"to know thyself.. what does it mean?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

we are actors… which is to say, we engage in acting in our daily lives…

I act at being a “good” employee… I pretend to follow the corporate mantra
of “profits are the only goal to reach in the business world”
I certainly don’t believe that the point or reason for existence is
this vain search for profits… but at work, I must pretend this is so,
I must act as if profits are the goal, reason for working in my big box corporation…

and you get some who actually believe in the “profits as reason for existence”
and usually, usually they are the managers and supervisors…
and the farther up the corporate ladder one goes, the stronger the faith
in profits becomes…now is this absolutely true? no, you might have a CEO,
simply play at his job, pretending that profits are the sole reason for existence,
but that is simply another form of acting…

and that is my point, we aren’t workers as much as we are actors, in a play…
and some play act that profits are the sole reasons for existence and others,
others believe it… but here is the thing, you can’t tell them apart…
you can’t spot the playactors and the ones who are the faithful…

We see this playacting all the time… here on ILP, we see UR playacting
that he is religious, and he seeks Jesus… but his words betray that…
he is simple playacting his believe in Jesus and in god…
when someone words and actions don’t match, they are playacting…
pretending to be someone they are not…
an extreme case might be the person who proclaims themself to be
pacifists, but actually gets into a lot of fights… their words say one thing,
but their actions tell us a different story…

this disconnect between our words and our actions show us that we
are playacting… we are pretending to be something we are not…

by nature, I am not a kind, caring, nurturing person… that is not who I am…
and yet, because of my job, I must engage in such unnatural behavior, for me at least…
I must express concern about people because of my role at work… I playact
all the time… but I am aware of the fact I am playacting my role at work…
this recognition of my role playing helps me to better able to playact…
there is no attempt on my part to pretend to be that person I playact at work,
I keep the two separate… unlike most people, I am very aware of my playacting…
and I can tell the difference between the two…

I engage in the Socratic maxim, “to know thyself” and by doing so, I am aware
of myself, my real self as oppose to the self I must playact every day at work…
for me, work is an means to a goal, and not an end for itself…
I hope to retire someday… I am 63 and I have worked for 45 years…
and frankly, I am done with working…and working is a means to that end…
it is not a goal of mine to work… and I know it…

so, you might go to school… and do you ask yourself, why?
why do I go to school? Part of the Socratic maxim of “knowing thyself”
is knowing why one does what one does… why do we work? why do we marry?
why do we have children? why go to school? what is the point of any of these actions?
and are they means to an end or are they the end goal we have?

we do instead of asking ourselves, why do we do? we don’t question
our actions and what they mean in terms of who we are and what
does it mean to be human? is the reason, or point of existence really to
work? to produce and be a worker? I don’t think so… but to be able
to answer that question, we must actually engage in what work is
and why we do it…and why go to school and what is that point?
and why do we get married or have children or vote democratic?

let us at least have a peek at what we do and what we ought to do

what does it mean to be human? and is work really that answer?

Kropotkin

2

watch children… they don’t playact… what they think and feel is
right there for one to see…and we spend years, decades trying to remove
this natural behavior from children… and we train, ''EDUCATE"
them to be artificial beings… beings that hide behind playacting
as not to reveal who they are in public… we are educated into
not showing or revealing our emotions or our thoughts to publicly…
and this hiding of who we are through playacting must have
consequences… we suffer from a wide variety of “illnesses”
that include drug taking, alcoholism, gambling, random sexual
acts…as we voluntarily playact, this extends to the modern
illnesses like alienation, our disconnection from each other and ourselves,
this playacting of removing our emotions has consequences in our lives…

It might be said that all of us, in the modern world, is that we suffer
from some sort of mental illness due to our constant playacting…
our playacting causes emotional, psychological problems, trauma
to our soul…

and perhaps, perhaps this emotional trauma causes
the violence we see in the modern world… perhaps this trauma
has caused the unprecedent and traumatic world wars of the
20th century? and has given rise to the individual and collective
actions of man against man… the Holocaust might be one such
example of the problems caused by our playacting?

