There is a certain modern type who makes a hobby of his or her “inner work.” Their talk tends to be a mash-up of therapeutic and New Age idioms. If by some device such a person has succeeded in putting you under an obligation to listen to her talk about herself, you may find yourself playing a more important role for her than you would prefer.
She tries to get you to endorse what strikes you as a fairly elevated view of herself, one that she has evidently spent a good bit of energy working up. This is a delicate sort of conversation to manage. You try to simply go along with it, amiably. But then she accuses you of not taking her seriously, not really engaging. This makes her angry. On the one hand, she insists that she has privileged access to the truth about herself. Through a process of introspection, she discovers in herself motives and character traits that, precisely because they are discovered by introspection, are not contestable by others. But on the other hand, she needs this truth to be validated. By you.
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was well aware of the inner-outer motif and the function it serves in carving out a realm that is safe for self-delusion. He anticipated Bruce Springsteen, who is reported to have said, “Self-knowledge is a kind of funny thing because the less of it you have, the more you think you have.”
For Hegel, one knows oneself by one’s deeds. And deeds are inherently social—their meaning depends very much on how others receive them. The problem of self-knowledge is in large part the problem of how we can make ourselves intelligible to others through our actions, and from them receive back a reflected view of ourselves.
For Hegel, there is no self to be known that exists prior to, or at a “deeper level” than, the self that is in the world. This implies that individuality, too, is something that we achieve only in and through our dealings with others.
Right away, there is cause for concern in this idea that the self is constituted by its actions. What if you find yourself playing a role prescribed by your social situation, and what is required of you is some act that you’re not really able to stand behind? Suppose you are a citizen of North Korea and Kim Jong Il has just died. Do you join in the wailing and hysterics? Yes you do. Closer to home, suppose you are attending a child’s birthday party. As the voracious tyrant rips open yet another gift, you find yourself cooing “Good job!” along with all the other mommies and daddies. What has to be the case for you to be able to identify with your actions as really being your own? Surely we would want to say that your true self is the one that is revealed, and perhaps emerges in the first place, through a particular kind of action—the kind that isn’t alienated.
Some will say that sincerity is the key element here; whether or not an act is a true expression of the self is determined entirely by the inner psychological state of the agent. But consider the case of someone who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater and a few people get trampled to death (this example is from a book on Hegel by Robert Pippin). This person regards himself quite sincerely as a well-meaning prankster—people ought to lighten up! But when he later says, “I was just joking,” his claim to have been misunderstood is not just self-serving, it is also self-deluded. One must know something about how the world works, about the norms of speech and action that prevail in a given society, and understand one’s own actions in light of these. The agent himself cannot unilaterally say “what was done” and thereby trump the meaning that his deed has for others.
Pippin puts Hegel’s point sharply when he writes, “You have not executed an intention successfully unless others attribute to you the deed and intention you attribute to yourself.”1 One can think of counterexamples to this formula—a successful deception, for instance. But it serves well as a corrective to the cult of sincerity, which perhaps amounts to this: the idea that you yourself can be the source of the norms by which you justify yourself. This idea seems to be the late modern understanding of autonomy, in a nutshell.2
Hegel says we need other people as a check on our own self-understanding. Our deeds bring us out into the light of day, and the way others receive them helps us triangulate on a true assessment of ourselves. This makes me think of economics. In economics, when we talk about the value of something, we are referring to an assignation of worth that has to be shared in order to be determinate. That is what it means for something to have a price. I want to bring out the affinities between economics and Hegel’s critique of sincerity by applying his logic of self-knowledge to a certain kind of economic exchange: getting paid for work you have done. If it is by our deeds that we know ourselves, then to be paid for your deeds—not the alienated kind, but the kind you are able to stand behind and claim as your own—would seem to be a good Hegelian recipe for discovering one’s worth. There are good reasons to have reservations about such a recipe, and we will consider them. But I think there is some psychic reality to be explored here. I want to consider how the simple acts of demanding and receiving payment for work may carry the possibility of self-knowledge, and in some cases may be the kind of encounter in which individuality is not merely revealed, but forged.
