Abstract
The guiding thesis of this chapter is that self-understanding is centrally an existential challenge. In particular, the chapter aims to lay bare the massive potential of our desire for social affirmation to influence and distort our self-understanding, mostly in a covert and unacknowledged fashion. To the extent that we are driven by this desire, we are primarily concerned with assessing, in an emotionally charged and self-deceptive manner, the social worth of our self, whereas we lack the will and ability to understand ourselves in an open and unqualified manner. Ultimately, it is argued that whatever the cognitive demands of self-understanding and our ability to meet these demands may be, we can never know more about ourselves than we are existentially willing to face and acknowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
As concerns the cognitive difficulties of self-understanding and the traditional propensity to focus exclusively on them, suffice it to say the following: In contrast to Dennett and other naturalist sceptics, I have no doubt as to our basic openness to, and our ability to phenomenologically access and understand, ourselves and others. Within this framework, I think there are indeed some cognitive challenges involved in self-understanding. However, in so far as one turns away and abstracts from the ethical-existential setting in which all self-understanding takes place—that is, from all the interpersonal concerns and motives that make self-understanding an emotionally charged and existentially challenging affair in the first place—and focuses entirely on the cognitive difficulties of understanding, one will be prone to misrepresent and exaggerate the cognitive difficulties themselves. Finally, it is important to recognise that the inclination to interpret existential difficulties as cognitive difficulties can in itself be motivated by unacknowledged existential desires, for example, by the desire to find intellectual solutions to personally demanding ethical-existential problems that we do not dare to acknowledge and face as such.
- 2.
Both Honneth and Taylor draw their principal inspiration from Hegel’s thinking about recognition.
- 3.
I present my view of the moral deficits of the urge for social affirmation in more detail in Westerlund (Forthcoming).
- 4.
In Westerlund (2019), I offer a phenomenological analysis of shame as rooted in the desire for affirmation and conditioned by our capacity for social self-consciousness. For other accounts of shame that emphasise the central role of social self-consciousness, see Sartre (2003 [1943]); Rochat (2009); Zahavi (2014); Montes Sánchez (2015).
- 5.
Bernard Williams (1993) has famously argued that shame, due to the sensitivity to the opinions and views of others that goes along with it, has an important role to play in our moral self-reflection. However, this idea seems misguided. As I see it, the problem with shame is that in shame—as in all self-assessments that are rooted in our desire for affirmation—we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves or others; rather, we are merely egocentrically concerned about measuring, and, if possible, enhancing, the affirmability and social worth of our appearance. This means that shame, by itself, cannot bring us self-understanding. For two recent attempts to defend the potential of shame to contribute to moral self-critique and self-understanding, see Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni (2012) and Thomason (2018).
- 6.
- 7.
For more about the role of identity and values in shame, see Westerlund (2019, pp. 76–82).
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Westerlund, F. (2019). Who Wants to Be Understood? The Desire for Social Affirmation and the Existential Challenge of Self-Understanding. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_11
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