Michael Cholbi:	Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. It really is an honor to be back here. I've had a number of noteworthy honors in my career, but I can't think of anything greater than having the opportunity to discuss my work with students that I know to be very capable and very curious and very demanding. So I know I have to be on my game with Swarthmore students.
	Now, before we get started, I should just say that the presentation will deviate a little bit from the abstract that was circulated. As I was looking at what I was going to say to you, the ending just seemed really boring and we know the ending is where the exciting stuff is. So I swapped out some of the sentences at the end of the abstract for some really sexy stuff by Harry Frankfurt. So I think that you'll think that that's much more exciting than what was in the abstract.
	So my subject today is self-knowledge and I like to start with this painting in large part because this is how I feel about self-knowledge when I think about this question of what it is to know myself and my own attitudes and beliefs, I feel a little like this poor guy, who's got a duck's head growing out of his head and some bird legs. It actually puts me in a philosophical frame of mind. Like I feel a little bit awkward and unsure as to how to proceed. When I first saw this, I thought for sure this has got to be Dali or some 20th century painter, but in fact it's by an unknown German painter from the 17th century.
	So let me go ahead and start here. There we go. Alright. So as philosophers are [inaudible 00:01:24] to do, the first thing that we need to do is just to define the terms of our investigation and in contemporary philosophy, the notion of self-knowledge is used in a very particular kind of way.
	So when contemporary philosophers talk about self-knowledge, they're not talking about knowledge of just any old fact about yourself. So the fact that I'm wearing a watch isn't self knowledge in a sense. Or the fact that I am standing here in the state of Pennsylvania is not self-knowledge in the sense that we're talking about here. We're talking here about knowledge of your own mental life, right? The various sorts of attitudes or states of mind that constitute your mental life. So we're talking here about knowledge of your beliefs, that you believe that today is Monday. That you believe that this semester will be a good one for you and so forth. Your sensations, that right now I am looking at a white reflective [inaudible 00:02:24] there. Or that you have a headache. Your desires and things that you want for yourself, your emotions, your values and so on.
	So self-knowledge on this model is knowledge of your own mental states. So on the one hand, wanting pancakes for breakfast is not by itself self-knowledge. Your knowledge that you want pancakes for breakfast is self-knowledge. Likewise, knowing how to speak Danish isn't self-knowledge, but knowing that you know how to speak Danish is self-knowledge. Hoping for a rematch of last year's World Series, not self-knowledge. Knowing that you hope for a rematch, self-knowledge. Believing that Swarthmore provided you a quality education, not self-knowledge. Knowing that you believe Swarthmore provided you a quality education, that's self-knowledge. So we're using self-knowledge in this particular and somewhat technical sense.
	Now, this is a pretty long tradition in philosophy of thinking that self-knowledge is really great. Lots of philosophers praising self-knowledge, saying that self-knowledge is perhaps more important, more worthwhile, more fundamental to living a good life than other kinds of knowledge, that it's perhaps a cornerstone kind of knowledge. I just want to give you a few examples of this or at least examples out of the philosophic tradition to motivate this observation.
	So this is the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Those of you who recall your history of ancient Greece, know that this was a very important site for ancient Greeks. There was an oracle there that could supposedly give you good advice or foretell your future and there were three inscriptions on the wall of this temple. The first of them, "Nothing in excess," which I suppose is pretty self-explanatory, "Surety, then ruin," no one quite knows what that one means. I'm looking around and you're like, "Surety, the ruins. What's that?" The third one of course is, "Know thyself."
	We see a similar admonition here is the work of Socrates and [inaudible 00:04:27]. So in this dialogue, Socrates is acting with his interlocutors and they fall into a conversation about why people like to speculate about sea monsters and multi-headed creatures and so forth or why that's a fun pastime. I don't know if it's still a fun pastime. I guess for the Greeks, it was a fun pastime, speculate about these creatures. Socrates stops there and says, "Look, this is all just silly, right? Why are we worried about sea monsters and so forth? I'm not worried about sea monsters because the Delphic inscription says that I should know myself," and he seems to say that, "It's ridiculous for me to be worried about sea creatures and so on, so long as I'm ignorant of my own self."
	Skipping forward quite a bit in time, our good friend Kant there. Kant did say that self-knowledge is as he puts it the first command of all duties to one's self. A central theme I think in much of Kant's ethical writings is that we are to aspire to an ethical condition where we understand and have an accurate grasp of our ever changing moral character. He says, as he puts it here, that, "We have a duty to perfect ourselves by knowing our heart, by knowing our moral dispositions." Now of course Kant, as he's want to be a pessimistic fellow says of course that self-knowledge is not exactly the easiest thing. He says, "It's a descent into hell." I'm hoping that's not true. 
