Keywords

1. Introduction

In the history of philosophy, there has from the outset been a strong tendency to avoid digging into the existential concerns and motives that are involved in—obstruct, distort, enable—knowledge and understanding.

Aristotle’s assertion at the beginning of his Metaphysics that ‘all men by nature desire to know’ (1984) gives paradigmatic expression to the penchant of philosophy to accept as its unquestioned starting point the idea that human beings are driven by something like a will to truth or a hunger for knowledge. Throughout the history of philosophy, different versions of this comfortable yet fundamentally unclear belief in an unproblematic desire to know have functioned as a pretext for not raising the question concerning the existential motives and challenges of knowledge: What does it mean to want to know? What might make us fear and dislike knowledge? What makes us want to deceive ourselves, to see what we want to see and to repress what we don’t want to see? What existential challenges are involved in knowledge and understanding? One result of the general failure to interrogate the existential challenges of knowledge and understanding is that philosophers have primarily conceived of the difficulties of understanding as cognitive in nature, as difficulties having to do with cognitively accessing and analysing the matters in question.

Of course, the tendency indicated above has not been all-pervasive. As is well-known, the tradition of philosophy has included a heterogenous array of thinkers who in different ways have questioned the dominant belief in our will to truth. At the beginning of the tradition, Socrates already points to the connections between knowledge, will, and emotions. More recently, thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud have proposed that what presents itself as disinterested thinking driven solely by a will to truth may in fact be motivated by a will to repress unwanted or painful truths, and to picture the world in a way that serves particular existential desires and goals.

The general inclination of philosophy to dodge the question concerning the existential challenges of understanding also comprises the issue of self-understanding. At least since Descartes, it has been common to think that whereas we have direct access to our own conscious experience, understanding other persons poses basic difficulties. Since we do not have direct access to other minds and since understanding others is always a matter of making indirect inferences and conjectures on the basis of their outward appearances, such understanding is difficult and imperfect. Furthermore, there is the entire discussion about the problems involved in understanding alien cultures and epochs. In this picture, the task of understanding oneself or one’s own culture appears as a comparatively unproblematic and easy task. However, even when the difficulties of self-understanding have been thematised—as has increasingly been the case in recent debates—they have primarily been conceived of as cognitive in nature. For example, naturalistically inclined philosophers have claimed that our reflective access to our own first-person experiences is fundamentally deficient—because it is unable to establish objectively verifiable empirical knowledge and/or because it does not reach the basic neurological domain that explains our experiences—and that only empirical research into the neurological workings of the brain and the body can give us basic and objective knowledge of the mind (cf., e.g., Dennett, 1991; Churchland, 1988; Churchland, 2013). Moreover, phenomenological philosophers have argued that self-reflection is cognitively demanding. Whereas we are normally directed outwards towards the intentional objects of our experience, self-reflection requires that we—in an unnatural and awkward manner—turn our attention from the objects of our experience towards our own experiencing self (cf., e.g., Husserl, 2014 [1913]; Heidegger, 1962 [1927]).

In this chapter, I will not deal with—or assess the standard conceptions of—the possible cognitive difficulties in understanding ourselves.Footnote 1 Instead, I will delve into the existential difficulties and challenges of self-understanding. More precisely, I will attempt to demonstrate and articulate the immense potential of our desire for social affirmation to obstruct our understanding of ourselves, mostly in a covert manner. To be sure, it has not been uncommon among philosophers to allude, in a more or less implicit and self-serving manner, to the idea that people in general have a desire to conform to the opinions of their group and that in order to attain knowledge one must achieve independence from collective pressure and prejudice. However, although there is clearly some truth to this idea, it has mostly been left vague and unclarified. My objective here is to show that our urge for affirmation goes deep into our self-understanding and that its potential to influence and distort our seemingly independent thinking is much greater than we usually recognise and acknowledge. This implies that self-understanding is essentially an existential challenge. Whatever the cognitive demands of understanding and our ability to meet these demands may be, I want to suggest that we can never understand more about ourselves than we are existentially willing to face and acknowledge.

