A new book offers a road map to exploring the self

Through science, philosophy, and stories, J. Eric Oliver’s How to Know Your Self brings his popular UChicago course and podcast into readers’ hands.

By Sarah Steimer

About two decades ago, J. Eric Oliver, professor in the Department of Political Science, introduced a course to UChicago students that combined philosophical texts, scientific theories, and psychology, all in the name of exploring the elusive self. In the years since, “The Intelligible Self” has also become a podcast (Knowing with Eric Oliver), in which notable guests answer questions that are meant to be useful for having a well-examined life.

But for those without an acceptance letter to UChicago, and the many who likely won’t receive an invite to the podcast, a new book from Oliver — How to Know Your Self — will allow them the opportunity to better understand themselves through the professor’s selected readings, lessons, and stories. 

“This is a book about what the self is, how it malfunctions, and what we can do to make it work better,” Oliver says. “It's for people who are intellectually curious and who are seeking some better tools for deciphering their own lived experience or interpreting their own lived experience.”

The origins of the book came long before the UChicago course. How to Know Your Self is also a culmination of the work Oliver has done personally over the years, long before joining the university faculty in 2003. 

“In some ways, this project started with me at an early age, looking for some meaning post-religion in my life, and spending a lot of my 20s and 30s exploring a lot of different things,” Oliver says. “I had all these interests in psychology and psychoanalytic theory and Buddhism. And 20 years ago, there was an explosion in neuroscience research, [in addition to] my long-standing interest in philosophy.”

Yet what Oliver found was all these different modes of exploring the self existed in isolation. By way of the UChicago course he designed, Oliver was able to put theories, traditions, and scientific discoveries in conversation with one another. 

“I realized in the course that what I can really offer my students is expanding the vocabulary of their own lived experience, giving them some conceptual tools to understand things about their bodies, their cultural situation, their egos, their life stories,” he says.

When folks outside of the university would learn about Oliver’s course, they would often ask him for a few book recommendations (“I have hundreds.”). Rather than hand off a reading list, Oliver decided to write his own text on the topic. 

How to Know is laid out in the same general trajectory as the class, but in 22 chapters instead of the nine questions Oliver focuses on in the course. And in an effort to move away from the academic writing of his previous books and make it more digestible for a broad audience, he chose to translate the information in a more narrative form. Woven through the book are Oliver’s own experiences, his friends’ stories, and those from history. 

Understanding that the personal makes the discussion more compelling is something Oliver gleaned from a tweak to his UChicago course. One year, he decided to ask students to reflect on what the course readings could tell them about themselves. As he writes in the intro to How to Know, “the course came alive with personal stories, psychological insights, and confessions.”

“The class really changed for me when I started asking the students not to just regurgitate readings back to me, but to start interpreting the readings vis-a-vis their own lived experience,” Oliver says. “A couple of things happened: Students suddenly got a lot more interested, and the class became a lot more challenging and messy.”

As humans, Oliver explains, we have a linguistic self, which is our own way of trying to understand our place in society, how we interpret cultures, and how we begin to know our own egos. This is where science begins to fall away, he says, because we understand ego processes through stories. In traditional cultures, this may have been done through myths and other story traditions. In our modern epoch, we have therapy, which, in some ways, is a sort of literary criticism for the “story of you.” In How to Know, Oliver also presents some of his own story.

“The worry I had, quite frankly, was, I didn't want to be solipsistic,” Oliver says. “But my editor said what I was putting in the book was helpful. Rather than to present myself as some august authority, dictating from on high, I'm in the muck, struggling along with everyone else. But I've been thinking about the muck for a while.”

So is it hard to write a book on knowing the self when the author, too, is still actively working on it — and there may be more gleaned down the line?

“One of the big ideas in the book is that the self is a process,” Oliver says. “The irony is, writing a book about the self, in describing the self in a book, you're concretizing in a way. Maybe the way to think about the book is as a snapshot in this process. And of course, there probably will be more snapshots needed down the line.”