UNDERSTANDING OTHERS AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

As we mature and we experience people of very different backgrounds and cultures, we may say that we 'know' more about other people. There will be some grounds for feeling this because we are in a position generally to anticipate fairly well many of their reactions to us, how they may think about this or that and so forth. Those who have partaken in important or formative experiences together have a better basis for knowledge of each other than those who have simply broken bread together. Yet even half a lifetime of shared experiences with another person need not at all be sufficient for knowledge of each other, as broken friendships and marriages demonstrate on a huge scale. It seems that those whose friendship survives a number of major testing experiences are those who can best lay some claim to knowledge of each other. Though there are instances enough that even such bonds can be broken by some unexpected differences.

Life is so multifarous that we cannot reliably hope fully to analyse and classify the various elements that go to make for a deep and reliable understanding of other people. It is not even possible to do this for oneself. The best we can hope for is probably a teaching that takes account of the broadest possible range of human social experience and inter-personal understanding. Any such doctrine must surely lay much emphasis on the question of the subjectivity of understanding. For it is our own perceptions and interpretations that are the primary source of error in judging the meaning of others' behaviour and misunderstanding of their nature, character and personality.

The very great diversity of human beings throughout the world and history, and the extraordinary range of phases of the ego and selfhood we can encounter, cannot be fully known or set down as systematic knowledge once and for all. Those who have wide and intensive experience of the world will agree that there is an almost unlimited diversity of kinds of persons and it is seldom given us to penetrate the deepest reality of most of them. Yet self-knowledge is distinct from this in having the unitary aim of reaching the truest essence of selfhood, that which contains the solution to the questions of human identity and destiny which apply to all us differing individuals. So self-knowledge has both diversely particular and general unitary aspects.

'WHO AM I AND WHY?'

The purpose of self-investigation is to know one's real or ultimate identity... to answer the questions 'Who am I?' in terms of both individual and collective knowledge. It is often considered to be connected to questions lie 'Why was I born' and 'What is the meaning or purpose of life?' These questions are not answerable purely or even primarily in subjective experiences, being the subject of the collective efforts of the man y sciences and related disciplines. Subsequently, as conceptions develop through knowledge and experiential understanding, the personal realisation of this individual identity within the whole of existence becomes much more embracing than at the outset.

In practice, self-investigation as a personal project proceeds by trial and error along various avenues of action and possible fulfillment. This inevitably leads one to learn what is not essential to living the good life, what only has temporary as compared to lasting relevance and thus what is insecure as a basis for one's self-developmental identity. To learn what is best, however, is not necessarily to be able to practice it. This usually comes through a very long search for personal fulfilment of many kinds, including trial and error leading - if successful - to the satisfaction of practical needs and desires and not least the attainment of inner security and peace of mind.

The be-all-and-end-all of psychology is not only the relief of mental-emotional suffering or the adjustment to life and its adversities we call happiness, therefore, but the self-knowledge that helps secure it. Without this vital principle, psychology easily degenerates into what is little more than a ritual of organising factual information, or by partial and incomplete theory backed up by largely trial-and-error therapeutic techniques. Without the purpose of self-understanding within the greater whole enviroment it is unlikely that lasting psychic benefits can be obtained.

THE EGO AND THE PERSONALITY OR 'SELF'

The ego is often interpreted as the sum of one's subjective ways of identifying oneself in distinction to the environment. In psychology, the ego is usually a a conception about traits of thought, emotion and behaviour which serve to protect, develop and grow the personality. The Freudian distinctions between ego, id and superego were a seminal advance in helping distinguish the effects of certain human actions and reactions. The term 'ego' is defined in numerous ways, more or less exactly, according to the purposes of using the term. Originally, 'ego' simply meant 'I' (in Latin). It came to be used to refers to those desires of a possessive or 'selfish' origin, as most easily seen in attitudes, behaviour and reactions which aim to defend and strengthen oneself in relation to any perceived threats. The ego - or structure of functioning personality living in the world - is an unavoidable part the human make-up. It is not a static entity, but develops and changes in various ways through life.

