Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 9

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CHAPTER 9
AUTOGNOSIS

Know thyself 2.0

 

The beginning of philosophy is to know the condition of your own mind.
Epictetus

“Know thyself” was famously inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and seen by Socrates’ friend Caepheron on a visit there to enquire as to whether Socrates was the wisest of men. Socrates himself tells the story at his trial, and Plato’s Apology represents one of the greatest acts of self-knowing in the history of literature. The second maxim carved on Apollo’s temple was: “Everything in moderation.” What is unspoken is the conjunctive implication of the two; everything in moderation, and that includes knowing thyself.

Nietzsche warns, in The Dawn, against a superficial form of self-knowledge which satisfies us at our peril: “To however high a degree a man can attain to knowledge of himself, nothing can be more incomplete than the conception which he forms of the instincts constituting his individuality.”

Self-knowledge is not a question of casually recognizing your own familiar traits. Knowing yourself is not being unhesitating about which type of latte you prefer, nor is it knowing you are squeamish when it comes to hypodermics, habitually very early for appointments, allergic to cats, or have a tendency to spend too much on tech. It isn’t even knowing that you have a tendency to romantic jealousy, bad anger management, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Knowing yourself is opening a stiff-handled cellar door, descending lightless stone steps with unsure tread, and daring to open other doors in the dark and the damp below, doors you have been warned against opening and which open in turn on to rooms you have been told – you do not know by whom – to fear.

What is the self we may or may not decide to investigate? And what is the nature of the knowledge we might gain from such an investigation?

 

In those days she understood herself very little.
John Galsworthy, Beyond

My term for self-knowledge is “autognosis”, a reasonably straightforward Ancient Greek construction, its connection with the Roman Gnostic school of philosophy notwithstanding. Genuinely to know one’s self is daunting and not necessarily to one’s personal advantage (and thus rather unnatural and counter-evolutionary). H. P. Lovecraft assesses the dangers of internal investigation in the story The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The contents of human consciousness are intimately linked with its past, the personal history through which it has lived to become a possible object of the study of itself, of autognosis. As our past is what we are essentially (just as the present is what we are existentially) with the addition of anticipation of the future and all expedited by the present, examining the self is not made easier when the Freudian concept of the screen memory is taken into account, an echo of a Nietzschean aphorism; Memory says, I did this. Pride says, I did not. In the end, pride wins.

What is the philosophical story of self-examination? Self-knowledge, autognosis, would seem at a first, casual glance to be a Cartesian given. Descartes’ famous epistemological axiom cogito ergo sum translates as “I think, therefore I am”, and although it looks like immediate knowledge of the self, it is just a guarantee of raw existence, the quiddity of being. Nietzsche pointed out that the step of adding an “I” to that which thinks is illegitimate, and Edmund Husserl refined Descartes’ insight to cogitationes, or simply “there are thoughts”.

But, despite David Hume’s unravelling of sense impressions and thoughts to find no supporting and ultimate substrate, no self to act as a tablet on which the other attributes could be written, the phenomenological self acts as though it exists, and is available for inspection as such, on this provisional basis.

The Cartesian cogito is often seen as a turning-point for Western philosophy, the beginning of modernism, the birthing of the individual. However, although the cogito is the centre of gravity of the Meditations and Discourse on the Method, and although to focus on any other aspect of this beautifully written text would seem like a performance of Hamlet without the Prince, it will repay us to look at what led Descartes to his great discovery, and what other elements were in play at this pivotal philosophical moment.

 

I recollect nothing of learning to read, I only remember what effect the first considerable exercise of it produced on my mind; and from that moment I date an uninterrupted knowledge of myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

Descartes begins in the library and, before he can move outward to proving both the existence of the world and that of God (and even that of the library itself) he determines that he can read his way to both: “[T]he perusal of all excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages, who have written them, and even a studied interview, in which are discovered to us only their choicest thoughts…”

As encyclopaedic as Descartes’ reading was, something is missing or, rather, something is ever-present yet unseen; the self. Descartes resolves to change the direction of his enquiries: “I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.”

Here is the distant echo of the Delphic Oracle’s injunction to Socrates; know thyself. Descartes moves from the library to the field of deeds, and, “[A]fter I had been occupied several years in thus studying the book of the world, and in essaying to gather some experience, I at length resolved to make myself an object of study.”

