Know Thyself

Carved into the temple at Delphi were two words: know thyself. Socrates treated them as an instruction addressed to him personally, and built a life out of following it. But the project he actually pursued is stranger than the modern idea of self-knowledge, which tends to mean understanding your feelings or your history. What Socrates wanted to audit was your beliefs about what is good.

The reason is a claim he makes repeatedly and that almost nobody has believed since: nobody does wrong knowingly. Every bad action, on his account, is a mistake rather than a weakness. This sounds obviously false, so it is worth seeing the argument before dismissing it.

It runs like this. Nobody pursues what they believe will damage them; that is close to what wanting something means. Acting badly damages the person who does it, because it makes them a worse person, and being a worse person is the deepest harm available to a human being. Therefore anyone who acts badly must not believe, at the moment of acting, that it will damage them. And that is a false belief. So the wrongdoing traces back to an error about what is genuinely good, not to a failure of nerve.

If that is right, a great deal follows. Moral failure becomes an intellectual failure, which means it is teachable. Punishment starts to look less like justice and more like a crude form of instruction. And the most useful thing you can do about your own conduct is not to strengthen your will but to examine what you actually believe is worth having.

Here is how the examination works in practice. Take any gap between what you say you value and what you do. You say you value your health and you have not exercised in three months. The ordinary explanation is weakness: you know you should, you just cannot make yourself. Socrates rejects that explanation. He says the behaviour is the evidence and the statement is the noise. If you genuinely judged the exercise to be good for you, in the way you genuinely judge that a hot pan will burn you, no willpower would be required. You do not need willpower to avoid grabbing a hot pan.

That reframing is uncomfortable in a specific way. It removes the comfortable story in which you have the right values and merely fall short of them. It replaces it with the claim that your values are whatever your behaviour says they are, and if you want the behaviour to change you have to go after the belief.

The obvious objection arrived within a generation. Aristotle looked at the same phenomenon and coined a word for it: akrasia, weakness of will, knowing the better and doing the worse. He thought it was so plainly a real thing that any theory denying it had gone wrong somewhere. Most people since have agreed with Aristotle. Augustine, seven centuries later, made the point from the inside: he found he could command his own arm and it obeyed instantly, then command his own will and be refused. From that he concluded the will is not one thing but something divided against itself, which is close to the opposite of what Socrates held.

So this is a live disagreement, not a settled doctrine, and it is worth knowing which side you are on. When you fail to do something you said mattered, is the honest description that you knew and were too weak? Or is it that some part of you never really believed it mattered at all? Socrates would say the second, and that noticing it is the beginning of the only kind of self-knowledge that changes anything.