In grad school, I did a lot of reading about how we know what we know. I gained a great deal of wisdom from that literature—nearly all negative. If I were to begin a line of question with “How can I know for sure that…?” the answer I got would nearly always be, “You can’t.” But along with all the cautionary tales, I remember a particularly vivid metaphor. Many scientific projects, this author said, are like building a building in a swamp. The first thing you do is to sink supporting structures into the murk to support the building you will be building.

So far so good.

But then some practical person—I was the person in this case—will ask, “How deep do you need to sink them?” The answer was, “It depends on how big the building is.” Of course it does. I went two directions from that encounter, one of which will be relevant to today’s reflection. [1] It involves what Chris Wells and Lewis Friedland call, in a recent issue of the journal, Political Communication, “misrecognition.”

They cite Charles Taylor in that regard:

“First, Taylor sees emerging, with the development of modern individual identity, a myth of the “true inner self,” the notion that each of us has an authentic identity, and that an important project of the modern individual is to discover and fulfill that immanent self.”

This demand to be truly recognized runs headlong into the dogma that each of is, or has, a “true inner self.” It is easy to be skeptical about a dogma like that. How would I know what my “true inner self” was like? How would I know whether you were correctly recognizing it and honoring it appropriately? To that, I respond with the answer I got to the question of knowing for sure that I have provided enough support in the swamp: “You can’t.”

But remember that the swamp example countered with another question, which was “How big is the building?” And if we are considering the “one true self,” we might ask, “What do you want it for?”

And finally, we come to what I think is the right question. I have no trouble believing that I “have” a self. Some say “am a self.” This self has intentions that I experience as “my intentions.” When they are frustrated or when they fail, I experience that failure as “my failure.”

But those are very crude measures and they are all action-oriented measures. The notion that Charles Taylor is referring to in the quote is a “true inner self.” If I had one of those, how would I know what it was. If it has qualities, are those qualities shared with all others? With some others? Are they unique?

Are the things I call my “self” traits, so that they are predictable from one time to another, as when people say, “I am uncomfortable among strangers.”? Are they episodic reactions I make from one time to another with nothing connecting them except the rationalizations I produce? I don’t know.

But that does bring me to the question—the building in the swamp question—which is, “What do you want it for?” In this way, I skip over what this self IS and move on to the question of whether this notion of the self will do for me what I want/need to have done. If it will, then I may know about it all I need to know.

Like everyone else, I want to accomplish things of interest to me, to have a circle of friends I can count on, and to be at ease with the sense of who I am that I have crafted over all these years. I need enough of a self to do those things. That’s not really very much of a self, but I think it will do everything I need for it to do. I call it “good enough.”

[1] The other one became a very practical device for formulating limitations and which became the core of my dissertation. It involved keeping some notes on things you were trying to do (or thought you were) and failing to accomplish (by some measures).