I shall try to speak as concretely as possible, i.e. not ‘philosophically’. However, I am going to take as my motto a quotation from Hegel’s Science of Logic, more precisely from the Preface to the second edition (III, 18):
The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is;
because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing [dieses Sichwissen] is a fun-damental determination of its actuality. (Hegel 1969, 37)
In fact I am abusing the quotation, for Hegel is speaking here of ‘self-knowing’ in the sense of the logical absolute. But this Sichwissen fits perfectly with what I want to say. I hope this will be understood.
Let me begin with the idea beloved of Heidegger according to which we are not what we are, but much more what we can be: Seinkönnen, ‘potentiality-for-being’.
We are something possible in relation to our own selves, we are our own projection, what comes towards us out of the future. The image we build of ourselves is largely composed of the sum of our projects and projections. We evolve, of course, on a ground made up of pre-existing determinations: we are our genes, the time and place in which we were born, the society in which we live, and so on. But beyond all that there remains a Spielraum, ‘room to manoeuver’, a space that is not yet occupied by anything, a niche of the possible in which we can install ourselves and freely settle into one direction or another of our lives. Of course this range of possibilities is to some extent predetermined by circumstances that have nothing to do with our freedom: fashions, ideals floating in the air, readymade lifestyles, which limit our freedom while leaving us with the impression that we are choosing.
However it still remains true that my own projections turn back on me and determine my way of being. I am what I really want to be, as well as being the range of possibilities that lie before me.
And yet it is not enough that I have these possibilities before me. In order to choose between them, I resort to a ‘knowing’—I have no other word—that tells me what it is better to opt for one particular possibility and not some other. Any choice of a possibility presupposes such a knowing—a ‘science’ in the broadest sense— that indicates the best possibility, that which really attracts me, and to which, concretely, I can begin to direct myself. A knowing, an understanding if you like, that gives me orientation.
However from this it follows that there is a deeper link between our existence and knowing or science in this broadest sense: knowing understood not as a totality of data gradually accumulated in the brain, but as a sort of understanding without which I cannot exist. The fact that I orient myself by choosing, and get it into my head that I can and should be this and not that, means that the knowing that precedes my access to what is possible for me is a condition of my existence. That my existence is constructed as a function of this knowing, and that this knowing is a condition of existence. When I choose to enrol in the Faculty of Mathematics or the Music Academy, I do so by virtue of having processed certain data of my own. And if, as in Plato’s Alcibiades, it is a matter of knowing what I am going to become and what it means to choose one’s life, then all the more does the choice presuppose knowing what a good life is. And so my confrontation with what is possible for my life presupposes a ‘knowing of what is possible’: I cannot choose unless I already have such a ‘knowing’, which in fact ultimately becomes the condition of my existence.
But once it is made, the choice implies a Richtungslinie, a ‘direction’ on which I must go from now on, and which, by the simple fact of its existence, eliminates all other possibilities. Having chosen from a multitude of possibilities, I am left with only one: I have limited myself to one, setting aside all the others that lay in front of me before I chose.
This whole game of choosing, which presupposes knowing as a condition of existence, also implies the necessity of testing what you know. If I can demonstrate that I have an understanding of the possibilities, then I can be sure that my choice has a sound basis, and, implicitly, have a guarantee that, through the well-founded choice that I have made, I will exist optimally and maximally.
But can I demonstrate this? Can anyone claim to have a reliable understanding of his possibilities, and thus, implicitly, a knowing by which to choose his life?
Socrates replied that the only thing he knows in this connection is that he does not know. He has the knowledge of his lack of knowledge. The choice of our lives presupposes a knowing, but it is a knowing that we do not have, and nor, from a Socratic point of view, can we ever have it. We strive to choose the best life possible for ourselves, because otherwise we waste our lives and live by chance, hurled this way and that; but on the other hand, when I am asked about the fundamental reference points of my life—courage, love, friendship, beauty, piety etc.—, when I have to put to the test a science of life, the only answers I can give are evasive and insufficient. In all these branches of knowing and understanding we are dunces. This is the dramatic nature of my human situation: I do not know anything, when in fact I have to know, because I have to choose my existence, since my existence itself is choice.