The result was the cogito, and the elements of epiphany for Descartes were self-examination and reading, whether books from his library or Galileo and Newton’s “great book of nature/the world”.

From the indubitability of being as proven by cogitation (I think therefore I am), Descartes goes on to rebuild both the external world and the necessity of the existence of God. The full process of this radical skepticism is riven with problems, not least Descartes’ use of the imagination, but the fulcrum of the cogito – with echoes of Augustine – supports the lever of the sense of the individual, who can and should study himself from the outset of his investigations.

Self-analysis seems to be a solitary affair. But there is no need to become an ascetic, a stylites perched on his rock in the desert or a monk in a cave with only a rice bowl and a toga for his possessions. The figure of the hermit was powerfully present in the medieval mind, hence its appearance as one of the major arcana in the Tarot deck. But there is another card in the deck that also indicates and suggests isolation, meditation, introspection. The Four of Swords, in the famous Rider/Waite deck, shows an armoured knight resting on a tomb. Knights would have their tombs prepared before travelling on crusade to the Holy Lands. It was the habit of some to recline on their own sarcophagi and dwell on their mortality and the shortness of life, on which Seneca wrote. Reflection is seen as an occasional resource, time put aside for self-reflection. This is in fact a deeply Stoic tableau, one which is thematised by Heidegger; Death is the tane of the mirror, and you would do well to think on that. Introspection – a word Carl Jung introduced, along with “extraspection”– is freely available, as Marcus Aurelius gently reminds us: “At what time soever thou wilt, it is in thy power to retire into thyself, and to be at rest, and free from all businesses. A man cannot any whither retire better than to his own soul.”

Stoicism was perhaps the earliest philosophical attitude which oriented itself towards the self rather than the outside world. We still talk of a “stoical” approach to life, and its meaning is close to the meaning of “being philosophical”, accepting of existence and its vagaries. Where was stoicism born?

 

He who knows himself thoroughly knows God and all the mysteries of His nature.
M. M. Pattison Muir

The philosophical school known as the Stoics was named for the stoa, the porch where Epicurus and his friends would meet and talk. The three major Stoics all had two main objects of study: philosophy and the self. The gentle investigation and gradual knowledge of the self is a constant sub-current to their meditations, epithets and letters, and the primacy of philosophy both as a way inwards and a necessary mediator with the external world is the supporting structure of their thoughts.

The main triumvirate of Roman philosophers known as the Stoics were Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180AD, Seneca, a 1st-century consul and playwright, and Epictetus, at one time a slave, and born 15 years before Seneca was forced to take his own life by the Roman state. Their philosophy, their love of wisdom, was purely personal and a matter of comportment. Marcus most famously wrote the semi-autobiographical Meditations, and Epictetus similarly left gnomic advice for the tranquil, self-aware life in the Enchiridion and others. Seneca’s most famous legacy is his letters to his friend Lucilius.

The Stoics are treated today as prototypical self-help guides, and their tendency towards an uncluttered life is a relaxant for those who must live in our chaotic emporium. Part of the panacea they offer is self-knowledge. Marcus: “[T]hose who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.”

Tranquility, writes the emperor, is possible if you “occupy yourself with few things”. Of these things, philosophy should assuredly be one, and perhaps the greatest of all. Seneca writes, in On the Shortness of Life, that “Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone truly live.”

And they alone are truly free, as Seneca goes on to make one of the most moving eulogies to philosophy in the classical – or any other – world:

The life of the philosopher, therefore, has wide range, and he is not confined by the same bounds that shut others in. He alone is freed from the limitations of the human race; all ages serve him as if a god. Has some time passed by? This he embraces by recollection. Is time present? This he uses. Is it still to come? This he anticipates. He makes his life long by combining all times into one.

So, unarmed and defenceless is no way to go looking for your innermost self. Armed with philosophy, however, this courageous quest can be undertaken, with the usual caveats concerning those old acquaintances, fear and courage.

 

Whoever does not want to fear, let him probe his inmost self. Do not just touch the surface; go down into yourself; reach into the farthest corner of your heart. Examine it then with care.
Saint Augustine, Sermons

To be a philosopher, then, is to be as free as is possible, and Seneca is telling us that what is important is not the body but the mind, or soul, or psyche, consciousness, spirit, nephesh, or any of the other sub-set which emerged from the classical world to denote the body’s radical other. Epictetus wrote of “[T]he body which we share with the animals, and reason and thought which we share with the gods.”

