How to Make Sense of Your Self
Socrates, as pundits like me never tire of reminding you, implored us to know ourselves. I like Socrates, because he took nothing for granted.
How do we know ourselves?
The first step is to note that it requires that we use our minds. Obvious, perhaps, but it’s often useful to state the obvious. We use our minds to make observations. It is also helpful to record our observations, so that we may compare them to further observations at a later date. It should be obvious that I advocate a scientific approach to self-discovery. I am not averse to using intuition. But intuition is only a guide. True knowledge requires good observations and good theories. Good observations can be repeated, and good theories are disprovable. Intuition cannot be repeated, and is not disprovable, and thus it is weaker than science and logic, in the long run. Intuition, in fact, is a starting point. Intuition gives us direction.
How do we use our minds to observe our own minds? Primarily by learning to observe and identify our feelings. We cannot identify our feelings reliably by simply giving them names or attempting (fruitlessly) to assess their intensities. Intensity of feeling is subjective, and a single word like a name for something is inherently unreliable. Feelings are understood by the context in which we experience them. Feelings do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in relation to our other experiences. Emotions result from causes: physical sensation, symbolic understanding, and also other emotions. The experience of feelings in turn leads to observable effects. Our feelings affect our attitudes, our moods, and the functioning of our bodies. By understanding our emotional responses to our experiences, we make steps towards understand ourselves.
It is almost possible to see feelings as a kind of ephemeral, intermediate state between non-emotional experiences and non-emotional responses. I do not mean that human beings are mere stimulus response-based organisms, however we have evolved from them, and our cells and other component biological parts depend on stimulus-response mechanisms, so it would be presumptuous to believe that our brains (and the minds to which they give rise) are completely free of stimulus-response behaviours. Feelings are the subjective experience of the feedback systems of the mind from which emotions emerge in a process of mathematical complexity. The feedback systems and our experience of them cannot be discounted, but sometimes it is useful to put them to one side, especially when they risk overwhelming our understanding.
In addition to our feelings, human beings also think logically, or at least linearly, about our experiences. Language helps us to systematize our otherwise chaotic thoughts. Some languages (or language variants) are more expressive, and others are more systematic. It is useful to be able to use both. It has been discovered by sociologists that improving our facility with language goes a long way to helping us to express ourselves, and this has many positive benefits. We need the symbols that language provides in order to communicate, but even more important, we need those symbols in order to think! And thinking is the way in which we achieve reliable understanding, which is a necessary pre-requisite of communication. You could say that we need to learn to communicate to ourselves before we can communicate to others.
Language requires both content (vocabulary) and structure. Language has structure on different levels. Syntactic and grammatical structure are basic to forming comprehensible ideas. Logic is necessary for the work of evaluating ideas in relation to other ideas. If you can agree that thinking is essential to describing the self (description being the result of observation), then you should be able to agree that logic is essential to ensuring the consistency of those descriptions, and also to making useful interpretative conclusions based on them.
In short, understanding of the self is similar to the understanding of anything else. By the abilities of the analytical portion of our minds, we can deduce our own natures. We can see what things make us feel good and bad, and which feelings underlie our behaviours, which we inevitably tend to evaluate either morally or aesthetically. Evaluating our environments, our feelings, our thinking, and our behaviour is integral to the act of determining who we are, because we only exist in terms of how we compare to both our ideal of how we wish to be, and how we compare to other people. The human self, like everything else, is relative; it is not an absolute.