	One can I suppose see the Freudian tradition as advancing the thought that self-knowledge is particularly useful or valuable. The idea that we are subject to unconscious or unnoticed motivational drives. These drives can lead us to behavior [inaudible 00:06:19] that are unfortunate or self-defeating or contrary to our well-being.
	Well, this Freudian thought seems to suggest that if you go into therapy and you pay $200 an hour to someone so forth for a period of 20 years, you might have a shot, not necessarily at being able to overcome these unconscious desires, but at least you could come to know what they are. You'd have a different relationship by virtue of knowing what they are. You'd be in some position maybe to live with it even if it's not so great that you are motivated by these unconscious desires.
	So again, there's this pretty long tradition within philosophy and within Western thought of thinking that self-knowledge is particularly valuable, right? That self-knowledge is something that we should strive for and be glad for. Now, that wouldn't be the impression you would get I think, if you began poking around in databases and so forth of current philosophy journals and books because what's striking about what a lot of philosophers are interested in nowadays about, in connection with self-knowledge is how little they have to say about the value of self-knowledge.
	They're predominately preoccupied with questions about or issues pertaining to what are supposed to be epistemically interesting features about self-knowledge. So if you were to dip into this literature, what you'd probably find is debates about whether self-knowledge is infallible. The idea here is that self-knowledge is infallible on the condition that if you happen to know that you are in some mental state, that you have a certain belief, say, that it will in fact be the case that you are. Or it could get mistaken in that regard.
	Conversely, there are debates about whether these mental states are self-presenting. Here the idea is just the converse that maybe there are mental states that you can't leave without knowing it. So I suppose a headache is like that. It seems like a strange idea to think that you would have a headache without realizing it.
	There are lots of debates about whether there's a distinctive method to acquiring self-knowledge. Some have thought that the way you get self-knowledge is through a certain kind of introspection. You interrogate your own mental states or a certain sort of reflection of your own mental states. 
	You also counter debates about the idea that self-knowledge has a personal authority. So here's me and here's you and on this model, or what's under debate here, is the idea that each of us is a special authority with respect to our self-knowledge, right? That other people aren't in any position to credibly challenge our claims about what we know about ourselves.
	Now these are very greatly extreme debates and I certainly would not discourage anyone here from dipping their toe into this literature. It's a very interesting literature, but I should say that all of these claims are contested. None of these are I would say in any way settled, but I want to switch our intention with respect to self-knowledge a bit.
	I want to switch our intention to the question of the value of self-knowledge rather than the epistemology of self-knowledge. In a way I think it's funny that philosophers seemingly become interested in these epistemic properties of self-knowledge and the epistemic disputes about self-knowledge, while almost all of them start to say, "Well, boy. Self-knowledge seems really important and worthwhile, but I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about just exactly these kinds of interesting debates about epistemology."
	So I want to shift our attention to a different sort of question, which is what if anything makes self-knowledge distinctly or especially valuable. Is there any reason to think that knowing your own mental life is somehow particularly worthwhile or valuable to us? So let me lay out the plan for our discussion today.
	So the first thing I want to do is I want to identify some desiderata that I think a good answer has to meet. I think there's certain things that we want out of an answer to the question, what good is self-knowledge. So I want to identify those three desiderata.
	Then I'm going to lay out what Quassim Cassam, who has written a recent book called Self-Knowledge for Humans, calls high road and low road answers to this question. He doesn't think that the high road answers are terribly promising. I don't think the low road answers are terribly promising. I'm going be, I don't know, the middle of the road. What is that these days? Who's the middle of the road? I don't know. Adele. Adele is the middle of the road. So I'll be Adele.
	Third, I want to elaborate Gwen Bradford's recent account of Achievement. Gwen Bradford has written a very interesting book, in which she talks about why we think it's valuable to generate or to realize achievements. I want to show then that there are certain instances of self-knowledge that are valued because they're achievements. The value of having certain kinds of self-knowledge is due to there being achievements of a certain sort. Then at the end, I want to argue that there's a reason why self-knowledge is worthy of pursuit, and that's because it's necessary for loving ourselves, for self-love and not in that high school sex ed way.
