We do not know everything. Awareness of this fact is an important first step in the intellectual domain. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear. [Erich Fromm] Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those…
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Value for Sunday of Week 15 in the season of Sowing
Developing, Encouraging and Promoting Self-Awareness
Humans are aware of themselves at a level and to a degree not seen in any other species. The human child progressively becomes self-aware during the first four or five years of life. This self-awareness is the cornerstone of the intellectual component of self-worth.
- If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. [Daniel Goleman]
- Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad. [attributed to Debbie Ford]
- Look at the evidence and to be willing to question your own truths, and to be willing to scrutinize things that you hold dearly because that way, that transparency, that self-awareness, will protect you from ever becoming somebody that whose beliefs somehow make them have myopic vision about what could be. [Jason Silva]
Real
True Narratives
- John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (Knopf, 1989).
- Sara Shandler, Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self (Harper Paperbacks, 1999).
- Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, 2011). “. . . by the time Krasner met (Jackson) Pollock she was already extraordinarily self-aware. She had a profound grasp of modern art, deeper though less instinctive than Pollock’s . . . And she knew she enjoyed being with exciting, challenging men . . .”
- Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018): “Freud said that of all men only Nietzsche truly knew himself . . .”
- Edmund White, My Lives: An Autobiography (Ecco, 2006): “He has a luxuriantly observant memory, and his past is evoked with keen feeling as well as a pervasive self-deprecating wit.”
- Liz Phair, Horror Stories: A Memoir (Random House, 2019): “More often than not in this uniquely thoughtful, self-aware memoir, the horrors she describes are mistakes she made, ethical challenges she failed, and moments of anxiety, bewilderment and being lost, often literally and sometimes because of her own flawed decisions.”
Not self-aware:
- Darryl W. Bullock, Florence! Foster!! Jenkins!!!: The Life of the World’s Worst Opera Singer (The Overlook Press, 2016):. People said she could not sing. She sang anyway.
- Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “. . . Challenges America’s Self-Deceptions”.
Technical and Analytical Readings
Academicians discuss self-awareness from many perspectives. For our purposes, I will divide the analyses into three categories: those that explore the experience of self-awareness and personal development (mainly in the realm of psychology) and those that explore the foundations of self-consciousness (mainly in the realm of neuroscience). Philosophers venture into both areas, though most of their work has focused on the essence and foundations of consciousness.
Neuroscience:
- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (Pantheon, 2010).
- Michael Ferreri and Robert J. Sternberg, eds., Self-Awareness: Its Nature and Development (The Guilford Press, 1998).
- Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford, eds., Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (MIT Press, 2006).
- Uriah Kriegel, Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Christopher S. Hill, Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007).
- Stephen Fleming, Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness (Basic Books, 2021): “The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.”
Psychology:
- Thomas Shelley Duval, Paul J. Silvia & Neal Lalwani, Self-Awareness & Causal Attribution: A Dual Systems Theory (Springer, 2001).
- Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself: Self-Awareness Meets the Inner Conversation (Soulux Press, 2017).
- Patrick King, The Art of Self-Awareness: How to Dig Deep, Introspect, Discover Your Blind Spots, and Truly Know Thyself (PKCS Media, 2022).
- Jerome Kagan, The Second Year The Emergence of Self-Awareness (Harvard University Press, 1981).
- Philippe Rochat, Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell and Maria L. Boccia, eds., Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans Developmental Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- G. Lynn Stevens and George Graham, When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (MIT Press, 2000).
- Andreas Demetriou and Smaragda Kazi, Unity and Modularity in the Mind and the Self: Studies on the relationships between self-awareness, personality, and intellectual development from childhood to adolescence (Routledge, 2000).
- Bernard D. Beitman and Jyonsa Nair, eds., Self-Awareness Deficits in Psychiatric Patients: Neurobiology, Assessment, and Treatment (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).
- Thomas Shelley Duval, Paul J. Silvia and Neal Lalwani, Self-Awareness & Causal Attribution: A Dual Systems Theory (Springer, 2001).
- Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015): “You’ll learn about our overzealousness to see patterns, our hindsight bias, our loss aversion, the illusions of randomness and the importance of the scientific method, all in under 300 pages of text. But there isn’t much in ‘Mindware’ that is new, and if you’ve read some of the many recent books on the unconscious, randomness, decision making and pop economics, then the material covered here will be familiar to you.”
- Phylis J. Philipson & Juneau Mahan Gary, Awareness in Action: Self-Awareness and Group Process (University Press of America, 2015).
Philosophy:
- Saulius Geniusas, ed., Varieties of Self-Awareness: New Perspectives from Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Comparative Philosophy (Springer, 2023).
- Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 2007).
- Dan Zahavi, ed., Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity: Central Topics in Phenomenology (Springer, 2010).
- Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (MIT Press, 2006).
- Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
- Dan Zahavi, Thor Grünbaum and Josef Parnas, eds., The Structure and Develpment of Self-Consciousness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2004).
- Joëlle Proust, The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Robert J. Howell, Self-Awareness and The Elusive Subject (Oxford University Press, 2023).
- Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- Robert W. Lurz, The Philosophy of Animal Minds (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Hector-Neri Castañeda, James G. Hart and Tomis Kapitan, eds., The Phenomeno-Logic of the I (Indiana University Press, 1999).
- Andrew Brook and Richard C. DeVidi, eds., Self-reference and Self-awareness (John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2003).
- David Woodruff Smith, Mind World: Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Paul Williams: Still Alive: the aged songwriter and musician displays considerable self-awareness in this documentary, a retrospective on an up-and-down life
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- E. Lockhart, We Were Liars: A Novel (Delacorte Press, 2014): “A privileged teenager named Cadence, who spends summers on an island owned by generations of her mother’s family, narrates an addictively enigmatic story. Something is amiss on the island, and a sudden tragedy only deepens the mystery — until all is explained in a shocking ending that will make you want to start the book all over again.”
Novels, from the dark side:
- Kate Elizabeth, My Dark Vanessa: A Novel (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020): “There are flashes of clarity. When Vanessa sees Strane shove her dog off the couch. When he continues to have sex with her for the first time even though she is crying. When he threatens that she will have to go into foster care if she tells anyone. When she finds out he betrayed her at a crucial moment. But then she reverts to the love story. She protects the idea of their being in love because she needs it.”
- Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter: A Novel (Europa, 2025): “Miller’s great strength, developed over nearly 30 years, is his ability to inhabit the inner lives of his characters, no matter how historically distant from our own. In ‘The Land in Winter’ he charts the psychological blind spots of his four principals, who are stranded between the hidebound postwar conventions of their youth and the new permissive age that lies just around the corner.”
Poetry
My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
And little engines with tracks to run on
And telephones of cans and thread.
I played the cornet and painted pictures,
Modeled in clay and took the part
Of the villain in the “Octoroon.”
But then at twenty-one I married
And had to live, and so, to live
I learned the trade of making watches
And kept the jewelry store on the square,
Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, —
Not of business, but of the engine
I studied the calculus to build.
And all Spoon River watched and waited
To see it work, but it never worked.
And a few kind souls believed my genius
Was somehow hampered by the store.
It wasn’t true. The truth was this:
I didn’t have the brains.
[Edgar Lee Masters, “Walter Simmons”]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Coleman Hawkins is widely considered to be “first great tenor sax player”, and is called the “Father of the Tenor Saxophone”. “His pioneering use of the tenor saxophone brought the instrument into common use in dance and jazz bands throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.” He “could read music before the printed word. He began piano lessons at five, learned the cello, and picked up the C melody saxophone at nine. He played his first paying gig at twelve . . .” “. . . he developed a unique, full-bodied tone and started employing long, rich, smoothly connected sets of notes that he often played independently of the beat.” He brought the saxophone into the jazz mainstream, so we could say that the made the jazz world aware of the instrument’s potential. “Hawkins invented the tenor saxophone in the way Richardson invented the novel: he took an often misunderstood instrument and made it work right for the first time.” In doing that, he also made saxophonists more aware of the possibilities open to them. For example, Sonny Rollins “considered Hawkins his main influence”. Hawkins’ output includes:
- His playlists, including his albums;
- Live: Art Ford’s jazz party, 8/18/58; (50’); and
- Live with Harry Edison Quartet at Wembley Town Hall, London, October 1964 (44’).
