Self-mastery and the reflective life
AC Grayling at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2004

Felicity Graham

Anthony Grayling's talk at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival on his new book The Mystery of Things was about why an understanding of science, history and the arts is important in the pursuit not just of knowledge, but knowledge of oneself.

Socrates said that he learnt the maxim gnothi seauton, meaning 'know thyself' at Delphi where it was inscribed, together with 'everything in moderation', over the entrance to the ancient temple of Apollo. In his own book festival talk on 'Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the ancient world shapes our lives', Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, upped the ante. He indicated the emphasis that Socrates placed on reflective thought: Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.

Grayling elaborated the theme: we are all in fact engaged in philosophy, in understanding the world and how we should live. Money, family and friends are important in 'the good life', but so is having a sense of self-mastery. One should try to be an 'intelligent responder', someone who takes note and reflects on what they have seen, read or heard. In this vein, the novelist EM Forster took the motto 'only connect', as the epigraph of Howard's End (1910). But the connections do not fly in unbidden. Insight and the ability to build a rich tapestry of knowledge improve with use. A journalist once asked the golfer Gary Player how it was that he always seemed to be at his best when the odds were against him. Player famously paraphrased Thomas Jefferson, saying 'Sure I'm lucky…and the more I practise the luckier I get'.

On the value of science, in his 2003 book What is Good? he describes part of a valuable scientific attitude as a readiness to think again in the face of new evidence. A paradigm of reason in action, science is open minded, proportions belief to evidence and tests what we believe. It states things as they are, not how we would like them to be. In the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant said a pre-requisite for progress through science was freedom from external constraints on debate and freedom from the internal fears which inhibit independent thought. It is still true now. Simon Goldhill reflected that one of the surprising and disappointing marks of our time, in great contrast to the Greeks, is how afraid people are to speak out independently. We need to ensure we do not trammel our own individual progress or society's scientific progress by timidity and uncertainty of thought.

Michael P Lynch, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, echoed this commitment to the pursuit of truth over belief in a recent article, Who Cares About the Truth? He says 'An unswerving allegiance to what you believe isn't a sign that you care about truth. It is a sign of dogmatism...True beliefs are those that portray the world as it is and not as we hope, fear, or wish it to be.'

From the Hutton report to the book festival's debates on the media, there is a growing focus at least in this country on the truth of information, about what we can and cannot believe. In his discussion about what is truth and why it matters Lynch gives a political and social justification for Grayling's championship of the reflective life. Lynch warns that if we are not clear about what is correct and incorrect, true or false 'you eliminate not just dissent - you eliminate the very possibility of dissent'. If we lose that clarity over truth and falsehood, we lose clarity over the distinctions between what is a fundamental human right and what is a temporary right of policy, such as the Patriot Act. Philosophy is not an indulgent luxury. We cannot say we care about truth unless we are informed, and if we give up the search for truth, we are already relinquishing our rights.

The reflective life also requires us to be informed about the arts. They temper the rigour of science with their invitation to become involved in the great conversation of what it means to be human. They open us to the nuances, subtleties and ambiguities of human nature and of circumstance.

Knowledge of history is equally important. A key reward of the reflective life might be an ability to avoid repeating ones mistakes. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891) Nietzsche presents the ideal of self-mastery through his mouthpiece, Zarathustra, but also in the concept of 'eternal recurrence', the idea that we should live our lives as though condemned to repeat them. Grayling made an analogous point: the most responsible thing a citizen can be is knowledgeable about history since it allows us to avoid repeating our mistakes. 'The furniture of a civilised mind', history allows us to see things from more than one perspective and to participate in current affairs with an understanding of how the world has come to be the way it is.

As an example, to maintain the superiority of the British navy's fleet in 1911 Winston Churchill ordered a change from coal-burning engines to oil, meaning ships could be refuelled at sea. The oil was to come from near Basra so it became imperative to protect the area. This and subsequent discussions over oil led to the carving up of the Middle East by the British. Once the empire was over we could see the disaster in the facts on the ground. Grayling said that we are there now, because of our long responsibility for the way things are. This was a political as well as a historical point, another indication of how philosophy and the reflective life are intimately bound to science and to politics. Many of the issues facing contemporary society are philosophical issues and they arise, like the HFEA's decision to allow therapeutic cloning, because of recent scientific discoveries.

Science, the arts and history are the three most potent resources we have for philosophical reflection, and if we make them part of the fabric of our day, when great debates arise we can engage in them in an informed manner, rather than with gut feeling and with prejudice. If we reflect on these issues we are playing a responsible role in living the good life, the creative life, the life well lived. In The Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle wrote that the good life is about your life and character, what sort of person you are, how you relate to other people, indeed the whole flavour of the person, and that you have a responsibility to be that person. This is echoed from Marcus Aurelius' idea of self-mastery in the face of adversity to Ruskin who commented that it would be a terrible death to die knowledgeable but without knowledge of oneself. We see it in Shakespeare's notion of the self-communing individual, typified in the great monologues of Hamlet or Iago.

Most people don't take reflection as far as Descartes who wondered if an evil demon was making him believe the world he lived in was real. Unlike Kant, most aren't interested in trying to prove, not through experience, but through reason that Descartes had no grounds for this concern. And yet, The Matrix (1999), a cult film by the Wachowski brothers, slated on the one hand as pseudo and shallow, and feted on the other by film buffs for its special effects, did raise Descartes' question. Here is our hero, it said - he thinks he lives in an objective reality just like you and I, but in fact it is all a trick played on his mind by an intelligent machine that feeds him and drugs him. Few have not reacted in some sense when the camera pans back to show those thousands of pods of duped and sleeping humans. If only we look at The Matrix without our fashionable cynicism, we recognise a horror and this is because we can empathise and imagine. If put in terms which conjure that empathy people do become attracted to questions like 'what are the limits to what we can know about the world?'.

Regardless of whether or not one is really troubled by Descartes' question, trying to use reason and discernment to structure one's way through an argument is one of the most satisfying things we can do. It forces us to do what in daily life is not commonplace: to truly engage, to try to understand the thread of someone else's assertions when they may have adopted an entirely different, even alien way of looking at a question, and then to consider what is sound or flawed about those assertions.

Whether it is The Matrix or AC Grayling, a modern Socratic gadfly who provokes us into thought, once we remove the trappings of circumstance, the study of what the world is and how we should live remains fascinating. Through this provocation, philosophy becomes personal, it becomes the reflective life. Sapere Aude! (dare to know) Kant wrote in What is Enlightenment? (1784). Education should be about the encouragement of lively reasoning, of why we need to be aware of our past, our present, and why it's important we learn to think well, and for ourselves.