	Alright. Now, alright. So there are three desiderata that I think we want to meet in an account of self-knowledge, okay? I'll go on to explain these. So don't worry that they're not immediately clear to you, okay. So first of all, I think we want to explain the value of self-knowledge in what I'm going to call local terms. Secondly, we want to explain how self-knowledge provides what I'm going to call value added and third, I think we want to explain why self-knowledge is worthy of pursuit.
	So let me go ahead and see if I can explain for you these three desiderata and make them apparent to you. So the first is that we want self-knowledge to have some value that we can explain in what I'm calling local terms. So what I'm after here is this slide. What I think we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is self-knowledge, right? An account of what's valuable about this knowledge insofar as it's knowledge of each of us in particular, not general knowledge about the human condition.
	Of course each of us has general knowledge about the human condition. For example, we get hungry and from the fact that we get hungry, I suppose you might realize, "Hey, I get hungry," but that's not in some sense a very interesting or deep fact about you. Everybody gets hungry. Occasionally you feel hungry. It's all well and good. What I think what we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is some account that recognizes that our target here is something specific to each of us as individuals. In other words, the value of self-knowledge should have something to do with the fact that it is self-knowledge.
	The second desiderata I think we want to satisfy here is that self-knowledge provides us some value added. What I have in mind here is that whatever value self-knowledge has got, it should be distinct from or more than the value that's provided by the attitudes themselves. Now, I'll try to explain that a little bit further in a moment, but let me see if I can motivate why I think it's an appropriate desiderata. 
	I think that what we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is that it's knowledge. Not just that you have certain beliefs, desires, values, emotions, but that there's some value in the fact you know that you do. It wouldn't be very interesting if the value of self-knowledge could just be reduced to the fact that you have the relevant attitudes, right?
	So an illustration of this, so going back to a couple of examples that we look at earlier. So consider this one, knowing that you know how to speak Danish. Now, no doubt, there's some value in knowing how to speak Danish. It's particularly helpful in Denmark, but you might think to yourself, okay, it's possible to know how to speak Danish without knowing that you know that. I mean, that seems weird. That's at least possible. You could be a small child and you're learning this language and you just don't know that it's Danish. [inaudible 00:14:30] hey, the language you're speaking is Danish.
	The worry here is something like this. What we want I think out of an account of self-knowledge is something that says the value of this state, knowing that you know how to speak Danish, adds something to the value of this. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be talking about self-knowledge having value. We would just be talking about what you know having value. So we want to have something that adds some value to the picture here.
	Lastly, I think that an adequate account of self-knowledge should explain why self-knowledge is worthy of pursuit. Notice that figures we were referencing earlier in our talk, Socrates, Kant, Freudian tradition, all of them seemed to think, self-knowledge is valuable, not in the way that good eyesight is valuable. It's nice to have good eyesight, but most of us don't go around pursuing good eyesight. It's not something that we say, "Hey, today I'm going to try to improve eyesight." We're glad to have it if we have it, but it's not really good that we think of as a good that's worthy of pursuit, something we should try to go out and seek, okay? So I think that what we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is that it's a condition that is valuable insofar as or because it's something that we should intentionally seek after.
	Now, Quassim Cassam distinguishes as I said before between low road and high road accounts of the value of self-knowledge. So let's just outline for you the difference between the low road and the high road accounts. So this is his book Self-Knowledge for Humans. It's a very good book, particular if you're not familiar with this literature. I mean, it has something to say and something to offer to people who are familiar with this literature, but does a good job I think if you know nothing about the philosophical discussion of self-knowledge to get you oriented. So it has that recommendation from me.
	But in any case, the low road accounts of self-knowledge is value say, well, the value of self-knowledge is that somehow it makes your life better. You led a better life, you're happier, more fulfilled. You have a greater level of welfare or well-being. That's pretty appealing, right? I mean, most of us want to live happier lives rather than less happy ones. So if the value of self-knowledge consists in the way that it contributes to well-being, that seems like a pretty compelling reason to think that self-knowledge is valuable, but I have to say, I don't think that this satisfies some of the desiderata that I placed in front of us before.
	For one thing, I don't think it does very much to explain the value of self-knowledge in particularly local terms. So for example, I don't know. Suppose that I am in a condition where I know that I feel nauseous. Not just that I feel it, but I know that I do. I say, "Ah, that's nausea." Now, that example seems to me to be pretty similar to lots of the knowledge that we have regarding ourselves you might say. That does contribute to well-being, but it's not self-knowledge in any very robust sense. I could be nauseous. You could be nauseous. We could all be nauseous. I hope not now, but you get the point.
