This essay was written by Justin F. White, a BYU Humanities Center faculty fellow.
In “A Theory of Jerks,” Eric Schwitzgebel describes the jerk as someone who “culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers” (5).[1] Schwitzgebel makes the further claim that “the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant” about his jerkitude.[2] I could be telling on myself here, but this fits with my experience that it’s relatively easy to pick out the jerks around me (or to point out instances of jerk behavior) even as it can be really hard to tell if I am (or, more accurately, the extent to which I am) a jerk.
There are lots of reasons why it might be hard to tell if we are jerks. Simine Vazire uses the term “blind spots of self-perception” to describe instances in which others know things about the individual that the individual does not (2010, 282). Some evidence suggests that these blind spots are more common when it comes to traits seen as desirable or undesirable.[3] It’s not just that it can be hard to tell whether we are jerks. It’s worse. There’s reason to be unsure of our ability to tell not only whether we are impatient, rude, or arrogant, but also whether we are intelligent, kind, or personable. Just as some people struggle to see or to take seriously potential shortcomings or vices, others can be almost virtuosic in their ability to see their flaws yet struggle to see their good qualities and virtues.
The difficulty of self-knowledge has a long history. It’s implicit in the Delphic injunction to “know thyself” and explicit in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality: “We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: ‘each is furthest from himself,’—with respect to ourselves we are not ‘knowers’” (1998, 1).[4] Various psychological approaches are similarly pessimistic, from Freud’s work on the unconscious to more recent work by Timothy Wilson, John Bargh, and others.[5] Seeing self-ignorance as pervasive and intractable, Quassim Cassam writes, “We need to be realistic, and that means acknowledging the full extent to which human beings can be, and frequently are, as opaque to themselves as they are to each other” (2014, 209).
There are various reasons why it can be hard to be a “knower” with respect to ourselves. One is likely familiar: we care about how we appear in ways that can make it hard to see ourselves clearly and can lead us to self-enhance.[6] We might, for instance, readily accept flimsily grounded claims that confirm our self-conceptions or make us look good, yet dismiss out-of-hand suggestions that contradict our self-conceptions or cast us in an unfavorable light. When we think (on some level) that some desire, belief, or characteristic is bad, it can take more evidence to convince us we have it.[7] Other times, we might reframe our behavior to make it appear less vicious. We are more likely to say, “I just tell it like it is” or “I’m a straight shooter” than “I’m a jerk.”[8]
We could multiply examples and go deeper in parsing the differences between naïve self-ignorance, semi-motivated self-deception, affected ignorance, denial, and the like. But what I’m interested in is slightly different. I’d like to look at a perhaps less familiar reason why it can be hard to know what we are like.
A key theme in the phenomenological tradition is that our everyday experience is largely characterized by pre-reflective, engaged absorption in the world.[9] As we go about our lives—typing emails, driving cars, chopping onions, responding in ordinary conversation—we typically skillfully respond to situations without much deliberate or explicit thought. One consequence of this is that there can be largely unmotivated gaps between how I see myself and how I see and engage with the world and with others.
In the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the relationship between our primary experience of the world and our awareness of the characteristics and roles that shape that experience:
I am for myself neither “jealous,” nor “curious,” nor “hunchbacked,” nor “a civil servant.” We are often amazed that the disabled person or the person suffering from a disease can bear the situation. But in their own eyes they are not disabled or dying. Until the moment he slips into a coma, the dying person is inhabited by a consciousness; he is everything that he sees. [Our particular characteristics] are the price we pay, without even thinking about it, for being in the world. (2012, 458-459)
Our physical attributes, characteristics, skills, and how we are embedded in the world shape our experiences in ways of which we are often unaware. We may not consciously think of ourselves as being so tall or able to run so fast, for example, but these affect how we perceive the world and our possibilities, as well as how we engage with them. Similarly, our (often tacit) beliefs, desires, and values shape how the world appears to us in our daily lives. We uniquely experience these because they are the “lenses” through which we view the world. Yet despite (or maybe because of) that proximity, it can be hard to see them clearly. This is one reason why self-ignorance can survive even sincere introspection.
