When I ask the question, "Why do I suffer?" I may be mistaken about the reasons for my suffering. I may lack the necessary knowledge or have developed clever ways of deceiving myself. Yet, I cannot doubt the utterance itself; it is there, expressed and alive.

Hugo Strandberg's book Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception provides an insightful framework for exploring such questions, particularly the classical inquiry, "Who am I?" This question invites critical self-examination, which is at once a moral examination. To know who I am, I must take myself as the object of my investigation, even as I recognize that both the subject and object of this inquiry will change throughout my life. Strandberg describes self-knowledge as a dynamic and evolving process deeply intertwined with my relationships in and with the world.

By scrutinizing these relationships, I may discover things I do not know—perhaps even things I have actively avoided knowing. As Strandberg puts it, "Self-knowledge is not one thing." Instead, it is a dynamic and evolving process connected to other questions that emerge throughout life. Self-knowledge, he argues, is also a moral question; it is about befriending oneself. Drawing on Seneca, Strandberg suggests that understanding who I am is an ongoing dance between self-knowledge and self-deception. In this view, self-deception is a moral phenomenon—a mixture of knowing and not knowing, but always in a moral sense.

One of Strandberg's most compelling ideas is the correlation between self-deception and remorse. Remorse reveals that self-deception is not a neutral act but a moral failure. When I experience remorse, I recognize that I should have seen things differently. The "should" is given by the perspective of remorse itself. In this sense, remorse marks the distance between self-knowledge and self-deception. According to Strandberg, love can reduce this distance, offering a hopeful path toward self-knowledge.

This correlation between self-deception and remorse offers a powerful way to think about why it is so difficult to answer the question, ""Who am I?"" One crucial sub-question is whether the self is fixed, created, or constantly changing. The idea that........

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