	I think that again what we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is something that locates self-knowledge in ourselves [inaudible 00:18:04] individuals, not just general facts about human beings. So I don't think that the low road accounts, again, the ones that say that the value of self-knowledge is that it contributes to well-being, do very well with regard to our first aim here. I also don't think that it does very well in terms of explaining what I call value added. Well, why not? Well, it's not clear how knowing your own attitudes over and above simply having them, contributes to your well-being.
	So take an example like, I don't know, it's late afternoon and I'm feeling hungry and so I realize I could use my late afternoon snack. I want to pop in some toast and slather some jam on it. After I eat my toast and jam, I feel better, better off, but notice that it didn't seem like the benefit that accrued to you there is because you knew or I knew that I was hungry, that I wanted toast, that I believe that we had jam in the refrigerator and so forth. It seems to come entirely from the attitudes themselves. I just wanted toast and so forth. I didn't need to know these things about myself. I could have just acted on the relevant attitudes and made myself better off. While I'm not an expert in any stretch of the imagination on the psychology of animals, it seems to me, that's pretty much how a lot of animals are. They adopt attitudes and they motivate them to act, but they don't really know their attitudes. They just go.
	So we might look at it this way, or put it a little differently. It doesn't seem like self-knowledge has any more power to cause my life to go well than the attitudes that I self know. Just having the attitude seems good enough, right? How is it that in addition to having them, my knowing that I have them, I'm made better off? So I think that low road accounts, I can understand the appeal. We all want to have better lives. We all want greater levels of well-being, but I don't think that they do well with respect to the first two desiderata that I laid out for you.
	So back to the high road. We all want to take the high road. Everybody thinks that's a good idea. The high road is not so exact, but essentially what the high road is is any sort of hue of the value of self-knowledge that says that it's necessary for the achievement of abstract high-sounding ideals. What abstract high-sounding ideals might we appeal to here? Well, one encounters in the literature on self-knowledge, arguments that in order for a person to be a rational being or a ration agent, you have to have self-knowledge.
	One also encounters arguments that say that if you really want to live authentically, like you want to be true to the person that you really deeply are, you have to have self-knowledge. There are other arguments that say that or that claim that you need self-knowledge in order to have a unity among your attitudes. The idea here seems to be that if you don't know your own attitudes, you're likely to have conflicting beliefs and desires and you'll end up pulled in every direction and you're just a big mess of a human being.
	Now, in the interest of time, I'm not going to go into great detail as to why Cassam rejects these, but I'll just say that I'm in general agreement or general sympathy with his reasons for rejecting them. In some cases, it's not clear why we should think that these high-sounding abstract ideas are really that valuable. Why is it so important that we be authentic or why is it so important that we have a unified set of attitudes? It's also not clear and here I think Cassam is particularly persuasive, that self-knowledge is essential to utilizing these things.
	So I think the high road answers, or at least the high road answers that have been developed up to this point don't seem to be very good candidates either and that ultimately this is because they don't really explain to us what I think we want to have explained to us, right? Why should we think we should pursue self-knowledge? Why should we interrogate our own beliefs, attitudes, desires and so forth in order to know them?
	So I'm going to adopt a middle approach or borrowing high-low, as I said and what I want to argue is that self-knowledge contributes to well-being to the extent that it's a kind of achievement. I'll say what I mean by that in a moment and then I want to argue that it enables self-love in a very particular sense of that word, self-love. So let's start with this business about self-knowledge contributing to well-being, to the extent that it's an achievement. Now, what's funny to me is that in a way, this idea is right under Cassam's nose. He says at several points in his book that self-knowledge can be, as he puts it, "The hard won achievement." It can be difficult to attain self-knowledge.
	Now, no doubt, many of you, you're college students. You have ambitions, hopes for your lives and so forth. One of the things that you have your target on are various achievements. That you'd like to characterize or define your life. Now, you could imagine paradigm cases of different kinds of achievements, maybe that learning to cook Korean food is an achievement. Earning a belt in some martial art is an achievement. Climbing the Matterhorn is certainly an achievement for most, earning tenure, raising a happy child, identifying a cure for a fatal disease, getting an important bit of legislation passed or earning a highest honors here at Swarthmore.
	So those are just the examples of achievements. Now, Gwen Bradford I think has written a very interesting recent book on achievements. The first one, as far as I know, that really treats the whole issue from a systematic, philosophical perspective. She points out what seems to me to be correct, that achievements are very important to us, the things that we want to achieve for ourselves. We think of them as critical sources of meaning in our lives. There are things that we think of as defining a worthwhile life for ourselves.
