The Problem With Knowing Yourself Too Well - Montaigne

Art by Yoon Miller.

(no links. she requested only to be cited by name.)

Let’s say a friend of yours, frustrated about the state of their life one day, described themselves to you by saying, “I’m a loser,” or “I’m a failure.”

Rightfully so, I think you’d come to their defense at that moment.

After all, what good does it do you to brand a label into the side of yourself like that, you might ask them.

You might say that no matter how you’ve acted before this it doesn’t help you to see your past as the extent of who you can possibly be.

But there’s a more sophisticated version of this same kind of labeling statement that goes on all the time. And it’s an insidious type of self-labeling because in our current climate when people do it, not only does nobody feel the need to rescue anyone from it, but it often gets a lot of social credit. Practically a round of applause at times.

I’m talking about labels like “I sabotage things because intimacy feels unsafe to me,” or “I shut down because I use an avoidance strategy in the face of conflict.”

Technical language derived from the field of psychology, turned into a descriptive claim about what kind of person I truly am.

Understandably, we give these sorts of labels a lot of respect. Seeking help for your own mental health has been stigmatized since at least the dawn of the field of psychology in the late 1800s. And when you see someone struggling, how miserable of a person would you have to be to not want them to get the help they need?

So, when a friend comes at us with what is clearly therapeutic language about themselves, it often doesn’t feel appropriate to criticize them. It shows your friend has vulnerability, bravery for putting themselves out there, work that they’ve put into introspection.

And it can feel like once they evoke this kind of language, my job is simply to listen. Who am I to comment on their past traumas anyway? This is clearly someone that’s in the process of developing greater levels of self-awareness. Good for them.

But self-awareness can become a kind of modern trap as well. Especially when the people closest to us are less comfortable offering their criticism.

The goal can become to just analyze yourself into the ground every day, become aware of all the ways you behave, link those behaviors to some normative psychological terminology, and then spend the rest of your life merely describing what you are.

A life where you transform yourself into one of the most self-aware people in the history of the world, truly. But are completely trapped in this static description of yourself based on ways you’ve acted in the past.

The philosopher Michel de Montaigne would want to point out that radicalizing self-awareness like this completely ignores an entirely different area of what it is to be a person every day: the fact that you are still something that is always becoming someone new.

Very few writers ever captured this as well as Montaigne did in his work. He was a pioneer of writing centered around self-observation; in fact, he’s widely credited with being the inventor of the modern personal essay.

So, he had zero problems telling people about embarrassing moments, his struggles with vanity, even his declining performance in the bedroom over the years…and he did all of it from a place where he always tried to never let the observation about himself turn into a label of what he is.

He talked about himself like he’s a moving target. He’d describe the way he acted in one situation and contrast it with another. He’d talk about a weak choice he made in a moment and describe it as a mood he happened to be in that day.

In his essay “Of Repentance,” he describes his own writing by saying, “I do not portray being: I portray passing.”

And part of his point is that if we’re always in a state of this “passing” like this, then becoming too focused on self-awareness has another big problem with it besides just being half the story.

He’d say no matter how socially approved the language is, none of these descriptions about ourselves are even close to capturing the full complexity of being a person anyway.

Content warning: the following is one of the most intense, critical passages that he ever wrote in his life. Montaigne gives a scathing critique here of his fellow authors, shooting a volley of missiles at them that forced many of these people into the fetal position. He said:

“Considering the natural instability of our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a little out in so obstinately endeavoring to make of us any constant and solid contexture.”

I’m sorry you had to witness him in a fit of rage there. There are some lines that should just never be crossed in this life.

In his best form of Renaissance politeness, after making sure to remind them all that they’re still the best authors in the world, he calls these people a little “out.”

Which, in this translation just means a little “off.” Meaning a bit sloppy in their understanding of the full complexity of a human being.

See, Montaigne thought that none of us can ever be reduced to a single label. Even people seriously trying to interpret a person get things totally wrong when they need them to fit into a neat description like that. We do this with ourselves all the time.

He says interpreters “choose a general air of a man, and according to that interpret all his actions.”

And isn’t that exactly what we’d never want our friend to do who’s labeling themselves with psychological language that’s supposed to be helping them?

The description of a tendency can be useful: “I shut down when conflict feels unsafe.”

But if that becomes the general air of me, then I risk lumping every future moment into the same one-dimensional story I have about myself.

But we’re more than that as human beings. In truth we’re probably a mix of a thousand different shifting forces. We contradict ourselves from one moment to the next. We often want two things at once. We’re forced to act, not knowing what we want, selecting from a multiple-choice question where every answer is suboptimal.

And while self-awareness is certainly better than being completely lost in your life, if needing total coherence about who you are becomes your main strategy for knowing yourself, you’ll almost always have to achieve that by being in denial of your own inner complexity.

For Montaigne, the danger is becoming so loyal to a story that explains something about you right now that you start betraying the person who could still become otherwise. He might say to never forget that self-knowledge should ultimately help you live life with more freedom. It shouldn’t just make you more obedient to your past.