Know Thyself III: Know the World

17 March 2021

This is the third consecutive blog on Aristotle and self-understanding, all emanating from the Delphic inscription, Know Thyself.  We are on the third of Aristotle’s five-point explanation of the claim that all people, by nature, desire to understand.

Today’s focus is on understanding the role that the desire to understand plays in the world.  And, in some ways, this is a very different proposition today, with a population fast approaching eight billion people, than it was in ancient Greece when the world population was less than two-hundred million (United States Census Bureau), a fact that would have been largely unknown to these philosophers.  Their arguably accurate estimate, that Athens was the most advanced city in the world, probably included approximate knowledge that there were some 500,000 fellow inhabitants around.  Why so many numbers?  And what does this have to do with mental health?

Eight billion people desiring to understand the world at the same time has consequences.  While most of those people will not be publishing media content for digestion, more people are publishing media content than at any other time in human history.  One of the by-products of our information age is data overload.  (In the blog of 24 February, one of the means of psychological first aid is to manage information ingestion.)  I will venture so far as to claim that ours is a time of information anxiety. 

And, indeed, when I Google that term, there’s already a thirty-year-old (!) book with that title and a concept defined as “...anxiety produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand (Wurman, 1989).”  And while some of what we’ve learned since Aristotle’s time saves lives and increases wellbeing, his concern was not quantitative but qualitative.  And those qualitative factors have not changed.

One of the many things that endears Aristotle to me is his scientific mindset—he was driven by observed data and logic.  Based on his observations of the suitability of human beings to life on earth, he felt the earth an hospitable home, the place we should feel we belong.  What we know that Aristotle did not, is that this is SO true because we have evolved right out of the water, soil, and air of our dear planet—nothing is more naturally at home on this planet than human beings.  And why, you might be asking, is this important to mental health?  If you maintain, as I do, that a thriving human life is built upon three factors, people, purpose, and product, the answer becomes clearer.  It was Aristotle who said that “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.  And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity [i.e., a god]; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one (Politics, Barnes, Ed., 1.1253a, 3-5).”  (In fact, the misanthrope is probably an ill man, not a bad one.)

If you have read Gabor Maté, or seen a corresponding Johann Hari video, you are familiar with the statement that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.  Aristotle is saying the same thing but in a more profound, all-encompassing sense: Aristotle’s connected human beings are connected to their soil, their tribes, their laws, and their hearths (homes).  As were John Donne’s parishioners. 

Many of you will recognize the passages below, taken from Donne’s Meditation XVII.  The magnificently overriding unity in Donne’s Meditation is, I maintain, parallel to Aristotle’s.  [Donne’s spellings of 1623 remain.]

“Perchance he for whom this Bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him...All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language…No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee...” (Coffin, Ed., 1994, pp. 440-441)

That mediation, from almost 400 years ago is, to me, about the unity of those things under the sun (per Ecclesiastes and the image, above).  As is Aristotle’s point about the unity of the soil, tribes, laws, and homes that populate our planet.  And while our information age is ironically alienating us from each other, the message of Aristotle (and John Donne) is that no human is an island.  The desire to understand has profound human roots. Understanding those roots, and the desire of understanding itself, is fundamentally the desire of homeboys to know (and cherish) their shared home. 

Dan Chalykoff provides one-to-one counselling concerning life direction, addiction, and change. Since 2017 he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery: danchalykoff@hotmail.com