We habitually experience our thoughts and feelings as mental states occurring inside us, and self-knowledge can seem perfectly ordinary. Sometimes, those same thoughts and feelings manifest a different meaning through introspection than they did when we experienced them in real time. When they become memories that evoke emotions such as melancholy, we use language or image to formulate expressions through which we communicate them. Those expressions can appear to follow already constituted mental event. But if it is the same experience, why does it yield different understandings in situ and in retrospect? If an experience is already ours as we live through it, why is its meaning not always clear to us immediately? Can an encounter reveal something that introspection alone cannot?

If an encounters with something outside us can bring our thoughts and feelings into focus, then not all self-knowledge can be described as the retrieval of contents already articulated within. A subtle physical sensation may register as a minute muscular tension, reminding us of an old injury before attention registers the sensation of pain; an incident may not be presently available to recollection until something in the immediate surroundings unexpectedly brings it to mind. Random series of happenings and encounters can affect how we become the person we are today, while their significance may become apparent only later when we attempt to formulate them. For example, in writing or through an autobiographical project using pen or canvas. What remains uncertain is how much of the understanding that eventually emerges existed beforehand in the same determinate form.  

This essay aims to show that self-knowledge develops when aspects of first-person experience not yet available to reflective understanding become intelligible through their relation to the physical situations in which they occur. What I propose does not deny interiority. Instead, an experience can be irreducibly first-person without being self-explanatory: the sensation is mine, while what it means may become clearer through an encounter in which it can be tested, differentiated, or revised.

Since the last series began with Marcel Duchamp talking in a roundtable meeting, for this one, I start with Yves Klein and his La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility), 1958.[3]  The work, subsequently known as Le Vide (The Void) may seem the antithesis of an argument about the relation between interior experience and material exteriority, if Yves Klein completed the work by removing “everything” from the exhibition space and leaving it “empty.” But the apparent contradiction is what makes this particular work fitting: it encapsulates a case for understanding that is not immediately available without the encounter. Think of it this way: Klein had removed the conventional material objects associated with conventional ideas of “art” entirely from view; yet his gesture of removal did not eliminate the material encounter. Rather, it relocated the encounter from a material object within the gallery to a heightened encounter with the physical space itself. In this context, space, the viewer’s bodily position, movement, emotional expectation, and perceptual uncertainty all consequently became operative rather than incidental.

Following Le Vide, the essay moves between art, philosophy, and other disciplines that have tried to describe the self from the inside and the outside. I examine Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, which grounds the argument in a subject already situated in the world; Dan Zahavi's account of pre-reflective self-consciousness, which explains how an experience is mine before I understand it; Ulric Neisser's work on self-narrative, from cognitive psychology, which separates the self who remembers from the self remembered; and Shaun Gallagher's Pattern Theory of Self (PTS), which provides a model for understanding how heterogeneous patterns of selfhood can nevertheless belong to a changing whole. Finally, the essay returns to art through contemplations of Roni Horn's Untitled (“The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.”) (2022) and Water Double, v. 1 (2013), where perceptual constancy and environmental variation provide a material stress test of what it might mean for self-knowledge to persist while its conditions change. From there, Jacques Derrida’s distinction between finding and inventing turns the inquiry to whether an understanding that emerges through such encounters should be considered a discovery of what was already there or the invention of something new.