Let us think about the Holocaust… because people are disconnected
from themselves, it allows us to commit actions like the Holocaust
against others… we aren’t real to ourselves and that goes double for
others, so it becomes easier to commit violence against others because
we can’t find our own human nature within all the playacting we do in
work, business, politics, family life… how do we know if our behavior
is decent or moral if we can’t even tell within ourselves what is decent or
moral? if you have to ask yourself, is this action moral/ethical,
you have clearly lost your identity, your ability to tell what is moral/ethical…

it seems clear that the people who committed the Holocaust never asked themselves
if their actions were moral or ethical… in trying to be something that they were not,
they forgot who they were and thus were easily able to commit acts of horror
that is the Holocaust… if you are not human to yourself, then how can others
be human to you? If you can’t tell if you are human, then how can tell if others
are human? People who are human can feel such human emotions as
sadness, happiness, fear, hope, joy beauty…and thus they are far less likely
to commit actions that led to the Holocaust and torturing of other people

in other words, if we can see others as human as we are, we are less likely
mistreat others…

our inability to see others as human beings is what allows us to commit actions
like the Holocaust and the daily actions of inhumanity we see
every day in the news…

we can now identify why people like UR can treat people so badly here
on ILP… he cannot see those he abuses as human… they are subhuman to
him and he has said as much… he can promise violence against others because
he doesn’t see others as human… and this is because he can’t tell that which is
human inside of himself… he is alienated, disconnected from himself
and thus he can threaten violence and death against others… he has playacted
so much he has lost himself in that playacting… the role is who he is…
there is no other outside of his playacting… and thus he has lost himself…
it would be very easy for him to engage in something like the Holocaust
because he can no longer see himself or us, as human… we are and he is,
just actors playing a role… nothing more… and where are the values of
joy, beauty, hope, love, justice… values which make us human?
UR can’t even tell us what those values mean because he has no idea
because he can’t even tell if he is human anymore…

Kropotkin

3

I will present this paragraph and then discuss it…

‘‘In a big city, full of scheming, idle people without religion
or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the
love of pleasure, and greet needs, engenders only monsters
and inspires only crimes, where moeurs and honor are nothing
because each easily hiding his conduct from the public eye, shows
himself only by his reputation’’

Jean Jaques Rousseau

a couple of things, Moeurs can be rendered as a cross of manners, morals,
and beliefs. 18th century writers used the word in a sense that terms like
‘‘value orientation.’’ Moeurs concern the complete manner, the style a person
posses.

the second thing is that the statement by Rousseau could have been written
by IQ45…IF he had any intelligence… for the conservative, the city, New York,
London, Paris, San Fransisco are “dens of iniquity” the place where morals go to die…

and yet, it is filled with assumptions, unwarranted assumptions that have no factual
content…and in the above paragraph, the values being attacked are idleness,
the love of pleasure, inactivity, sloth…(sloth is best described as laziness)
and yet, without some down time, some inactivity, we human beings can
can lose sight of who we are, we are so busy that we can’t see who we are
anymore… many scientists and writers must have inactivity, time to think,
Da Vinci was famous for his lack of activity, but he was usually in thought,
as was Einstein, and Newton and every great thinker must have time to
think, to have the leisure to think… thus “sloth” leisure is necessary for
us to think and ponder and wonder about what it means to be human…
for Rousseau, what was a negative is actually a positive… enforced time off
is what keeps us sane… what Rousseau really hated was play… recall your
puritans… they hated and banned anything resembling play…
no theaters, no gambling, no card games, no dancing… work was
the only thing you were allowed to do… but play is essential to human
existence… we might be defined as beings that play…games, sports,
theater are essential parts of being human…

my best thinking comes after a couple of days off and I have time to think
and reflect and ponder… working, constant working prevents me from
having the time to think, to “know thyself” and one needs time to
think about the Socratic maxim, “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”
but we need time and leisure to think about or to examine our lives…
an essential part of the Socratic maxims is the time needed to think
about the unexamined life and to “know thyself”

So what Rousseau thought of as an negative, is really a positive…
he is making assumptions as does the conservative makes the exact
same assumption, that we must always keep busy and working…
the devil is found through idle hands… no, seeking what it means
to be human is found through idle hands…

(the paragraph written by Rousseau BTW is found in
in a book, “The Fall of Public Man” by Richard Sennett…)

Kropotkin