	If you think about the people that we sometimes denigrate as slackers, what are we essentially saying about those people? Well, they don't have any achievements on the agenda. There's nothing that they're trying to achieve with their lives. Life is just passing them by. So I want to spend a few minutes just interrogating the notion of achievements because I want to come around back to show that certain instances of self-knowledge are themselves achievements and are valuable for that reason. By the way, I love the cover of her book. There's this kid who ate all the pie. He won first prize here, but I guess he's got a bellyache or something like that. So he doesn't seem to take much satisfaction in this particular achievement.
	In any case, there are two key questions on our agenda here. First of all, just what is an achievement and secondly, why are achievements valued? So we'll start with our first questions. What are achievements? So she says, "That the product of one's efforts are an achievement to the extent that these two conditions are met. First of all, that attaining the product is difficult for the person who attains it." So in order for you to have engaged in or realized an achievement, you have to have done something that is at least for you, difficult. Notice that this is quite compatible with that same product, to use Bradford's vocabulary, not being particularly difficult for someone else to realize.
	So for the beginning violin player getting a few measures out of even the most basic tune is quite an achievement. If you've been to a fifth grade violin concert, you know what I'm talking about. Whereas for the concert violinist, that would be no achievement at all. This person could, as they say, do it in their sleep. So part of what defines an achievement is that it's difficult for the person who's achievement it is. There have to have been some measure of difficultly.
	Notice that this could also, in addition to it being true that achievements can vary in difficulty for different persons, they can vary for one person at different points in their lives. I have no doubt there are tasks now that are not an achievement for you at all, whereas if you had done them if you were in high school maybe, that would be a big achievement. Writing a ten page paper. My goodness. Now maybe not so great an achievement.
	The other condition that has to be met in order for you to have produced something in such a way that your production is an achievement is that it's attained via your actions competently causing it. So here, I think of the example that comes to mind and I imagine that some of the philosophers and philosophy students here, probably this example comes to mind too, Aristotle was very found of archers, learning to be an expert archer. Now of course if you're new to archery, you can stand out there and pull your arrow back on your bow and point in the general direction of the target and let go and bang. Maybe it might reach the bullseye, but of course, that doesn't look like an achievement because you didn't know what the hell you were doing. You just pointed in that general direction and it just happened to fly over there and hit the bullseye.
	An achievement seems to be the product not merely of our efforts, but of our deliberate efforts and efforts that we understand as directed successfully at the product. So the expert archer pulls his arrow back and shoots his arrow and he hits the bullseye, but it's not luck. He knows what he's doing. He understands why it is that his body movements and so forth enabled him to hit the target. So these are the conditions that an achievement must meet.
	So again, and just to use a really good example, I imagine that earning highest honors in Swarthmore would be difficult for most people. I didn't do it and again, if it happens, it's probably going to happen because someone is competent at all the different things, all the different tasks you have to do in order to get there, right? There might be these incredible savants that walk into those exams and with no effort, just write these brilliant exams and get examined and they do brilliantly, but we wouldn't think that somebody who just got there through dumb luck, who wrote down some words on the page, not knowing what they were doing and yet somehow those were the ones that the external examiners went, "That's brilliant." That wouldn't really be an achievement.
	Now, self-knowledge I think has one of the attributes of an achievement. It's often difficult and I think without getting too personal here or anything, you might scan your own personal history and think of a moment where you realize something about yourself, your own attitudes, beliefs, desires, et cetera, that came to you as a surprise. Whoa, I didn't know that I really loved to do such and such. This I think underscores the thought that self-knowledge can be achievement in part because it's difficult and I think there are some good reasons why it's difficult.
	One reason it's difficult is just because it's knowledge and presumably all the mistakes that we're prone to make when we're trying to know things outside ourselves, we're also prone to make when we're trying to know things, so to speak, inside ourselves too. Whatever bad reasoning or inadequate evidence you might have for forming a belief about how far Saturn is from Earth, you're just as susceptible to those same sort of mistakes when you're trying to figure out whether you really do believe in socialism. There's no reason to think that our self-knowledge, our efforts at self-knowledge are going to be any less plagued by the same sorts of problems we have when we're just trying to get knowledge about anything else.
