Our subjectivity means we can never truly grasp an accurate autobiographical account of ourselves. But we shouldn't be trying to, explains Emma Syea. Auto-noetic consciousness positions the self within a narrative setting that paints the big picture of who we are. 

What if you cannot reliably know yourself? What if the picture you have of yourself as a person, essential to making sense of your experiences and your relations to others, turned out to be systematically mistaken?

SUGGESTED READING Leading philosophers at HowTheLightGetsIn Global By Self-knowledge is crucial for understanding our beliefs, our desires, our attitudes, our motivations, and our values. It sheds light on our interactions with others. It allows us to project forward into the future.  One means by which people try to search for and express a conception of themselves is through the practice of autobiography. By recounting our past experiences, we aim to uncover insights and to build up a picture of ourselves. Through self-documentation, we hope for self-knowledge.

But is this hope misplaced? Trying to grasp the self through such a subjective lens seems problematic – the worry is that any description we give of ourselves will inevitably be distorted by firstly, our perspective and secondly, the unreliability of our memory. Is it actually possible to provide an accurate account of ourselves?

Trying to grasp the self through such a subjective lens seems problematic.

When constructing an autobiography, the assumption is that our memories have been neatly catalogued and archived, their content preserved, ready to be called upon as we wish. Having access to this library of memories implies a sense of control - that we are free to dip in and out of our memories, and that we may use them to assemble a truthful account of our lives.  But, as Virginia Woolf notes, memory is a ‘seamstress, and a capricious one at that’.  Whilst certain types of memory such as procedural memory (responsible for motor skills like knowing how to walk or ride a bike) are reliable, the type of memory implicated in autobiography – episodic memory – is notoriously unreliable. Episodic memories do not tend to manifest as exact reproductions of our past experiences. Instead our experiences are summarised, altered, condensed, and sometimes even censored altogether.