A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.
— Diogenes Teufelsdröckh
II. What is self-consciousness? Roughly, it is the knowledge of our own individual existence. Now, I could mean this in the trivial sense that we all know we exist. However, this knowledge is without content. I call this formal knowledge. True self-consciousness is not something trivial and without content. Rather, it is knowledge that is actual and embodied. I call this concrete knowledge. Here is an example of this distinction.
Suppose you do not know how to
ride a bike. In this case, you may have seen others ride a bike, and you have a
rough idea about how to do it. You know that to ride a bike, you need to move
your body in certain ways, but your knowledge is without content because you
can’t actually ride the bike. All you know is that it is possible to. Thus,
you have formal knowledge. If you were thrust upon one and needed it to get
somewhere, you would lose your balance and fall almost immediately. Most of us
will not remember clearly what it feels like not to be able to ride a bike in
this way, but all of us, at some point, were in this position. Suppose now you
do learn how to ride the bike. It now feels like an organic extension of your
body you couldn’t possibly fall from, absent some external barrier. You now
know not merely how you might possibly go about riding a bike, but actually
how to do it. You now have concrete knowledge.
Once we gain concrete knowledge
of how to ride a bike, we gain a kind of automatic potency when we pick it up and
ride it down the street. We are sure of the workings of some feature of the
world (namely, the bike and its relationship to our body) in a certain way that
even entails getting on a device external to ourselves and boosting down the street
free of concern. If we lacked this knowledge, like all of us once did, the bike
is experienced as something alien and unsure, a being that is abstract and ambiguous,
rather than concrete.
This should be evident, if not
for riding a bike, for many other things. Anything we do for the first time
brings with it this baggage, like starting a new job or trying out a new skill.
Similarly, anything you might perceive as not ‘your’ kind of thing. You might
say or think, “oh, I’m not really the athletic type” when it comes to physical
pursuits, or “oh, I’m not really the academic type” when it comes to
intellectual pursuits. In both cases, you experience the thing, especially when
performed by others, as beyond your reach. You understand formally what those
things entail (in some cases) but lack the concrete understanding that would let you do them
like you would ride a bike. An example for myself is golf. I am awful at golf,
and being in a position where I would have to play it inspires very little
somatic confidence in me.
There are three features of such
experience worth noting. First, we feel powerless. Our perceived or
actual lack of knowledge about some particular aspect of the world means we
have no power to affect things in that domain. Second, we feel abstracted.
Since we have only formal knowledge of the domain, our ability to do anything
is purely abstract, as opposed to embodied (as we would have in concrete
knowledge), and thus disconnected from the world as it is. Third, we feel dependent.
This may seem anterior to the last feeling: how can one be both abstracted from
the world and dependent on it? All I mean is that we feel dependent on the way the
world is now, rather than on what it could be, due to our actions. Or, if there is a problem to be solved, we are dependent on others to solve it. This is opposed to feeling independent, the feeling that we are in a world of attainable possibilities, a world whose problems we can affect and resolve ourselves, a world which we can shape, at least partially, by our own actions.
These three different aspects are all entwined with one another.
III. My contention is that
this distinction can be made regarding one’s very existence as a person. Our
knowledge of such activities as riding a bike, chopping vegetables, swimming,
or driving a car is no different in kind from our knowledge of our own self.
Indeed, why would it be? Being ourselves is both an activity, the activity of being-oneself and choosing to act in certain ways, and it is pursued in precisely the same
kind of way when it’s successful: by actually doing it, not merely observing
it. We do not have a peculiar faculty that would make this kind of knowledge
any different to these other kinds. What knowledge of ourselves,
self-consciousness, does have that differentiates it from other kinds of knowledge, is a peculiar intimacy and constancy – we are
always around. That is, the object of knowledge, ourself, is, at least formally, present in every experience
(because otherwise, you, the I, would not be having an experience). This does not make it fundamentally different from these other things. It just makes it all the more important.
Thus, on the one hand, we almost
necessarily have formal knowledge of our own existence. In every thought,
choice, and movement, we know ourselves, at least in the abstract, to be
present in those activities. We cannot doubt that we are there, formally. But
does this formal knowledge simply translate, due to its ubiquity, into the kind
of concrete knowledge we attained when we learnt how to ride our bikes? No. Not
only can we lack concrete knowledge of ourselves, but this experience is also
both normal and ubiquitous. The same powerlessness, abstraction, and dependence
can be felt regarding one’s very own self. And this is worse than in any other
case because your person is the ever-present instrument through which you are
interfacing with the world in the first place. Thus, a lack of
self-consciousness infects your very being. We feel this lack in the same kinds
of situations we feel in other cases of knowledge.
