why you can never fully know yourself

There is something strange about being a self. We can think about ourselves, remember ourselves, describe ourselves and even observe our own thoughts as they happen. Yet we can never quite stand outside ourselves and see the whole thing at once. The moment one part of us becomes the thing being observed, another part has taken up the position of observer. What we discover about ourselves can become part of experience; the position from which it becomes experience cannot become its own object without another position taking its place. To experience anything at all, there must be some distinction between what appears and the position from which it appears. That distinction can move almost anywhere, but it cannot disappear. Something must always remain outside the current field of view.

That necessary remainder is what I mean here by emptiness or the void. It is not a mysterious substance, a hidden soul, or some little dark homunculus sitting inside the mind and watching the show. What remains invariant is not any particular hidden content, but difference itself: some constitutive non-identity that cannot collapse completely into immediate self-presence. This is also why other minds must remain other. A self becomes this position partly through its relation to positions it is not. The distance between us does not merely separate one self from another; it helps constitute both. If that difference disappeared completely, if system and environment became indistinguishable, the boundary sustaining the self would disappear with it. Something might remain, certainly, but there would no longer necessarily be a separate position from which that existence could be experienced as mine.

This gives the ancient pursuit of psychological freedom a small structural problem. For thousands of years, contemplative traditions have worried away at attachment, suffering, impermanence, emptiness and the peculiar business of seeking liberation through the very self that seeks to be liberated. We nevertheless tend to imagine enlightenment, catharsis or complete freedom as extraordinary experiences: something I might attain, possess and finally know. But freedom then becomes another thing the self wants to acquire for itself. If genuinely unbounded freedom entails dissolution of the boundary, there may be no experience of enlightenment in the ordinary sense because there is no longer the same bounded position there to possess it. The person does not evaporate. You can still have a name, a house, a car and a PlayStation. What disappears is the necessity of organising existence around the assumption that all these things belong to some separate and enduring entity at the centre of the show.

That becomes more troublesome once we look beyond private psychology. Much of social, economic and political life is organised around selves imagined as persistent entities with interests to defend, identities to maintain, possessions to accumulate and futures to secure. Yet much of what any person takes to be their own arrives from elsewhere: language, values, desires, categories, technologies and expectations that were here before us and will continue after us. We hold these things closely, call the resulting coherence a self, then construct economies, institutions and considerable amounts of human misery around keeping it intact. The self may therefore be less a foundation than a transient function of a much larger relational field. Even experience, usually treated as the final floor beneath which explanation cannot descend, may itself be another surface. There is something underneath it, although “underneath” is almost certainly the wrong word. The void is not simply what we have failed to explain. It is the necessary difference through which a self, a world and experience itself can appear at all.