This is not the way

To know oneself is to have knowledge of one’s self.

This description is a bit shaped like itself, but I find it important to break open the “oneself” and consider: what is a self? In successive approximations: one’s self is what one is; one’s self is one’s essential nature; one’s self, perhaps, consists of the character of one’s capacities and values in the absence of specificity of situation.

Self-knowledge, then, is knowledge of the “self”: knowledge of what one can and what one can’t, knowledge of what one would and what one wouldn’t, knowledge of what one might and what one mightn’t.¹

This is a useful predictive tool. I refuse to discuss value (see also below) in this context, but self-knowledge has utility, allowing one to judge what one can feasibly accomplish, increase efficiency, enhance division of labor where applicable, and probably encourages happiness or something, if that seems like a desirable goal. In general, it seems like self-knowledge ought to allow a person, if not to achieve more, at least to fail to achieve less.

At the least, being aware of one’s shortcomings ought to let a person find ways to avoid or circumvent them instead of getting stuck in them.

I’ll identify my principal weakness as a denial of meaning. From my own perspective, this is a fairly complex issue—but I’m likely to be biased, of course, since both fundamental attribution and self-serving biases are in effect here—because I maintain perhaps slightly contradictory beliefs: there should be meaning, but at the same time I would not recognize anything to have meaning because I recognize no cause for meaning to exist; this state of affairs might be characterized as a sort of absurdism. As I’ve noted previously, I believe existence is because existence if and only if existence and existence is observed only if existence, and because existence is probable if existence yields existence; there doesn’t need to be meaning for existence.

This lack of recognizable meaning does carry with it a sense of lack of meaning and purpose and direction and motivation, however; I’d characterize most of what I do as things I do because they are things I do, or that I’ve done and haven’t changed because the change wouldn’t seem especially meaningful, either.

I would say that I’m working on this meaning deficiency, but I also find it rather difficult to tell whether thinking about it has actually had much effect, or even desirable: while on one hand, “there is no meaning”-ism certainly dampens motivation significantly and is probably a major contributor to chronic procrastination, actually trying to find meaning hasn’t actually tended to result in finding any which I can reconcile with a lack of a source of meaning, which doesn’t help with the motivation.

If I were some sort of character in a story composed by a human, my strength would probably be something like, “free of the need to matter, it can focus on doing what it really cares for”—but I don’t think I am, and even if I am, my storyteller seems to subscribe to a different literary tradition, because I haven’t found anything that I’ve cared for that much.

Instead, I’d claim that my strength is an awareness of expectations; my claim is difficult for me to verify, however, and is certainly subject to confirmation bias. Compared to others, I believe I have a greater awareness of what I want to happen, what I expect will happen, and how both of these could possibly go wrong—so, to some extent, I am claiming above-average self-knowledge, I suppose.

I believe I have this type of self-knowledge because I’ve done quite a bit of programming and something of a bit of proof-writing, and while there are many things which I’ve been rubbish at, I’ve generally been quite good at thorough and complete case coverage. I’ve known others to be puzzled at unforeseen and unexpected turns of events, but this is not a problem I recall experiencing; if I have, I’ve since corrected, perhaps overcorrected, for it.

But even having claimed a weakness and a strength, I don’t feel that they particular describe me; broadly, they are qualities I exhibit often, and perhaps are thoroughly important in creating me, but one cannot grasp the true form of me from them. Perhaps thinking about, and discussing, one’s own weaknesses and strengths is difficult because it requires a concept of one’s self which one can accept as oneself, but can be brought to mind in its entirely. That is, it is not sufficient even to know everything about oneself, or even to be able to expect how one might respond to any circumstances: while such a model would certainly be a type of complete self-knowledge, it is not a useful self-concept because it is too complex for us to reason with, so we must make simplifying assumptions to consider our own qualities.

Simplifying our self-concept, however, is difficult because we exhibit actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: as actors, we tend to more often attribute our own actions to situational causes than to intrinsic factors. As such, we do not often identify ourselves with generalizations; however, identifying our own weaknesses and strengths requires generalization, because particularly specific situational aspects of our behavior are too situational and specific to provide meaningful information about ourselves on the whole except in aggregate—and aggregation would require us to simplify and discard situational justification, which we are unwilling to do.

I, at least, have been unwilling to make generalizations about myself: I am not two qualities, but actually a complex system of interactions which may or may not even be deterministic; I haven’t been sure of how I ought to put down a few broad strokes without missing everything which is myself. Simple is beautiful, perhaps, but the devil is in the details, and beauty doesn’t offer quite as many Faustian bargains.²