We feel powerless in two
different ways. First, we feel it socially when, as a person, we are not (or seem not
to be) affecting others, especially those we care about. For example, when someone
ignores us, dismisses our suggestions, or misunderstands what we are trying to
say, be, or present ourselves as. It is when your social contribution amounts (or seems to amount), to nothing. Second, we feel it materially when we feel we have no
skills, hobbies, craft, or use, that allow us to manipulate the world
around us. In short, we feel it when we have no means of asserting our presence as an individual in our environment.
We understand formally that we are there, but our self is not realised as something
concrete. This does not feel good; we encounter the same kind of uneasiness in
our very self that we faced in approaching some external environment that made us uneasy.
This powerlessness translates
directly into dependence. Once we feel like our person is ineffective, both in
contributing towards our social environment and in creating things that are the
product of our own skill, we become dependent on external features of the world
to take care of us. Rather than being able to commence some social activity or
solve problems with our own hands, we become terminally reliant on the existing world
and others to work itself out for us. Both features have the unfortunate effect
of harshly limiting our horizon of possible positive experiences by making the
most important part of our world, our selfs, something ambiguous and
ineffectual, like a bike we do not know how to ride. Left for too long in such a state, we become helpless and even come to habituate ourselves to our helplessness.
In the same vein, we feel abstracted socially when we are accorded all kinds of social roles, such as mother, father, brother, sister, friend, or mentor, but feel out of step with that role. Abstraction here is a mismatch between social role and felt self. In these cases, we know formally that people take us to be one of these roles, yet we may feel misapprehended because we feel we are not such roles. This can occur in both a positive and negative sense. It may be positive in the sense that we may aspire to some role but fail to reach it. For example, this is something felt by parents experiencing postnatal depression telling themselves, “I’m a bad mother", or it is felt by us when we fail to live up to the duties we have towards our friends or family. It may be negative in the sense that we may be given a role we do not even want or identify with in the first place. The most obvious case of this is when individuals are saddled by others with essentialist assumptions about the social categories they are perceived to fit under. For example, about gender or race. However, I think an underrated but extremely common occurrence of this is the roles we are given in jobs. Here we observe our person to be treated a certain way and to affect certain things in the workplace in a way that we do not reflectively endorse as valuable. Many of us do not like our jobs and do not view the work we do as valuable. This is abstraction, a mismatch between ourselves as a public object of knowledge and ourselves as felt from our own perspective. In perceiving both perspectives, our person is sundered in two. We become out of step with ourselves and live a double life.
In each of these cases, our
knowledge of ourselves has faltered. It has regressed from a concrete and
embodied doing to an abstract and formal observing of our life going by. We are
reduced to feeling a kind of worldly inadequacy. We are neither the author of
anything meaningful to us, socially or materially, nor do we know the concrete independence and freedom we have from the world. We only glimpse it
formally. We are alienated from ourselves. It is not that we have lost
ourselves entirely; that would be impossible. Rather, since we are constantly
changing and developing, we must learn what we are all over again and at each
phase of our lives.
IV. We are now back to where
we started. What can we do to overcome our alienation and assert ourselves as
the converse of alienation: as independent, powerful, and concrete? What can we do
to gain self-consciousness? As I noted, there are two sites for gaining
self-consciousness. The first is social, and it is through recognition. The
possibility and desire for recognition undergirds almost all distinctively social
interactions, interactions between beings like us, persons. Recognition
is when another person you take to be like yourself or equal to yourself (in
any relevant respect) recognises your person as legitimate, rational,
and independent.
To recognise one as legitimate,
you affirm that they should be here (wherever ‘here’ happens to be), that they
are in the right place, and their presence is good. That strange, slightly off-centre feeling you get when you
are in someone else’s house is the same feeling you get about you get when in a social situation where others do
not recognise you as a legitimate member of that group, as having a
place. Conversely, the comforting ease with which you inhabit your own house is
how it feels to be properly recognised. To grant this kind of recognition, you
facilitate and affirm another’s presence; you legitimate their place in
relation to you by showing them that it is good that they are here.