JUSTIFICATION THROUGH CONFRONTATION
Consider the case of a motorcycle mechanic. In handing a labor bill to a customer, I make a claim for the value of what I have done, and put it to him in the most direct way possible. I have to steel myself for this moment; it feels like a confrontation. The point of having a posted labor rate, and hours billed in tenths on the service ticket, is to create the impression of calculation, and to appeal to the authority of an institution with established rules. But this is a thin and fragile pretense observed by me and my customer (it is hard to pose as an institution when you run a one-man operation), and in fact the bill I present is never a straightforward account of hours worked. It always involves a reflection in which I try to put myself in the shoes of the other and imagine what he might find reasonable.
This lack of straightforwardness in valuing the work is due to the fact that the work is subject to chance and mishap, as well as many diagnostic obscurities. Like medicine, it is what Aristotle calls a “stochastic” art. Especially when working on older bikes, in trying to solve one problem, I may create another. How should I bill for work done to solve a problem of my own making? Should I attribute this new problem to chance, or to a culpable lack of foresight on my part? This question has to be answered when I write the service ticket, and in doing so I find that I compose little justificatory narratives.
When a customer comes to pick up his bike, I usually go over the work with him in detail, and I often find myself delaying the presentation of the dollar amount, because I fear that my valuation isn’t justified. But all my fretting about the bill has to get condensed into a definite assertion on my own behalf. Whatever conversation may ensue, in the end the work achieves a valuation that is determinate: a certain amount of money changes hands. As he loads his bike onto the back of a pickup truck, I want to feel that the customer feels he has gotten a square deal; I want to come away feeling justified in the claim I made for the value of what I did.
Here, in a microeconomic exchange, lies the kernel of ethics altogether, perhaps. In presenting the labor bill, I am owning my actions. I am standing behind them retrospectively. And this requires making my actions intelligible to the customer. The Hegelian suggestion seems true to me—namely, that it is in the confrontation between the self and the world beyond one’s head that one acquires a sharpened picture of each, under the sign of responsibility.
As Pippin explains, what distinguishes human acts from mere events, and from animal doings, is that we are concerned with justification. Our deeds don’t simply enact our desires. Rather, in acting we make a tacit normative claim for ourselves—for the legitimacy of the act, and indeed the worthiness of its end. Crucially, Hegel suggests that this normative moment arises only in a certain kind of encounter with another person—someone who addresses me, or issues a sort of summons to tell him “where I am coming from.” More strongly: the question of justification arises only if I am challenged by another, or anticipate being challenged by another, who doesn’t merely stand in my way as an impediment to my doing what I want to do, but rejects the validity of my claim to be acting with justification. To rise to this challenge means I have to evaluate my own actions—are they something I really want to assert the worth of? Stepping back and considering in this way is something I have to do if I am going to own my deeds; if I am going to stand behind them and identify with them as my own, and not regard them as mere movements that my body has made. It is this evaluative stance toward ourselves that distinguishes human beings.
Work, then, is a mode of acting in the world that carries the possibility of justification through pay. When the claim I make for the value of what I have done prevails in a meeting with another free agent and I succeed in getting paid, I take this as a validation of my own take on my doings.3 The absence of such experiences may help us to understand why the long-term unemployed often suffer self-doubt, as do the idle adult children of wealthy parents.
THE PROBLEM OF THE DISSIDENT
But consider also that this validation through pay is a function of the prevailing political economy. As Talbot Brewer put it to me in conversation, the politico-economic regime may reflect back a distorted view of oneself. It may confer an inflated salary and corollary self-regard on some professions while placing a slight value on others, being indifferent or oblivious to the excellences these latter demand of their practitioners. Because we are social creatures and refer ourselves to others for justification, such obliviousness in the larger society may infect a man’s own experience in such a way as to make it illegible to himself.
