Reason is an underrated way to be authentic

John Stuart Mill, notetaking, rationality, and emotion

Orhan Pamuk’s notebook

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This is the third part of a series but can be read independently. Part 1 was titled “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process” and part 2 “Becoming perceptive.”

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In August, I wrote a post about how things that have turned out well in my life have tended to follow the same design process. In one sentence: they grew from small playful experiments that swelled into something more complex.

I talked about this in terms of form-context-fit. A form (a glove, let’s say) is good if it fits the context it is designed for (the hand). Hence: to find the right form you have to study the context. And this is why the relationships, jobs, and essays that I found by doing playful experiments ended up good: having grown in the context, they were organically shaped to fit it, unlike the forms I came up with by, for example, looking in a university catalog and fantasizing about different lines of work.

When it comes to “forms” like careers and relationships, the context you are designing for has two important parts. The first is the external world. You have to figure out how stuff works to know if a specific form is feasible; you have to develop your perceptiveness so you can see opportunities that you can leverage to find a fit; and so on. I talked about this in the second part. Today I want to discuss the other part of the context, namely, you.

And this is where it gets murky.

I think most people have the experience that they have something like an authentic self, and when they are in situations that resonates with this, it feels alive. It fits.¹

But it is not entirely clear what this true self is. What exactly is it we are trying to be authentic towards? How can you know that you have found your core? And how do you know what fits it?

These questions are often viewed through a romantic lens: the thing you want to be true to is something indescribable, a “felt” calling, something you reach by “trusting your intuition” or “listening to your body.”

But even if we accept that there is something like a true self, it seems hard to argue that emotions and intuitions can reliably guide us there. Our emotions and intuitions, first of all, do not come from within most of the time; they are implanted and controlled by forces outside of us. Second, what we feel is often unmoored from reality. Finally, and most importantly for the point I want to make in this essay, our emotions and intuitions are littered with contradictions.

To take a simple example: when I was at the gallery where I worked until last week, my low blood sugar cravings sometimes told me that it was ok to take a pastry from the café. But when I want to feel like a upright person, I don’t believe in taking stuff that isn’t mine. So which is it? If I follow my gut and eat the pastry, I will be true to myself in the moment, while betraying other versions of me.

To be clear, I do think our intuitions and emotions tell us crucial things. Intuitions are, partly, compressed representations of our experiences and can, if we are experienced, hold more than we can put into words. Emotions are pointers to what we need to flourish as humans, and so form the basis of our ethics. (See this footnote² for more reflections about the value of intuition and emotion.) But as valuable as this is, we can do better than just follow these contradictory winds as they pull us first one way, then another, like a plastic bag in the wind.

To get at a more reliable way to be true to ourselves (and design a life that fits us), I want to talk about how many philosophers tended to think about this problem before the Romantic era. I find the older way more useful.

Confronting contradictions

To illustrate what I want to talk about, let me quote a passage from John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, a book I highly recommend. In the passage Mill is 26 years old, he’s working at the East India Company, and I get the sense that he’s still affected by a depression that came over him a few years prior and unsettled his self-identity. 

“I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places,” Mill writes with reference, primarily, to the effect Coleridge—a romantic—had on the utilitarian philosophy Mill had inherited from his father. But, Mill writes,

I never allowed [my system of thought] to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.

Mill is trying to figure out what he believes is true, and what he can stand for, and how to live. But the way he does it is, at first glance, the opposite of feeling: he is constructing a system of thought, a philosophy. He is hunting down the contradictions in his intuitions and his thoughts; he insists on finding ways of thinking that allow him to resolve these contradictions.

Importantly, he did this in writing. Using writing as a tool to understand yourself and create coherence in your values is a practice that goes back, at least, to Antiquity. Epicurus, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, and many others (who we know Mill read as a child, by the way) advocated using ethopoeitical writing to put our thoughts in order, figure out what is true, and shape our character so that we live our values.