This radical division between body and its other would go on to have a long tradition in philosophy, with the body deemed inferior to the soul.

Philosophy has still the feminine modesty noted by Nietzsche. She requires you to tend yourself before concerning yourself too much with others. Marcus Aurelius warns against this existential gregariousness:

For not observing the state of another man’s soul, scarce was ever any man known to be unhappy. But whosoever they be that intend not, and guide not by reason and discretion the motions of their own souls, they must of necessity be unhappy.

So, we have sketched the internal voyages of a soldier-philosopher, an emperor, a consul and a slave. By the 19th century, however, a specialist had arisen; the psychologist. While the scene of their investigations was primarily the interior life of others, particularly when dysfunctional, so too the new psychological class had time for reflection, for speculation on their own psychical lives. “Speculation” is naturally and etymologically linked to self-analysis; Speculum is the Latin for “mirror”.

 

How can anybody know me
When I don’t even know myself?
The The, Giant

Sigmund Freud was conflicted about the possibility of self-analysis, but then he was conflicted about many things, including philosophy. In the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he recognises the importance of examining the self, but only as an entry requirement to the psychoanalytic profession: “Psychoanalysis is learned, first of all, from a study of one’s self, through the study of one’s own personality.”

Freud’s father died in 1896, and Freud lapsed into a depressive state he sought to counter by meditative introspection. How effective he found this may be gauged by a letter written in November of 1897: “Self-analysis is impossible in fact. I can only analyse myself by means of what I learn from the outside (as if I were another).”

A problem which is inbuilt to the Freudian system will be inherited by Jung; architectonics. Both the tripartite Freudian system of the psyche (ego, censor, id) and the more complex Jungian model of the psyche (also featuring the shadow, animus and anima, and the archetypes) are architectural models, and parts of the building are cordoned off.

The Freudian unconscious is like the cosmologists’ “dark matter”; although it can’t be observed they know it must be there because of the observable range of its effects. For Freud, the unconscious is not available for inspection at first hand, but must be assembled through the visible language of the signs it expresses. To this extent, you can know yourself up to a point, then you come across the staple of fairy tales, a guarded gate.

For Jung, introspection (his term) is a mandatory function of age: “For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.”

Jung does not simply prize scientific enquiry, but sees the interior journey, an odyssey through the self, as part of the development of that self: “Whoever progresses along this road of self-realization must inevitably bring into consciousness the contents of the personal unconscious, thus enlarging the scope of his personality.”

There is, of course, something of a drawback to all this enthusiastic self-examination. If you go down into the cellar of the self, you may not be alone.

 

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
Catchphrase from 1930s American radio serial The Shadow

The Shadow is a highly operative part of the personality for Jung. A second self, the Jungian Shadow presents only two alternatives for the conscious self: accommodation or conflict. Jung states that the shadow is not some kind of evil twin. This is not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The shadow is depicted as a shabby, childish creature, “merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted and awkward; not wholly bad.”

The existence of the Shadow as a part of the self, the doubling of what seemed a unity, is a precursor for psychical dysfunction. In any fragmentation of personality-ego into separate personalities-egos, such as schizophrenia, Jung writes that “the normal subject has split into a plurality of subjects, or into a plurality of autonomous complexes.”

These complexes have a high perimeter fence, and are not accessible to those who seek to find: “[V]ast numbers of people must be quite unaware of the way they are related to their inner psychic processes.”

And these inner voices speak to one, but not always to help.

 

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.
Samuel Beckett, All that Fall

In 1805, a 16-year-old Byron writes to his half-sister, Augusta, concerning an inopportune remark concerning the area of Southwell when he happened to be staying with a family there. The sentence was, he writes, “prompted by my evil Genius”. Byron, of course, lacked Socrates’ daimonion, the inner voice which only ever advised him negatively, when not to do something. There is even an evil genius in the key scene from Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. Could it be that Descartes’ Jungian shadow was there at that fateful moment, attempting to steer Descartes wrong? Are there devils in the house of philosophy?

