“You should have stayed at university and become a philosopher,” my Dad told me one day.
This wasn’t quite as random as it might sound. We’d had dinner a few weeks earlier and he had told me that he had seen there was going to be a documentary about Wittgenstein on TV. Knowing that I had studied the mad genius of Anglophone thought, he had decided he should watch it and learn what he was all about. A happy conversation about the Picture Theory of Meaning and the limits of solipsism ensued and he had noticed that I was more engaged than I was when we were talking about my job. QED.
Data and the interpretation of data are different things, however. If I was energised, it was because I wasn’t really used to him taking an active interest in something that interested me. This is not a criticism – parents generally get their children into the things that interest them (or try to); more rarely does the traffic head in the other direction – and if he didn’t always share my more outré enthusiasms, he was always willing to fund them.
If the dialogue, therefore, revealed a degree of incomprehension, it was not just on his side. For it was only when I thought about it that I realised the root of my enthusiasm. That our mutual interests were things he had shared with me, not things I had shared with him had never really struck me before. Our relationship was just the way it was. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have known that, just that I didn’t know it.
This is just one anecdote. There could, I am sure, be countless more if I just turned my mind to them – times when something has happened which has shown me that the story I tell myself about myself is partial, incomplete, or just wrong.
There is an inevitability about this. We change and develop but we know ourselves only in retrospect; what we were is not necessarily what we currently are. There are bits of us we would prefer to pretend do not exist. Bits that others, perhaps, are more willing to see. But there is a tragedy too. For we are the people who can best know ourselves – my dad knew how I had reacted, I knew why I had reacted. Or at least I could formulate an alternative reason to his – our minds are just as good at inventing self-elevating justifications as they are at sweeping inconvenient facts under the carpet of our subconscious.
It may be that there is an afterlife. It may be that we reincarnate. But if neither is actually true, then we are unique entities with a limited shelf life. Unique opportunities too – for we are the one chance this particular arrangement of material has to know itself before it is gone, scattered to the cosmic winds never to return. If we don’t take this chance, we won’t get another.
Generally, though, we don’t. We settle on a convenient narrative, a story which makes us feel good about ourselves and shoe-horn everything we do into it, forgetting the bits which cannot be made to fit. There is security here, a sense that we are predictable, understandable (to ourselves at least) and stable. How would you feel if you decided you were an awareness shackled to a body and mind you could never understand, whose behaviour you could never forecast? Pretty terrified probably, like a passenger in a hijacked plane.
But there is often little truth in our tale. Our stories are outdated and partial. There are parts of us we just have no access to. You have, for example, no idea how your spleen is currently entertaining itself.
If our narratives are wrong, and can never be entirely right, then they can, at least, be more accurate. All we need to do is pay attention. Certainly, more than we do at the moment. And be honest about what we see. Certainly, more than we are at the moment.
This could be a call to solipsism – reducing ourselves to the only thing in the universe. It could be a call to withdrawal – taking ourselves to a mountain somewhere to grow a beard and contemplate our navels.
But it is neither. For it is only in interaction with the world that our selves become visible. We are the creatures which behave in that way in those circumstances, who think those thoughts after that stimulus, who feel those emotions after those events. Remove the world, and we remove the evidence, the trail of footprints we leave. And then our quarry fades back into the undergrowth, leaving us with nothing to track.
Final victory may never be possible, nor is it perhaps desirable. If a world where we had no idea who we were would be terrifying, a world in which we had complete self-knowledge would be stultifying. But progress is possible. Thinking of ourselves as object, not just subject, forces us to pay attention, to notice how we behave, to ask what sort of thing creates this pattern as we “run through the jungle of life like a panther, leaving a trail of self” in the words of an old friend (yes, alcohol had been taken. Why do you ask?).
We have more opportunities to do so than ever before. The virtual world offers a new forest through which to track ourselves, social media algorithms treating us as they see us, not as we see ourselves. AI systems spot patterns in the ways we interact with them, patterns they can reflect back to us if we ask them. They observe what we actually do, not just what we allow ourselves to think we do.
My dad wasn’t entirely wrong all those years ago. I had considered staying on at university. It was a summer job which convinced me not to, showing me that, while I had a reasonable understanding of my academic abilities, I had no idea if I could do anything else and I should probably find out. But I would have done Ancient History, not Philosophy. I was more interested in how people behave than in how some people think they should behave. Some ideas are, after all, so silly only a philosopher could believe them.
Take Plato. You may be perfectly happy to believe that the thing on which you are sitting is a chair. He wasn’t, introducing instead the idea of the “Forms”, real objects which exist totally separate from us; the things we think are real merely being shadowy reflections of them. Imagine, he says, sitting in a cave, looking at the wall. As things move outside the cave, they cast a shadow. The shadow is what you perceive as a chair, the thing outside the real Chair.
But if his analogy does not necessarily hold for chairs, tables or almost anything else, it probably holds for ourselves. We may never be able to experience much of ourselves directly, but we can see the shadows we cast and we can draw some conclusions from them about the thing outside. We have a unique vantage point. And the sun won’t be up forever.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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