2. Are We Sure We Want to Be Understood?

Listening to our everyday speech and thought, it is easy to get the impression that there is nothing we want more than to understand ourselves and be understood by others. We often declare—to others and to ourselves—that we long to be understood and to be seen as we really and truly are by others. This wish to be understood concerns both our significant others and the community we live in. We bitterly lament it when we feel that we have not been understood or seen. Sometimes, we may even be overcome by the dark and self-pitying thought that nobody will ever understand us.

If one takes this way of thinking and talking at face value, one is presented with the bewilderingly happy picture of the human being as a creature who passionately desires to seek and hear the truth about herself and who longs for interpersonal relations characterised by mutual open understanding. This sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it sounds as if some kind of self-deception and illusion was at work here.

So, what do we as a rule want when we state that we want to be understood and seen? What wish comes to expression here?

My suggestion is that very often, perhaps for the most part, our avowed will to be understood is in fact an expression of our will to be affirmed. In so far as this is the case, what we wish for is not unqualified understanding. Rather, what we want is to be understood in a certain way, namely in a way that in some sense affirms us and supports a conception of ourselves as socially affirmable and respectable. If, by contrast, we would encounter somebody who actually saw and understood us beyond this wish—and who did not refrain from shining light on our problems, self-deceptions, and shames—we would likely react with pain and anxiety. In fact, it is not improbable that, precisely at the moment of being understood, we would feel misunderstood and unfairly judged.

What is this desire to be affirmed? Why does it regularly present itself as a will to understanding, although unqualified understanding is not what we seek here? How should we understand the immense power of our urge for affirmation to induce repression and self-deception?

3. Love, Social Self-Consciousness, and the Desire for Affirmation

During the last decades, many philosophers, psychologists and sociologists have highlighted the need and desire for social affirmation and recognition as essential to our psychological well-being (cf., e.g., Honneth, 1996; Taylor, 1991).Footnote 2 It has been repeatedly emphasised that social affirmation is crucial to our self-respect and self-esteem—to our ability to respect and value our own self, to relate with trust and hope to our surrounding social world, and not plunge into debilitating shame, anxiety, and depression. The emphasis on the psychological-existential importance of social affirmation has gone hand in hand with a heightened moral sensitivity to the need and demand to affirm others. In particular, the moral demand to respect and affirm others has been stressed in relation to people belonging to groups that are devalued or oppressed by the social elite or majority.

Now, I think it is obvious that our experience of being socially affirmed or not affirmed tends to have immense impact on our psychological welfare. It is also clear that relating to others with contempt or hatred is a paradigmatic form of evil in which we close ourselves to, depersonalise and harm others. However, despite the emphasis and attention given to our urge for social affirmation, not much has been done to try to understand and critically reflect on the ethical and existential sense of this urge. Indeed, it is not unlikely that the governing sense of the moral and political obligation to meet and respect this psychologically central urge has suppressed the impulse to inquire in this direction.

How so?

Well, I want to suggest that our desire for social affirmation is ethically-existentially deficient and problematic in many respects. In so far as we are dominated by this desire, our attitude is fundamentally self-concerned and closed to others.Footnote 3 Moreover, the urge for affirmation motivates a kind of self-assessment that is inherently distortive and deceptive. In this chapter, I will mainly focus on the second aspect.

So, what is the desire for social affirmation? The ensuing depiction will of necessity be sketchy and provisional. However, I hope it will suffice as background for my analysis of the internal tendency of this desire to hold down and distort our self-understanding.

Let me begin by naming two basic human concerns that, I contend, ultimately motivate our urge for social affirmation. First off, I want to insist that, in a very fundamental way, we care for and desire the company of other people. I will call this basic care and desire for others ‘love’, although I am aware of the potential misunderstandings this brings with it, given that the term can refer to a plethora of different emotions and attitudes. When I talk about love, I thus refer to our care for others as individual persons who concern us, and our longing to be together with them in a manner of loving and open contact—not wearing social masks or relating to them as a means to some external purpose.