Here is one way to approach this kind of writing. You write down your thoughts, feelings, and intuitions about decisions you are making—like a lot of people already do when thinking through hard problems. Then (this is the main difference) instead of letting the note rot on your phone, you set up some system that makes sure that you revisit your reflections when you think about the same topic again. This is a big theme in Seneca and Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius. You want to return to your notes so you can enter into a dialogue with them, refine your thoughts, and integrate past insights with what you’ve learned in the meantime. In this way, the notes act as a self-organizing system that accumulates, integrates, and generalizes intuitions and insights. (I go into more detail about how I do this in this footnote.³)

Writing in this way, it is hard to ignore the inconsistencies in your thoughts. You are forced to wrestle with the contradictions. Which of the clashing intuitions or principles do you believe in? Or is there perhaps a third, deeper way of thinking about it that resolves the contradiction?

This type of reflection is closely related to what the philosopher John Rawls calls the method of reflective equilibrium, which goes something like this:

1. You look at your intuitions in various situations and formulate principles that fit what you see.

2. To see if your principles hold up, you look at more cases (in particular, counterexamples) and consider other perspectives.

3. If your first principles do not fit the new cases, you adjust them to “better fit the data.” But, importantly, you do not adjust only your principles; you adjust your intuitions and emotions, too. Perhaps your intuitions were wrong; perhaps it wasn’t right of you to feel that way.

4. This gradual correction continues until no further improvements come to mind. For now.

While the method of reflective equilibrium was originally framed as an exercise that happens between different people, I’m talking about using it to reach agreement with yourself across time, or to negotiate between different parts of you in the present (as in internal family systems therapy). To return to the example from above, when low blood sugar Henrik thinks that it is ok to steal pastries at the gallery and later regret it, I can use reflection to set the cravings in dialogue with my righteousness and figure out which feels more core to me.

Then living authentically means: acting in line with whatever is most core.

Reason vs emotion

There are several critiques you can raise against treating being true to yourself as an intellectual exercise in this way. I will not cover all of these critiques, but I want to discuss one. It is the objection that working in this way is over-intellectualized and makes you emotionally numb (and hence disconnected from the source of human flourishing).

I think this critique is fair when it comes to the Stoics and many Enlightenment thinkers, including Mill’s father (“For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything that has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.”) They thought that the truth about how to live was, more or less, the same for everyone. So even though they valued thinking for yourself, the aim of that wasn’t so much to figure out what feels right to you, as to figure out what is right, for everyone, and then get yourself to act that way.

I’m wary of this.

But, as John Stuart Mill is a great example of,⁴ reason, logic, and systematic writing is compatible with taking your feelings seriously. It can even help you feel more deeply; doing this just requires attentiveness.

As I gestured at earlier, I view reason (partly) as a way to bring different parts and versions of me into a conversation with each other, so they can share their intuitions and experiences and reach a shared understanding that feels authentic to both. Let me talk about how this can look when I think in writing.

I have over the last decade, in a continual dialogue with myself, formulated a comprehensive idea about how I want to live, and I have set up habits and principles that help me stay true to that. I go up at 5 every morning, 7 days a week, to write for 4 hours before the kids wake up; I aim to keep the internet off until later afternoon; I meditate for five minutes before I hang out with the kids so that I will be fully present with them; and so on.

Some days, confronted with this system, it feels totalitarian. I feel dead inside sitting down at my desk before dawn.

A mistake I have sometimes made when this deadness comes over me is to force myself to act out the system, pushing the feeling down. This makes me lose contact with myself. I lack direction, I drift.

As Peter M. Senge writes in the introduction to David Bohm’s On Dialogue:

Our personal meaning starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed. The incoherence increases when past meaning is imposed on present situations. As this continues, yesterday’s meaning becomes today’s dogma, often losing much of its original meaningfulness in the process. 

A much more useful thing to do when my system starts to feel like a dead dogma is to go, “. . . oh? huh? Something feels a little off here?” and then sit with that feeling for five, ten minutes, or however long it needs to unfold.

When I do that, two things happen. 

First, there is a depolarization, meaning when I make sure that my emotion “feels heard,” the emotion stops seeing my system as an enemy. It relaxes and opens up. I sometimes get tears in my eyes; it is a bit like when, after a fight with a partner, you break through and manage to see each other and all tension just snaps away. “Oh, sorry, I was stupid.” “No, I was stupid!” I no longer see my system as an opponent but a chorus of past me’s that come toward me in a dialogue across time.

