Know Thyself
One familiar pastime, or time waster, is trying to make sense of what’s happening in the world around us. What is Boris Johnson trying to achieve? Will Trump get booted out? Will Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes come out on top of the Formula One World Championship again this year? How will Philip Pullman bring the Book of Dust trilogy to its conclusion? What is Scott Morrison trying to achieve? It is like living in a world of crossword puzzles, sorting through the clues, and attempting to find answers. I suppose that’s why we tend to check news sources daily, reading commentaries and opinions, determined to keep in touch with current events.
However, most of this is attending to things external to ourselves, about our environment. At another level, the focus shifts to concerns that are more personal, about our place in the world. Why am I sticking with this job or on this project? Is this the time to do something new? What am I hoping to achieve? This is about satisfaction and discontent, about what gives meaning to our lives, about purpose. It is as if we are asked to give an account of who we are and what we are doing. Personal, yet still public: it is how we inform others, tell our story. Helped by getting feedback from friends, our focus on meaning and purpose intensifies as we face a change, a major transition, or as we respond to that restless, nagging feeling we want to do or be different.
There is yet another level to this, captured by that pithy admonition written on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘know thyself’. [i] One of three deliberately brief statements, the other two were ‘nothing to excess’ and ‘surety brings ruin’. My mother would have loved the second one: her line was ‘everything in moderation’. That advice is easy to understand, but what did the first one mean, to know yourself? The task isn’t clear. Are you to account for your life, your family background, education, positions, partners, holidays and pastimes, your life story? While interesting, those answers take us back to the public domain. Moreover, such accounting is relatively safe, quickly dealt with, even if you add in a few assessments – your Myers Briggs profile, score on Ravens Progressive Matrices, or even results from an emotional intelligence inventory. We can be quite certain none of that was being sought at Delphi.
The phrase keeps popping up in history. For many writers, it is shorthand for ‘know your place’. It is a warning, not to step outside your station in life, or, more commonly, a reminder that you are human, and only god can provide the real answers. For many philosophers, it is seen as intrinsic to the task of learning. Thomas Hobbes suggested you learn more by studying yourself rather than others, particularly the feelings that influence your thoughts and motivate your actions: “but to teach us that for the similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man, to the thoughts and passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, etc., and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the like occasions”.[ii] Maybe. As for Descartes, he started from there: his first principle can be summarised as: I think, and as thought cannot be separated from me, therefore I exist, a view usually stated as cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”. But Descartes was pursuing the rational self, whereas the entrance to Delphi in ancient Greece might have been looking for a rather different response.
When Plato included ‘know thyself’ in his Laws, I have to believe it was for a good reason. Indeed, in his use the term comes across as a challenge. The implication is that one shouldn’t bother about knowing other peoples’ views, but reallyknow yourself. At one level, it might refer to seeing through the various masks we wear, the various stories we tell about ourselves. “The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation.” [iii] To quote from Erving Goffman’s perceptive analysis in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:
The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die. It is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented” He goes on to observe the self does not belong to its possessor. “He and his body merely provide the peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. The means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg … there will be a team of persons whose activity on stage in conjunction with available props will constitute the scene from which the performed character’s self will emerge, and another team, the audience, whose interpretive activity will be necessary for this emergence.” [iv]
Goffman’s methodology, later to be called his dramaturgical analysis approach, is an evocative introduction to the social construction of the person.
Ernest Becker, one of my heroes in the world of psychological studies, suggested that the crucial stage in human development was to escape from ‘reactivity’, from instinctual or learnt responses, to assigning our “own stimulus meanings” or as he put it, “traffic in non-sensory meaning”. [v] Meaning, however, is not something we assign by ourselves. It comes through contact with and in engagement with others, initially with a parent. In this critical sense “consciousness, then, is fundamentally a social experience”. [vi] This is today’s popular view of the brain as a computer, its programs analysing data and constructing models, creating an illusion of something that is me.
The puzzle that causes over who I am is exacerbated by another. When you look in a mirror, all you can see is the external aspect of yourself, but not what you feel, not what you know yourself to be. As Becker quotes from James Baldwin, “mirrors can only lie”. The real me, the unseen me, is the one that I constantly ‘have in mind’, hidden but which I might try out in small ways or more boldly in interacting with other people. Using Goffman’s perspective, as I take on and off various masks, I monitor my performance, assess the responses I receive, and consider what all this tells me about me. Becker suggested this is as if we are running an inner newsreel, allowing us to test and rehearse how we are in the world. If that sounds fanciful, it’s because we are sometimes reluctant to admit how much time we give to reviewing (and worrying over) what we did in an interaction, in a presentation to a client or to a teacher, or in how we spoke to someone we care about, concerned that they might have mistaken our intent.
Does that mean the admonition to know yourself is asking us to check on how we are seen in the world? There are two problems with that answer. The first is that, despite what I have just said, much of the time we are not checking and reviewing: we forget about that inner newsreel and just get on with things. It’s a problem with Goffman’s view, because we can’t constantly be on stage, collaborating with others to affirm a personality, a character. Indeed, that leads to the second problem: on many occasions we happily accept a package deal, bypassing reflection, and settling for passivity. Sometimes I say, “I’m just a grumpy old man”. What I am doing is deciding not to explain or explore reactions and self-image; I am simply taking on a well established persona, assuming that you know it too, and neither of us need waste much time exploring what it means. Neither of us is going to check, nor will I be asked, ‘is that really you?’