In addition to this, we are concerned about others for quite self-concerned and instrumental reasons. We are vulnerable and mortal creatures who can get hurt and who can die, and we are always conscious of this predicament. Out of this apprehensive self-awareness, others are present to us both as a potential threat and as a potential aid. While we know that they can hurt and even kill us, they are also there for us as our most central means for achieving safety, control and well-being.

My suggestion is that both these motives form the source which animates our desire for social affirmation. To understand the desire for affirmation, we need to see how the motives get invested in and shaped by our social self-consciousness, that is, by our ability to sense how others see us and how we appear in their eyes.

As human beings, we have the basic ability to sense and understand—more or less astutely—how others see, think, and feel about us. Looking into their eyes, seeing their gestures, and listening to their speech, we can sense the movements of their soul and how they relate to us: their fear, their joy, their love, their pretence, their hatred, their contempt. However, we do not only have a sense of how others relate to us; we also have an equally basic sense of how we appear in their eyes: as frightening, attractive, powerful, disgusting, despicable, etc. What I call the desire for social affirmation is nothing but our intense desire to be affirmed—liked, esteemed, respected—by, and to appear affirmable—likeable, worthy, respectable—to others. Correspondingly, we dread the prospect of being seen by others as non-affirmable, unworthy, despicable. This means that in so far as we are driven by the desire for affirmation, we are hypersensitive to how others see us and to the appearance we present to them. It seems to us that our ability to gain affirmation is decisive for our possibilities of achieving safety, power, and—above all—love.

To comprehend the nature and force of our desire for affirmation, it is crucial to recognise that it goes deep into our self-understanding.

In desiring social affirmation, we are not only concerned with how others see us and judge us in contrast to how we see and assess ourselves. Rather, we also have a direct sense of ourselves as we appear in terms of our capacity to achieve affirmation. We have always already to some extent internalised the values and norms that regulate the valuations of our group and we can see and judge ourselves directly in the light of these values. This means that regardless of whether anybody else is present—in person or in imagination—we have an emotionally charged and very concrete consciousness of ourselves as objects of social evaluation. The judging self-consciousness does not only target our outer appearance but our entire being. Is the person that I see and who I am beautiful, intelligent, good—that is, capable of achieving affirmation? Or is he ugly, stupid, corrupt?

Our affirmation-seeking self-consciousness constitutes the centre of what is often called our ‘self-conscious emotions’, to which belong, for example, pride, self-esteem, embarrassment, and shame. All these emotions can be understood as our reactions to how we see ourselves in the light of our urge for affirmation. For instance, whereas in pride we see ourselves as affirmable and admirable, shame is the agonising perception of ourselves as non-affirmable and despicable.Footnote 4

4. Potential for Obstruction and Distortion

So how does the desire for affirmation affect our self-understanding? In what follows, I will argue that this desire is a primary source of obstruction and distortion when it comes to our understanding of ourselves.

In our dealings with other people, the desire for affirmation makes us want to act and talk in ways that make us appear affirmable and likeable in their eyes. It makes us prone to be sensitive to and internalise the values and norms of our group as the measures we need to live up to in order to achieve affirmation. It motivates us to do and say things that we think others will value whereas we try to suppress everything in ourselves that threatens to undermine this goal by soiling our appearance. Instead of openly saying and expressing what is on our mind, we hold back the thoughts and emotions—the anger, the tears, the love, the joy—that may cause aversion.

In addition to driving us to present ourselves as affirmable to others, the desire for affirmation is a desire to see and conceive of ourselves as affirmable. We are directly conscious of our own affirmability and it seems to us that the image we see is decisive for our prospects of attaining respect and affirmation. Hence, the desire for affirmation is a force that influences how we see ourselves.

How does it do this?

