Subjective and objective self-knowledge

How one can know oneself? I have already touched on this question, saying that one need first to know what the self is. To find the right answer is not easy, because various systems have provided too many of them. Generally, there exist two competing understandings of the self that suggest two kinds or two aspects of the self. The first one is the pure subject that does not have any qualities or content of its own but that is able to reflect any qualities or content. It corresponds, for example, to purusha in the philosophy of sankhya, Cartesian's cogito or the "I" in logical positivism. The second aspect is the self as a subject of psychological life that can be considered objectively in terms of structure and content. Historically, it has been conceptualized in many ways as soul, ego, personality, and so fourth.

Although both kinds of the self are opposed to the world, they are opposed differently. The self in the sense of the pure subject is a passive spectator contemplating the spectacle of nature, including the activity of psyche, and its opposition to the world as object is absolute. The self in the sense of personality, however, is a compound structure whose components are provided by the world itself. Phenomenologically, there is no difference between the elements of the external reality and the elements, or meanings, constituting the self. The difference of the self from the world consists in its selectivity: not all meanings of the world constitute personality, but only some of them. Personalities, therefore, differ from each other by what sets of meanings they identify as their own or project into the world as themselves. As content, personality is a result of selecting from the pool of world meanings, and as function, it is a principle of this selection.

Let us consider now how these two aspects of the self correspond one to another. Their difference is the difference between consciousness and the psyche. Psyche or personality acts a filter that limits consciousness in one or another way. In other words, it acts as an interface between consciousness and the world.

It follows from the stated duality of the self that self-knowledge can be approached in two principally different ways depending on what aspect of the self is being known. However, both ways, if they are realized consistently, inevitably lead to the same paradox: that the result of self-knowledge is the knowledge that there is no object of knowledge.

In the case of "objective awareness" (Duval and Wicklund 1972), that is, knowing of the self as personality, one finds out that the self consist of the same semantic elements as the world and differs from the latter only by its limited nature. In the case of "subjective" self-knowledge, one finds out that the self cannot be known or described because it is not an object separable from the knowing subject. Moreover, in both cases it turns out that the self is not an individual entity because its limits erode in the process of knowing and it tends to coincide with the world in the first case and with consciousness in the second.

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