	I also think there are some reasons that are a little more particular to self-knowledge. So one of them is that we are subject I think to shifting evidence. So one of the classic troupes of comedy is the person who's torn between two lover. Do I really want an exciting partner who is a great deal of fun or do I want a stable, warm partner. That sort of thing. Of course if you're actually in such a situation, your emotions are likely to be rather unsteady. For ten minutes today, you feel, "Boy, exciting partner, whoo-hoo," but then tomorrow it's like, "Boy, I sure like that warm, stable partner that I'm considering." so we've got this conflicting evidence, this stream of evidence that comes at us from our own consciousness that I think makes self-knowledge difficult.
	Then lastly I think sometimes we don't actually want to know certain things about ourselves. We might discover unpleasant things about ourselves. It might serve as a motivation to avoid self-knowledge. We might find out that we're not really as talented or virtuous or clever as we think we are. We might avoid self-knowledge so as to protect our egos, but this is again, by way of saying, hey, self-knowledge can be difficult to attain. So let me just give you an example at the end to get these ideas concrete in your head.
	So imagine this person Camille and she thinks, "I have a lot of trouble in the romantic arena. Am I someone who has a fear of committing to a romantic relationship?" She does things that I imagine lots of us would do. So she looks at her past relationships and she particularly looks at why they ended. Why did this one come to an end? She might pose the question to her friends. Her friends have been present for many of these breakups. Maybe the friends know something that she doesn't.
	She might look at her family history. She might think, "Maybe I've been trained to bring relationships to an end because I'm afraid of somebody else ending the relationship on me. I don't want to feel betrayed or abandoned. So I make sure it doesn't happen by betraying or abandoning them." She reads some of those great self-help books. Maybe she reads philosophy. I don't know if that can help. Maybe she goes out on the web and looks for all of these blogs that discuss it. Maybe she visits a therapist. At the end of it she says, "Yeah, maybe that's it. I really do have a fear of romantic commitment. I didn't realize that I did, but I in fact do."
	This seems to be an instance of a [inaudible 00:33:18] of self-knowledge and I think it's an achievement. It's an achievement, one, because it was difficult. It was time consuming, multifaceted. She had to shift through a fair body of evidence about herself and I think that her methods amount to her competently causing this outcome. She looks within. She looks without. She consults professionals. She consults amateurs. She brings about her own self-knowledge in a way that I would say it's competently caused. This looks to me like an achievement.
	So I'm not saying that all self-knowledge is an achievement. I hope that I'm not misunderstood. Lots of self-knowledge is just knowing that you're really looking forward to a cold beer later tonight. I don't think that's an achievement? That's just, that sounds nice, but at least some of it is. Some of it is achievement because it's difficult. It's attained through process that is competently caused.
	Now, achievements typically result in good products, being able to cook Korean food, et cetera, but I should say that Bradford has some very interesting things to say about morally horrendous achievements. Notice that there could be achievements that are morally atrocious. I imagine that pulling off a particularly intricate art theft looks like an achievement, but that doesn't seem to be as much in favor from a moral perspective, but the larger point here is that the value of an achievement isn't reducible to what it is that you're producing through this process and there are two reasons that she points out.
	One of them is that sometimes the product just is the achievement. If you're trying to climb the Matterhorn, it seems strange to think, "Well, what's the point of that?" I mean, the point is to get to the top of the Matterhorn. That is the achievement, the thought that there's some further state that you're going for, maybe [inaudible 00:35:16] or something like that, but just insofar as we're talking about that as an achievement, it doesn't seem like it's valuable for the sake of something else.
	The other thing to underscore or the other reason is something you mentioned before, that the same product can vary in difficulty between persons. If that's true, then it seems like the achievement is more valuable to the person faced with the obstacles. It's more impressive you might say as far as an achievement goes for the novice to do something well than for the expert.
	Now, this then raises the question, well if there's something about the fact that you realize some product and in so doing, you achieve it and that has value, well, what is that value? How is it that the value of that achievement is somehow greater than the value just of the product itself. Why does the fact that you managed to achieve it add to its value? Well, Bradford is an adherent of a certain position in value theory, I guess you could say, that goes by the heading perfectionism and the rough idea here is that what makes our lives go well is when you're able to perfect and exercise our distinctly human capacities. 
	So a thought here is that by making yourself physically strong or by learning various skills or by becoming particularly kind, or morally decent or whatever it is, you are perfecting the distinctly human capacities that define us. Her proposal is that what achievements are is that they are the development of a certain rational capacity that we have that she just calls the will. I think that what she's after is this idea. If you attain some achievement, you have to exercise your will in particular ways. You've got to persistent in the face of that difficulty. Remember that achievement has a measure of difficulty for you.