Obviously, the desire for social affirmation is not in itself a desire for understanding. When it comes to self-understanding, it is, precisely, a desire to conceive of ourselves as affirmable.

When our self-understanding is moved by this desire, we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves or the world. Rather, we are interested—in an emotionally fraught manner—in assessing our own affirmability, such that we hope to see ourselves as affirmable and dread the view of ourselves as non-affirmable.

In so far as we are driven by our desire for affirmation we are interested in and attentive to matters—to ourselves and to the world and people around us—only with respect to how they might affect our social worth. Moreover, the desire for affirmation motivates a will and an effort to conceive of ourselves and our affirmability in as positive a manner as possible. That is, it prompts us to try to interpret ourselves in a way that makes us emerge as affirmable and socially worthy. This pull towards idealisation goes along with an inclination to repress and interpret away anything that threatens to undermine our conception of ourselves as affirmable.

Although our capacity to see what we want to see and repress what we do not want to see is formidable, we can of course fail, which means that we come to perceive ourselves as non-affirmable and socially worthless persons. Depending on the severity and quality of our negative self-assessment, we are overcome by emotions such as shame and depression. However, the fact that shame and depression spell failure to our effort at idealisation and repression does not mean that they would reveal the hidden ugly truth about ourselves. Given that we are here merely concerned about our affirmability, the negative self-assessment is merely a measuring of our social worth that has little to do with self-understanding. Indeed, just as our will to appear affirmable makes us prone to interpret ourselves in an idealising manner, our anxiety and depression tend to incline us to attend to things that threaten and dirty our self-conception.Footnote 5

Let us—to take a readily available example—think about how the desire for affirmation might influence the self-understanding of an academic philosopher. To bolster my sense of my affirmability and to avoid the continuously threatening menace of emerging as non-affirmable and worthless, I might, for example be tempted to do the following. Regardless of the truth, I might feel pulled to think of my own field of research as of great importance and to evaluate my own philosophical theses and arguments as positively as possible; I might be inclined to evaluate the scientific group that I belong to and that appreciates my work as especially enlightened; I might want to think of the philosopher as playing an important role in society and in history and I might feel a pull to think of the virtues and capacities that I think I possess as a philosopher as supremely valuable. Correspondingly, I might feel inclined to repress and dismiss all views and utterances that threaten the conceptions in which I have invested my urge for affirmation as in some sense irrelevant: unconvincing, shallow, unscientific, unjust, stupid, unintelligible, etc. In case I would fail to live up to the values and virtues that I have appropriated, I might try to come up with a new understanding of what is important. In case I would fail to achieve recognition within my research community, I might be tempted to write off these people with envy and contempt as shallow idiots, instead succumbing to ressentiment and putting my faith in a group—perhaps a dreamt-up or future group, perhaps God—that understands my genius.

The potential of our urge for social affirmation to affect different areas of our understanding is in the end limitless. This is because our assessment and view of our own affirmability essentially involves and is dependent on our understanding of others and of the rest of reality. Everything is potentially relevant here, which means that everything can become the object of our effort to interpret things in a way that confirms—or, as in the case of anxiety and depression, disconfirms—our affirmability. Hence, our urge for affirmation may affect our understanding, for example, of what is ethically-existentially valuable, of which people are important and insightful, of how the social, economic, and natural worlds work, of what others think and feel, of whether God or gods exist, of what amounts to knowledge and truth and true science, of how history should be written, of which jobs and tasks are important, of how to conceive of sexuality, gender, religion, skin colour, money, refugees, luck, illness, climate change, art, culture, and so on.

5. We Do Not Know What We Want

Ultimately, I want to suggest that when driven by our urge for affirmation we are fundamentally confused and deceived about what we desire.

Above, I claimed that the desire for affirmation is centrally rooted in our desire for love and contact with other persons. We long for being together with others in an open and loving manner. When in the grip of our urge for affirmation, it seems to us as if appearing affirmable would condition and secure our possibility of attaining love, and as if failure in this respect would sentence us to a life without love. Perhaps one could say that what the desire for affirmation promises us is something like a power or capacity to attain love. This, however, is a momentous self-deception.

