From Asia to Egypt to Greece, our ancient ancestors shared an insatiable curiosity to find out who we are. The first inscription at the Temple of Apollo read Know Yourself. To know, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is to be aware through observation, inquiry or information. Etymologically it means to recognize or identify, in its active form, it means to be aware, to perceive, to see. In its oldest Into-European form to know means ability, can do.
So where should I start to find out who I am? What is the self? According to the dictionary self is a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action. But what is that essential being, how do I know it. The Greek word for self is autos, and today we use that word to describe autonomous machinery, like an automobile. Interrelating the past with present on the path to knowing myself I’d like to start at the very beginning from the birth of a newborn body to the forming of an infant mind.
An infant would stare at you trying to absorb every speck of existence but as far as we know nothing makes an impression on him yet. When physically stimulated, for example, touching his belly, he would wave his hands and legs in uncoordinated manner and he might fashion a smile or a laughter. If an infant is left unattended on top of a table he’ll eventually reach the edge and fall over to the ground. The beginning stages of his live is marked by looking at the world, but not seeing it. In time his efforts to see pay off and he starts distinguishing light and dark, near and far, high and low. The ability to differentiate one thing from another generates connections in his nervous system that in turn generates energy to move with more coordinated precision from one end of the floor to the other from one room to the other. He starts crowing on his four extremities with his head raised, and his sight directed to the destination of his curiosity. He desires to see everything he looks at as an entity, as an isolated existent. He wants to know What is that? He will utilize all his perceptive senses to study and explore the surrounding world and the more he differentiates the more precise his movement becomes.
The richer the environment he has to himself to explore the more differentiated his experience becomes. He’ll study the difference between smooth and rough surfaces, he’ll experience hot and cold sensation, he’ll marvel at the appearance and disappearance of his care givers, he’ll indulge himself in dry and wet environment, he’ll discover the comfort and discomfort of pressure on himself and his interaction with soft and hard objects, he’ll hear and listen to soft and loud noise and music, he’ll taste sweet and bitter, liquid and solid food textures, he’ll feel the difference between oblong and angular shapes, he’ll exercise his strength in trusting and throwing objects, as well as his body. He is beginning to see himself through differentiating the world around him and his place in it.
His initial contact with a spoon in his hand and the attempt to feed himself is awkward and uncoordinated. But, in time he is a better judge of distance, weight and motion and he is able to hold the utensils with confidence and determination and happily find his open mouth to fill with food he desires.
As time passes and his movement improves his focus sharpens and he begins to blend with the environment. His vocal apparatus allows him to repeat whatever he hears and soon after he starts associating words with things in the world and starts identifying his differentiations by their name. Armed with language and desire to see and identify everything he encounters he starts making mental differentiations between the external sounds he hears and understands and the sounds he generates that in turn are understood by his parents. He is now capable of differentiating moving things from stationary things and grouping them in his mind as a means of expectation and anticipation of impending interaction. He is communicating and interacting with the world through his body and mind.
The child’s skill to differentiate things in the world and see himself as an entity in the world brings him to the next stage of knowing himself through integration. At this stage it is not enough to only sense the world but he wants to interact with it. Faced with various shapes and colors, letters and numbers he begins organizing them according to their attributes. He can place a circle in a circular cavity, and place a squire in a squire cavity. He can group blue numbers with blue letters and blue spheres, he can group numbers separately from letters. He is beginning to integrate his differentiations on the basis of distinguishing characteristics.
Ayn Rand articulates this process in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology as follows:
“When a child observes that two objects (which he will later learn to designate as ‘tables’) resemble each other, but are different from four other objects (‘chairs’), his mind is focusing on a particular attribute of the objects (their shape), then isolating them according to their differences, and integrating them as units into separate groups according to their similarities.
This is the key, the entrance to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness. The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow.
A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members.”
Through the perceptual mechanism the child is able to differentiate, through his conceptual mechanism the child is able to integrate. He can now see himself as a unit of his family and differentiate his family from the families of his friends. He can further differentiate himself as a child similar to his friends and different from adults, for example his parents. Making differentiations on the basis of the unit perspective gives rise to his understanding of how things around him work.