To recognise one as rational, you must take them to have a rich inner life and be capable of reasoning for themselves, as in principle capable of offering a valid contribution to the processes of social reasoning we perform with each other. We lack this form of recognition when we are undermined, when those around us
treat our suggestions and inferences about what is true or good as invalid and to be ignored, as not even incorrect but inadmissible. We also lack it when others treat us merely as an object to be communicated to, but not with, as a source to be drawn from, but not to be engaged with.
We gain this kind of recognition when our unique contributions are recognised
by others as valid and substantive contributions to conversation and
decision-making about what is true and good. More generally, it is granted when you treat someone
To recognise one as independent, you take them to be capable and free to undertake their own projects. We lack this when we are belittled, patronised, or treated as otherwise inadequate. Here are three examples. First, parents often fail, for a long time, to recognise that their kids, at some point, can think, do, and choose for themselves independently of their will. Recognising this independence is crucial for the self-consciousness of fully developed persons and burgeoning adults alike. Second, the reason why we get angry or upset when someone tells us what to do or gives unsolicited advice is that they are failing to grant us this axis of recognition. They are failing to grant that we are a free and capable person that is able to act within and change the world, ourselves, without the help of others. Finally, women are often treated as incapable of performing some task by virtue of the fact that they are women, rather than by virtue of their capability of performing that task. In this case, one is not even recognised as the individual that they are, but merely as the abstract member of a group. In each of these cases, others are denying a person's agency. Granting this kind of recognition is a matter of treating others as agents that are free and capable rather than as things that must be helped. Doing this is often as much a matter of not acting towards others in a certain way as it is acting towards them in a certain way (sometimes you just have to not say anything!).
In sum, a person who has gained self-consciousness through recognition is someone who feels they have a place, that they legitimately inhabit it, and that it is good for them (and others) that they are there. It is someone who is taken to be rational, where their distinctive contributions to social engagements are taken to be valid (though not necessarily correct) reasons for thinking that something is true or good. And finally, it is someone who is taken by others to have agency. That is, they are taken to be free and capable of acting without the help of others.
This is all well and good, but
how exactly does this relate to self-consciousness, which is supposed to be
knowledge of ourselves? Well, a substantial part of one’s very person is
objectively constituted and shaped by how others see us and by whether or not
they recognise us. Almost all of what we care about with regard to ourselves
is not given intrinsically, merely by the presence of our bodies: think of how your
desires would be different, alone on a desert island, to what they are now, surrounded by others. I wouldn’t care about
money, status, or any kind of social standing whatsoever. Thus, most of
what we do and care about as a person, and therefore much of what we ourselves feel, is given only in relation to others and
insofar as others treat or recognise those desires or feats as legitimate
within some social group. Failure to gain or grant recognition in any of these
ways does not happen in the privacy of our own minds, but in the actual world.
Social interactions, especially when repeated, suggest to you that your person is constituted in a certain way (because people treat you as such), and you end up either internalising that treatment or feeling alienated from it because it does not match up with how you thought yourself to be. And if much of our self and its desires are constituted by such interactions, then misrecognition, the mismatch between what we take ourselves to be and the way we are perceived, is alienation, in the sense outlined above. It makes us feel powerless, abstracted, and dependent. However, now we are conflicted. We surely know ourselves, at least formally, to be free and independent, but in the lack of recognition from others and in hearing the opposite, we are told we are something less than that. Our knowledge of ourselves falters. This should not surprise us, given our social nature.
Thus, it is in recognition
between beings that take themselves to be equal that our formal and implicit
knowledge of ourselves as free and independent transitions to a concrete and
lived knowledge that really embodies these things. This is because others repeatedly recognise your person as legitimate, rational, and
independent. And by treating you as such, they allow those things you actually are to shine forth into the open, for yourself and others to see. And because recognition means you can be concretely present to yourself in this way, the formal knowledge you always have of yourself from your
perspective is concretely embodied in your action. You come to know not just that you are a certain way, but what it is to be that way in action. Hence you escape the grasp
of alienation. You are not powerless as you are recognised as a social force
that changes and affects the world; you are not dependent for the same reason. You are a source of creation, and not merely an object pushed around. You are not
abstracted because, in true recognition, your role (what people take you to
be) can only be based on you, not something anterior to you. Those lucky enough
to have been in love or be blessed with truly good friends know the joyous
self-consciousness granted by the free and open parallelism between two equals or amongst a tightly knit group.