Why?

The basic problem is that in so far as we give way to the desire to achieve affirmation—and, in the end, love—we abandon, precisely, love.Footnote 6 That is, we do not relate to others in an open and loving manner. We do not welcome them and care about them as the persons that they are, and we do not reach out towards them and express ourselves to them in an unqualified manner. In short, we do not venture the possibility of being ourselves and encountering each other without social masks.

Instead, succumbing to our anxious urge for affirmation we are intent on appearing affirmable and likeable to the other. In this, we do not openly speak our minds in the hope that the other will welcome us as the persons that we are. Rather, we strive to present an image of ourselves as affirmable while repressing anything in ourselves that might threaten this image. Furthermore, while dominated by the desire for affirmation, we do not care for and open up to others as persons. Rather, we are egocentrically concerned about our own affirmability, whereas the others figure as the audience that observes us and judges us. Here, we only care about them as the look that judges us. We do not relate to them as persons to care about and encounter in an open way.

This also means that, despite our assurances to the contrary, we are certainly not interested in hearing the honest opinions of others or in being understood by them in an unqualified manner. Rather, we want others to conceive of us in ways that bolster our sense of ourselves as affirmable. When they do this, we tend to feel and think that we have been seen and understood. By contrast, when others think or say things that threaten our sense of ourselves as affirmable, our anxiety makes us prone to resist their opinions or to disqualify them as persons. We may, for instance, react with anger, heatedly accusing the others of interpreting us in an unjust and fraudulent manner; or we might react with contempt, conceiving of the others as worthless or insignificant characters whose opinions we can safely ignore. So no, when we are driven by the urge for affirmation we do not want others to speak their mind and we do not want them to see and understand us if this does not serve this urge. To be sure, we tell ourselves that we want others to be honest and to mean what they say. After all, what would be the point of their flattery if it was obvious that they were lying? Still, we only want their honesty in so far as we want to hear what they have to say. Everybody is familiar with the tragicomedies that are regularly played out when somebody professes to want to know the truth without really wanting it. Hence, when I sense the falsity of my friend’s praise, I do not say ‘Please, tell me what you really think! I want to know it—even if it hurts!’ Instead, I say: ‘Do you really mean that? Are you sure you don’t just say it because I want to hear it?’ And my friend, who knows what I want and who does not want to hurt me, assures me that she meant what she said.

To get a sense of the fundamentally deceptive nature of our desire for affirmation, consider what it would mean if our dream of achieving affirmation came true. What would this mean? What happens when we try to envision the end goal of this desire?

What would it mean if I would unexpectedly be hailed as the greatest philosopher in the world and if, moreover, I would be firmly convinced of the truth of the splendid image of myself as a philosopher of superior social worth? Well, strictly speaking, this would merely mean that a large amount of people—including myself—would like and admire my image and persona as a great thinker. However, this perfect success would not by itself have brought me one millimetre closer to love. The audience would be mesmerised by my image—not by me—and I would be taken in by their admiration—not by them as persons. Behind the apparent splendour of my success I might still be living a lonely and alienated life without love. Perhaps one could say that realising one’s dreams of affirmation while lacking love in one’s life would be like being praised and admired as the hero of a play that has nothing to do with oneself and one’s deepest longings.

The paradox is that it is precisely the desire for affirmation—and our effort to enhance our capacity to be loved—that makes love so immensely difficult and threatening. Love requires us to drop our social masks and encounter each other in an open and loving way. Hence, from the perspective of the urge for affirmation love itself appears as the definite threat to our effort to secure love.