Self-knowledge always involves the risk that what becomes apparent in the depths of the self can be desolate and demanding, an unwelcoming portrait of an over-examined life. Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Beckett’s characters, Antonin Artaud, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, Huysmans’ Against Nature, even the De Quincey of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. These psychonauts forgot – or never knew – the conjunctive Delphic oracle; Know thyself in moderation. There is, however, merit in seeking out the hidden self if one has the resilience to recognize it for what it is.

These deceptive or helpful little devils and genies come from within, but today the trickster gods and malevolent sprites who lead the wanderer further into the dark forest increasingly come from the external world, a world which has increasingly outpaced philosophy and, as noted, left her begging for scraps. For those who wish to be autognostic, and who are aware that philosophy is a guide to be treasured, how do things stand with her in the modern world?

 

Let the hour
Come, when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally…
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

The modern Western world in its atomised state, with its millions of self-styled individuals massing to form a drone force, lacks the ethos of individual self-awareness (which can blossom into collective self-awareness, as happened with the classical Greeks) required to make philosophy viable. Old books look beautiful, but they can simply furnish a room as ornaments and not as that for which they were intended. Also, modern culture, really a simulacrum of culture, reverences the new, the up-to-date, the next model, the latest series. As for literature, that has been quickly sanitized and pressed into the service of the state, for whom sensitivity readers are outsourced morality clerks. There will be no more good books written in our lifetimes, just the mechanized doggerel described by Yevgeny Zemyatin, in his novel We: “Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and grandeur of the One State.”

Philosophy will avoid the censor’s pen precisely because the deep state no longer need fear it. There was no need for the globalists to ban philosophy. All they had to do was encourage and incentivise a cultural environment that rendered it inoperative.

Philosophy qua philosophical thinking may well train the mind, but for what? The modern world makes increasingly fewer demands on the mind except as a set of aptitudes, performance enhancers without the distraction of disinterested enquiry. Depth thinking is no longer required in western economies. Managemental and technocratic technique need only the ability to make simplistic links and associations on a huge and interlocking scale. Expecting philosophy to assist in modern business practice is like expecting classical architectural theories to build better prisons. Philosophy, from the classical age to our own, has been thoroughly deracinated, as we have seen throughout this book.

Philosophy was once simply a part of the “skill set” with which men like Seneca and Cicero went about their lives and businesses, and self-knowledge came with the territory. It is this engagement with philosophy which makes a letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero, which seeks in reasonable argument to persuade Cicero that he is over-reacting just a little to the death of his daughter, such a fine example of philosophy’s original bond with the human and, by extension, the social. Now, philosophy hasn’t changed, but the nature of the human has.

 

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Politicians are interesting in the context of what it is to be human. Today’s political class, broadly speaking, are less like humans and more like the next generation of AI. Artificial Intelligence has as its centre of gravity the fusion of human and computer, the former being, as it were, supplemented and enhanced by the addition of the latter. This is analogous to the “change of function” we heard so much about during the Covid pandemic.

There is, however, another form for this cybernetic hybridisation to take, that of the addition of computer-like personalities to already existent human beings rather than human qualities to computers, the only requirement being that these humans were already quasi-autistic, lacking the normal range of empathic and intrapersonal skills – as well as a sense of geographical rootedness – a healthy human being would have. The conscience is altered, the aim of existence refined and, instead of radiating outwards towards the community, becomes insular and self-serving. This is the prime reason that politicians are also actors. Watch politicians being interviewed. There is nothing about the vast majority of them of spontaneity, nothing that indicates that they share a world with us and evaluate it in the same way and with the same moral cartography. They process reality differently. They are unlikely to indulge in genuine introspection because they have no use for anything that might hobble their progress. The maxim of these elites is an adaptation of Hippocrates’ famous first line of the oath named for him; First do no harm to my political career.

It is unlikely these strange creatures will waste much time in introspection. But it’s not just them. The contemporary West is maximally unconducive to genuine introspection. The prevailing orthodoxies appear to be self-examining, but are nothing of the sort. Firstly, there is so much white noise and, with the permanent presence of smartphones, this static can be accessed at any time and anywhere.

Governed by replicant non-humans, watched by a thousand watchers, lost in a mirror-maze of information, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation; where can we turn to make a separate peace?

