Introspection

“Know thyself.” Said Thales, and it’s certainly had staying power. Most people would agree knowing oneself is a really good idea. 

The few exceptions been :

The philosopher Immanuel Kant who claimed that self-knowledge is the gateway to mental illness.

The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who labelled “know thyself” as a con, because it’s something that’s impossible to do.

And Mark Twain who said that if you know yourself you’ll inevitably despise yourself. Even old Thales reportedly said that knowing yourself is the most difficult thing that you can possibly do.

It’s tempting to imagine that self-knowledge is easy to come by. All you have to do is introspect. The idea comes Descartes, who held that the mind is transparent to itself.

The problem with this way of looking at things was discovered by experimental psychologist. The first experimental psychologists used introspection as a tool for psychological research. They thought that if introspection could be regimented it had the power to reveal the functionings of the human mind. But when they attempted all they achieved was a massive waste of time and a scientific wreck. Different labs produced different results and it became clear that introspection is far from reliable. This gave rise to two, anti-Cartesian theories: behaviourism created by John Broadus Watson, and psychoanalysis created by Sigmund Freud.

Watson thought that you can’t build a science from a private, first-person perspective. He urged we build the science of psychology out of observations of behaviour. The data produced would be open to third-person scrutiny and would thus be objective.

A behaviourist says that we come to know ourselves only by observing our own behaviour and if you know yourself better than others know you, it’s because you’ve observed your behaviour more than others have. Because nobody but you has been in your company at all times. According to Watson self-knowledge is nothing but knowledge of your own behaviour. Thus everyone would know themselves very well.

But they don’t.

This is because observation of behaviour is only one component of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t pure observation, it's an interpretation of what we observe. If we don’t interpret our behaviour correctly, then our self-knowledge is non existent. And we often misinterpret ourselves, because self-serving biases come into play that cloud our vision.

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I would write a little about psychoanalysis and Freud but I don't really get it. So feel free to do your own research.

Side note : Wrote this from the bath and I'm starting to feel like Jean-Paul Marat.

For those of you who don't know the legend. He was a French political theorist, journalist and scientist during the french revolution. He had with a horrible skin condition that kept him confined to a bathtub although this didn't stop him from writing editorials that paved the way for the widespread acceptance of utter violence and bloodshed during the Revolution. He was eventually stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday after he had invited her in for a meeting about enemies of the french people. (He literally had meetings in his bathtub).

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793)

Anyways good night,

- Juliette