Know Thyself?
(Excerpt from Flux: when everything is up for grabs, a book in progress.)
I was an only child for the first 18 years of my life. So I could probably trace my biases to the early influence of my mother, to my childhood, my birth, and even before. But psychological and sociological explanations feel insufficient. They seem like a way to avoid trying to better understand myself, a way to abdicate responsibility for my actions.
“Know thyself,” Socrates; maxim, calls for us to reflect on ourselves as a first step toward knowledge of any kind. But, paradoxically, such an effort is doomed by nature because it is self-referential. As Hofstadter argues in his book I Am a Strange Loop, when a system refers to itself that creates a paradox within its own structure. Self-awareness has limits. As the mathematician Kurt Gödel proved, the consistency of any system cannot be proven inside that system. You might say that the purpose of your life cannot be proven within it.
Perhaps the value of biographies and of fiction derives from our inability to know ourselves directly. That’s why we strive so hard to understand the motivations, emotions, and thought processes of others.
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Also — literally, physically — we can never see ourselves except through the eyes of others or backwards and two-dimensionally through mirrors, or after-the-fact through photos, and videos. Nor can we truly hear our own voices directly, only through echoes and recordings. And likewise for the other senses. Others’ memories of us always differ from our own of ourselves and can be more complete and accurate than our own.
Having two eyes on the same side of our heads gives us depth perception, a sense of three-dimensionality from integrating the two separate views. Likewise, becoming aware of ourselves through the differing perceptions of those emotionally attached to us, and hence paying close attention to us, gives us a sense of our own multi-dimensional reality.
In other words, limitations which are built into our very existence could be seen as purposeful design or extraordinary serendipity. They pull us together, make us dependent on one another.
When a long-time spouse or friend dies, we lose an important piece of ourselves, a vision of ourselves, an awareness of who and why we are.
When Barb, my wife of 39 years, died, it was nearly a decade before I was fortunate enough to find Nancy, who helped me build a new sense of who and why I am.
