Socrates’ “Know Thyself”

“Know thyself”.  One of the most easily quoted and well-known maxims in the history of Western philosophy, it stands alongside such pithy quips as “I think, therefore I am” and “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him” on the list of timeworn phrases that most well-read folks are capable of recognizing, if not quoting outright.  It also stands as likely one of its most poorly understood.  Typically cited in a context which appreciates and overvalues a literal interpretation, the saying actual holds much more complexity than is generally assumed upon first glance.  Though often attributed to Socrates, the phrase actually comes from a description on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and has been a topic of interest for many philosophers throughout history.  However, instead of cataloguing all its appearances throughout the western cannon, its uses by Plato within the Socratic dialogues is where we will take our entry for today. 

The phrase most notably finds its origin in the Phaedrus, a wide-ranging dialogue between Socrates and the eponymous interlocutor.  Nominally about love and the erotic, the dialogue covers a vast array of topics, including the arts, the nature of the mind, madness, rhetoric, and the use of dialectics.  However, I want to offer a reading in which each of these topics is actually secondary and meant to be illustrative of the original point raised by Socrates, which is that of the paradoxical concern of self-knowledge as being defined by the limitations on both knowing as it pertains to general knowledge and knowing the self.  Or, as Socrates reveals within the dialogue, it is not merely that he is concerned with knowing himself, but also that he is dually aware that he is one who “knows [that he] knows nothing”.  That, as it were, the self is only to be known in its unknowability.

Here we have an encounter with paradox, born of a predilection for irony and the dialectic argumentation that is a central tenant of the Socratic approach to philosophy.  Several hundred years later, the German philosopher GWF Hegel will argue against the incomplete nature of this approach to doing philosophy, developing a concept of dialectics that will demand resolution, giving us the famous relationship between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  For Hegel, the major flaw in Socrates’ philosophy is that his interrogatory method was unsystematizable, due to Socrates’ interest in breaking down structural assumptions about knowledge, without any perceived interest in building them back up.  His assertion is that Socrates lacked a positive philosophy of any sort.  Kierkegaard, another of philosophy’s ultimate ironists, would later revitalize this aspect of Socrates’ thought, asserting that breaking down assumed pathways to knowledge should be the very role of the philosopher, and that the Socratic injunction to know that we know nothing, least of all the self, is essential to the process of doing philosophy.

This Socratic approach to dialectics and paradox is going to be essential to a certain way of thinking about doing therapy.  So often, clients come into the consulting room seeking a solution to the conundrum of personal identity.  They have been led to see the professional therapist as a kind of technician who will help them to reconcile the irreconcilable.  I am here reminded of the famous words of Elvin Semrad, a well-known Boston area analyst, who was noted to have said the point of this work is not to make the unbearable bearable, but to demonstrate to people their capacity to bear what feels unbearable.  Something like dialectical materialism is fine for understanding the unfolding of socio-political contexts, vis-à-vis Marx.  But when it comes to the dialectical tensions of human suffering and existence, I would encourage exploration of the possibility that it may be most pertinent, through careful attending and holding of the client, to help others develop the capacity to hold those tensions.

Socrates tells us that we must know our self, but that the self is unknowable.  He is here signaling to us one of the dialectics which is fundamental to therapy, the one that exists between structure and change.  On this journey through the concept of the self, I want also to bring us again to the work of Soren Kierkegaard, who offers us one of the most important definitions of the self in the history of the western cannon.  In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard states the following:

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

Later, Kierkegaard draws the tension of man in his existence between the finite and the infinite; the eternal and the temporal; and necessity and possibility.

What does this all mean?  Like Socrates, Kierkegaard is oftentimes most interested in what we are not.  Let’s revisit those words again.  “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self” and later “the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self”.  Here we have self, not as a reified entity, but as a synthesizing process (or perhaps even better to say synthesizing processing to denote the ongoing and ever becoming nature of this self-ing that we are in our be-ing).  Complementary to Socrates’ notion that we must know ourselves, yet know nothing, Kierkegaard is providing us one reason as to why this may be the case.  Namely, because the self is not a thing, but a mode of relatedness that relates the inherent tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes of our existence to one another through the subjective experience of what it means to have a “self”.  However, Kierkegaard also tells us that “angst” is “the fear that arises at refusing to become yourself”, while also describing angst as “the dizziness of freedom”.

Here we get our first foray into what we might term existential anxiety.  We, in our being, are confronted with the many contradictory and opposing natures of what that being entails.  We seem to know that we are something, and yet also have the strong sense that we contain possibility and are always also becoming something else.  We are deeply rational and yet also able to be stirred by our emotions.  We are born and die alone, contained within an existence which seems to be purely our own, and yet are inextricably born into relation with the world, ourself, and others.  We must, by our very nature, contain all of these things; and yet these things cannot, like in the world of Hegelian dialectics, be synthesized, but must be held in an open dialectical tension.  Socrates precedes any language for this by thousands of years.