Being a Stranger to Yourself — The Many Meanings of "Know Thyself"
Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard (CBS, 2020)
In the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard (CBS, 2020), “Remembrance,” former captain and admiral Jean-Luc Picard is asked, “Have you ever been a stranger to yourself?” to which Picard replies, “Many, many times.” I have had this experience of being a stranger to myself many, many times as well, times in which the current version of myself (my actions, my sense or perceptions of myself, and so on) seems at odds with how I presently view myself, how I envision my ideal self, or how I have viewed myself in the past.
At face value, being a stranger to oneself seems to fly in the face of the Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” which was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Deplhi and which was often cited by Socrates according to Plato and Xenophon. And while knowing oneself seems like an obvious virtue, I find, as I reflect on the phrase “Know thyself,” that many interpretations are possible, historically and for us today:
The Socratic Interpretation
According to Socrates, true wisdom is knowing what you do not know. So an essential part of knowing yourself must be recognizing the limits of your own wisdom and understanding—knowing what you do genuinely know and knowing what you have yet to learn. In the Phaedo dialogue, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul. So knowing oneself for Socrates also entails knowing your true nature as an immortal soul.
The Platonic Interpretation
According to Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII), most people are like prisoners living their entire lives staring at the wall of a cave, mistaking dimly lit shadows for reality. Knowing oneself, then, for Plato is recognizing your mind’s/soul’s potential to understand the essence of philosophical concepts such as justice, love, goodness, and so on, instead of the shadowy and transient illusions or imperfect copies of those perfect forms here in the physical world. Knowing oneself is a matter of breaking your own chains of ignorance, freeing yourself from the allegorical cave and crawling your way into the sunlight of genuine knowledge. As for Socrates, for Plato the starting point is being self-reflective enough to recognize that your starting point is one of ignorance (despite his view expressed by Socrates in the Phaedo dialog that knowledge is a matter of recollecting things your immortal soul already knows).
The Empiricist Interpretation
According to some empiricist philosophers, such as David Hume, our personal identities are merely a bundle of experiences, perceptions, and memories. To know oneself, then, for an empiricist like Hume is to understand the ways in which your past experiences have shaped and defined yourself, including your habits, your habits and reactions, your emotions, and your entire conceptual framework. According to another empiricist philosopher, John Locke, we begin life with a tabula rasa (blank slate) for a mind. Copies of our sensory perceptions are impressed upon this blank slate, thereby filling our minds with the contents of our sensory experience, upon which our subsequent rational faculties can operate. It is easy to fall into a trap of thinking that our present reality is under our control when in reality much of our sense of self is shaped by external and past experiences outside our direct control. Knowing oneself on this view is a matter of becoming acquainted with your past while also not being bound or limited by it.
The Kantian / Post-Kantian Interpretation
According to Immanuel Kant, our rational categories are universal and necessary and provide the structure fo constructing and understanding the world of our experience (as opposed to the way in which reality is in itself, apart from the active role our minds play in structuring our reality). The fundamental Kantian insight that the world we experience is not reality as such, but realm of phenomena—of appearances—that is constructed by the synthesis of reality in itself categorized and filtered and structured by the categories and structures of human reason and perception (categories of the understanding and forms of the intuition, respectively for Kant).
While Kant held that everyone’s mind structures reality in the same way because our categories of the understanding are universal and objective, post-Kantian philosophers pushed the notion of a constructed realm of human experience in the direction of subjectivity, in which each individual, culture, or historical context constructs its own reality with an irreducible subjectivity—with no way to gain access to reality in itself through any form of metaphysical knowledge. So as I see it, the Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” according to a Kantian, or a post-Kantian, interpretation, would be to become aware of the ways in which you are constructing your own reality (whether universally and objectively as for Kant or individually and subjectively as for various post-Kantian philosophers such as Nietzsche).
The Nietzschean Interpretation
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Western culture, Western religions, and Judeo-Christian morality have all served to pacify human beings into weak, herd-like beings, masking their potential as strong, creative, and subjective individuals with their own values and with authorship over their own life stories. So for Nietzsche, “know thyself” means something more like recognizing and embracing your individuality, your own unique perspectives, to purposefully go against the grain and against the flow of the herd—philosophically, morally, culturally, aesthetically, politically, and otherwise. The Nietzschean notion of authenticity is not merely a matter of looking inward and seeing your own essence, as if that essence were something fixed and necessary; it is a matter of embracing your own creative power to author a life story for yourself that is uniquely suited to you, actively and because of the perspectives and metaphors that you choose to create with which you actively and creatively define yourself.
The Existentialist Interpretation
According to existentialist philosophers—whether of the Christian variety like the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard or of the atheistic variety like the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre—we have free will to decided what to dedicate our life to—to define our own essence, as Sartre says. According to the existentialist interpretation of “know thyself,” therefore, knowing oneself must be a matter of recognizing your own free will to define your own life—not to be constrained by anything in your past or constrained in your thinking about what your life can and could be in the future, but to look at the future from your present standpoint and to use your free will to decide what your life will be going forward.
The Postmodern Interpretation
The heart of the postmodern mindset is the insight that there is no such thing as context-independent truth, only truth relative to something—whether culture, history, language, or otherwise. Knowing oneself for the postmodern thinker, then, is to understand the ways in which your identity is shaped by various external factors such as your culture, your ethnicity, your linguistic structures, your religious or political assumptions, and so on. There is no such thing as a content-independent self to know, only a self that is mediated and defined by a complex web of social and political and cultural factors, largely implicit factors that must be investigated and revealed to ourselves in order to truly “know thyself.”
Conclusion
With these many competing and overlapping interpretations of the ancient Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” and many other interpretations too numerous to mention here, it is no wonder that we are sometimes strangers to ourselves, even despite our best efforts and intentions to know and to understand ourselves or to be the most authentic versions of ourselves possible. Add in the time factor, the many changes we go through in the course of a human lifetime, both because of our natural growth as individuals and because of the contingent, external events that shape our lives, thereby molding us into the individuals we are at any particular moment, and it’s a wonder that we have any semblance of self-knowledge whatsoever instead of being completely opaque and utter mysteries unto ourselves, no matter how much we look and search inward to find our inner truth—or truths, as the case may be, just as there have been many senses of self for Jean-Luc Picard in the course of his long lifetime, as there often are for you and me.
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