Self-Knowledge through Cross-Cultural Contact
The following post is Part VII in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I define the term “self-knowledge,” and then discuss what makes it a useful framework for understanding Manchuria’s intellectual spaces.
In the dissertation, I investigate the myriad ways Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria created, defined, and transformed the collective self, or perhaps more accurately, their collective selves. The following chapters takes self-knowledge to mean the experiences, cultural symbols, discursive language, emotions and ideas shared among people in a group that are often, but not always, appropriated with the purpose of fostering communitas or community sentiment. By what processes did intellectuals produce self-knowledge and why?
My study takes a social approach to self-knowledge. Sociologist Darin Weinberg, for instance, recommends stepping away from a first-person perspective of the self in which individuals have what philosophers refer to as “privileged access” to their own mental life.[1] Weinberg instead argues that knowing oneself defies “personal possession” because “self-knowledge is a dynamic and ongoing collective accomplishment rather than a strictly private personal assessment.”[2] By this definition, self-knowledge entails generating subjectivity that can be shared by like-minded people. A social conceptualization suggests that self-knowledge may be a critical factor in the process whereby one collective identity supersedes another.
One of the main premises of this thesis is that shared experiences lead to collective knowledge, which serves as a precursor to imagining a community. Knowledge of the collective self in turn reinforces a sense of community. What happens to self-knowledge in different settings where cross-cultural contact occurred? I aim to show how self-knowledge changes and to explain how different spaces affected the forms of self-knowledge produced through Chinese and Korean intellectual interaction.
In connection with intertextual exchange discussed above, my dissertation considers writing to be a significant form of self-knowledge. Drawing from the semiotician Theo van Leeuwen, I view writing as the practice of recontextualizing discourses. In other words, intellectual writing reflects values and ideas that are important to society at any given time. Van Leeuwen stresses that discourses do not merely exist in written form, but originate as “social cognitions,” a form of conscious knowledge because it is known across individuals.[3] Hence, a writer re-contextualizes previously held notions and ideas by giving them form in writing. I discuss the journal publications and army songs as expressions of self-knowledge for the purpose of reconstructing the discourses around Chinese and Korean interaction the participants themselves used.
Social cognitions, especially in their written form, sustain the extensive and complex processes involved in nation-building, a primary concern for the thesis. Representing a collective self in writing has historically been seen as a legitimate way to determine who “we” are and why “we” do things. Because of how the written word has been linked to the process of legitimating nations and nationalism, this thesis recognizes that some forms or platforms for self-knowledge production were considered more useful, authentic, and applicable to nation building than others in the conceived sense.
[1] Brie Gertler, Bill Brewer, and Stewart Cohen, Privileged Access: Philosophical Accounts of Self-Knowledge (Florence, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2003) is one point of entry into the philosophies behind the concept of self-knowledge. See also Brie Gertler, “Self-Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/self-knowledge/. Accessed 20 March 2019.
[2] Darin Weinberg, “The Social Construction of Self-Knowledge,” in Contemporary Social Constructionism, Key Themes (Temple University Press, 2014), 101–112 and 102.
[3] Theo van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.