Have you ever asked yourself who you are? In doing so, you might get all sorts of answers, like a name, a date of birth, a place of birth, a nationality, a field of knowledge you’ve studied, a degree, a profession, an identification number from one source or another, or perhaps just a pronoun. You will be able to describe yourself as you would type it down in your CV, as your mother would to your fiancé, or as a doctor or a biologist would. You are advised to “be yourself” for everything, and yet, who are you after all?

To be fair, it is not an easy question, despite being a quite simple an elegant sentence to ask, the more you think about it, the more preposterous it becomes, and the answers you obtain become less and less meaningful over time. Are you a name? An ID? A job? Information? It just sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Philosophers have argued about it for a long time, and using many different points of view. Some philosophers like David Hume have proposed that identity and personality are just information in our memory that we associate with ourselves. This conclusion, despite sounding quite tragic, is perhaps the one that more closely reflects scientific observations. After all, everything we’ve mentioned so far is just a bunch of information that you get either because you’re told so, such as your name or your place of origin, or because you choose it over time, such as your profession or even your nationality.

Claiming that our self is no more that the information stored in the tabula rasa that our brain is gives a quite elegant and tidy explanation for the evidence we can collect. It explains why we can forget who we are after some trauma messes with our brain, or why we can change our identity and personality over time. In fact, those traits of personality that we associate with other people seem to be related to the frontal cortex of our brain, and many patients have experienced dramatic changes of personality after an accident has damaged them this part of their heads.

An other view on the subject is the one that philosophers like Plato had, who considered that our minds, our souls, were independent of our bodies, in the same way as they conceived ideas separated from the real physical phenomena. In other words, that the concept of the self and what defines us, our personality, way of thinking, and so on, are an idea. This would mean that we’re born the way we are, and our personality remains unchanging throughout our life. We might change our habits and behaviour, and we could even go on clinical changes, but our way of thinking remains the same.

This idealist’s point of view would mean that there is a concept of “us”, and that “being ourselves” is indeed possible, unlike from Hume’s empirical view of the problem, who would argue that, because the self is a collection of information in our memory that can change overtime, “being ourselves” could mean being in any way, as there is no permanent “us” to which we can compare.

However, despite being more spiritual than scientific, the idealist view of the problem introduces an other way of identifying the self: as a way of being and thinking. It understands the self not as an identity, but as the behaviour and mental structures that an individual may have. As these aren’t exactly information, and definitely aren’t a form of memory, they can’t be analogised to the tabula rasa that empiricists like Hume would argue, because they are speaking of different things. In fact, both points of view can be combined, as they don’t necessarily contradict each other.

This is the eclectic point of view, the one that philosophers like Kant would defend, that argues that your self is not information, but a way of thinking, and that stays the same in your mind, whilst your identity is memory, and that memory is structured and analysed by those mental structures that define your self, or personality.

Despite the “middle point” that Kant would offer, neither side fully agrees with it. Idealists (or Rationalists) defend that our knowledge isn’t phenomena that our brain analyses, but real concepts, immanent to the world we live in and universal to every mind, and on the other hand, empiricists wouldn’t agree on the presence of those mental structures in our mind, arguing that our brain is plain empty.

These three epistemological positions develop different concepts of what it is the self, but they might not disagree that much on what does it mean to be oneself. Whether we consider that we our self is an identity, defined by information held in our mind, or a way of being, structural in our brain, or even a soul; in the end, being oneself can be understood as the same thing by all of them: being honest. And by this we mean honesty in terms of not behaving as we aren’t, rather than looking for what we are. It’s about not behaving in an artificial way, or saying what we believe not to be true. It’s about doing what we believe is the right thing, regardless of what would be acceptable in a particular situation or something. It’s more about not lying than about saying the truth.

Perhaps what self-help books refer to is this, rather than complex, philosophical conceptions of the self and epistemology. Perhaps when they insist on us having to “be ourselves” they mean us to behave honestly, without having to cover ourselves up. We might not even need an “inside trip” to find who we are, nobody really knows what that means after all, but just in doing what we would do, and saying what we really think, instead of doing what we are expected to do, or saying what others want to hear, we’re being ourselves.

We might not be able to tell for sure who we are through the eyes of philosophy, but we might be able to settle down what we mean by “being ourselves”, and in so, perhaps, become better people.