost shows, may sound us more inwardly than we do ourselves.

Most people are ready to know what they are at their fringe, so that they won’t have to find out what they are at their core. They see the margin where their self meets the world which they plan to stamp their will on.

I know myself through the mediation of the world. And so I don’t know my true self at all.

The strong must be weak in self-knowledge, because self-knowledge would make them weak in the world.

People want to learn how the world works because they want to control it. But they don’t want to know what they are since they would have to control themselves.

Most of us know no more of ourselves than our own self-deceptions. And that’s all we need to know to make our way in this world of fraud. To know more would do us no good, and might do us great harm.

How could we guess how small we are, when we seem to cut such a large figure in our own small world?

16 Too near and too far for self-knowledge

We can’t see others clearly, because they are too far from us, and we don’t see ourselves, because we are too close. We don’t make out what others are like, because we care too little for them. And we don’t want to make out what we are like, since we care too much. We can’t get outside our own minds, but we have no will to go within them. The motives of others seem so tangled and inscrutable because we can’t access them, and our own do so since we would gain nothing from their scrutiny.

The few who know their soul quite well are still not conversant with large tracts of it which those who have met them a few times see straight off, as you may figure out a husband or wife more unerringly than their mate does who has lived with them for years. ‘Most people,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘are known to others better than they are known to themselves.’

Most people know their souls too remotely to blench at what they might unearth if they knew them up close. But there are a few who know themselves well enough to dread what they might find if they knew themselves better.

17 The cowardice of self-deception

Some of the bravest people, who would never flinch before a foe, hide from themselves their whole lives. They have to go out to face the world, since they lack the nerve to stay in and face the blank of their own self. They can stare down any threat except the truth.

We refuse to look in our own hearts, in the hope that no one else will look in them, as babies shut their eyes and trust that they can’t be seen. And the world plays along with our game as we do with toddlers.

18 We pretend to deceive ourselves

To fool others, you must first fool yourself, though at times you need merely seem to.

Hypocrites try to dupe others, sincere people have to dupe themselves. If you can’t hide your motivations from the world, it may do just as well to act as if you were not aware of them yourself. ‘Some men,’ Bradley wrote, ‘are not liars because they always speak the truth, and others because they never do.’ No one seems more honest than those who keep up a steady pose of being taken in by their own lies.

Most of us lie to ourselves even when we seem to gain nothing by it. And the few who don’t still have to put on the guise of a decorous self-deception. If you have glimpsed the truth, you need all the more to act as if you had not. Self-discernment may be your glory, but ignorance is an excuse. And often you need an excuse more pressingly than glory.

People fool themselves most of the time. But they also makebelieve that they need to fool themselves still more than they do. Not even their self-deception is quite genuine. They are not so dainty that they can’t admit the dirty truth to themselves once in a while. They intuit who they are a speck more than they seem to, though much less than they think they do.

19 Secrets and self-knowledge

Some people put on a front of secrecy to hide that they have no secrets, and some put on a front of unreserve to hide that they do. They hoist a bright curtain of ostentatious directness in order to screen their real selves.

Those who don’t know themselves lay bare what they are by each word that they say. And those who do know themselves lay bare what they are by each word that they do not say.

Keep your secrets sealed away, and they will keep you more imprisoned. Yet they may yield up to you the key to unlock the chambers of your heart. Secrets ferment your self-knowledge in the dark. And repression lays bare far more than openness.

20 Self-concealment

Few people are aware of all the secrets that they take such pains to hide. And if they were, they might not be able to hide them so well. Those who don’t know what mischief they do still have the craft to conceal it. How deftly they parry truths which they don’t even perceive.

Most people know themselves so little, that you learn more about them from the things they try to conceal than from the things they feel driven to confess.

Those who are most opaque to themselves are most transparent to others.

I want others to watch me and feel for me, but not to see through me. So I waste my days forging an effigy of myself for them to gaze at, and then curse them when they do so from an angle that I don’t like. I long to be seen and heard but not read, to be exhibited but not exposed, displayed but not disclosed, and famous but not fathomed. I like to be illuminated by a bright stage light, but not revealed by a harsh search light.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow that you cannot but be false to everyone.

How do the blind fend off the importunate eyes of others?

21 Nowhere to hide

People spy into you more than you guess, but less than they guess. They spot that part of you that you were so keen to hide. But that is all they spot. And they are keen to ferret out all but what matters. They love to pry out a few shadowy secrets, but have no use for what is best in you. Most of what we strive to conceal lies on our outside, and onlookers catch sight of it more readily than we do, since we see ourselves from within. Our secrets form our outlying precincts, which all comers get a glimpse of as they near us.

How quick others are to see through me. And yet how little of the truth they bring to light. Those who boast that they’re an open book would be dismayed by what there is to read in them. If you think you have nothing to hide, you don’t know yourself very well.

Clothes are the emblems of all our disguises. We spend so much time and care collecting them, but they don’t fool anyone. ‘Society is a masked ball,’ Emerson said, ‘where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.’

 

See also:       Psychology,          Happiness