Isn’t it curious how curious we are about ourselves? You would think there could be nothing easier than knowing yourself. After all, you are you, and there is nothing and nobody that you have more direct and immediate access to than yourself. Yet, when someone remembers the old Greek aphorism “know thyself”, instead of sighing in expectation of being bored by something so obvious as self-knowledge, we nod and want to know how… How do we get to know ourselves? If you happen to be sighing in boredom or sceptical disbelief right now, here are two numbers to consider: as of July 2024, there are around 5.5 billion internet users worldwide1; the question ‘how can I know myself’ has been searched in Google almost 2 billion times2.
Perhaps Greeks meant it differently. A long, long time ago – about 2.500 years, to be not very exact – someone inscribed a number of statements on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, where the famous Oracle resided and prophesied. Among these were: “know thyself”, “nothing in excess”, and “surety brings ruin”. While translations of the last two vary, it is the first that seems to be fixed by our fascination. When we read these words today, we tend to interpret them as wisdom quotes that tell us what we should consider in living our lives. What if they were observations of human nature?
What if these inscriptions on an ancient temple were literal truths carved in stone, telling us something noteworthy about what it means to be human? “Know thyself” – we will always need and seek more knowledge about ourselves, never reaching complete understanding. “Nothing in excess” – we will always be tempted by extremes and continuously embark on various quests looking for the golden middle way. “Surety brings ruin” – we will always search for certainty and repeatedly fall prey to our illusions of having found it before starting again.
Of course, I do not know if that is what the Greeks meant all those years ago. Nobody can know for sure because we cannot ask them. There is too much distance between us. And even if we could ask them, I suspect we would hear different answers. Various interpretations. Just as we are doing now – interpreting. And let’s not forget that feeling overly sure about our knowledge and beliefs can bring ruin precisely because we risk losing sight of their roots growing out of interpretation. Maybe that is one of the valuable lessons in knowing ourselves that we can learn from these old Greek wisdoms: to be human means to interpret.
Interpretation is all about circular movement between parts and wholes and back again. There is no clear beginning and end, foundation and neatly ordered layers atop it. I do not doubt that we can analyse and structure almost anything into phases, sequences, orders, and nearly perfect categories, but I also have little doubt that all these efforts, however useful in their respective contexts, are interpretations. We cannot grasp the meaning of something without understanding its context and how it fits there. Understanding a context involves comprehending how it is made up of various parts and their relations to each other. The circularity of interpretation. So how can we interpret ourselves?
That is the question which brings us to the stubborn difficulty surrounding the whole self-knowledge endeavour. Throughout the ages, different people have proposed various ‘right’ ways to know yourself, depending on their understanding of what it means to know, to be a human, a person, to be in (their) world and how that world works. In many societies of ancient times as well as for centuries after, knowing yourself referred to your place in the accepted order of things. That ‘social place’ determined who you were and how you should live. Our cultures in Western societies today are permeated by ideas and concepts coming from psychoanalysis and modern psychology. But only some 150 years ago psychoanalysis did not exist.
For example, it is highly unlikely that ancient Greeks used the methods or notions of psychoanalysis to understand their feelings and experiences when they met at the agora of Athens to discuss the latest gossip about politicians, do some shopping, and perhaps engage in a bit of philosophical discourse about the right way to live. The distance in time between cultures means not only a difference in our languages, ways of dressing and technology but also a distance in our approaches to life and our fundamental ways of thinking. You want to know yourself by analysing your childhood relations with your caregivers because you think that is influencing your coping mechanisms that no longer serve you as an adult today? Please, don’t make Zeus laugh!
Of course, this does not mean people did not have self-reflective thoughts before Sigmund Freud developed his theory, but they did so in very different social, cultural, and political contexts. Efforts to investigate human consciousness in modern scientific terms led different thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries down various paths, and the journey continues. For example, Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl were both students of Franz Brentano. Yet Husserl, the founder of the philosophical approach called phenomenology, had the following to say about “unconscious content” – a major theme of Freudian psychoanalysis:
“It is certainly an absurdity to speak of a content of which we are “unconscious”, one of which we are conscious only later. Consciousness is necessarily a being-conscious in each of its phases… retention of a content of which we are not conscious is impossible.”
Edmund Husserl (from his early thoughts and lectures on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness)
For Husserl, our consciousness of some content and that content itself are inseparable from each other. There is no free-floating content, so to speak, to which we direct our consciousness and thereby become conscious of it. If so, then there can be no content given to us that we are not conscious of and can somehow become conscious of later. To an extent, I agree with Husserl – consciousness is being conscious of something, it is a dynamic interaction where process and content are indivisible. However, I also feel that his idea here suggests something along the lines of an overly simplified ‘what you see is what you get’ approach to consciousness and, especially, our knowledge of ourselves.
When introspecting, am I conscious of all there is about myself? Is all the ‘content’ given to me in its entirety? It appears Husserl is pointing in this direction when he claims that, although we sometimes speak to ourselves in internal monologues, there is actually no communication in such instances, we are not really saying anything. Why? Because we have immediate and direct access to our internal content at the same moment as we ‘talk’ to ourselves about that content. According to Husserl then, at least during this earlier phase of his philosophical career, it is pointless to tell myself that, for instance, I feel sad right now, as I am already directly experiencing this sadness without any need to point it out through words.
If only self-knowledge were really that simple… If it were, we would not keep searching for answers and recalling the old words carved into the stone of an ancient Greek temple long, long ago—know yourself. While these days the quest for self-knowledge has become much more focused on individual psychological exploration, we might find it useful to remember one of the most important insights of phenomenology: consciousness is a dynamic interaction with the world around us, not an isolated ‘thing’ inside us. So what, you might ask? I am glad you asked! One Wilhelm Dilthey wanted to pass on a short message on this matter.
Dilthey was Husserl’s more senior contemporary (some 26 years more senior) and was interested in formulating a scientific method for the human sciences, contrasting them with the natural sciences. But the message he wanted to pass on here is this: even for the purposes of our own self-knowledge, introspection alone is insufficient. Firstly, introspection influences the lived experience. Anyone who has tried meditation or yoga can confirm this. As soon as you start deliberately observing your breath, for instance, it changes. In introspection, we are not ‘objective’ but ‘creative’ observers. Paying attention to what and how you feel, influences what and how you feel.
Secondly, by relying solely on self-reflection to understand ourselves better, we can forget our embeddedness in the social, cultural, political and historical contexts of our lives. In short, we can create an illusion of an isolated self that can be studied in this ‘controlled’ isolation. This means that any introspection should involve and be accompanied by our attention to our actions, behaviours, habits, the ways we treat other people, furnish our homes, what sort of blog posts we write (or letters, as Dilthey would say), and so on. In other words, when reflecting on who we are, we would be wise to also look at how we are with and towards others.
Here, dear reader, I will have to leave you. For now. I wonder how the experience of reading these words has (and maybe will) contributed to your understanding of yourself. Until next time…
… keep exploring!
P.S. Thank you for visiting me here on the humanfactor.blog! If you enjoyed this post and are interested in more philosophical content, I invite you to explore the blog, leave a comment, like, and subscribe to get notified of new posts.
Featured image: The Delphi temple to Apollo where the famous Ancient Greek Oracle was located. Image by Frank Fleschner from Kirksville, United States – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3291564
- Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/ ↩︎
- You can check this yourself by googling the phrase ‘how can I know myself’ (I last checked on October 13, 2024). ↩︎
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