At their best, everything internal to oneself is understood externally by the
other, and in that recognition, we reach the highest self-consciousness. In
those moments, we feel the highest satisfaction.
Thus, paradoxically, in self-consciousness, we are dependent on others to become independent. In those around us affirming,
accommodating, and empowering us, we can inhabit ourselves self-consciously,
like a well-trodden skill. Indeed, without this crucial actualisation of what
is implicit, we drift through the world as if always riding a bike we never
learned not to fall off of, or, as if trapped in someone else’s house, never to
make ourselves at home.
V. The second source of
self-consciousness is through work. This form of self-consciousness is
not achieved through animate beings like us, but rather through a particular
relationship with inanimate beings. Yet, it still retains the paradoxical
character of recognition: we are still dependent on something else, namely, things,
for our independence.
Work here is not to be conceived of in its narrow instrumental sense, as the working of a job to make money. Rather, work is meant here in a technical sense. Work is the activity of modifying or producing something in our environment such that we see ourselves as the willing, reflectively self-endorsing author of that modification or thing. Modifying or producing is meant in the ordinary sense here of creating something new, or changing something that already exists. Seeing ourselves as the author of a modification or product is to see us as either one of, or the only, essential determinant of that thing coming to be. That is, as the agent without which the project would not have been possible, in its current state. If it was an independent project, it is the recognition that your choices and hard work were the single necessary determinant of that thing's success. If it was a group project, it is the recognition that your choices and hard work played a decisive role in the completion and/or success of that project.
Reflectively self-endorsing some modification or product is to look back on the project and think that it is good that you undertook it. You could think this for a number of reasons. For example, it could be that the work, in itself, was good. It could be that the end product was, in itself, good. Or, it could be that it contributes towards some future or potential thing that you take to be good. This is in contrast to things that we do not reflectively self-endorse. For example, take a smoker who is trying to quit. If they cave to their impulses and smoke a cigarette, they are the author of their actions (though perhaps not the willing author), but they do not think that what they are doing is good. They do not reflectively self-endorse their action. This is necessary for work.
Thus, I say again: work is the activity of modifying or producing something in our environment such that we see ourselves as the willing, reflectively self-endorsing author of that modification or thing. The kind of thing that is not work in this sense is those actions that lack our willing authorship, reflective self-endorsement, or both. For example, take any job constituted by menial labour whose conditions of completion are strictly defined in advance of your taking on the role. Perhaps you drill holes:
In this case, it could barely be said that you are creating or even modifying something that already exists. Strictly speaking, you are, but you act entirely according to the inflexible role that is prescribed to you. Given this kind of constrained activity, it is hard to see oneself as the author of it. While it is true that the particular holes you drilled would not have been drilled if you did not drill them, someone else could have drilled them and would have drilled them in virtually the same exact way, had you not done them. The same is true for someone working on a factory line or sorting packages in an Amazon warehouse. Thus, for us to feel ourselves to be the author of some action, it is not sufficient that we were the ones who undertook the action. Rather, in performing the action, to feel ourselves to be the author of that thing, we must feel ourselves to have left a distinctive imprint on the thing that is uniquely our own. We must feel that without our contribution, things would not be the way they are.
Furthermore, drilling holes is probably not the kind of thing you would reflectively self-endorse, in that you probably have no interest in the activity of doing it, nor any interest in the end product, nor any kind of vision about its possibilities for goodness according to your values. The best that could be said in such a case as this (as Matt Dillon does), and indeed this is the primary reason for people engaging in such work, is that it could be a means towards some other end that you value, i.e. making money, surviving, and doing the things you actually want to do with the means earned from the job. Thus, the ideal kind of reflective self-endorsement of our own activity is the endorsement not only of the means that work produces for us outside of it but also an endorsement of the process and end value of that work in itself.
At its best, work combines a valued and engaging means, a valued end, and valued outcomes. In other words, work comes closer to what I mean by work as a route to self-consciousness when it bears the unique contribution of and the positive reflective valuation by the individual doing it. In such a case, the modification or product is seen as utterly one’s own, as the distinctive effect of one’s agential powers, rather than as the product of forms external to those powers.