What then is the solution? How can we escape from this terrible paradox of human existence? There is only one way: the solution is to ‘chew over’ the problem.
That is why Socrates engages in discussion, in dialogue. Without a break. All the time. A whole life spent in dialogue. I have to keep discussing what I have to do, namely how I can manage to choose the best life, without for a moment claiming for myself the position of ‘I know’ and of the truth. When we read the Socratic dialogues, this is what strikes us at every turn. ‘Yes, we are talking about courage,’ we hear Socrates say. ‘What exactly is courage in itself?’ But why do we have to know what courage is in itself? And the answer is always the same: ‘So that we can choose, so that we can know how to choose our life.’ This was not just a problem for Socrates; it was a problem for the Greeks in general, one of the great ongoing problems that would not leave them in peace. This was a problem worth ‘chewing over’ endlessly, and one which, for Socrates, pushed dialogue to the foreground.
And yet this is not the path that philosophical thought followed after Socrates. Already with Plato, who basically stages the problem of endless dialogue, discussion is no longer the same thing; rather, as happens constantly among us, it has already become a front for searching for and finding the truth. This postulation of infinite dialogue, generated by the need for a knowledge by which to choose in the conditions of ‘I know that I do not know’, is the first fissure that Socrates brings with him in the history of European thought. (About the other fissure—the question—I have spoken at length on another occasion.1) And on the basis of this fissure, our choice proves to be only a manner of speaking. We want, of course, to choose our existence, and indeed to choose the best possible (see Gorgias, Meno, Alcibiades etc.), but in fact we do not choose because we do not know, and because we know that we do not know.
Well then, in the context of this issue, of this relationship with one’s own self, I am going to speak about falsifications of the self, about self-deception. I have seen, with Heidegger, that my life is essentially possibility. Possibility both as reaction and as horizon. It is reaction inasmuch as I can react to a given situation in one way or another. This is one of the senses of the possible for me. The other sense is my projecting, that which I could be. My plan is to talk about the psychological horizon of the possibility of life, and within that, to raise the problem of self-falsification.
Let us see how lack of self-knowledge appears within the context of self-image, and what the relation is between what I am and what I think I am. And all this based on a temporal structure of self-falsification. I am now going to propose an inventory of the ways in which we deceive ourselves, based on the temporal hypostases of the future, the present, and the past.
The Future
Dreams
My dream of what I am going to be is my own projection into a hero, a personal projection par excellence. Dreams begin in childhood. When I was a child, I dreamt of becoming a racing driver. Perhaps nowadays a child dreams of becoming a cosmonaut or a Formula 1 driver like Nigel Mansell. Dreams begin in childhood and continue in other forms in adolescence: in some cases they remain with us all our lives. One form of life-long dream is that of the (as yet) unrecognized genius, the Van Gogh model, let us say. There are people who paint or write poetry all their lives, convinced that they are unrecognized just as Van Gogh was, but that one day… Others are for ever Don Juan: Ortega y Gasset says that there is not a man alive who does not believe that he was Don Juan, at least in his younger days, that he perhaps still is, or, if he was not and is not, that he could have been but did not want to be. There are hundreds of variants on these dreams, and it is they, these dreams, that create the real failures. These, I emphasize, are personal dreams: i.e. they are formed by my projection of myself into a model or ideal type of person.
Fanciful Ambitions
Any fanciful ambition involves an overloaded opinion of my own capability, a wrong evaluation in an upward direction. If, for example, my dream is to become one of the great philosophers of the world, then my fanciful ambition might be to solve the problem of time. Why is it dangerous to nourish such ambitions? Because the precious mirage of ‘I’m going to do’ gets in the way of ‘I do’. The fanciful ambition is thus the project that prevents you from doing. An example would be the project of reading the works of the great thinkers in the most fundamental way. This is a fanciful ambition, because there can be no definitive reading of the great philosophers. This time it is no longer a matter of personal projection: I start with myself and see myself as a great hero. This time we are dealing with a mystification at the level of action. He who nourishes fanciful ambitions is a man of action sabotaged by his own project of doing. He sets out to do in his own space something that he cannot do. He wants to catch a whale with a flimsy fishing line. It is the very grandeur of his project that puts the brakes on its achievement. This lack of adjustment to one’s own possibilities is another source of failure. In my generation there was a guy called Ştefan Teodorescu who was always making up ample tables of contents. He never even got as far as writing the introduction. However the nourisher of fanciful ambitions is not an agonized failure; his life becomes a dolce far niente, a sort of continuous waltz among a host of projects endlessly taken up and abandoned again. There is a Chinese proverb: ‘Every road starts with the first step’.