His focus now turns on the integrations of things, how he groups his many toys in one group, separate from the toys of his friends, how he groups toys he plays with, separate from the things he eats, how he integrates his interactions with certain people, separate from interaction with other people. He is capable of spending more and longer periods of time by himself, focusing on the things that interest him. His focus expands with his ability to make wider and wider integrations of how things work or do.
He is beginning to know himself. I play with my toys, I eat my food, I play with my friends, I talk to my grandma, I am running around, I am tired, I want to go to sleep.
You can take this process of differentiation and integration and apply it to an apprentice who is learning a craft, or to an athlete who is preparing to become a champion in his field and you’ll discover that the essential being of the self is his consciousness.
The opening sentence of Ayn Rand’s book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology reads:
“Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration.”
The degree of differentiation is proportionate to the degree of control the body can exact in space. The more detailed or refine the differentiation the more precise the control of the action. The degree of integration is proportionate to the degree of focus the mind can project and sustain in time. The wider the integration in the scope of activity, the longer the duration of focused awareness can be sustained.
Taking these two principles you can follow the progression of a novice apprentice developing his skills to become a master. A novice knows that it will take a long time, usually ten years of serious practice, to achieve a level of independent understanding of the action required to fulfill a task in his chosen craft. That is, the novice must project a willingness to face success and failure for the next ten years without losing focus of the goal to achieve mastery of the craft. He must investigate his progress in the ability to execute complex operations as required by the craft with precision and exactness only possible through experience and study of all the elements involved in his interaction with the matter he shapes.
As he gets closer to mastering the craft, the apprentice must accumulate enough differentiations and integrations so his body can function automatically with flawless performance. In this regard, depending on the craft, a master can observe and determine what level of development the student has achieved and what he needs to work on to get to the level of mastery. The master can group these differentiations required to strengthen the precision of the pupil as units and test his ability as he accomplishes each required unit.
In this higher level of understanding himself the student is judging himself against his interaction with the developing skills he is working to make masterful. He is comparing himself to the skills of his master and to the quality of the product of his creation. He becomes the process and action that the final product requires of him. He uses his body to perform the task that his mind assigns to it. He is consumed actively to generate the best possible item his skills can muster. His body and mind link inseparably to consciously perform all the differentiations and integrations acquired through his experience. To create the one in the many product he has to become the one in the many self.
Differentiation and integration are the two essentials required for human flourishing and help the individual through interpersonal, extrospective and introspective experience to know himself.
Historically, man began as a nomad, living his life day by day. His future was uncertain his goal was to survive today. As agrarian cultivator of the land he roamed for millennia, he was able to expand the day into a season, so he lived from one season to the next, from one cycle of planting to harvesting to the other. That gave him more time to reflect on himself and generate more differentiations and more integrations. His goal was to survive this season. He rooted himself to the land and the land became himself. But in time expending his land became an imperialistic pursuit of achieving opulence through force and he spent a long period of time defending and searching for what is left of what he remembered to be himself. Soon after he rediscovered the ancient maxim to know yourself and he found the courage to live by his consciousness again, he developed industrial scale productions and began expanding through exploration. His goal was to survive the availability of a resource used in his industry. In short time the industrialist turned into a capitalist and his goal became to expand the duration of the life span of man for as long as it is possible.
The next stage of development will have to deal with the individual and his expansion of value creation. The ability to know himself as fully integrated in the world as the world is fully integrated in him.
Philosophically the world matter, psychologically you matter. Your desire to see the world makes your life possible. Your desire to see yourself makes the world possible. The two are interdependent and indispensable one in the many.
Following on the link between body and mind in knowing yourself in my next episode I’ll focus on the structure and function of our body and how does it relate to the structure and function of our mind.
Toward the end of the month Ron Pisaturo and I will discuss his latest book - A Validation of Knowledge, A New, Objective Theory of Axioms, Causality, Meaning, Propositions, Mathematics, and Induction; with a chapter on Mathematics co-written by Glenn Marcus.
I have learned a great deal from his book already and can’t wait to have him discuss it on my podcast. To fully enjoy the forthcoming conversation with Ron, please, get a copy of the book and read it ahead of time.