What Good Is “Self-Knowledge”?

This is me examining myself in an elevator mirror.

HOBOKEN, APRIL 26, 2025.  The column below is based on “What Good Is Self-Knowledge?”, a talk I gave at my school April 17. The talk and column expand on “Is Self-Knowledge Overrated?” My headline wraps “Self-Knowledge” in scare quotes for reasons explained below. – John Horgan

INTRODUCTION

During his heresy trial that old blowhard Socrates said: “Examining myself and others is the greatest good.” Socrates means that thinking hard about life makes you a better person, that is, happier and nicer. I call this claim the Socratic Principle.

All modes of inquiry—the humanities, arts, sciences, journalism, what have you--assume, at least implicitly, that the Socratic Principle is true. I began to doubt the principle while working on Mind-Body Problems, for which I interviewed philosophers, psychologists and other professional examiners.

Several mind-body experts scoffed at the notion that their expertise might help them be better people. Yeah, these heirs of Socrates reject the Socratic Principle. I found that funny, so I started questioning the Socratic Principle, first as a kind of joke, then more seriously.

This happens to me now and then: I come up with an idea that I find funny, like, Science is ending! Or, Ignorance is conserved! The more I toy with the idea, the more compelling it becomes. Below, I examine four modes of examination--philosophy, psychotherapy, meditation and literature—to see how the Socratic Principle holds up.

PHILOSOPHY

Does pondering morality, as Socrates did, make you more moral? That is, nicer? Not according to a 2014 study by philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust.

Schwitzgebel and Rust asked philosophers who study ethics about their personal behavior. Do they talk during colleagues’ lectures? Return library books? Reply to student emails? Stay in touch with their moms? Eat meat? Donate to charities?

Schwitzgebel and Rust conclude: “On average, professional ethicists’ behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of comparison groups of professors in other fields.” This finding has been replicated by studies in China and Germany.

Socrates died for his ethical convictions. But many modern philosophers display what Schwitzgebel calls Schelerian separation, named for the early-20th-century German philosopher Max Scheler.

Scheler was known both for his “inspiring moral and religious reflections,” Schwitzgebel says, and for his “horrible personal behavior, including multiple predatory sexual affairs with students.” When asked about the gap between his teaching and behavior, Scheler replied, "The sign that points to Boston doesn't have to go there.’”

PSYCHOTHERAPY

Critics have bashed psychoanalysis since Freud started pitching it in the late 19th century, but it remains an influential mode of self-examination.

Freud was famously grouchy. Was he ethical? Not according to literary critic Frederick Crews. He argues persuasively that Freud was a coke fiend, fraud, bully and liar, whose famous case studies were largely fictitious.

Maybe Freud was just pointing to Boston. That is, maybe psychoanalysis helps others become happier and nicer, if not Freud himself. Psychotherapy is hard to evaluate. Unlike a Prozac pill, every psychotherapy session is different. And what counts as a good outcome?

In a 1975 study, psychologist Lester Luborsky and two co-authors review studies of various talking cures, including behavioral, interpersonal and psychoanalytic therapies. Luborsky notes that researchers tend to find evidence for the therapy they prefer. Jungians favor Jungian therapy, behaviorists behavioral therapy and so on.

After discounting this “allegiance effect,” Luborsky conclude that all psychotherapies are equally effective, or ineffective. Talking to a therapist doesn’t help all patients, but it helps some, and it’s better than doing nothing.

Luborsky’s finding corroborates the “Dodo hypothesis,” first proposed by Saul Rosenzweig in 1936. The phrase alludes to a scene in Alice in Wonderland in which Alice and other characters race around an island inhabited by a Dodo. When Alice and her pals quit running, the Dodo declares: “Everyone has won, and all must have prizes!”

The Dodo hypothesis has been repeatedly corroborated. It implies that psychotherapy harnesses the placebo effect, the tendency of our belief in a “cure” to become self-fulfilling.

It doesn’t matter whether you see a cognitive-behavioral therapist or past-life-regression healer. If you believe this person will help you, there is a chance she will (and a chance she won’t, wishful thinking, sadly, isn’t a cure-all).

I know smart people who still undergo Freudian psychoanalysis. Why does Freud endure? Because research into mental illness has not produced a paradigm powerful enough to render Freud obsolete once and for all.

That includes psychopharmacology, which “explains” mental illnesses as neurochemical disorders best treated with antidepressants and other medications. If these medications really worked, no one would consult Freudians anymore.

MEDITATION

The failure of psychopharmacology also explains Buddhism’s enduring popularity. People I respect are big believers in meditation. Robert Wright asserts in his bestseller Why Buddhism Is True that “the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow.”

That’s a dramatic way of saying that meditation can make us happier and nicer. But can it? Like psychotherapy, meditation is hard to test, and researchers tend to be meditators, subject to the allegiance effect.

But a 2023 meta-analysis found that meditation yields “small to moderate” relief of psychological distress. Psychotherapy makes some people a little happier, but there is no evidence that meditation works better than psychotherapy or exercise.