In addition to being fundamentally confused about what it assesses, our affirmation-seeking self-assessment is an inherently unreliable and distortive measure of how others see and judge our social value. In self-consciously assessing our affirmability we tend to be conscious of ourselves—of how we appear—while not being very open and receptive to how others actually see us. Given this closedness to the views of others and given the emotional character of our self-consciousness, our self-assessment is likely to be highly influenced by the emotional atmosphere—our anxiety versus our effort at idealisation—of the assessment. Moreover, in assessing our own appearance, we tend to apprehend others as the anonymous and homogenous audience of this appearance. Hence, our self-conscious assessment of our social worth standardly takes the form of a reifying assessment of how we appear and are seen by ‘the others’, which is strongly influenced by our sensitivity to traits and signs that confirm our present emotional disposition, and which is only loosely connected to what particular others actually think about us.

6. The Shine of Truth and the Question of Personal Identity

However, if I am right that our urge for affirmation is a prime obstacle to self-understanding, how come we nevertheless tend to conceive of the self-assessments issuing from this urge as true self-understanding?

In fact, the desire for affirmation itself constitutes a central motive for conceiving of the assessments that corroborate our sense of our affirmability as true and insightful. Naturally, we feel inclined to think of these assessments as true and to think of understandings that threaten them as false. Conceiving of our affirmation-driven understandings as true provides a kind of normative framework that legitimises our own perspective and puts certain demands on others. If we conceive of our affirmation-seeking understanding of ourselves as the truth about ourselves, then clinging to this understanding is a mark of our insight and will to truth. In this, we can also think that others have an epistemological-moral obligation to acknowledge our self-understanding as true. Moreover, whether positive or negative, it belongs to our evaluating self-perception that we have a very concrete quasi-perceptive sense of our own appearance and value. We do not only grasp in an abstract manner how others might think about us. We directly feel and perceive our own self as impressive and attractive or as shameful and repulsive. In short, it is not difficult to understand that our affirmation-seeking self-assessments tend to masquerade as true understanding.

In this connection, we should briefly attend to the issue of our personal ideal identity. The reason for this is that we tend to conceive of our identity as our true self although it tends to be rooted in our desire for affirmation.

We generally develop and maintain a personal identity that is constituted by the values and ideals that define who we, ideally, are. What needs to be seen is that the desire for affirmation tends to get heavily invested in our identity. Beyond our day to day struggle to present ourselves as affirmable and avoid disgrace and shame, we develop an ideal identity that carries our hopes for achieving affirmation. In so far as our identity is motivated and fuelled by our urge for affirmation, it is an ideal conception of ourselves as socially affirmable. It is precisely on account of its rootedness in our urge for affirmation that our identity functions as a central determinant of our self-conscious emotions. We strongly feel that we need to live up to the values of our identity in order to retain our self-esteem and achieve the affirmation we long for. By contrast, if we violate or fail to live up to our identity, we are bound to feel shame and to lose hope in our ability to be affirmed. The values and ideals of our identity may be of all kinds. They may concern our ethical-existential character, our societal task and work, our worldly success and prosperity, our skills and talents and character traits, our sexuality, our gender, our skin colour, our religion, and so on.Footnote 7

So, what about our inclination to conceive of our identity as our true self that we want others to see and recognise? Clearly, the desire for affirmation is a strong motive for wanting to believe in our own identity as in some sense true and realistic, and we want others to recognise and confirm it as such. Our conception of our identity is emotionally loaded. After all, we sense that our prospects of achieving affirmation depend on it.

However, to say and believe that our identity constitutes our true self is deceptive. In so far as our identity is rooted in our urge for affirmation it is nothing but an ideal picture of ourselves as affirmable that we have developed and maintain and that we strive to live up to as our promise of and path to affirmation. The values and ideals constituting our identity may be more or less rooted in genuine understanding and they may be more less ethically-existentially good or corrupt: being loving, courageous, cunning, ruthless, rich, sexy, strong; being a philosopher, a Nazi, a businessperson, a gang member; being black, white, gay, hetero, etc. Moreover, our conception of our own capacity of living up to our identity may be more or less realistic. Still, to the extent that we are here moved by our urge for affirmation, we are not interested in openly understanding ourselves. Rather, we are drawn to the values and ideals of our identity and to the relevant traits in ourselves as materials for an ideal picture that can carry our hopes for affirmation. In this, we are strongly inclined to endorse whatever helps us build and believe in our identity and to pass over and repress all disturbing elements.