 

Take up the book and read.
Saint Augustine

For the reader fresh to philosophy it is difficult to know where to begin. Philosophy histories are good books to read when you have some experience of original texts but, for the beginner, the tide is too strong, the reader is whisked down a white-water current, crashing against rocks on either side of the torrent. A major part of philosophy is to go back, always to return, to the source-texts. Schopenhauer, writing of Kant, is very firm on this principle: “It holds good of him in the highest degree, as indeed of all true philosophers, that one can only come to know them from their own works, not from the accounts of others.”

I would suggest half-a-dozen short volumes for the newcomer to philosophy:

• Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers.

Diogenes was a third-century writer about whom little is known apart from this history of Greek, pre-Socratic philosophy. Academics have criticized the work as non-evaluative (as though a history has to be evaluative) and concentrating too much on incidental trivia from the lives of the Ancient Greek thinkers. But this is precisely what makes Diogenes a delight, and a perfect introduction to classical philosophy.

• Seneca – Letters to Lucilius.

Seneca had the misfortune to tutor the young Nero, who later forced the consul’s suicide on suspicion of complicity to assassinate the mad emperor. The epistolary format allows a humanity to breathe which makes the reader feel at home. Seneca’s gently avuncular tone is unhurried, and the letters often proceed from mundane, everyday experience to the moral precepts underlying that experience.

• Plato – Apology.

Essentially the court report of the trial of Socrates. Although this seems like beginning at the end in terms of Plato’s work, it is the best place to start in this case. As noted, this is not so much a work of philosophy as about philosophy, particularly its relation to the state. The academically famed Republic and Timaeus are too long and complex in the former case, and too cosmological in the latter to be an entry point to Plato, and the Apology shows the virtue of Socratic humility.

• Descartes – Discourse on the Method/Meditations.

René Descartes may have “flunked out of college”, failing to graduate from the universities of Franeker and Leiden, but he still influenced philosophy, mathematics, and geometry. Serving as a mercenary soldier also gave him more life experience than many philosophers, and it shows through in the elegantly written Discourse on the Method. One of Western philosophy’s key texts as it contains the cogito argument generally agreed to have been the starting-point for Western individualism.

• Nietzsche – Ecce Homo.

The name Nietzsche always has a whiff of brimstone about it, but the Lutheran pastor’s son must be approached with caution. Following the crowd and beginning with the bombast of Thus Spake Zarathustra would be a mistake. It contains Nietzsche’s central ideas, certainly, but in a ponderous dramatic style and without the playfulness of Nietzsche’s other books and essays. Written towards the end of his sanity, this charming little volume contains chapter titles such as Why I write such excellent books and Why I am a destiny.

• Bertrand Russell – Basic Problems of Philosophy.

This is rather more “technical”, 20th-century philosophy. Russell was primarily a mathematician but, like his protegé Wittgenstein, saw mathematics and philosophy as vitally connected. As a “starter kit” to explain such fundamental philosophical terms as a priori, idealism, induction, universals and others in the basic lexicon of Western philosophy, the Basic Problems repays inspection.

 

You got a new and dangerous condition, boy.
You know you’re gonna lose your own volition, boy.
Scritti Politti, Philosophy Now

At the time of writing, the top 20 Amazon best-sellers in philosophy contains no classics with the exception of the great emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a text in close attendance to this book. It is at number 17. Other than that, the top three are as follows:

Number one is 2019’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. It is tagged under “Philosophy of Ethics and Morality” and is described by the New York Times as ‘a thought-provoking, discussion-worthy story’. A small excerpt:

“‘What do you want to be when you grow up’, asked the mole.

‘Kind’ said the boy.”

At number two is The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. This is a compendium of sayings from “the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P. T. Barnum”. Law 15 is entitled; Crush Your Enemy Totally.

At three is Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Peterson is one of several figures who have attracted the animosity of the Left. Yes, it is homely pop psychology to an extent, but Peterson is well-read, principled, and was, importantly, a clinician, and no mere psychological theoretician. A passing observation about the origin of philosophy from 12 Rules:

When the Ancient Greeks sailed to India and elsewhere, they too discovered that rules, morals and customs differed from place to place, and saw that the explanation for what was right and wrong was often rooted in some ancestral authority. The Greek response was not despair, but a new invention: philosophy.