The nourisher of fanciful ambitions never manages to make that first step. Or if he does, he leaves the road before he has trodden firmly on it.
Plans, Concrete Projects
These represent a third possible source of self-falsification in the context of the future. I say ‘possible’, because not every plan necessarily leads to self-falsification, only one that cannot be abandoned along the way as soon as it proves to be unrealistic or mistaken.
Any activity that I embark on presupposes a concrete plan. However as the activity advances, it may or may not confirm the initial plan. Self-falsification sets in when I lose my flexibility, when I become the slave of a project even when it no longer suits me. To avoid this sort of self-deception, I must, when I have a project or a plan, keep asking myself along the way if it is still appropriate for me to follow it, if it is really good, etc. It is not necessary that things should turn out just as you saw them at the beginning: sometimes you get a better view of them along the way.
The Present
One’s Own Set of Issues
We cannot talk of an intellectual in the absence of a personal set of issues. You will not obtain Selbstwissen, ‘self-knowledge’, by, for example, sitting in your armchair and asking yourself intensely ‘what am I like?’ (This time I am not going to show you, as in the previous cases, how you can deceive yourself, but rather how you can avoid doing so.) So let us consider the personal set of issues. There are exceptionally quick-witted people who live in a veritable jungle of issues. They keep having all sorts of ideas about all sorts of things. Some can write an article every day or every week with some new idea, and sometimes these are only a fraction of the ideas that come to them. The case of Wittgenstein is an eloquent one. Ideas never stopped coming to him; he would write them on bits of paper and throw them into a drawer. Others came along later, took the papers from the drawer and put them in order, giving them the form of immortal ‘works’. At first sight, all these notes of ideas seem to be a jungle, but in fact this is not the case. It is for this reason that we can speak, if not of Wittgenstein’s system, then at least of his way of thinking. These scattered notes rhymed with something; they had the coherence of a way of thinking, and were, ultimately, ‘systematic’. Nietzsche did the same thing, producing feverish jottings in notebooks, scribbles on pieces of paper. A good part of the works of Nietzsche consists of notes. If you take all the volumes he wrote, you can see what a jungle was in his head. I have taken two extreme examples in order to make it clear that one’s set of issues is a matter of the present, of the ideas that come to one at a given moment. And out of these notes of ideas you yourself appear, and, reading them later, you are able to see what you could not appreciate when you wrote them: that they have a certain structure, that they are not a jungle, and certainly are not a form of trickery—that they are not means of self-deception, but an authentic Selbstwissen.
External Solicitations
In order not to be falsifying, external solicitations should only be accepted if they fit within one’s own set of issues, and refused—as far as possible—if this is not the case. (NB: As you will see, what I have to say here only applies to intellectuals, and hardly at all to other types of people.) Even then, however, compared with the ideas that come from inside me, external solicitations are to a much lesser extent my own, and engage my commitment much less. In fact they have one major failing: as soon as they become systematic, they come to take the form of a chain; they start to represent you, and gradually build up an image of you to which you end up submitting in time. Little by little, you become this mask of yourself that you can no longer deny and that, finally, you have to accept as actually being your own face. How many intellectuals have disappeared in this way (or have never got as far as being born) behind ‘regular collaborations’?
Concrete Work
The truth is that, out of the three temporal hypostases, it is only in the present that we can see what we really are. Starting from the present, I can find out who I am. It is in fact the place of the self, and it is here, in the present, that our existence is played out. The future is possibility; the past has gone. The present, on the other hand, is continuously generating us: it is the source of a good knowledge of ourselves that is relatively immediate, and in which the role of self-falsification is reduced as far as it can be.
