We have an idea of self-knowledge that is associated with introspection, to self-analysis—it is an individual activity, or even one that is constitutive of the individual. This is a conception inherited from Descartes’ philosophy, according to which we have privileged access to the contents of our mind and, therefore, only we can genuinely know, or legitimately assert, which are our intentions in speaking or acting, or what we feel at a given moment. On the other hand, others only know this about us if we inform them. By the same token, each one of us only knows about others’ intentions, thoughts, sensations and feelings inferentially (I see someone writhing in pain as I writhe in pain when I hurt myself and I infer that she is suffering) or if they inform us (and we believe them). So, we can always have doubts about the contents of other minds, but not about the contents of our own. It was this kind of infallibility that led Descartes to take introspection as the foundation of all knowledge.
Wittgenstein undermined this conception with his famous “private language argument,” according to which we only have access to the contents of our mind because we have a vocabulary to describe them, a vocabulary that is part of a shared language. So, for Wittgenstein, the Cartesian view is untenable: private experiences and private contents of consciousness are inextricable from a shared language (and form of life).
However, the most compelling way of challenging this picture created by Descartes, which is still dominant, can be found, I think, in minority thinking, which supplements self-knowledge with two dimensions often ignored by traditional philosophy: ethics and power. These two dimensions derive from the fact that, according to the minority view, self-knowledge is inseparable from knowledge of others.
In the preface to her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks describes her life and that of other Black women in a small segregated Kentucky town, who cross the railway lines every day, leaving the shacks and abandoned houses of the periphery behind and heading to the centre to work (“as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity” (hooks 1984, ix)). In the centre the streets are paved, there are shops, but they cannot enter, there are restaurants, but they cannot eat there, and they can never look others (white people) in the eye. Such life experience leads her to devise a conception of self-knowledge and knowledge of others revolving around a margin-centre dialectic: “Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and centre. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and centre and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole” (ibid.).
According to this conception, living on the margins provides a singular outlook, and this singularity can be expressed as follows: one who has been discriminated against, to the point that she cannot look others in the eye, becomes a visionary because she knows more about reality (marginalized people know both margin and centre, while people at the centre know only of the centre), because she is aware of the paradox of her marginalization (aware, that is, of the public perception of segregation and privately conscious of the centre’s dependency upon the margin), but above all, because her life depends on this vision. It is no accident that a great deal of what I’m calling minority thinking draws from autobiographical accounts—just as our senses become more alert when we are in danger, so do marginalized people rely on their knowledge of others and themselves for their survival.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf sets the following challenge: “Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!” (Woolf 2015, 61). If that were to happen in 1929, the year in which the book was published, literature would suffer such a blow it would cease to exist, since the number of literary works representing men as mere lovers of women was basically null. And this quip was meant to expose, a contrario, the enormous poverty from which literature had always suffered due to women being represented “almost without exception (…) in their relation to men. (…) And how small a part of a woman's life is that (…)” (Woolf 2015, 60).
However, it is not only literature that suffers from the silencing of women, both as authors and as characters. From this incomplete representation, there follows a necessarily deficient self-knowledge, for, according to Woolf, “there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself” (Woolf 2015, 66). And while women have always benefited from the description of the spot at the back of their heads in the literature produced by men (“Think how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that dark place at the back of the head!” (ibid.)), the same is not true of the latter. However, “[a] true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling” (ibid.).
Moreover, men are in desperate need of these descriptions, since women’s discrimination consists, according to Woolf, of a cognitive distortion that allows them to grossly overestimate their value and capacities. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (Woolf 2015, 26). And such excessive self-confidence, strictly dependent upon the lowering of women[1], is the very foundation on which all civilization rests: “How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?” (Woolf 2015, 27). One of the effects of literature written by women would thus be to correct the pictures women and men have of themselves, distorted in each case by either a lack or an excess of self-worth.
These two authors thus subvert our traditional conception of self-knowledge, i.e., the idea that we know ourselves through introspection, by examining our feelings, thoughts, and actions, as well as the concomitant idea that we are in a privileged position for doing so, for we know what we feel and think better than anyone. On the contrary, bell hooks and Virginia Woolf suggest that self-knowledge necessarily involves other people and that, in very important respects, not only do we have no special authority to speak about ourselves, but we may be the blindest to who we are. The main difference between these two conceptions is that the latter entirely overlooks matters of power and ethics, while, according to the former, these are necessarily central, for, in this view, identity, dignity and, ultimately, survival all depend upon how we are treated by those in power.
With this in mind, we can come back to Descartes and notice the oddness of the idea that I only know the inner life of others inferentially. It is easy to think that we can never really come to know what another person thinks or feels because we can only think our own thoughts and feel our own feelings, not those of someone else—it is easy because this is still the dominant picture today. However, if someone is bleeding and screaming in front of me, it would be extremely odd to say that only inferentially do I know that she is suffering. This would be largely unintelligible as a human reaction (it would be more intelligible as the reaction of a visitor from Mars).
What if this encapsulation in our own mind is not a universal condition, as it claims to be, but a quirk? What if this perspective that replaces empathy with inference is not a sound account of how we understand the world and others, but an ethical handicap of Descartes himself? “[I]f I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, (…) I normally say that I see the men themselves (…). Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which conceal automatons?” (Descartes 1986, 26). When our attitude towards others and their inner life is sceptical, doubting their humanity is a merely logical conclusion: how do I know that they are not automatons? This dehumanizing point of view is the first step towards segregating and eventually subjugating and annihilating someone. I am sure that Descartes did not have any of this in mind—just as the best anarchist is a banker, as Fernando Pessoa wittily suggests, those who have more power are those who least think about it. And so, the counterpart to the visionary conception of self-knowledge put forward by minority thinking would be a conception of power and privilege as ethical and cognitive blindness.
[1] We might as well say, conversely, that men are looking-glasses reflecting the figure of woman at half its natural size.
Bibliography
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (trans. and ed. John Cottingham). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (eds. David Bradshaw and Stuart N. Clarke). Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2015 (1929).