Does meditation make you nicer? A 2018 meta-analysis found that meditation “is likely to have a positive, but still relatively limited effect in making individuals feel or act in a substantially more socially connected, or less aggressive and prejudiced way.”

My conclusion: The Dodo hypothesis holds for meditation as well as psychotherapy. And like psychotherapy, meditation harnesses the placebo effect. If you believe meditating will make you happier and nicer, there’s a chance it will.

But meditation doesn’t help everyone. And many prominent meditation gurus, far from being enlightened saints, are narcissistic monsters. They don’t go to Boston.

LITERATURE

I was an English major in college. I read novels like Finnegans Wake (yup, the whole thing) and poems like Songs of Innocence. I teach humanities courses to freshmen now, and I assign short stories by Borges and Jamaica Kincaid.

A 2019 article in the BBC rounds up research on whether fiction can “make us better people.” In one study, subjects read a short story and answered questions about it, then a researcher pretended to drop a bunch of pens. Subjects who “felt the most transported by the story and expressed the most empathy for the characters were more likely to help retrieve the pens.”

I’m guessing that researchers who study reading’s effects are literature lovers, hence subject to the allegiance effect. And literature lovers are probably more empathetic to begin with.

Not all literature lovers are nice. Stalin wrote poetry in his youth and called writers “engineers of the human soul.” Hitler reportedly liked to quote Shakespeare. And needless to say, many great writers are miserable wretches, whose deep investigations into the human condition don’t make them happy and kind.

FINAL THOUGHTS

To sum up: Examining yourself and others doesn’t always yield positive results. That’s not surprising, given what some big-shot examiners have concluded:

Buddha and Socrates say we’re trapped in a cave of ignorance. Nietzsche says God is dead and morality is bunk. Camus says life is absurd. Tolstoy says free will is an illusion. Thomas Kuhn and James McClellan say absolute “truth” is unattainable. Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter say consciousness is an illusion, we’re virtual zombies. Henry James says we can’t ever really know each other or ourselves, so maybe we should wrap “self-knowledge” in scare quotes. Freud says a death instinct lurks deep within us, which is hard to argue with right now.

No wonder so many people cling to religion!

I’m a compulsive examiner of myself and others. That’s why I’ve dabbled in psychedelics and meditation. That’s why I read novels like Ulysses and Infinite Jest (although I read and watch crap too). That’s why I study science with philosophical implications, like neuroscience and quantum mechanics. That’s why I saw a psychoanalyst several times last fall (long story). And that’s why I write. Writing is my main mode, my meta-mode, of examination.

No one pays me to do all this, not anymore, so why bother? I’d like to say I do it for its own sake, not as a means to any end, but that’s not strictly true. I read, write and so on for many reasons. To distract myself from the shitshow, to satisfy my curiosity, to overcome my tendencies toward derealization, solipsism and habituation, to remind myself how weird life is.

A final point. I’ve been afflicted by self-doubt all my life. Examining myself and others has led me to conclude that self-doubt is good, not a bug but a feature. That’s why I try to instill self-doubt in readers, friends, students. Look at our world: Are self-doubters the problem? Doubt can even yield a kind of truth. Knowing you’re in the cave is sort of like escaping it.

Of course, that could be my allegiance effect talking.

Questions?

Postscript: Thanks to Lindsey Swindall, my Stevens colleague, friend and meditation teacher, for letting me give this talk to the Humanities Roundtable, which she oversees.

Response from my friend and Stevens colleague Smaran Dayal: Hey John, In all of these examples, why is the individual, her behaviour, and resultant happiness and/or goodness the focus of your analysis? And who has the definitional power of what counts as happiness and goodness? For the same reason that Freud endures, the intellectual-historical approach to concepts endures: we go to certain writers and thinkers to help us understand the world and our place in it, whatever the empirical accuracy of their thought might be (how we prove such accuracy is also a fraught question: why are we to believe that a quantitative, questionnaire-based study can provide any kind of truth about the world? What allows us to generalize from a limited survey sample size to truth-bearing statements about all of society or humanity?). I've talked to [Michael Steinmann, a professor of philosophy at Stevens] about this at some length, but the social sciences still don't have an answer to the positivism problem that the Frankfurt School outlined. My contention is that examining yourself is particularly helpful in so far as it helps you understand the matrix of social, economic, and political relationships in which we find ourselves. And that can reveal some truth about the world to us. Maggie Nelson talks about this in her philosophical memoir The Argonauts. I taught it in Queer Fiction this semester. She makes an argument in defense of examining yourself and narrating your reality, but the focus for her is to understand what our location and socialization can tell us about the broader world we inhabit. And on some level Henry James (and Freud, incidentally) is right: we can't really know ourselves. I would amend that to say: we can't ever fully know ourselves, but by examining ourselves honestly, we might learn something about our society, our shared history, and the world we inhabit. Best, Smaran