But this isn’t me hyping myself into believing what my system demands of me (the way Lyndon B. Johnson could work himself up emotionally to believe any political position if he had to make a speech about it), because—

Second, when I depolarize, I (nearly) always discover that my resistance to the system has some insight. By reconceptualizing my beliefs and goals in light of this insight, I deepen my system, making it more authentic, resonant, flourishing, and alive.

Authenticity as dialogue

By surfacing my conflicting intuitions and parts, I see myself more whole.

And it is the writing and the ideal of intellectual consistency that forces these conversations to the surface (“When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions . . . ”). If I had said, well my feelings are mysterious, they go one way now, then another—I would not have had the opportunity to have this dialogue with myself.

In this way, reason actually becomes a process that makes me less numb to myself. By engaging myself across time, I can build layers of complexity and precision that let me go deeper than I can without the support of logic, reason, and writing. Writing is a tool for emotion as much as a tool for thought.

I’m not saying this is easy. It is clearly common for people to think themselves numb. You have to take that risk seriously. Also, you have to accept that not everything can be captured in language and be sensitive to that leftover that floats around languageless in your body.

But, these caveats aside, there is something deep about this older conception of how to be true to yourself, deeper than the pure feelings-based approaches to authenticity that are common today.

It is like the upwind that lets birds of prey soar in the mountains: if there is only emotional wind, or only the hard rock of reason, there is no lift. You need both the mountain and the wind to soar.

The thing we are trying to get at (”your true self”) is such a complex thing. We can’t expect that it will be possible to find it using only one technique, nor capture its full nuance in any one framework. But by looking at it from many perspectives, we see more aspects of it. And we can then set these perspectives in dialogue with each other to lure out more and more insight as we try to reconcile them.

Reading what I have written above, I realize what I’m saying sounds a bit more navelgrazing than I mean it. So I should add: this is not something that you just sit down at your desk to do once, or by going off into the woods to meditate for a week. Rather, it happens, piece by piece, day by day, as you act out what you think you stand for, get feedback from reality, and reflect on that—as you gradually unfold a life that fits you to the world, and the world to you.

This is a complex topic and if you want a more well-rounded view of what I’m saying, I recommend reading:

1. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

2. How to think in writing

3. Two kinds of introspection

4. Almost everyone I know would do well thinking more about what to focus on

There are also a bunch of good essays and books by others that I often return to when thinking about this topic:

1. “Seeing more whole” and “On Green” by Joe Carlsmith

2. Autobiography (ebook) and On Liberty (ebook) and “Essays on Bentham and Coleridge” by John Stuart Mill

3. Mill on Liberty: A Defence (pdf) by John Gray (which provides a good overview of Mill’s philosophy of individuality, autonomy, authenticity, and so on—topics he never wrote a full treatise on but only left remarks about here and there in other works).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum (only the first four chapters) is a good work on the philosophy of emotion, and how emotion connects with cognition and ethics.

5. “Self-writing” by Foucault is a good introduction to how writing was used as a tool for thought and character formation during Antiquity.

Any other recommendations?

Acknowledgements

Spencer

did the heavy lifting with the editing on this one. Henry Oliver gave me reading recommendations for Mill (he has not read a draft for the essay, so I’m not sure if he approves of my reading). Oliver also has a good post on Mill.

1. You can have good relationships and careers without being true to yourself—if you do things out of duty, for example. My grandparents lived like that, and I think it is beautiful. But it feels good when there is a fit between how you live and your interiority, and it makes it easier to iterate toward forms that are innovative and bring new value and meaning into the world.

2. Intuitions are a type of pattern matching, closely entwined with perception. They are qualified guesses. “Based on my understanding of the world, which is a compressed representation of what I have experienced [footnote: and also some things that are hardcoded into my genes because of stuff my ancestors experienced]—I think this guy is a sociopath.” It is a bit like how when you feed a machine learning algorithm with data, the algorithm can compress that data into a predictive model that captures important features of the data set: our intuitions are a very dense representation of our experiences. The richer and more well-calibrated your experiences are, the more insight your intuitions contain.

Inversely and importantly: if you are inexperienced, your intuitions might be noise.

Emotions, on the other hand, are the source of our values. We feel anger because we perceive that a political decision threatens the well-being of our children. We feel jealousy because a rival got something that we perceive that we need to flourish. Emotions are, in other words, not just waves of irrational energies that crash over us: they are a type of cognition. It is a part of cognition that assigns values to things, so we can make priorities and protect what is central to our well-being, or flourishing.