Again, it is worth noting that work is not limited to one’s occupation or job. Indeed, many will not get this kind of satisfaction from their job, and there is nothing wrong with this. It is all well and good if someone does (indeed, this is ideal given the time we spend working), but for many, work (in my sense) will be achieved by most in their free time pursuing some project. It is in our projects that the possibility of work is particularly fertile.
A project is a long-term goal that often requires the putting aside of immediate desires and frivolities in order to create something that will not offer immediate gratification but, instead, deep and lasting satisfaction. For example, I find this in researching, expanding, and maintaining my digital music collection. However, it could include anything from honing a sport or new skills, fixing a car, playing an instrument, collecting stamps, maintaining a herb garden, and so on. Our lives are peppered with such projects. Unlike in a job, where we are often working for someone else, we have unmediated contact with our values in our own projects because they are wholly the product of our own agency, not something imposed from the outside. (Though this is not to say that someone's job cannot be one of their projects in this sense, it certainly could be.) This means that projects are likely the kinds of things that bear our distinct mark of authorial contribution. And given that we usually choose to spend our time doing them, it is very likely we also reflectively self-endorse such activity. Thus, it is through our projects that work is achieved. But how does this relate to self-consciousness?
In the same way that others’ affirmative recognition of our presence provided the grounds for self-consciousness, concrete knowledge of our own selves, work is the other route through which this is achieved. But how do we gain such knowledge through our work? In work we create or modify some aspect of reality that we distinctly recognise as our own unique contribution to the way the world is. In recognising that contribution as our own we directly encounter ourselves in the world. We come face to face with objective, external, evidence of the features of our personhood. We encounter in our work our power, independence, and concreteness, those familiar aspects of us that are always at least formally known.
First, we see that in order to have made our thing, we must have
chosen to create and affect the world in our own image (independence). We come to know that we are free to project ourselves upon the world and in our image. Second, we see that for the world to be this way, it was essential that it was we that worked upon it, and that it is immediately
causally traceable to our person (power). This necessitates our own existence to ourselves. That is, we come to know that we are necessary ingredients in making the world what it is. Third, we see ourselves reflected
in the world not merely as a formal collection of ideas, values, and desires, things that are internal, merely potential, and therefore objectively inaccessible, but as a unique productive activity that actually enacts that collection in the world by shaping it according to those ideas, values, and desires. We come to know what it is for those things to be encountered not merely in our heads, but in the world (concreteness). Finally, since work is a direct expression of our own values, there is a one-to-one correspondence between our values and the
outside world. Thus, to work is not only to modify the world in your image it is also to make it good. Thus,
work, in this sense, is a direct counter to alienation through self-consciousness, the concrete knowledge of ourselves. This means that work, finally, is unalienated labour.
VI. I have been writing so far as if self-consciousness were this simple relationship between our self, which stays the same, and our state of knowledge which seeks out this static self. However, this is not what is really happening. There is no distinction between ourselves and our state of knowledge, because a change in our state of knowledge is a change in ourselves, and the current state of ourselves determines our state of knowledge. Does this mean that there is no real difference between self-consciousness and alienation, because our self is always identical to our state of knowledge, and these things determine each other in a meaningless and circular fashion? No. What this means, rather, is that self-consciousness is not the discovery of some hidden self out there for us to find, but the very process by which we create ourselves as a being that is independent, powerful, and concrete, at all. Self-consciousness is not just the thing that allows us to arrive at our self, but that which is constitutive of it.
Thus, if merely formal
self-consciousness is alienation, then concrete self-consciousness is freedom.
To be free is to have a concrete and real-time knowledge of one’s own existence
and, therefore, of one’s real possibilities that can be actualised, despite each
of our unique situations as finite creatures. It is to understand your own state space and to be able to rationally navigate it. I may never
be able to fly, but self-consciousness lets me know that I could deliver you
this piece of writing and that such an activity is valuable to me, just as it will let you pursue your own good.
Thus, self-consciousness is a vehicle for not just awakening, maintaining, and honing, the talents and abilities that are within our grasp, while rationally closing
off those paths our finitude condemns us not to follow, but ultimately the vehicle constituting this freedom at all. Once we are free, knowing our possibilities allows us to not submit ourselves to the world but instead
actively create it in our own image, and to the best of our ability.
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