The development of ego occurs firstly at a bodily and sensory level, gradually expanding into the inter-personal sphere. The ego can be said to comprise those emotional and mental attitudes which involve drawing boundaries between the person and the environment and thus underlies any defensive or aggressive kinds of expression. In some cultures, the ego can be most simply characterised by the words 'me' and 'mine' and is often considered as the cause of human misery and suffering, distinguished from the 'Self', which is a supposed higher expression of the human psyche, which (paradoxically) is supposed to be the essence of 'selflessness' and universality. For example, the word 'self' is often used in religious and spiritual literature and in some psychology (eg. Jung) to represent the intelligent 'whole' of the human being, which is realised only as more far-reaching personality development than ego-growth takes place. This self is regarded by some as being inherent to us - rooted in our impersonal collective human identity - somewhat as the unchanging cinema as the screen underlies the images that play across it. The manifestations of the self in our lives are not easily distinguished because they are largely covered over by those of the ego. In this sense, the self is thought not to be a material phenomenon, but an ideal entity, a product of consciousness and an ideal towards which we strive.In these doctrines, the ego's drives are suited to to survival and growth in the physical and social world but they are consequently mostly restless, self-seeking and outgoing. The ego is not seen by such moralising doctrines as a vehicle for gaining recognition of one's higher good in the shape of true vision or secure peace of mind. For this, a preliminary is recognition of the ego's limitations and what is not in accordance with one's true self. The ego's drives and most of what has followed from them obscure the proper 'I', and these must be controlled and directed into useful channels in the interests of thw whole self. As soon as the ego is defined, however, in wider terms and studied systematically from various angles and within various contexts and cultures, it becomes evident that the dualism 'ego vs. self' is a non-empirical construct and hence is invalid as a tool for understanding the psyche.

Though the idea of selfhood differs from person to person, there is a common experience in that none of us can really regard ourselves as other than whole 'identies' or integral persons, however incomplete or unfulfilled we may know or think ourselves yet to be. Each our 'inner model' of the self gets straightened out, develops and is refined as we make progress towards greater self-understanding.

The most common view in Western scientific psychology denies the existence of any self independent of the ego. If one hypothetically considers the situation of a human being born without senses at all and asks whether such a being could develop any sense of self-awareness (which is a necessary function of the mature ego or self) one realizes that it is highly unlikely. The brain would not have any external impressions and would therefore not be able to distinguish between what is 'self' and what is 'not self'. The brain's neuron activity would slow down in the absense of signals and without stimulus could never reach the level of activity necessary for self-recognition. This opinion is concurrent with the view that our brains receive both external and internal impressions (in a time sequence) and are constantly comparing present and past impressions - both in the short term memory and later also long term. The brains builds up an awareness of time. of otherness and consequently also selfhood (this being learned by children in their first two years or so). Without such a process, it is hypothesised, there would be no possibility of self-awareness in any meaningful sense.

UNDERSTANDING THE SELF AS A WHOLE

Underlying the idea of 'personal integrity' is a human urge to organise one's experience and relate it emotionally and mentally to an idea of oneself. The word 'oneself' happens to express the intuition of one self, a unitary and thus consistent whole. People identify themselves - or their selves - with the word 'I', which normally persists as the same single self through time and through changing life circumstances. Where this is not so, we may assume that harmonious development has been disturbed or arrested, such as in mental derangements as in amnesia or 'multiple personality' disturbances in so-called schizophrenia.

Our most basic identity is not dependent on the body, which alters greatly from childhood to old age. It may not even depend much on others or the social roles and qualities with which our social identity is tied up. But our basic inner 'I' identity is not itself observable to others. Therefore people are identified by externals like bodily features, social characteristics and outward personality. This is not how a person experiences selfhood, of course.

Because only such outward identifiers as bodily or social behaviour can be observed, the social sciences have long ruled out the inner 'I' from all their considerations The unitary nature of each human being's self-experience has thus been lost to many psychological theories which have concentrated on our various external aspects. Scientific ideas about human beings have fragmented and 'compartmentalised' us. Much science-based psychology and psychiatry rely on analyses of people which do not start out from any understanding of the person as a whole - or neglect it altogether - and so also end without any synthesis of what is human understanding. This fact is reflected in the present-day lack of any unifying theory or 'paradigm' in empirical or analytical psychologies, where the multiplication of incompatible schools and sub-disciplines rules the day and irrelevant natural scientific and quantitative statistical research methods are widespread. The so-called layman's understanding of others is therefore frequently more human and common sensical than that of psychological science, which is often abstract and alienated from life as it is lived. Specialists in psychology and psychiatry deal mostly with special cases and analyse unusual mental or emotional problems in detail, which can be good and useful. It is when the specialist outlook begins to dominate the whole outlook on human kind that the problems increse and become overwhelming, as in the case of mental illnesses and social disruptions worldwide today.

In all forms of investigation, not least in self-investigation, which matters one chooses to examine and test among all the many alternatives is crucial for how one's insight develops or fails to develop. There are many blind alleys and short-sighted approaches which raise neither oneself nor society. The scientific method which relies on (past) experience often looks only backward, not futureward. Again, a far-reaching psychology is required to provide a clear map of the terrain, depicting both the structure of the human psyche in its various parts and levels so as to be able to choose a clear course away from the dead-ends and byways and forward on to the main highway of self-realisation. The subject is the human whole, both as the actual fact of being one complete individual and also the potential of understanding and becoming a fulfilled and fully-integrated with the whole self.

