by John Schwenkler
This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. The first three parts can be found here, here, and here.
γνῶθι σεαυτόν, the inscription over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is said to have read: Know thyself. The maxim has the form of a command, suggesting that what it describes is something we often fail to do, and moreover that this failure is no mere cognitive lapse, but something that willful effort is required to overcome. As the philosopher Ursula Renz explains in her introduction to a recent volume of essays on philosophical conceptions of self-knowledge through history, many philosophers have taken self-knowledge to be an important part of achieving wisdom:
Some … even claimed that the acquisition of self-knowledge is the very end of philosophical inquiry; to engage in philosophy, they thought, is to explore and thereby to ennoble the self. [This] concern with self-knowledge was immediately practical. Not only is self-knowledge constitutive of the kind of things we are, but it crucially matters for the individual persons we are or want to become.
To modern ears, the command to know oneself suggests a concern with knowing who one is, in a sense of this phrase that we connect with talk of self-discovery and of the forging of an individual identity that defines one’s lifelong pursuits. But this conception of the command reflects an understanding of human individuality that the ancients arguably did not share, or at least did not credit the same importance as many of us give it today.
Shorn of that assumption, the command to know oneself is as much a command to know who–or what–we are: that is, to understand what we sometimes call the “human condition”, not just abstractly but rather in a way that recognizes this description as applying to oneself. Such knowledge is also bound up with the kind of articulacy about ourselves that I described in my first post in this series: the self-knowing person is able not merely to “go on” in the way that we do, but also to say what it is that our going on in this way consists in, and justify why it is that we go on in this way. Read more »
What is commonsense to most people who received a K-12 public education in the United States is that every formal system of state schooling throughout the modern world is designed to educate its students to develop, what Charles Lemert calls “sociologically competencies” within whatever ideological system is dominating at the time of their schooling. People correctly assume that children going to school during the Weimar Republic, for example, were educated to function competently within that ideological system. Children who were in school during the reign of Chairman Mao in the People’s Republic of China were educated to function competently within that system. Children in China today are educated to be sociologically competent in China’s current government and economic system. Children in France, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Iran likewise are educated to function competently in those systems. In the Soviet Union, children were educated to function within its version of communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, children were required to learn different civic knowledge and skills in order to be competent within the newly emerging political ideologies of reformed nation states.
Notwithstanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca, translation continues to be a vital component of international relations, whether political, commercial, or cultural. In certain cases, translation is also necessary nationally, for instance in countries comprising more than one significant linguistic group. This is so in Switzerland, which voted by an overwhelming majority in 1938 to add a fourth national tongue to thwart the irredentist aspirations of its Italian neighbor, and which in certain contexts is obliged to use a Latin version of its own name (Confoederatio Helvetica) to avoid favoring one language group over another.
If you listen to that track as featured in the mix, my judgment may seem a little harsh. The track is on the static side, but that’s hardly a fault in the context: the textures are lovely, and there’s plenty of movement; and at under four minutes it can’t really be said to overstay its welcome. A minor work, perhaps, but as a brief linking interlude it works perfectly well. So what’s the problem?
front of some her UC Berkeley colleagues, Doudna shared, “a story … about some research … that led in an unexpected direction … ” producing “ … some science that has profound implications going forward…but also makes us really think about what it means to be human and what it means to have the power to manipulate the very code of life …”
He is an enigma. He sits up there in his marble chair, set in a Greek temple, literally larger than life, and he defies us to understand him.
There should be more.
So, here’s a game. Try to imagine: “What unbelievable moral achievements might humanity witness a century from now?” Now, discuss.
The translated versions from Tamil into English of Perumal Murugan’s two books, One Part Woman and the The Story of A Goat, weave stories of the complex life of the rural people of South India in an engaging and highly readable form.
Jack Youngerman. Long March II, 1965.
The political philosophy, and more importantly, political practice that took root in the wake of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ (say 1775-1848) was liberalism of various kinds: a commitment to certain principles and practices that eventually came to seem, like any successful ideology, a kind of common sense. With this, however, came a growing sense of dissatisfaction with what it seemed to represent: ‘bourgeois society’. Here is a paradox: at the very point at which the Enlightenment promise of the free society seemed to be coming true, discontent with that promise, or with the way it was being fulfilled, took hold. This was a sense that the modern citizen and subject was somehow still unfree. If this seems at least an aspect of how things stand with us in 2020 it might be worth looking back, for doubts about the liberal project have accompanied it since its inception.
As she returned to her country after eight years of self-imposed exile in Dubai, Benazir reflected in her posthumously-published memoir