	Furthermore, you've got to persist in a goal kind of way. You've got to get to your product, not through luck or happenstance or something like that, but because you have figured out how to realize that prompt. As she puts it, "This is the mark of willpower, the power of one's will in seeking a goal.
	How am I doing on time? Because I don't know how long you ...
Speaker 2:	[inaudible 00:37:45]
Michael Cholbi:	Oh, an hour, gosh. I'll just start talking really slowly. Okay.
Speaker 2:	So about 15 minutes.
Michael Cholbi:	There we go. Okay. So what I've said to this point, very roughly is that the value of some self-knowledge, a lot of it is trivial and easy to get, but the value of some self-knowledge can be explained in terms of it being achievement, knowing your own emotional proclivities, knowing your deepest moral or political values, knowing the things that bring you lasting satisfaction, knowing that this is the person that you want to marry. So I think these can often be achievements and we can then ask ourselves whether this account is satisfactory by going back to those desiderata that I proposed at the outset.
	So does this account explain the value of self-knowledge in local terms? That is to say not by general facts about human nature or the human condition. I think the answer is yes. Afterall, your achievements are yours. In achieving self-knowledge, you have achieved something that is not a general feature of the human condition. It's in some sense, the product of you.
	Secondly, we want a good account of the value of self-knowledge to give us value added. Here I think the achievement account is satisfactory also. So as an achievement, your self-knowledge seems to be more valuable than simply having the attitudes that you know about it. So the value added consists in the fact that being in a position not just to have some attitude, but to know that you do is itself an achievement.
	So I think we're doing okay. We've got an account that seems to have done something for us, but I don't think that this does very well on the third one. Why do I think it doesn't do very well? Well remember that the third one says to us that what we want out of an account of the value of self-knowledge is something that explains to us this intuition that apparently a lot of philosophers and a lot of non-philosophers have too, that we should pursue self-knowledge, that we should go after it. I guess I haven't from Bradford or Bradford plus me, haven't really heard a substantive reason why we should seek self-knowledge, particularly given that self-knowledge is only one possible achievement amongst many.
	I mean, why should I go after self-knowledge instead of climbing the Matterhorn or learning to cook Korean food or whatever? So it's an achievement. Well, big deal. You might say, that's nice, but we haven't really shown that it's particularly worthwhile or special. It may be just true that some of us like self-knowledge and some of us don't. Some of us might say, "Hey, I really want to understand my own attitudes and values and so forth." Other people are like, "Whatever. I'm just going to plow forward in life."
	I think one analogy that comes to mind here that is helpful for me in thinking about this is there do seem to be some people who are just fascinated with genealogy. They really want to know where they came from, but then I've met people who are like, whatever. What does that have to do with me here and now? Why shouldn't we think of self-knowledge the same way? Some people find that an engaging achievement, but others are left cold. So why is it really worthy of pursuit?
	Well, I want to give an argument about why it's worthy of pursuit. [inaudible 00:41:26] a concept of self-love. It begins with the premise that you can't love someone that you don't know. It follows this that one cannot love one's self in the absence of self-knowledge. That's two. Third, I want to argue that self-love is necessary for, and here I'm borrowing some of the language from Harry Frankfurt, "Wholehearted identification with our cares and interests," from which it follows that self-love is necessary for our wholehearted identification with our cares and interests. Finally in premise five, that wholehearted identification with our cares and interests is necessary for "Feeling at home," I use again, Frankfurt's language, "With ourselves and for living well." From which I hope it all follows that self-knowledge is necessary.
	Let me see if I can elaborate some of these ideas to make these premises seem at least credible to you. So that's Harry Frankfurt there. You may know him as Mr. Bullshit. You might have read that book, but he actually has written some stuff that isn't bullshit or about bullshit and much of it concerns love and related topics.
	Frankfurt points out that both amongst philosophers and amongst the populous at large, there's a tendency to denigrate self-love. We think that people who love themselves, there's something suspect about those people. Perhaps we admit that it's natural or inevitable that we love ourselves, but we don't think it's admirable or something that we ought to encourage or commend, but he actually says, "No, when you really look at it, love of one's self is in some ways, the greatest love of all." I don't know if he knows about Whitney Houston, but he should have.
