The title of Arnold Ludwig’s latest book shows that the subject matter is both psychological and philosophical. It also signals the problems it faces. “The self” is a term that seems to cause far more confusion than clarification. It sounds good, but it is so contested by different theories and is used in so many ways in popular discourse that it is either used in a precise, highly theoretical fashion, or, much more often, in a vague and indeterminate way that brings together all sorts of ideas. Ludwig uses the second approach.

The fundamental premise of How Do We Know Who We Are? is fascinating. There are many long-standing problems involved in understanding the self that have been explored both by philosophers and psychologists. They are hard problems, such as ‘what is the nature of authenticity?,’ ‘how much control do we have over our lives?,’ and ‘to what extent must a person’s life be unified by some theme or thread of narrative?’ Most theorists approach these questions from a high level of abstraction. Even those with plenty of clinical experience tend to have a theoretical bias which shapes their descriptions of people, and they rarely get to meet anyone in their patient’s life apart from the patient. Ludwig mines a potentially rich alternative approach: the thoughts of biographers. He interviewed many biographers of many different famous people including Marilyn Monroe, Hitler, Stalin, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Laurence Olivier, Anne Sexton, George Gershwin and John Cheever. In writing a biography, one has to grapple with how to portray a person and get to the truth of that person’s being. Biography can be a profoundly philosophical enterprise, and even those biographers who have no interest in philosophy inevitably have to make assumptions about what it is describe a person’s life. Ludwig uses his interviews both to illustrate the philosophical problems that arise in understanding the nature of self, and also to guide him towards answers to those problems.

Ludwig takes interesting philosophical positions. He doesn’t identify himself with any well-established school of thought, but his rejection of the notions of “true self” and “authenticity” gives his thought a post-modern slant. I rejoiced on reading “All that the distinction between a true and a false self signifies is a value judgment, and a not necessarily defensible one at that, which arbitrarily presupposes that the absence of all conflict represents the most natural state.”, (49), because that’s precisely what I argued in one chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation a few years ago. I’m not suggesting that Ludwig ever was aware of my dissertation, which has simply gathered dust since it was first put on library selves. It was simply good to find that someone else sees things in the same way that I do. Much later in the book Ludwig puts the same point in a different way; “Being authentic is just as much a defined social role and part and parcel of certain kinds of life stories as being inauthentic.” (247.) These are bold ideas which deserve careful investigation, and Ludwig deserves credit for initiating an innovative and promising research project.

Unfortunately How Do We Know Who We Are? does not live up to its potential. It suffers from having too many ideas, not enough unity, and lots of woolly thinking. Ludwig jumps from one topic to another with rapidity, without ever really pressing his argument. Most of the time it is not entirely clear what his argument is. There are many interesting references to different theories and different authors, but it isn’t clear how it all fits together. The quotations of biographers are frustratingly short and uninformative. Maybe Ludwig has attempted to do too much in one book–at its worst it becomes a pop-psychology catalog of familiar ideas and experiments in social and cognitive psychology. But at its best it manages to be enormously thought-provoking and useful as a starting point for further discussion.

Categories: Philosophical