Every regime has such blind spots and exaggerated valuations with regard to the range of human possibilities. They have a political character to them, shaping souls and forming the young in the image of the regime. Imagine a high-achieving university student who understands that he is supposed to want to be an investment banker but is left cold by the picture of his future that comes into view when he imagines such a life. He would really rather be building houses, having gotten a taste of that life while working in construction one summer. But he finds it difficult to articulate what he finds valuable about this activity and to justify it as a choice of livelihood in the terms prevailing in the public discourse, or given the expectations of his social milieu. So he brackets as best he can these unsanctioned intimations of what a good life for himself would look like, and with the help of a little medication they wither, like a limb that has been tied off to prevent an infection from spreading.
On the Hegelian position elaborated by Pippin, there would seem to be little room for dissent from the mainstream. To be an agent in the full-fledged sense is to be well adjusted to social norms, because these provide the only possible justificatory framework for one’s deeds. Absent the public framework, one is at sea without a compass or keel, listing badly toward fantasy. The fate especially to be avoided is that of Don Quixote, who takes himself to be a knight engaged in acts of chivalry but inhabits a social world in which such roles and deeds are not possible. That is, they are not recognized, not intelligible to others.
This is a deeply conformist line of thought. It leaves little space for beautiful folly, or for the world-making activity of the artist or eccentric. Yet Hegel’s central insight into the social character of genuine agency (and corollary worry about solipsism and self-delusion) seems to me on target.
The question I would like to pose, then, is this: To whom does one look for a check on one’s own subjective take? To “the public,” or to the competent within some concrete community of practice? There are many such communities, corresponding to diverse niche ecologies of human excellence, while the public is an undifferentiated blob.
Bringing our focus down to a smaller scale in this way won’t secure space for the genuine maverick, but I hope it will help to articulate the grounds on which people who have come together around some practice—one that has formed them in important ways and perhaps leaves them feeling untimely, or out of joint with the surrounding society—might carve out normative niches for themselves, resisting the imputation of insanity and defending themselves against the functionaries of psychological adjustment. The practices I have in mind, as being especially countercultural and therefore in need of defense, are philosophy and craftsmanship.
ON THE “WHO” AND THE “WHAT” OF JUSTIFYING NORMS
For Hegel, the “who” with reference to whom one justifies one’s actions are those who are similarly habituated within some particular form of ethical life—a cultural jig that has developed over time and offers a meaningful frame for one’s activities. In such a world, deeds have a revelatory power. They speak for themselves, and this is because they are addressed to, or potentially taken up by, others who inhabit the same culture, within which deeds have somewhat fixed meanings. Sacrificing a lamb is intelligible (as a sacrifice rather than, say, as performance art) only if a whole set of cultural enabling conditions are in place.
But this means that in times of cultural flux and uncertainty, when it is not clear what “our rules” are, there is a basic difficulty for individual agency understood socially. One is thrown back into oneself, with little reference beyond the movements of one’s own will and solitary judgment.
Under such conditions, the material practices of making things and fixing things take on special significance. Their meaning does not depend on fragile cultural conditions and shifting articulations. If we are dealing with concrete stuff together, our actions are likely to achieve the mutual intelligibility that is required for genuine agency. Matt Feeney said it well: “The nature that is providing for and vexing me is the same nature that is providing for and vexing everyone.”4
Note that this is true of nature only in a trivial sense if the “everyone” is not further specified—in that case we are limited to such banalities as “What goes up must come down.” Nature provides a meaningful ground for mutual intelligibility only if you get more specific, and this is what happens within a community of skilled practice. Competence rests on an apprehension of real features of the world, as refracted through some set of human needs/desires and corresponding technologies. These features may be easy to grasp, as when a master plumber shows his apprentice that he has to vent a drainpipe in a certain way so that sewage gases don’t seep up through the toilet and make a house stink. Or it may be something requiring subtle discernment, as when a better motorcyclist than I explains, from a rider’s point of view, why it would be good to decrease the damping in the front suspension of his motorcycle. There is a progressive character to these apprehensions—something about the world is coming into clearer view, and your own judgments are becoming truer. Or rather, you are becoming more discerning, seeing things about which you had no judgments previously. Getting outside your head in this way, you have the experience of joining a world that is independent of your self, usually with the help of another person who is further along. The process is aided if (as in the case of suspension tuning) the pertinent features of the physical system you and he are grappling with are apprehended through sensorimotor engagement, as then the desired qualities of the system can become an object of joint attention, and hence of communication.