	He says that in reasons in love, that love of yourself is purer than other sorts of love because as he says, "It's that sort of love that's most likely to be unequivocal and [inaudible 00:43:26]. In fact, he says that, "When we think about what love is, we'll see that self-love most fully realizes or most fully instantiate what we think love is." Why should we suppose that that's true? Well, here's some things about self-love that seem to make it the purest sort according to Frankfurt.
	First of all, it's outside of your control. It's very often said that we don't choose love, love chooses us, but it certainly seems that that's true in the case of self-love. None of us think to ourselves, "I've really got to care about me today. I'm deciding to do that." It seems rather to be largely outside one's control. Notice that it's also a devotion to a particular individual. We think of the best sorts of loves are not a devotion to everyone taken generically, but to a very specific kind of person. Well, who could be more specific than you?
	Notice that it also involves a perfect union between the lover and the beloved. There's an old theory about the nature of love that says that love is union between two people. Well of course you don't even have to unify you and you. You're already unified. You love yourself disinterestedly, seemingly for its own sake. You care about you not because you are pursuing some ulterior purpose or motive. It seems to be a reason for action that doesn't require some further reason or action. It's a terminus of justification that something is disinterestedly good for you.
	Finally, self-love is I think on Frankfurt's model, a love wherein one strives to promote your true cares. So his idea here behind self-love is not that self-love is a kind of indulgence. Self-love is not just a doing whatever you want all the time. That's not self-love. That's actually the character that I think he calls a wanton, somebody who just acts impulsively or acts just on his strongest current desire. The self-lover is someone who understands in what his or her true interests or concerns reside and acts on those. So it's not a self-indulgence or pursuing your wants willy-nilly.
	Now, these features of self-love that the self is disinterested in love for its own sake and that the self-lover strives to promote the beloved's true cares, requires that you know who you're loving. I'm not a therapist, but it seems to me that one observation that I think seems reasonable is that very often human love relationships struggle because the partners don't know each other very well. They think that their respective efforts to love one another are going to succeed and they're well-intentioned, but they don't because they don't really understand their partner well enough to know what would count as love [inaudible 00:46:33]
	So too for self-love. If you don't know who you are, you're going to have a very difficult time knowing in what your true interests consist and you'll have a very tough time loving yourself. Here I borrow directly from Frankfurt where he says to us that when you truly love yourself, not in this self-indulgent way, bona fide self-love, this is a condition in which you are able to wholeheartedly identify with your cares and interests. You're able to see them not simply as the interests or cares that you happen to have, but the interests or cares that in some sense fit you. 
	So as I try to put an epiphany here, this sort of self-love nevertheless requires self-knowledge. To identify with our cares and interests requires identifying our cares and interests. There's a certain epistemic condition, namely self-knowledge that has to be met in order for us to identify wholeheartedly with those.
	So what I want to say in the end is that self-knowledge is valuable as a self-love enabling achievement. So I haven't got a completely reductive account of the value of self-knowledge. I'm not appealing to one and only one value. I think it's a composite of two. On the one hand, it's difficult and one can attain it through certain kinds of procedures that count as competently bringing it about or competently causing it. That's the achievement [inaudible 00:48:05], but what makes it worthy of pursuit I think is this other facet, namely that enables us to love ourselves truly and properly. 
	So if we go back and we have this modified view that I put forth, right? Self-love enabling achievement. Does this satisfy our third desiderata, that this is something that we should want to go after, that it would make sense for us to pursue? I think the answer is yes because again, if it's valuable to identify wholeheartedly with your cares and interests, that requires self-love and adequate self-love in turn requires self-knowledge. 
	So if I can recap where we've been, we started with this question: what if anything makes self-knowledge especially distinctly valuable? I proposed these three desiderata to you, that the value has to local, that it must be knowledge of you, not just knowledge or generic facts about human beings. The value has to be distinct from the value of what it is that you know. It's got to be value added and we have to see that self-knowledge turns out to be worthy of pursuit.
	We looked at some standard low road and high road accounts and I suggested that for various reasons, those don't seem to satisfy our desiderata. They come up short. I tried to argue that self-knowledge is a valuable achievement. I think it can be difficult to attain and it can be competently caused by the person who tends to have it. I suggested by Bradford's work that there are some instances of self-knowledge that can be said to be valuable because they're achievements.
	Finally, appealing to Frankfurt, I proposed an amendment here to the achievement based account according to which, self-knowledge is a worthy pursuit because it enables us to truly engage in genuine, bona fide self-love. So that's it. So I hope that you will contact me if I'm not able to take all of your questions and comments today or you got to run or something like that, any of that. I thank you all for your time.