Again, the attempt to reach an understanding of the human condition strictly by scientific observation and analysis from a neutral 'value-free' position has not been completed by far. It may even be self-defeating in that - in its own methodology from the start - it virtually eliminates the systematic investigation of self-understanding as a natural human propensity and merely 'assumes' this self-understanding in practise. An attempt to build up a purely objective, scientific theory of the whole self-understanding human psyche would also probably be a practical impossibility due to the utterly vast variety of individual variables and special factors that would be involved in any given society and culture, besides which such variables are also always changing at varying rates. In addition comes the most completely unpredictable 'factor', that degree of human freedom by virtue of which persons can reject or transcend their previous standpoints or even entire world-views. Hence the confusion spread in most 'serious' psychological literature today, because of the methods not taking into account all the underlying values and assumptions either of the scientist or his 'subjects'. The great synthesis of many parts that makes each human person who he is are only connected and drawn together in the living human person.

If one investigates and understands people without taking account of the wider, suprapersonal aims that give intelligible purpose to the work in making it useful to individual seekers and practically applicable to the cultural or social environments involved, the attempt lacks value. Human studies must not ignore the perspective of our highest aspirations and deepest motivations, including our visions of the purpose of our lives in relation to the Cosmos and the deepest possible enigmas of our existence.

Our knowledge of ourselves as human subjects arises in self-awareness, which can only properly be developed and known by the direct method, self-inquiry. This is so because of the impenetrability of consciousness itself to the neutral, external observer. This idea that the intelligent subject is the actual starting point of all knowing, so acceptable to common sense, has also been recognised through the ages by those who investigated the inner reality through putting spiritual theory into practice. The universe is not just something independent of the human spirit, an objective quantity in itself, but it is inevitably the cosmos-as-experienced-by-myself. Without self-observation, then, insight into human nature can obviously hardly arise. So this fact must again provide direction and meaning to a psychology into which empirical studies can be integrated as important, yet secondary, information. Otherwise psychology becomes a collection of unrelatable hypotheses, a theoretical beast without definite direction that is seriously lacking much in both head and heart and even one which becomes subject to blind rampages.

SELFHOOD AND THE BODY-SOUL DILEMMA

Through ages of human existence and dozens of major civilisations, the belief in the human soul or spirit has persisted. One crucial problem for scientific psychology (i.e. having assumed the thesis of universal physicalism) is, in a nutshell, that it denies in advance that the 'psyche' or 'soul' has existence as an entity. Often, such psychology then struggles to explain or suppress and the ever-present reality of the inner life and its vital importance. Rejecting any entity it tries to construct - by abstract conceptualisation - all its explanations so as to avoid any association either with our immediate inner experiences. This applies particularly to anything smacking of the supra-physical, transcendental or para-psychological, the empirical basis for which is admittedly very shaky in scientific terms not least because such experiences still largely seem to transcend empirical measurements of any kind. Though this theoretical problem has not been satisfactorily solved in scientific psychology, when pressed by critics, it almost always returns to behaviourism. This means some form of physical reductionism, which assumes that each human action and purpose is the result of some (invariably unidentified) physical cause, as physical responses to physical 'stimuli'. By claiming that very complex neurological processes are at work, such physicalistically-based psychology simply falls back on its own assumption, the one that is causing so much contradiction and distortion, the elimination of the subjective reality of the human subject in the interests of its own supposed scientific 'objectivity'.

Though human beings are objects in that we have bodies, our 'being' is itself not the body. Recognition of the special nature of mind (as distinct from the physical brain) or more exactly, of consciousness, requires a different kind of understanding to that which dominates in science.

What in the 20'th century is regarded as scientific psychology assumes that physical existence alone is what is real. It sees, for example, the mind as a mechanism of the brain. Yet it cannot use empirical research methods to investigate, say, the imaginary, abstract ideas, a future plan, a symbolic interpretation or a sublime conscience. What is 'in' our minds is evidently inseparable from our personalities, yet this meaning-filled world of the soul with its inspiring spirit simply doesn't exist for modern science at large even today, despite a few oft-quoted personal spiritual beliefs of some great individual scientists.

A key assumption of any systematic understanding of the psych (i.e. psychology) must therefore be that it is not our bodies or brains, but our minds that make us what we truly are! Whether one can reasonably postulate a soul or spirit of the kind religious beliefs make obligatory - an eternal essence or body-independent 'soul' is a question mainly of belief.