In the end, if the urge for affirmation is what drives me, my understanding of the meaning of my identity will be deceptive. Far from being the vehicle that will help me be myself in an open and loving relation to others, it essentially remains another social mask that promises to secure the possibility of love although it in facts holds it down.

It may be good to note that here I focus exclusively on our identity as rooted in and playing a key role in our desire for affirmation. I do not claim that all understandings of who we are and want to be would be reducible to this function. Thinking about who we are and how we want to live our life may mean many things. We may—beyond and against our urge for affirmation—actually try to understand our own motives, feelings and problems in our relations to others. Also, we may attempt to picture the life we want to live and the work we want to do in the world, not just on the basis of our urge for affirmation but from the point of view of other motives—such as love, responsibility, inclination—and of a vision of what is needed and possible in the present world. Nevertheless, I do think that the desire for affirmation is an immense force that tends to pervade our conception and talk about who we are, very often in a way that we fail to acknowledge. The question of when and where it is this force that propels us is a question that each of us has to think about and answer for himself or herself.

7. The Existential Challenge of Self-Understanding

The main objective of this chapter has been to lay bare and articulate the massive potential of our desire for social affirmation to obstruct and distort our self-understanding—usually without our noticing, or wanting to notice, this.

Let me sum up. Given that the desire for affirmation is one of our strongest motives and given our social self-consciousness, we are always and everywhere concerned about and drawn to assess and attend to matters in terms of how they affect our social worth. Hence, we are also drawn to conceive of ourselves in ways that confirm and bolster our affirmability and repress whatever threatens it. Since our assessment of our affirmability also involves our understanding of others, of the social world, and of reality at large, the potential of the urge for affirmation to affect our understanding is limitless. Ultimately, I suggested that in desiring social affirmation we are basically confused and deceived about what we desire, such that in desiring and pursuing affirmation we are in fact counteracting the possibility of love and affiliation that we hope affirmation will bring us. In all this, the urge for affirmation also motivates us to conceive of our affirmation-seeking self-assessment as true self-understanding in a way that covers up its deceptive nature.

The analysis conducted above suggests that self-understanding is essentially an existential, not just a cognitive, challenge. Recognising the immense capacity of the desire for affirmation to affect and distort our understanding, we can see that being existentially ready and willing to understand is a prerequisite for understanding ourselves in an open and unprejudiced manner. Meeting the possible cognitive demands of self-understanding—say, engaging in self-reflection, attending to and withstanding prejudices, striving for clarity and distinctness, and surveying the relevant literature—is not enough for attaining understanding. Without a basic willingness to acknowledge and see the matters at stake, no amount of purely cognitive ability will by itself grant us understanding. In fact, without such a willingness, we will be drawn to put our cognitive skills in the service of our desire for affirmation, developing understandings and arguments that—more or less directly—serve this urge and repress what we experience as threatening to it. Hence, it is only when motivated by the right existential spirit that our cognitive abilities and skills can play their possible roles in enabling and advancing our understanding.

Above, I have tried to describe in general terms how the urge for affirmation works in and influences our self-understanding. However, it is important to stress that this general description eventually points towards the deeply personal task of reflecting on how this desire is present in oneself and in one’s understanding. Needless to say, it is the personal task that is the crucial and difficult one. In fact, attaining a general understanding of the workings of our desire for social affirmation may be easy enough since this does not necessarily pose a threat to this desire. Perhaps elaborating this kind of understanding merely boosts our sense of our own insightfulness. What is existentially demanding is to actually interrogate the understandings of ourselves and our identity in which we actually have invested our desire for affirmation. Even more demanding is to try to lessen the grip that this desire has on us and try to relate to others and to ourselves in an open and loving manner without thinking about how what we do or say affects our affirmability.