Hence concrete work. Concrete work can be either a feverish and inspired creation, or a painstaking and laborious one. We have a great deal to learn from both. They oblige us all the time to keep asking ourselves: where do I have difficulties? Where am I not succeeding? This struggle to catch your own thought and formulate it is an excellent method of reaching yourself. To succeed in knowing what you think presupposes an enormous effort, and it is only when you become attentive to the difficulty of exteriorizing your thought that you begin to know yourself. It is sufficient to look at the manuscripts of famous writers to see how different people are, and how different are the pathways by which each person reaches their own self.
Now, in this ‘what I am doing now,’ it is very difficult to falsify myself. Reduction to the present means potentiating the self, obtaining an identity with one’s own self, which has managed to integrate and to master the past and the future too. This is the ideal of ancient and medieval wisdom. The present, the past and the future need to be grasped and held together as a whole; in other words, the present must be answered by a cleansed past and future. In every moment of the present, I must be wholly as I am. I must reach the point where everything I do represents me. However there are few things that we consider represent us when we do them. That is why there are so many people who all their lives are completely unaware of what they are doing, while there are not a few who give moral lectures after doing things that shock everybody.
But in the ideal of wisdom that I have been speaking of, the risk is that of closure: I possess a total knowledge and control of myself, and the capacity to translate my own wisdom into action. I thus have a perfect circle, a closure of myself permanently sealed by my knowledge and my action. Well, no! To avoid this danger, the present must be kept ever open, or rather we must always be open whatever our present may be. The motive is quite simple: I know that ultimately I know nothing.
The image of Socrates is clear in this respect: Socrates was a wise man who lived all the time in the present, keeping the present ever open. He lived the present in the market place, like a sort of time-waster. He could begin any discussion with anyone, just in order always to remain open to the outside. To keep the present open, not to close it, means in fact avoiding the position in which the present no longer means anything. And the present no longer means anything when the truth is beyond discussion and I am in possession of it—when the truth is known beforehand and the discussion is only for the sake of demonstration.
The Past
The Mistakes of the Past, Covered Over or Forgotten by the Subconscious Will
This is the most serious source of self-falsification that comes out of the past. No-one is more of a ‘trickster’ than we are with our own selves. I have never met a greater deceiver than a person with their own self. Any mistake has an impact on the image that you make of yourself. However it is curious to see how it is always the image that wins and never the mistake. The latter is either concealed, blamed on someone else (women excel here), or forgotten by the subconscious will. And it is amazing to see how well this subconscious will to forget functions. People can clearly remember their moments of success, but it takes a great effort to remember the serious mistakes they have made.
Why does this happen? Because a mistake is in fact never finished. It has to be closed somehow, and the simplest way of closing it is to forget it. It is hard to finish a mistake. It is very easy to finish a success: you climb on top of it and look down with pride. But what can you do with a mistake? Do you acknowledge it? Do you recognize that you made it? I would kindly ask you to learn what to do with your mistakes! You have to look them in the face, seeing them as the most fertile well-springs of the self. There is no better source of self-knowledge than dialogue with your own mistakes: acknowledging them, seeking to avoid repeating them, transforming them, healing their source.
One’s Own Defects
We speak casually of our own defects and accept their repetition with ease. We do not get rid of them precisely because we consider that we can cure them at any time. I know that I am indiscreet, that I am greedy, but—or so I keep telling myself—I can stop being so at any time. I only have to want it. The solution is in my hands. Some time I am going to stop and start taking myself seriously… But I do not take myself seriously.
Beautification of One’s Own Past: Making Myths and Legends
Here we have to deal with the opposite side of the tendency to forget our mistakes. You keep alive in your memory and endlessly go over those events in your life that show you in a good light. By constant retelling, they become veritable myths. We have all had a grandfather who, when we were children (children love repetition!), used to tell us over and over again about some great deed in his youth (something he did in the war, how he caught a thief, or something like that). The danger here lies in the fact that you start to hang onto these things. It is not just because of a sort of self-love that you mythologize the episodes that show you at your best, but rather because of the unacknowledged doubts about yourself that you gather over time. Some rely all their lives on the fact of having once been pupils of Heidegger. We all do this, one way or another: we hang on to something that is favourable to us, and make a myth of it in order to counterbalance our smallness, the inner doubt that we have about ourselves.
That’s all!
Reference Hegel. G.W.F. 1969. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin.
The World We Live In
Alexandru Dragomir (auth.), Gabriel Liiceanu, Catalin Partenie (eds.)
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