Intuition, then, encodes information about reality, and emotions gesture at a diffuse value system that we operate by, values connected to human flourishing. And we want to leverage the insights these processes surface. But we, also, want to be wary of how unreliable and filled with contradictions they are.

3. I use both a paper notebook and Obsidian, a notetaking system. Let me describe the notebook first because that is the easiest. I simply keep a journal where I write down what is on my (when I was younger I used to vent in my journal but that was not a positive thing for me, so now I focus on reflection). Then, about once a week, I reread what I have written and make an index. That is, I number the pages and then in the back of the notebook I write “parenting: 4, 37b, 61” (the b is because I only number the left side on each foldup to save time, and then call the right side of foldup 37, 37b). And then I go back and reread what I was saying the other times I wrote about the same topic.

In Obsidian, I’m a bit more structured.

There I also start by brain dumping in a note. But then I go through it and turn that brain dump into several notes, each containing precisely one idea. I put a summary of that idea in the title: this is important. Since I use Obsidian, I can link my notes together by typing [[the title inside square brackets]], and so use one note as part of the argument of another. (I also use this capacity to link to create a note called [[index]] where I collect links to important ideas, so that I can find my way back into my network of ideas.

Now, a little later, I am in another situation where the principles and ideas that I have written about before apply—so I go back to read it, only to discover that this time, my previous thoughts feel a bit off to me now. As I reason about why, I rewrite the note to generalize it so it is true for both the current situation and the past one. I enrich it with a bit more experience, making it a bit more general and wise.

Sometimes, this rewrite makes me change my mind. Then I change the title. Let's say I have come to the conclusion that [[It is always good to trust your feelings]]. And then that blows up in my face, so I have to rewrite it as [[Intuitions are an important input into the decision-making process but need to be validated]]. And this is the cool thing about Obsidian, because what happens now? Every note using the title of this note as a part of another argument will have been updated, so when I revisit a note that uses the note about feelings as part of a wider argument, that sentence will now have changed! And that is a reminder to rewrite this note to incorporate that change, which might, or might not, lead me to revise my understanding of this idea too, causing me to change another title, letting the new insight cascade through the system.

It takes some practice to write in this way, and I recommend looking at Andy Matuschak’s notes to get a feel for one way to structure this kind of writing. Once you get going, writing in this way turns all of those throwaway notes that you make any way into a sort of self-organizing system that accumulates insight. Also, I should add: the point of a notetaking system is to help you get stuff done, and make progress on stuff that is meaningful to you, so don’t spend too much time thinking about the tool.

4.  John Stuart Mill’s philosophy is useful when it comes to these questions because he deeply wrestled with both the Enlightenment tradition and the Romanticism of his age, and integrated the insights from both. For an overview, read John Gray’s Mill on Liberty. Here is an excerpt:

Mill’s position here is a complex one. On the one hand, like Aristotle, he affirmed that men were the makers of their own characters. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Mill held to the Romantic belief that each has a quiddity or essence which awaits his discovery and which, if he is lucky, he may express in any one of a small number of styles of life. 

And:

We come now to a fundamental aspect of Mill’s theory of individuality, namely his claim that a man who attains or displays individuality will have desires and projects of his own—he will, in the idiom I have adopted, exhibit authenticity. A crucial question, now, is how authenticity is related to autonomy. On some accounts, such as Ladenson’s, authenticity is collapsible into autonomy. As Ladenson puts it, ‘For Mill… the cultivation of individuality is the development of reason.’ Though that claim captures an aspect of Mill’s theory of individuality, it neglects an aspect, too. For Mill, as I have pointed out, a man displays individuality only if his desires and projects are his own. No doubt, reason—self-criticism, careful thought and so on—will typically be an indispensable means for any agent to determine what are his projects and desires; but the point is that for Mill, this is partly a matter of discovery. On Mill’s account, autonomy and authenticity are not equivalent, since a man could display autonomy in a very high measure, and yet (in virtue of false beliefs, perhaps) be mistaken as to where his unique endowments and potentialities lie. Part of the rationale for encouraging experiments in living, after all, is that they are aids in attaining self-knowledge (which may, in turn, be useful to others).