On knowledge and knowing oneself.
S.R.,
I have always felt opaque to myself.
And upon returning to that question I am in no better a position to answer after long pondering than I was before I had began, for it seems, to me, anyway, a most disagreeable endeavor, to somehow step outside of myself and look into myself as one would peer into a room through a door ajar, or a window unobscured.
And I fear that the more I probe into my thoughts, and feelings, and hopes and intentions, all the more that the aedifice of my inner self becomes nebulous, amorphous, and difficult to dissect — or, on the contrary, that even if its landscape were clearly and distinctly delineated, that doubt would creep in, say, under the door, and that every part of the whole which could be separated, would be subject to a cross-examination that finds nothing conclusive.
And so you can imagine the abject horror, like that of Virgil (rather, I am thinking of Jerome, who quotes Virgil),
“Horror everywhere in the soul — at once the very silence terrifies.”
Aeneid II.755 (my translation)
or Orpheus followed by Eurydice,
“And they were not far off from the brink of the earth,
But he, lest he lose her,
fearing, loving,
longing for a glance,
turned his eyes —
and she was gone…”
Ovid, Metamorphoses X.55–57 (my translation)
or Odysseus in the cave of Cyclops, the one-eyed man-eating monster of Homer, or, even worse still, the country gentleman of Euripides (who drinks his milk mixed, as the Greeks did their wine), and finally, that image by which I am frequently haunted, that description of dialectic in Plato’s Euthydemus, that philosophical inquiry is like a labyrinth (291b4).
But now we have arrived at a twofold problem — much like our Theseus, we can descend into the labyrinth with our clue, and find the minotaur, and find our way back out by retracing our steps — that is the easy part.
It is the slaying of him, however, that is difficult.
But whereas Theseus is armed with a sword, or his hands (depending on the source and the scholia, of course), what means have we?
We are, each of us, like that description of Socrates we find made by Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, each akin to those little statues of Silenus, which,
“when they are split in half, seem within to contain treasures…”
Symposium 215b1–2 (my translation)
We contain multitudes, infinite forms, both as grandiose and as base as the world which we inhabit, and the divine in which we live, and move, and have our being — though far be it from me to pass judgments on our virtues and vices. That is not my concern here.
Is there some distinguishing mark by means of which we can know what is true within us? What I truly think and feel?
Does our Plato suffice?
“For I set up as a definition of being nothing except power [sc. the power to act and be acted upon].”
Sophist 247e3–4 (my translation)
To say that something is true, is to say it exists. This, I suppose, suffices for knowing that a thing is, e.g., my internal dispositions, my emotions, whether I am angry, or sad, or perhaps even my intentions.
Each of course has its own phenomenology, and I must know how I feel, because I am feeling it. And in that respect it seems that we might have our clue, our way out of the labyrinth — but I would not be so quick.
We must also have ready at hand some schema, some paradigm, off of which to base our interpretations — that anger is like this, sadness like this, such and such intention like this, and so on and so forth. We must have our tools of interpretation at hand, and play the painstaking part of the observer, or the spectator, and diagnose accordingly.
And yet still further complications arise when we take into consideration that the self is stratified, that the mindscape is not wholly one disposition or another, but that several might be heaped upon several, and that these might endure through moments, and hours, days, etc., etc., and might, rather, do coexist with very ill-defined boundaries between these territories. And this says nothing of misidentification, or of attributing the wrong cause to a mental phenomenon, or of the tension between the self with itself, in which things are hidden, and failed to be disclosed upon introspection, and come to light only through accident.
There is an epistemological position of the Stoics that I am wont to ridicule, as I think it should be ridiculed, and nonetheless I cling to it, if only for some consolation—that there is some distinguishing mark between “true” and “false” sense-impressions.
Those which are true, so it goes, have some quality which separate them from impressions which are false, as, e.g., those objects of sight are present distinctly to vision in such as way as cannot be detected by other senses (cf. Cicero’s Academica II.XI.34).
Now this much seems like a philosophical gymnastic, as it is possible to have two impressions, one veridical (if this can be properly said), the other not so, which on the face of it seem to present in the same way (e.g., hallucinating an object in a scene as opposed to actually seeing this object in that scene) as to be indistinguishable, and yet there “must” be some way of distinguishing between the two. But what this means is unclear. And while this is typically applied to matters of skepticism about the “outside world” I think perhaps the same sensitivity to external matters be proffered to those within, for that whole just as much.
I am left to wonder whether or not being such as we are, we are better to abandon such inquiries, in favor of a position which accounts for the impossibility of knowing, and lives on the basis of seeming, rather than knowing. And in that respect I wonder whether it is not so much knowing as it is choosing, or living by means of faith, or hope, that allows us to live, and act, and be.
Perhaps we are like those philosophers of Berkeley’s description — who kick up dust, and then complain that they can’t see.
But I can’t be sure.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George