What do we mean by the ‘self’? It is one of those terms that we use in all sorts of ways, and with greater or lesser clarity. Some of the uses are rather harmless, such as ‘self-service’ in a restaurant, ‘self-assessment’ for tax purposes, ‘self-made’ as in ‘self-made billionaire’, and ‘self-centred’ meaning that she only thinks of herself and not of others. But often we use the term without being at all clear what we mean: ‘self-control’, ‘self-realization’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘self-belief’, and, even more murkily, all those terms that seem to point to some deeper, more central you, such as ‘core self’, ‘the real self’, and so on.
It may well be that, in ordinary discourse, these terms are used with considerable looseness, and so philosophers have to do some tightening up for us. Kristján Kristjánsson's approach in this important book is to understand the notion of self in what he takes to be the ‘commonsense view’ as ‘the set of a person's core commitments, traits, aspirations and ideals: the characteristics that are most central to him or her’ (5). As Kristjánsson observes, not all of the uses of ‘self’ of the kind mentioned have this sense, and moreover, of course, it remains to be said just what is meant by terms such as ‘core’ and ‘central’. But it does capture a philosophically interesting notion of the self.
Evidently this notion is quite distinct from the notion of the person in the metaphysical discussion of numerical identity over time: I am the very same person that I was when I was twenty, but I dare say (without giving away any secrets) my set of core commitments, traits and so on has changed since then. Indeed, Kristjánsson rightly takes it that the notion of the self with which he is working presupposes ‘the backdrop of the basic stability of our metaphysical self’ (218–19). The self, Kristjánsson argues in Chapter 4, is emotion-based. This involves most particularly the self-conscious emotions, which ‘are evoked when persons believe or judge themselves to have lived up to some ideal self-goal’ (78); here, then, we are concerned especially with emotions such as pride and shame, and those who have read his earlier work (particularly Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy, Routledge, 2002) will be reminded of the philosophical importance that Kristjánsson attaches to these emotions.
Apart from focusing on a philosophically interesting notion of the self, a second helpful thing that Kristjánsson does is to distinguish between the self and what he calls the ‘self-concept’ which is ‘the set of a person's self-conceptions or beliefs about his or her self’ (5). It is clear that one's self and one's self-concept can come apart, and Kristjánsson takes his realism about the self, allowing for the possibility of objectivity and truth, combined with his central role for emotion in constituting the self, to be against the ‘dominant self-paradigm’, which he takes to be ‘cognitivist’ and ‘constructivist’.
It is, I think, in his discussions of the self-concept that Kristjánsson's work is most effective. As a philosopher of education he is well-placed to reveal a whole range of self-conceptions that educationalists and psychologists have urged on us over the years, many of which are more or less malign. He singles out for particularly well-aimed attack the idea of global self-esteem, as promulgated by what he calls ‘the self-esteem industry’, with its ghastly idea that if you only have enough self-belief, then you are capable of achieving anything; amongst ‘progressive educators’ in the 1980s and 1990s, lack of global self-esteem ‘became an all-purpose explanation for educational underachievement and disengagement from schoolwork’ (100). In fact, as Kristjánsson shows us, there are only weak correlations between educational underachievement and low global self-esteem, and between high global self-esteem and success. As a corrective to the ‘self-esteem fallacy’, Kristjánsson recommends justified, domain-specific self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect, where there are much stronger empirical correlations; the connections to pride and shame will be self-evident here. Kristjánsson argues for an Aristotelian notion of self-respect (rather than a Kantian one), which he gleans from Aristotle's notion of megalapsychia or ‘great-mindedness’, which consists of having a proper view of one's own moral worth, and which has four components: command of all the virtues; pridefulness; strength of character; and stability of character. So far as concerns stability of character, of course we do not want to be constantly vacillating in our character, but we should nevertheless see ourselves as being open to the possibility of radical change in our character, as Kristjánsson goes on to discuss in Chapter 10. Sometimes it is only through radical change that progress can be made; Nietzsche's remarks are very apposite here: ‘A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!’