An established type of research in the social sciences still hopes to understand human behaviour by inference from the study of monkeys and rats. It has scant success, referring at best only to evolution's lower, most animal-like aspects of human behaviour. The danger is to make too far-reaching inferences from such studies. The is less problem of this perhaps at the physiological level, but to regard people only as organisms or living mammals would be very misleading. Consider also that the story of the mainstream of humanity's evolutionary goal unfolded itself fully yet. When the psychologist ignores and denies human motives and purposes as the true 'cause' of our actions and will allow only natural-physical causes like drives, instincts, reactions and environmental adjustments instead, the resultant view of mankind must surely be incomplete and distorted.

Such realities as care, altruism, love, charity, compassion, hope, purity... in short, all of the qualities that make up the humanaspects of human beings, are intrinsically inaccessible to physical measurement or empirical research methods. They are all too seldom made the direct subject of studies in 'official' social and psychological science, as the study of all the most used textbooks and accepted research literature at most universities will show! Methods of statistical measurements are constructed which cannot grasp the qualitative nature of values or their meaning and purpose and thus tend largely to create fictions and fallacies about the human activity involved. It is comparable to people interpreting a non-subtitled film from a very foreign country without understanding the language... all one sees is all the scenes, the outward 'action', missing the chief meaning, the motives, values and incalculable other inner considerations in full human interaction.

The idea that body and mind interact is unavoidable in our self-understanding, and this implies a degree of separation (though not necessarily outright dualism). On the other hand, certainly much of what we call the mind is doubtless based on operations within the brain, all of which is quite possibly distinct from those intimations we call 'spiritual' in nature or origin. A degree of dualism is always necessary for analytic understanding and at any rate it is unavoidably used, it being impossible to speak sensibly and coherently about the fuller human reality without assuming such differences, but the goal of this will always be a higher synthesis (or whole) in the understanding reached. In short, they are logically unavoidable conceptual tools. This does not, however, imply that there is any real or ultimate separation between any of these, for not only do they all interact, but they form a unity together.

OBJECTIFICATION OF THE HUMAN SUBJECT

Rather amazingly, one consequence of trying to deny the mind-body duality has been the rejection by much 20th century science of the existence per se of any subjective 'internal motor' of the mind in the form of as 'consciousness! The extreme of this attitude is therefore to consider all (human) subjects as (physical) objects. Known as 'objectivism', this is pure self-contradiction. All that is not physically-measurable was 'explained away' as 'epi-phenomena', 'secondary effects', 'apparent existents' and so on... that is, in terms that nobody can properly explain. Studying people scientifically and interpreting according to objectivising theories can lead towards self-alienation and depersonalisation which eventually affects society in unfortunate ways, but the same can be asserted of religious and spiritual beliefs about incorporeal entities like the 'soul'. To regard anyone primarily as a 'stimulus-response system', however complex, (though at last there are fewer who really do this!) or as a passive 'object' of research is to deny that an essentially human trait is the power awarely and actively to transcend or alter the given conditions of life. This view of the human being, negates the person, and may well rob people of will power and active spirit.

Believers in the supremacy of such a hard scientific doctrine no doubt assumed the invalidity of all ideas of soul and abolish the idea of a human spirit as phantasms. It may be that humanity is emerging from religious belief and all forms of 'spiritual superstition' and that the role these currently fulfil may be changed or made superfluous. The fears that religious ideas (soul, spirit etc.) seem to assuage may be met in other ways. Nonetheless, the problem remains: though the many sciences may ultimately prove to explain far more that possible today (such as when instrumentation and computing power develops beyond what we can imagine now), the deeply ingrained human faith in transcendental values can be transcended by forms of self-understanding that make ideas like the 'perennial soul', the 'spirit' or the 'Self' redundant. Thnis need not lead to undue or misplaced 'objectification' of human subjectivity or complex human conceptions like values, ethical dispositions and so forth.

Traditional mechanistic and deterministic assumptions tend to live on, though largely discarded in physics today, but they are becoming less relevant in the life of human beings than in an earlier more 'mechanistic' atmosphere.

(Note: There are numerous ways in which the human being's nature can be distorted through 'objectification'. The prime fact is that no individual's nature is given or fixed in all respects and that we can consequently develop and sometimes even bring about changes in personality or undergo considerable transformations as a result of crucial experiences. The tendency to classify and label is very common and this way of 'objectifying' can have many deleterious effects on a person's life and arrest development. It is very common indeed to characterise people through verbal descriptions, which tend to fixate understanding. Likewise, we often generalise about persons on the basis of known national, social and many other group factors. Such methods, though based on statistics etc., still tend to do injustice or violence to the individual. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are even trained to categorise people according to theories of personality, as will be examined later. In all these attempts at characterising others, we must be very careful not to hypostatise thought, treating the individual as an entity whose nature is somehow given once and for all in 'objective' traits.)

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(The text of 'The Human Whole' revised ed. on this website is copyright of Robert Priddy. 1999)