Aristotle on Self-Knowledge

This chapter argues that Aristotelian virtue of character involves knowledge of one’s own abilities and qualities, forms of self-knowledge that are implicit in Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and in his account of practical reasoning. Support is found in the description of truthful people in EN IV 7, who, in contrast to boasters, give true, unexaggerated reports of their own qualities. It is also found in Aristotle’s discussion of the magnanimous person, who has knowledge of their own worth. The good person, then, has both kinds of knowledge, while the bad person may have knowledge about his non-ethical abilities, but not about his character. It is unclear whether the akratic, the person who knows the better course but voluntarily takes the worse, lacks self-knowledge or is self-deceived. Self-knowledge about one’s own character also appears in some of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship.

Aristotle on Knowing One’s Own Character

The chapter addresses the question of the relationship between self-knowledge and virtue. It extracts an account of self-knowledge from Aristotle’s remarks about magnanimity and truthfulness in the Nicomachean Ethics, and explains how magnanimity in the form of self-knowledge acts as an ‘adornment of virtue’ by reinforcing our inclination to choose virtuous acts for their own sakes. Self-knowledge, it turns out, is confined to the virtuous: only the virtuous person knows her own decision for action, while the akratic becomes temporarily ignorant of her decision, in failing to attend to it and its affirming function. The vicious person, meanwhile, does not perceive or know the true quality of her actions or motives, being in error about their value. This chapter defends an account of Aristotelian self-knowledge as necessarily encompassing practical nous rather than simply theoretical nous.

From the Cradle to the Cave

In the Republic two odd passages, one in Book 7 and the other in Book 10, invite us to think about self-perception and its paradoxes. The situation of the prisoner in the cave, whose view of himself is limited to his own shadow, is paralleled by the ‘amazing sophist’ of Republic 10, who holds up a mirror and makes everything, including himself. Here it is suggested that Plato emphasizes the paradoxical nature of both. As a consequence, these passages allow us to rethink how Plato conceives perception as a model for knowledge, and how he thinks that self-perception may be understood as a model for self-knowledge. It is suggested that we might understand Platonic knowledge as ‘stereoscopy’, with internalist conditions.

Reading Plato’s Mind

This chapter distinguishes two Platonic interests in self-knowledge: the ‘thin’ self-knowledge that a human being is a rational soul using its body as a tool (the Delphic self-knowledge made prominent in the Phaedrus, First Alcibiades, and elsewhere), and the ‘thick’ self-knowledge of the particular accidental psychological profile of an individual. The two are contrasted in four ways: the thin applies to the entire species, makes no reference to irrational parts, offers no etiology of contingencies, and makes no special use of first-personal knowledge; the thick applies to individuals, incorporates details about the irrational soul, explains the individual through a narrative of the events that shaped them, and is first-personal in making the object of self-knowledge identical with the subject of that self-knowledge. This richer, thicker form of self-knowledge is illustrated with extensive examples from the Republic and Seventh Letter.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Control in Plato’s Charmides

This chapter examines the treatment of self-knowledge in Plato’s Charmides. The chapter argues that Critias’ proposal that temperance is self-knowledge, and its subsequent examination by Socrates, initially offers the reader a picture of self-knowledge as a reflexive self-awareness of the content of mental states. However, the initial discussion between Socrates and Critias presents the reader with a tension between the dual demands placed on self-knowledge in that dialogue. On the one hand, since self-knowledge is directed inward, towards one’s conscious states in acting temperately, it appears to be presented as reflexive. On the other, since, as a kind of knowledge, self-knowledge must be about something, and so dependent on the object it is directed towards, it is presented as exhibiting the characteristic of ‘objective intentionality’. A clue to the tension’s resolution, it is argued, can be found by considering the more standard understanding of temperance as self-control, and in Charmides’ characterization of temperance as a kind of ‘quietude’.

Self-Knowledge, Self-Perception, and Perception of One’s Body in Stoicism

While self-knowledge is usually considered to be knowledge of our soul by our soul, this is not the case in Stoicism. There is hardly a debate on self-knowledge in Stoicism, because there is no perception of myself as something different from my own body. The Stoics tend to identify the self with the ruling part of the soul, but they have no certain knowledge about it. Self-perception is the perception of the whole body and soul as a unity and of the parts of the body and the soul, and this allows a human being to rule his/her own body, but it is neither perception nor knowledge of the ‘self’. Since a human being is a complete mixture of a body and soul, it knows itself as an animated body, and this kind of knowledge is quite different from the form of self-knowledge involved in most of ancient philosophies.

Epicureans on Hidden Beliefs

Epicurean accounts of philosophical therapy—as involving, for example, repetitive practices, as well as argumentation—allow that a person may fail to know himself because he fails to know what he believes. This chapter considers two Epicurean texts that offer categorizations of kinds of belief and attempts to distinguish a class of what we might call ‘hidden’ beliefs: beliefs that can be extremely damaging but are difficult to identify and remove because the believer does not know that he is committed to them. Closer attention to these Epicurean texts is important for a full understanding of the Epicureans’ psychological outlook and the presuppositions of some of their therapeutic practices. The author then evaluates the positing of such hidden beliefs.

Self-Knowledge in Plato? Recognizing the Limits and Aspirations of the Self as a Knower

This chapter defends two hypotheses about the extent to which we find a conception akin to ‘self-knowledge’ in Plato: (i) that the kind of second-order cognitive condition of interest to Plato would not be a post-Cartesian kind of privileged first-person access or authority, but rather a second-order assessment of the extent to which the self is a knower, achievable by effort and reflection; and (ii) that, in contrast to a post-Humean perspective, the Platonic self who is fully a knower would qua knower be motivated to realize that knowledge in action. The first is defended by showing how awareness of the extent of one’s knowledge is dramatized in the Apology and Protagoras, in its achievement in the former, and in the breach, in the latter. The second is defended by appeal to an account of the ‘rule of knowledge’ in the Protagoras, unpacked with the aid of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

An Alternative to Cartesianism? Plotinus’s Self and its Posterity in Ralph Cudworth

The aim of this chapter is, first, to analyse the specific articulation, in Plotinus, of the notions of self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and interiority. It is, more precisely, to show how the conceptual relations we have inherited from the ‘Cartesian moment’—between self-knowledge and self-consciousness, but also between self and substance, or between self and identity—are actually dissociated in Plotinus ‘philosophy. Insofar as he accepts an immediate reflexivity, Plotinus cannot be enlisted for the ancient thought of the self. But because he does not confer on self-knowledge the value of a principle, he cannot be enlisted either for the modern philosophies of consciousness and the subject. Nonetheless, Plotinus’ philosophy of the self was a direct source of inspiration for a Modern, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, who finds in it a basis to criticize some fundamental aspects of Descartes’ thought. The chapter therefore also evaluates this legacy in Ralph Cudworth.

Kinds of Self-Knowledge in Ancient Thought

This chapter explores the topic of self-knowledge in ancient thought, asking in particular what the ancient concept (or concepts) of knowing oneself amounts to. The chapter begins by contrasting the issues which occupy ancient and contemporary discussions of self-knowledge, and the obvious points of continuity and discontinuity between the two. The author isolates two forms of self-knowledge: cognitive self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s own mental states, and dispositional self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s moral or intellectual dispositions, and traces the treatment of these forms of self-knowledge in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophers, and Plotinus. In the course of discussing the texts of each thinker or school, and the relevant scholarship, this chapter also canvasses the ways in which the chapters in the rest of this volume seek to engage with some of the problems or issues that have emerged.