Compositions:
- Brazilian Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993) composed five books of Ponteios (see recordings by Isabel Mourão and Max Barros) (approx. 95-97’) (list of recorded performances), short pieces for piano in the style of preludes. “The word ponteio was taken from the popular music repertoire in which it referred to a freely composed instrumental melody, generally played by pluckin the strings of the guitar.” “All the Ponteios have in common a certain internal rubato that is achieved through subtle inflections of tempo and supported by a network of astonishingly varied syncopated figurations.” Their atonality, combined with the preparatory style of the prelude, suggests the process of becoming self-aware.
- Pierre Boulez, Sur incises for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists (1998) (approx. 37-39’) (list of recorded performances) explores “the myriad ways the sound of three pianos can be extended by adding three harps and three percussionists (playing mallets and other tuned instruments) to the basic ensemble.” It can also be heard to reflect the piano’s internal life, influenced by those elements. In explaining the work, Boulez remarked: “‘You don't become a painter by looking at a landscape but by looking at a painting’, said André Malraux. And that is perfectly true: you become a musician because you have looked at music, studied composers, which makes it possible to deduce a number of things and to see the real consequences of the gesture of the composer who preceded you.”
- Charles-Marie Widor, Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 13/1 (1872) (approx. 36-39’) (list of recorded performances); and Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 13/2 (1872, rev. 1887) (approx. 35’) (list of recorded performances): These are two early works in this genre, and in the composer’s output.
Albums:
- Sarah Elizabeth Charles, “Inner Dialogue” (2015) (57’) “is a work of confidence and maturity, an intensely personal musical statement, and a hip blend of styles, suggestions, and sounds.”
- Geoff Eales, “Invocation” (2014) (67’): Eales writes: “One of the biggest challenges facing an improvising musician is to deliver a performance that holds the attention of the listener when playing completely solo. To achieve success, one must dig deep into one’s musical psyche in order to invoke the muse within.”
- Soft Works, “Abracadabra” (2003) (60’): Elton Dean’s saxophone is forward among the quartet, as if in a conversation with himself.
- India Gailey, “To You Through” (2022) (38’): “For this, her second solo album, Nova Scotia cellist India Gailey (b. 1992) put together a program of six works from a multigenerational selection of living composers—five by others, and one by herself.” She says that each selection “feels like a part of me”.
- Yulia Ayrapetyan, “Komitas: Songs” (2022) (71’): these songs, arranged as short pieces for piano, convey a sense of self-awareness. The composer became a priest but then pursued other paths, leading to irresolvable conflicts with the church. His music suggests that he was clear about who he was.
- Catrin Finch & Aoife Ní Bhriain, “Double You” (2023) (47’): “Running through their stories – as individual creatives, remarkable women, and now as an inspirational duo – are universal themes of identity, self-belief and the courage to find yourself and follow your own path.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Judy Collins, “Both Sides Now” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Pablo Picasso, Girl in Front of Mirror (1932)
- Edouard Manet, Woman Before a Mirror (1877)
- Peter Paul Rubens, Woman with a Mirror (1640)
- Giovanni Bellini, Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror (1515)
Film and Stage
- Face to Face, about a woman who “comes to the realization that she doesn't understand the nature of her own inner reality”
- Raging Bull: after years of self-destructive behavior, a world-champion boxer“emerges with a gleam of self-awareness”; one review calls the film “a landscape of the soul”
- Marguerite is a wealthy woman who thinks she can sing, and is cruelly encouraged by her “friends”, who want something.
