According to legend, inscribed on walls of the temple on the sacred site of Delphi in Ancient Greece were two premier injunctions: NOTHING IN EXCESS, and KNOW THYSELF. This course will be an examination of the latter injunction in an effort to discover what self-knowledge is, why it might be valuable, and what, if any, limitations it might face. What is missing from a person lacking in self-knowledge that makes her less wise, virtuous, or competent in certain areas than others who have this capacity, and what if anything might she do to fill that gap? Historical sources as well as recent research in philosophy, experimental social psychology, and neuroscience will inform our investigation, in the course of which we will become students of our own dreams, and cultivate some meditative practices. Learning Outcomes: Learners will gain familiarity with prominent themes from Western, classical Chinese, and Buddhist approaches to our knowledge of ourselves. In the course of doing so, they will gain an appreciation of the relation of self-knowledge to wisdom, of the value of intellectual humility, as well as of methods of learning about oneself that do not depend on introspection. Learners will also become familiar with contemporary research in experimental social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience into the emotions, the unconscious, the role of affect in decision making, and self-deception. They will also gain an appreciation of a challenge to the assumption of a coherent, unified self that derives from the Buddhist tradition. --- This course was created by a partnership between The University of Edinburgh and Humility & Conviction and Public Life Project, an engaged research project based at the University of Connecticut and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
How best to live?
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From the course by The University of Edinburgh
Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge: The Examined Life
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The University of Edinburgh
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From the lesson
MIND AND SELF: Some Aspects of Human Nature
Is there such a thing as a human nature? And if there is, how can we know what it is? In this module we will look at how the concept of human nature is used and potentially misused, and what can all this tell us about ourselves. And finally: can human nature be changed?
Meet the Instructors
Mitchell GreenProfessor of Philosophy
Dr Simon FoktLearning Technologist
University of Edinburgh
[MUSIC]
Another important aspect of these theories of human nature is that many of them
are directed towards answering questions about how best to live,
either our own individual lives, so to speak,
or politically as part of a large group of people.
So if we understand aspects of our nature, that might shed some light on how we ought
to do things, in particular, how we ought to organize ourselves into a society.
Famously, the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, held that once we understand our
natures, we will also that it's best to keep that nature in check.
So in a state of nature, he held,
people will do what comes naturally to them and what comes naturally to them,
he would say, is to act in a generally selfish, self-interested way.
And for that reason, there will be little control over your resources.
Little ability to predict what's going to happen tomorrow.
Because you never know when somebody's going to try to take something away from
you and violate your privacy or your person in some way or other.
So Hobbes famously argued that if the state of nature were allowed free reign,
if we were allowed to just be in a state of nature with no control over ourselves,
lives in such a situation would be nasty, poor, brutish and short.
Hobbes' view had a great deal of resonance among philosophers of his day,
political thinkers of his day, leaders of his day, as well as afterwards.
And many held that, well, if that's the case, if that's what things would be like
in a state of nature then we better have in mind the application of some powerful
government that would control us and keep us from going that way.
From behaving in such a noxious and abrasive and destructive manner.
And that's the way in which Hobbes and many who followed him argued for
the justification of a political organization such as a government or
even a king.
Later, philosophers thought that Hobbes was onto something, but
that he underestimated the positive side of human nature.
So, for example, Bishop Butler and
David Hume in a later century argued that human beings
are indeed in large part selfish, are indeed in large part prone to violence.
But they also have the capacity for what, for example,
David Hume referred to as sympathy.
Sympathy is a kind of quasi-technical term in David Hume.
And Hume's idea of sympathy is something like the following.
I have a natural and unreflective, fairly automatic
reaction to the well being including the plight of other people.
So, for example, even if I have no particular personal interest in
well being of a particular child who lives for an example in Nebraska.
Nevertheless, if I hear a report on the radio or
on the news about how such a child fell down a fairly deep well,
is alive but is stuck there and is having difficulty getting out.
Then I'm probably going to be clinging to the radio or some other news source
to find out what happens and hoping very much that the child is saved.
It's very natural for us to resonate automatically unreflectively,
in a way that takes concern for the well being of another.
Just as if unless you thought you were in danger of being harmed, if someone falls
over in a crowded place, then you're likely to help that person get up,
again, so long as you don't feel like you're being tricked into being robbed or
something of the sort.
So Hume would argue, following Butler,
that many of us at least if we're brought up and
develop in a way that's relatively normal, relatively typical for our species.
We're going to take some automatic and
unreflective concern for the well being of others, so long as doing so
does not clash too violently with our own interests and needs.
That sympathy, Hume, for example would argue, can be seen as a basis for a form
of government that does not require an absolutely rigid political organization.
But a certain amount of flexibility, because people can be depended upon
to act in a way that's relatively sympathetic towards one another.
So long as there's not some strong counteracting force.
So if that's right, then we have Hobbes on the one hand, Butler and
Hume on the other, arguing that if we can find out what human nature is,
that'll give us some pointers as to how we are to organize ourselves into society.
Other thinkers from different traditions, for example, Confucius, held that yeah,
for the most part,
people are not too different from the way that Hume describes.
They're largely self interested.
They start out as pretty good, capable of being improved.
Generally speaking, not saints, but generally speaking,
people don't start out as inherently evil either.
And his focus was that on the improvement of the self,
the refinement of one's character.
At one point in the for example, Confucius writes, find inspiration in the odes,
take your place through ritual and achieve perfection with music.
The idea here is the following.
We start out with a pretty good self, not great, prone to error, prone to a certain
amount of selfishness, but if we cultivate the self in the appropriate way,
we can end up with something that is quite virtuous in the end.
So human nature itself doesn't tell you a great deal about what we're like.
It's kind of how we start, an imperfect stone in need of polishing.
We polish it by means of such things like rituals,
by cultivation and thereby become a virtuous person.
And you might be struck by the idea that rituals are an important part of
developing the self.
And ritual indeed was a larger part of traditional societies.
On the other hand, you might wonder whether not a good number of your
activities are in some sense ritualistic.
When you enjoy a sporting event like a football match or baseball game.
When you get together with family members, when you go to a place of worship.
There's a fair bit of ritual happening there, not all of those activities there
are things that have to occur for purely practical purposes.
There are certain routines you go through and if that's the case,
then that's one of the symptoms that something's being a ritual.
And it helps tie a bunch of people together.
They have something in common.
But I think Confucius and those who follow him would also say that when that happens,
you're also developing yourself.
Because many of these rituals are not just things that you do,
but there are many respects other directed things.
So when people sing a national anthem,
when people clap, applause for a performance.
They're doing it jointly, they're doing it as a group and they're acknowledging one
another's existence and participation as stellar group members.
There is a kind of pro-social nature of many of our rituals,
that puts us in the space, I think.
Points us in the direction of others, as opposed to pointing you away from others.
And as so far as you're point in the direction of others,
you are thereby becoming more of a social being.
And generally speaking, as long as you're in a reasonably healthy society, becoming
more of a social being, again, there are exceptions or limitations, but also it's
going to tend to make you a better person by virtue of that kind of cultivation.
So a perspective that's valuable from Confucius,
is that our nature is a template on which we can write.
We write by doing things.
It's not as if our nature is something that's fixed and stays with us our entire
lives, rather it's subject to a certain amount of plasticity.
And that plasticity is something that we're responsible for
working with as it were and our job is to develop into virtuous people.
And Confucius would say, we develop into virtuous people by such things as self
cultivation, becoming cultured, as well as engaging in rituals.
Rituals aren't inherently bad or boring or silly.
They have a value, in large part because they allow us to exercise our
pro-social types of abilities.
[MUSIC]
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