Perhaps this is because we’re often lazy. Think of the many times you have been talking to someone: they’ve made a remark or observation, suggested a view, argued a point, and you chose to leave it, not offering a detailed response, nor contradicting or reframing what was said. Deciding not to act, or simply letting an issue or a remark slip by because you want to focus on another, limits the performative aspect of the situation. Does that matter? Let’s sit on the other side of that interaction. You have said something to which there was no obvious response offered in return. Of course, you might have picked up some non-verbal cues, but that just adds to the complexities in this! Unaware or only dimly aware as to how you were seen is a small but not trivial failure: in the mirror of another’s reaction, there was nothing learnt. Unchallenged, we hold on to our view. I said I was a grumpy old man, my friends said nothing, so I am likely to embed that character a little deeper. Avoiding self-examination, we inhabit one of the familiar and widely-shared models of self, sustained by the apparent acceptance of those around us.
Let me put that thought a little differently. It is demanding to keep working on who you are. It is easy to forget about reapplying our ‘make-up’, altering our presentation of self, reimagining how we appear. Instead, why not accept a pre-packaged solution? In our current fraught times, we’re aware of the complexities of constant re-examination, unwilling to check on how we’re seen, and comfortable to go along with an accepted persona: a heterosexual, privileged, white, liberal? In my worst moments, I’m concerned many people are losing their ability to re-think who they are; easier to abandon any self-examination and ignore how we’re seen while secretly dreaming about being a film star, a pop singer, a famous writer, a tournament winning golfer.
Like Garfinkel, Anselm Strauss saw us as the outcome of interactions, rather than a real self:
“due in considerable part to unwitting responses made by each participant. Consider that in any single instant any one of the following may happen: (1) A may respond quite consciously to a witting gesture of B’s; (2) A may respond consciously to an unwitting response of B’s (a tone of voice or a movement of a hand); (3) A may respond without himself being aware of his response to a conscious response of B’s; (4) A may respond unwittingly to an unwitting response of B’s. Now double these points by substituting A for B, and B for A. [vii]
Getting complicated? Yes, it is. However, I think Plato might be getting impatient, too. I can almost hear him saying, yes, fine, but that’s not the point. His point was about knowing yourself, not the self reflected in the social construction of your selves in collaboration with others, not the social you, but the essential, hidden, real you, the spark of you that inhabits your consciousness, the you that is hard for anyone to discern, including yourself. As Becker asked, what is the nature of the unique individual that remains if you remove the bundle of constructed, packaged and adopted selves, all the implicit agreements you’ve made with others about who you are?
Given his psychoanalytical training, it is not surprising that Becker focussed on our mortality, “the tragic bind that man is peculiarly in – the basic paradox of his existence – is that unlike other animals he has an awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand; and on the other he is the only animal in nature who knows he will die.’ [viii] A tragic bind? It is an inconvenient reality, for sure. Knowing that our life span is limited, we do work hard at self-preservation. In that, we are like most sentient creatures, doing whatever we can to stay alive: fight, flight, or freeze. Dramatically illustrated as the Covid-19 pandemic swirls around us, we fight, wash out hands, wear a mask, socially distance (and ignore Trump’s advice on Clorox or hydroxychloroquine); we turn to flight if we can, living away from crowded cities, isolating on islands or other safe places; or we freeze, uncertain, anxiously sitting at home, stuck in place.
We can do more than that. Human beings are unique. Constrained by our limited senses, our physical bodies, our biochemistry, we have three very special capabilities: communication, imagination, and the ability to make choices. Communication allows us to share and store a huge selection of ideas, connections and possibilities, one vastly greater than any one of us can generate. Imagination allows us to play with new ideas and new possibilities, testing out what works or doesn’t, growing our body of choices while identifying limits and impossibilities. And we can make choices, and in doing so change our repertoire of ways to be in the world.
Choices about our lives are not just about self-preservation. We are social animals. We work with others to care for those in most need. During the coronavirus pandemic, some chose to join the caring professions, graphically illustrated by the devoted teams of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and clinics looking after infected people. Others cared through wearing a mask when outside. Why are many people now reluctant to wear a mask? This might reveal a lack of awareness, not self-interest. How can I, a healthy young person, become infected or pass the virus on to others? Bombarded with contrasting stories and recommendations, it’s easy to forget our social obligations, unlike those health professionals who are focussed on ‘doing their duty’.
Some people transmute the desire for self-preservation into seeking to create something they can leave behind. We can live on through our descendants, our written words, paintings, buildings, gardens, sporting triumphs, or any other actions that memorialise us through our contributions. Nor does this have to be a selfish endeavour. We can work with others to build a children’s playground, establish an organic food cooperative, work in a kindergarten to assist children in learning to read. We can be part of a special interest group pushing to protect unspoilt areas for the future, or working to bring a political group to power because we share its aspirations.
Somehow, I seem to have slipped back to external indicators. To know yourself is not any of these things. It is a private, personal search, reaching for the ineffable, the inchoate, the things in between, a sense we are unable to put into words and yet, if we allow it space, subtly informs our sense of being. If you believe, as I do, that we are spiritual beings as well an intellectual and emotional creatures, it is to be found in the experiences we can’t easily explain to others but which are truly profound. It is the self that responds to a piece of music, to a sun lit garden at the end of the day, to a moment of quiet, or to the sensation of overwhelming love on unexpectedly seeing a partner or child. These give us brief glimpses into our hidden self. To know yourself is to recognise and hold on to those moments that reveal the true essence of who you are.
[i] Nicely reprised – in Greek – over the Oracles Door in The Matrix, the Wachowskis’ film of 1999
[ii] Quoted in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
[iii] Norman O Brown, Love’s Body, Vintage, 1966, page 90. Shakespeare said the same a little earlier!
[iv] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday, 1959, pages 252-3
[v] Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning, Penguin 1971, page 19
[vi] Ibid, page 35
[vii] Anselm Strauss, Mirrors and Masks, Martin Robertson 1977, pages 58-9
[viii] Ibid, page 143