This kind of education is driven forward by the visceral concern for excellence that comes with being initiated into the practice, and a corollary contempt for the shoddy (for example, a toilet that stinks or a bike that wallows through turns). In the course of becoming skilled, feeling is joined to judgment, and our perception becomes evaluative: the ends served by the practice illuminate our activity, casting deep shadows wherever our performance fails to live up to them. To the extent these ends are simply functional they are graspable by anyone; they are “public” in that sense and provide the grounds for getting paid. But meeting the standards of function doesn’t exhaust what the practitioner cares about in doing what he does. Because he strives for excellence, there is room for a kind of freedom and individuality in the practitioner, even as he conforms to the public, merely functional norms of the practice.
A carpenter, for example, answers to his level, his square, and his plumb bob: standards that have universal validity. Yet it is up to him how these minimal standards will be met in the graceful arc of a stairway’s handrail. The discriminations made by practitioners of an art respond to subtleties that may not be visible to the bystander. Only a fellow journeyman is entitled to say, “Nicely done.” In doing the job nicely, the tradesman puts his own stamp on it. His individuality is thus expressed in an activity that, in answering to a shared world, connects him to others—in particular, to other practitioners of his art, who are competent to recognize the peculiar excellence of his work.
Earlier, when I considered the example of the mechanic, I suggested that confronting a customer with a labor bill is a moment when you have to step up and justify your deeds to another, and that doing this confers on your work the status of nonalienated action. That is, it is action you are able to assert the value of to another, and take responsibility for. If you succeed in getting paid, the value you asserted is validated not just by the customer, but by all who hover in the background of the transaction: the entire market for similar services.
But then I had some second thoughts, when we considered the kind of distortions that are typical of the marketplace, where some activities receive inflated valuations and others are slighted. The values assigned by the marketplace are an unreliable proxy for human excellence. Even in its ideal form, the “free market” can offer only an abstract sort of valuation, since it is predicated on fungibility. The great heterogeneity of goods and services is treated as fundamentally equivalent; each can be represented by a price—a point on a shared scale that stretches over a single dimension. The market is leveling, whereas our evaluative activity as moral agents is sensitive to differences of kind.
Therefore the exchange between the mechanic and his customer can go only so far in satisfying the mechanic’s need for validation of his peculiar excellence, as a mechanic, for the simple reason that the customer isn’t competent to recognize its finer points. What the mechanic wants—what we all want—is recognition. But that is something you can get only from your peers; from people whose vision has been sharpened and sensitized to the relevant considerations through a process of initiation.
What we want, when we want recognition, is to be recognized as an individual. This seems to be possible only in the context of genuine connection to others, with whom one is locked into some web of norms—some cultural jig—that is binding, yet also rich enough to admit of individual interpretation. Skilled practices fit this description, and for that reason have special significance in our efforts to win recognition as individuals. Our efforts on that front get confused and misdirected when we live under a public doctrine of individualism that systematically dismantles shared frames of meaning. The reason we need such frames is that only within them can we differentiate ourselves as not merely different, but excellent. Without that vertical dimension, we get the sameness of mass solipsism rather than true individuality.
The de-skilling of everyday life, which is a function of our economy, thus has implications that reach far beyond the economy. It is integral to a larger set of developments that continue to reshape the kinds of selves we become, and the set of human possibilities that remains open to us.