Kristjánsson addresses what he takes to be a threat to his moral objectivism about the self, which arises from a significant body of empirical work purporting to show that there are two distinct kinds of self-conception which are found in different cultures and which cannot be ‘harmonised’ (167): the modern, liberal, Western conception of oneself as independent; and the more traditional, collectivist, Eastern conception of oneself as interdependent. He appeals in particular to the seminal work of Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (‘Culture and self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation’, Psychological Review 98, 1991, 224–253) which he claims, with perhaps a little exaggeration, is ‘undoubtedly one of the most influential works in late twentieth century social psychology’ (168). In any event, there is no doubt that their research, and much that has followed on later, shows that what we might think of the Kantian notion of the autonomous self does not capture something that is universal in humanity, but rather something that is peculiarly modern and Western.
Kristjánsson considers four possible responses to this research, each of which he finds to be inadequate. They are, briefly: reject objectivity in favour of cultural relativism; reject one self-concept in favour of the other; reject the distinction as being a gross exaggeration, which ignores significant differences within cultures (specifically the USA and Japan); and adopt what Kristjánsson calls the ‘two-baskets theory of the self’, according to which one's personal identity and one's social identity are at two distinct, non-competing, psychological levels of organisation. Having rejected these possible responses, Kristjánsson turns to ‘biculturalism’, where two cultural paradigms are integrated in the one individual. This on its own is not enough for Kristjánsson's form of objectivity, however, and he endorses the mouthful of ‘synergic bicultural integration’, in which the person sees his ‘double background not as a mixed blessing but rather as a unique source of interpretative tools for grasping experience’ (186). Touchingly, Kristjánsson mentions his own son, who can see things through both Chinese and Icelandic eyes. As Kristjánsson does rightly emphasise, bilingualism will be important here; I liked his telling us of ‘an old Slovak proverb which says that with each newly learned language on acquires a new soul’ (187).The idea of biculturalism is clearly important, both in its own right and as a response to an unwarranted relativism, although Kristjánsson could do more to show how this ideal – for this is clearly what it is in Kristjánsson's unashamedly Aristotelian model – is meant to work amongst, for example, the Bangladeshi community in East London, or what the implications are for, say, the legitimacy of outlawing the niqab or burka in France.
Another target of Kristjánsson's attack is ‘Hiltonism’ and ‘Hiltonistic post-feminism’. At their door are laid the charge of hedonism, understood as ‘egoistically driven satisfaction of felt sensual desires’ (215). No doubt all this hedonism is a Bad Thing, and much to be disapproved of, but two points are worth making here. First, Paris Hilton, who at one point is compared unfavourably with Socrates by Kristjánsson, might simply be very good at marketing herself in a way that exploits a certain appetite, just as the manufacturers of deep fried butter exploit a certain appetite. Secondly, and more seriously, Kristjánsson might take more account of how these superficial hedonistic attitudes, where what one really really wants is to be a ‘celebrity’, with everything that celebrity status brings with it, are simply a by-product of the mundane lives which so many people are obliged to live (in the East as well as in the West, in Africa, and in South America), where what people really need is to escape from their lives, whether through hedonistic celebrity fantasies, or whether through the fantasies of gaining untold wealth through winning the lottery – or whether through the comforts of eating deep fried butter. Hiltonism might be a symptom of a disease rather than the disease itself.
The last chapter is concerned with radical self-change: change not only in how one conceives of oneself; but also change in the self that is conceived of. The achievement of self-understanding is not simply a matter of making a choice of what to think of oneself, but rather of coming to understand the kind of person one in fact is – a process that can, of course, involve considerable suffering. As Kristjánsson puts it, in a way which sums up his overall thesis in this book, ‘the ultimate goal of self-understanding is the appreciation of truths about the self, and the emotional maturity of a self that has learnt to respect itself as the possessor of such truths’ (239).
This is not the place to argue for it, but I am not convinced that talk of the self in the sense that Kristjánsson is focusing on is not in the end deeply misleading. Hypostasising a set of ‘central’ or ‘core’ commitments, traits, and so on is just what leads to the horrors of global self-believe and global self-esteem which Kristjánsson himself so effectively criticises. I believe we would do better to drop all talk of the self as a set or collection of core traits, to replaced with talk on individual traits, each of which can be more or less central or core, each of which can be the proper object of pride or shame, and each of which can be subject to radical change.
Kristjánsson does not set out in this book to unearth deep truths about the metaphysics of the self or about the epistemology of self-understanding. Rather, he sets out to delineate a whole range of highly practical issues concerning how we think of ourselves and our core traits, in such activities as self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. In this he draws on his extensive knowledge of the empirical literature, particularly the literature on moral education, and in this respect the book is much to be recommended as a complement to some of the more austere, less practical, philosophical treatises on the self.