For a concrete example of what this might look like, take David Foster Wallace’s description of Roger Federer in “Federer Both Flesh and Not”:
Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won’t experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you. (2013, 20-21)
On some level, peak Roger Federer surely knows he is an exceptionally talented tennis player. When playing tennis, however, his primary experience is of the solicitations of the situation, not of himself as possessing the characteristics and skills that allow him to play as he does. To generalize the point: our original engagement with the world—our perception of things, events, and other people—is shaped by our characteristics, skills, roles, and identities. But just as Federer’s experience while playing tennis is not of himself having extraordinary speed, reflexes, and skill, neither will we initially experience ourselves as kind or as jerks, as humble or as self-important. Instead, we experience the equivalent of a large and slow-moving ball and, when the stars align, the exhilaration of playing high level tennis. The jerk, as Schwitzgebel describes him, sees stupid people populating his life, annoying obstacles to his goals. The kind person, conversely, sees people around him who could use help or an encouraging word. But again, the kind person or the jerk need not see themselves as a kind person or as a jerk for their worlds to appear in those ways.
When one’s behavior differs in undesirable ways from one’s self-conception, it is tempting to see it as self-deception. We might think that behavior shows where one stands more clearly than one’s self-conception, perhaps partly due to the ways that self-conceptions can be distorted and subject to motivated cognition. After all, self-conceptions can all too easily be put in the service of our tendency to avoid responsibility. We might agree with Bradley Pearson, the narrator of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, who writes, “I am aware that people often have completely distorted general ideas of what they are like. Men truly manifest themselves in the long pattern of their acts, and not in any nutshell of self-theory” (Murdoch 1973, 11–12). If we want to know what someone is like, then, we should not look at how they think about themselves, but at how they consistently act. We want an account of agency (and of the human self more generally) that is sensitive to our tendencies to self-ignorance, but that does not lose sight of our capacity for self-directed action.
A prominent vein in philosophy and the humanities more broadly has suggested that we think of the self in terms of narrative. From Oliver Sacks to Jerome Bruner to what Kieran Setiya describes as “a murderers’ row of philosophical big hitters” (Setiya 96)— including Alastair MacIntyre, Daniel Dennett, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur—it is widely held that narrative is important to our self-understandings and perhaps even an ineliminable part of living well.
The significance of events and actions and the way we understand them often depends on how they fit in the broader context of a life. If I see life as an opportunity for growth and myself as someone for whom setbacks and challenges are opportunities for learning, this will likely affect how I experience and respond to life events—whether it’s my paper being rejected (yet again!) from a desired publication venue, my over- or underbaking a baguette, or my becoming distracted in an important conversation despite promising myself that I would be a better listener this time. I might be inclined to see these more as steps on my journey and less as confirmations of continued, insurmountable inadequacies. We also see the importance of context in the way the same achievement seems different when it comes eventually after years of striving than if it is the expected result of extraordinary and precocious talent. In short, the stories, or narratives, that frame our lives seem to matter a great deal.
As you’d likely expect, not everyone is sold on narrative (or stories) when it comes to the self. Worries vary, and there are too many to adequately address here. But I’ll briefly mention (and still not adequately address!) a couple.
In her straightforwardly-titled “Your Life Is Not a Story: Why Narrative Thinking Holds You Back, ” Karen Simecek (2024) claims that the stories we tell about ourselves are restrictive and that “being wedded to a narrative view of the self” can lead to Sartrean bad faith, which she glosses as “living without being aware of one’s responsibility or in control of one’s own destiny.” Another worry, fitting to our discussion here, is that we can be unreliable narrators, seeing ourselves in self-ignorant or self-deceptive ways. Inaccurate self-conceptions can factor into the tendency to avoid facing hard truths about ourselves and, relatedly, to avoid responsibility for our actions. And we should certainly take that danger seriously!
