“Self-Knowledge Is Dangerous” struck me as an odd title for an essay in a book about how the mind works. I would think that learning about our brains would inherently constitute self-knowledge—unless we refuse to take any of it personally.
That seems to be the strategy Marvin Minsky recommends in his book, The Society of Mind. That book has profoundly altered the way I think about myself since I first read it in the mid-nineties, but he suggests that we avoid that sort of thing by compartmentalizing our understanding the way “we keep our books and clothes in self-made shelves and cabinets—thus building artificial boundaries to keep things from interacting very much.”(p. 65)
In his view, self-knowledge is dangerous because if we closely examine the needs, values, etc. that are our heritage, we might find them “too infantile or too unworthy to tolerate… what would we substitute for them—once we divested ourselves of all those ties to instinct and society? We’d each end up as instruments of even more capricious sorts of self-invented goals.”(p. 68)
The alternatives, as he sees them, are either to continue in the ways of our forefathers and mothers—already capricious—or abandon ourselves to becoming instruments of even more caprice, but what if there were other alternatives? What if examining all those old ideas revealed an underlying order in reality that earlier generations had overlooked? What if this underlying order were more profound, more inspiring, and less capricious than anything they had conceived?
Minsky’s concern says more about his own approach to life than about any universal danger, but his approach is shared by the large conservative branch of society. Daniel Dennett expresses a like sentiment in his book, Elbow Room, as I noted in my review: He cautions us about looking “`too closely’ at our mental activities.”
Others have approached the unknown territory of our inner life with a more adventurous spirit:
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and preferred to die rather than give up his own examination. Fortunately, most of us will never have to choose between physical death and freedom of thought, but self-knowledge can lead to a kind of death that is, for some, equally frightening: Once we have thoroughly looked into it, we may find our old self deadly uninhabitable.
In order to pursue self-knowledge, then, we have to believe that no matter how bad the things we learn about ourselves may be, knowing the truth is preferable to remaining ignorant. We have to be willing to give up our comfortable illusions in the hope that reality will at least be bearable. It may even turn out that truth is not only stranger than fiction but more fun—there are rumors to that effect.
Life has to embolden us to make such a choice, and there are many suggestions that it is, indeed, a radical one. The Buddhists have a couple of metaphors: it’s like taking a step from the top of a hundred-foot pole, or letting go over the edge of a thousand-foot cliff.
How do we find the courage to take such a step, to risk all that is familiar for the chance that the unknown holds something better? We can take Socrates’ word for it, as one who has been there and lived to tell the tale, and there are others in every major religion—usually on the fringe—who offer reassurance: Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Dogen, and many more.
Some of us have found ourselves in the position of Cortez’ soldiers when he invaded Mexico and burned his ships after everyone got ashore: we know too much to go back to where we were, and the only course is to forge ahead and hope for success.
I have certainly had my share of “dark nights of the soul,” along the way, but the end result has been a freedom I had never imagined possible. I have been freed from the anxiety and insecurity that were built into my earlier, conventional view of life and myself.
We have nothing to lose but our chains, but if life hasn’t prepared us for it, Socrates’ reasoning alone won’t convince us to take that leap. Here’s hoping you have that kind of life.
