Delphic Maxim 8: Know thyself

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

8. Know thyself

Of all the inscriptions on the temple at Delphi, this is the most widely-known. The Wachowski’s referenced it over the door of the Oracle in The Matrix, just as it was carved over the entry to the Oracle at Delphi.

In his Dialogues, Plato often begins a conversation where Socrates elaborates on this theme: “the unexamined life,” he says, “is not worth living”. Knowing yourself is a project that stretches on across a lifetime, not something you can find and understand and be done with it, but involves a continual relearning of the world, of your identity in it, and of your relationships with people and circumstance.

It’s not a coincidence that Jostein Gaarder launches the philosophical journey in Sophie’s World by posing the question “who are you?” to Sophie. It’s the fundamental question that we need to ask in order to move through the world. One of the reasons this maxim is important is because it is a recognition that we don’t already know ourselves (otherwise what would be the point of reminding us?), and that the pursuit of truth or knowledge — which someone hoping for an audience with the Pythia would be seeking — requires that we look inwards. But the view from inside is not the only way we can know ourselves.

I once had an argument with a very good friend about whether it made sense for people to travel ‘in order to find themselves’. My view is that we are products of our social world. We learn from our families, friends, teachers and societies. There is little that genuinely grows from ‘inside’. Who are is a unique blend of all the influences in the outer world, tempered and stretched by the biological impulses and psychological structures of our inner world. Isolation and travel might lend us spare time to think about ourselves, but there’s no more ‘truth’ out there to be found about who we are than there is in the ancient habits of cavemen or lobsters (contra the views of Mr Peterson).

Knowing yourself involves a recognition of this fact: you are enmeshed in a community, you are a product of a trillion accidents (what philosophers call ‘contingency’), biological as well as social. To know yourself involves going beyond simply identifying your opinions and your points of view and the way you read the world, but also question how and why you have come to read it that way. This is a complicated thing, it can’t be completed in a day.

Jostein Gaarder is my favourite author, because his stories like Sophie’s World and The Solitaire Mystery remind me that the world is wonderful and worth wondering about. Part and parcel with being human is — I hope — an innate curiosity about the world. “We are dolls, bursting with life”, exclaims Hans Thomas’ father in The Solitaire Mystery — it’s only when we become dull to that fact that life loses its excitement and magic. Like Jokers in a deck of cards — not quite fitting with the other suits, no suit in the pack, but a card nevertheless — asking questions, like philosophers do, helps us to retain a sense of wonder.

The Pythia was once asked who was the wisest man in all the world. She answered that it was Socrates: “wisest is he who knows that he does not know”. Socrates was never satisfied that he knew everything, and most certainly was not satisfied that he knew himself. But he knew that he didn’t know things, and in a way that intellectual humility made him wiser than all the Sophists and ‘wise’ men who didn’t take the time to doubt.

This maxim is my favourite, because knowing yourself is a never-ending project, and a reminder that your are constantly changing, so each day you get to know yourself anew.