Okay, so how did we get here and, perhaps more importantly, are we there yet? We started with a question about jerks, specifically, and self-knowledge more generally. For a variety of reasons—some more a matter of naivete, some more vicious—we might not be the best judges of the sorts of people that we are. It’s important, then, that we take others’ perspectives seriously. But given that we have some capacity to direct and re-direct the course of our lives, we also have some say in the sorts of people we become. I’m less interested in our abilities to explain ourselves and our motivations to others, though that surely can factor in. What I want to highlight is our capacity to aspire to be different and to (almost always with the help of others) bring about this change. One reason answering the question of whether I am a jerk is different from answering a question about whether a rock is grey is that, at least sometimes, how I answer the question can be a way to commit to a different way of being. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that in many of our actions, we are “expressing a situation,” seeing and responding to the world as we find it, based partly on our pasts, habits, current goals, and so forth. But he thinks that as humans, we also have the capacity for what he calls “personal acts,” in which we are not merely responding to but can “create a situation” (223). He uses the decision to become a mathematician as an example of a personal act. When we commit to a decision or to some life path, it can reshape how the world appears to us and redirect the course of our lives.
Our capacity to tell stories about ourselves, then, is double-edged. We can tell stories that are overly restrictive or that make it hard to see ourselves clearly, potentially impeding our ability to become the people we want to be. But we also can tell better stories—more flexible stories or aspirational stories, in which we see ourselves not only as who we currently are, but also as the people we want to become, even if we’re not yet there. And so, while we have reason to keep in check the thought that we are the only ones who really know ourselves, so too should we resist turning that role entirely over to others. As it turns out, despite their differences, both these paths very often turn out to be ways of avoiding our responsibility for the selves that we are.
[1] Eric Schwitzgebel. 2019. A Theory of Jerks and other Philosophical Misadventures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[2] Schwitzgebel refers to the jerk as a “he” because “the best stereotypical examples of jerks tend to be male” (2019, 7).
[3] See also Simine Vazire and Erika Carlson (2011). “Others Sometimes Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20(2): 104–108.
[4] Admittedly, not all think that we should take the Delphic advice seriously. Bence Nanay (2017) argues that the advice to “know thyself” is not only silly but actively dangerous. Nanay claims that our efforts to know ourselves will (tend to) lead to self-images that are problematically stable, given the ways in which we almost inevitably change over time. This can lead to a “deep abyss between who we are and who we think we are.” A certain kind of self-knowledge, then, can lead to cognitive dissonance and can ultimately become “an obstacle to acknowledging and making peace with constantly changing values.” As I see it, however, “making peace with constantly changing values” is not only compatible with but might even require a certain kind of self-knowledge. Given the sorts of creatures we are, genuine self-knowledge would involve awareness that we can change and that we could be very different than how we see ourselves.
[5] Wilson’s Nietzschean-titled Strangers to Ourselves (2002) as well as Bargh’s Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do (2017) are good examples. Freud, Wilson, and Bargh are all, in some sense, dual-process theorists, but alternative frameworks also have space for self-ignorance.
[6] In Talking to Ourselves, Doris discusses self-enhancement as part of a broader category of motivated cognition (92–97).
[7] The jerk, as Schwitzgebel understands him, might be in a unique—and uniquely bad—spot when it comes to self-knowledge. If part of what it is to be a jerk is to fail to appreciate the perspectives of others, then the jerk may be especially likely to discount the perspectives of others when they suggest that his behavior is less-than-ideal.
[8] Or as Taylor Swift describes it, “casually cruel in the name of being honest” (“All Too Well”).
[9] See, for example, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927/1962).
References
Bargh, John. Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do. New York: Touchstone, 2017.
Cassam, Quassim. Self-Knowledge for Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Doris, John. Talking to Ourselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. Routledge, 2013.
Murdoch, Iris. The Black Prince. Vintage, 1973.
Nanay, Bence. “‘Know Thyself’ Is Not Just Silly Advice: It’s Actively Dangerous.” Aeon. 16 October 16, 2017. https://aeon.co/ideas/know-thyself-is-not-just-silly-advice-its-actively-dangerous.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1998.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. A Theory of Jerks and other Philosophical Misadventures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Simecek, Karen. “Your Life Is Not a Story: Why Narrative Thinking Holds You Back.” Psyche, 2024.
Vazire, Simine. 2010. “Who Knows What about a Person: The Self–Other Knowledge Asymmetry Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(2): 281–300.
Vazire, Simine and Erika Carlson. 2011. “Others Sometimes Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20(2): 104–108.
Wallace, David Foster. “Federer Both Flesh and Not.” In Both Flesh and Not, 5–33. New York: Back Bay Books, 2013.
Wilson, Timothy. Strangers to Ourselves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