A modest, beginner’s library, then, and hopefully not too patronising. Anyone wishing to study philosophy today should stay away from the university, save your money, and educate yourself privately. University Humanities degrees cost a great deal, represent a type of indentured servitude, and if they are an investment they are now a high-risk one. There is no guarantee of a job simply because you have checked off your degree, far less so if that degree is in one of the new wave of worthless grievance studies pamphlets. As employers become increasingly appalled by the standard of graduates, they will begin to employ the autodidacts, those who kept away from the noise and the babble and read quietly.

 

God orders me to fulfil the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself and other men.
Plato, Apology

Philosophy and the self have a reciprocal relation and can form a virtuous circle. Philosophy will help you to know yourself, and knowing yourself will incline you to philosophy. But knowing yourself is not a mere function of age, nor is it a broadly affirmative but largely unchallenged construction of your view of the way in which you make your circle in the world. As noted, knowing yourself is not affirming a casual audit of the aspects of your life of which you approve.

The enemy, the hydra we face, does not want the type of introspection which is healthy and helpful. It is happy with a centrally controlled, pharmaceutically and culturally induced self-absorption, because that does not breed dissent, just an acquiescent assent. Again, the Venn diagram which nests globalists, the new Left, and Islam can be clearly plotted.

Autognosis is tempered by other factors than simply the will to make that attempt. Firstly, the external world – a part of which we internalize – is gaining in complexity. Perhaps it is more likely that a 12th-century European peasant would have “known themselves” in a clearer and more uncomplicated way than the psychologically and pharmacologically cluttered individual of today. Christianity, scorned by modern Western elites and their media water-carriers (and even by the Anglican Church itself), featured a level of self-examination that would baffle most people in the West today. Luther would confess for six hours. A priest told him he didn’t have to confess to every fart. But Luther did. This is autognosis as a psychopathological condition, certainly, but that is not of itself an argument against its worth. Autognosis is the film negative of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a fascination with the self not to aggrandize that self but potentially to denigrate it. And, speaking of denigration, avoid autognosis if it is offered to you by strangers.

Beware the straightforward invitation to autognosis. Check its provenance. It may not be all it seems and it may have been kidnapped as it is all the rage in some quarters. Which of our favoured philosophers wrote the following?

Be braver. Critically examine ourselves and our assumptions and biases. Find out what our unconscious biases are.

This concise amalgam of Plato, Nietzsche, Husserl and Freud seems to suit our purposes admirably. But it is to be found in a research article in The Journal of the Archives and Records Association in the UK. The article is called How do UK archivists perceive ‘white supremacy’ in the UK archives sector? The call to arms quoted above has to be placed in the comfortable swaddling of context.

The intellectual sandpit of “woke” culture and all its racial and gender-based cohorts make much of self-analysis, just as long as it is white people doing the analysing. We are to work harder to find the gangrene inside ourselves, correct – as much as we can, fallible as we are – our whiteness and, by washing our sins, become worthy to genuflect before blacks and the mentally disturbed. Without showing any understanding of the unconscious, they make much of “unconscious racism”. “Micro-aggressions” are caused by trace elements of the racism whose taint whites will never wash off.

Never justify yourself by using autognosis at the behest of others. It is your project and yours alone. And philosophy can be your guide just as Virgil led Dante.

 

What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self,
With thee it comes and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow staies
Thy coming…
Milton, Paradise Lost

So, make yourself a small corner where you can’t be seen, like Winston Smith scribbling his diary in a blind-spot his telescreen can’t reach, and begin the descent, open-minded as you open your mind, and with your philosophy books tightly packed in your back-pack. Do as the Emperor Marcus suggests: “Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquility.”

As we have seen, retirement into the self can lead to severe self-interrogation, and we cannot be sure that we will not fold under questioning. A letter written by Schopenhauer to Goethe in 1819 suggests that what keeps many from philosophizing is a wariness Schopenhauer places in a classical context:

It is the courage of making a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to enquire further; and we give way to her and that is the reason why philosophy stands where it does.

What type of person can make a descent into the abyss of the self and, more importantly, report back honestly on what he finds there not necessarily to others (although much great literature is this type of confessional) but to himself? For some of us, finding this out is an existential imperative. If, as an epigram on Pherecydes tells us, “The limit of all wisdom is in me”, then gold-rush fever impels us down into the depths.

The only way philosophy in the white Western tradition will survive the current purge is to take up the book and read. The only way to pave the path with willows for the return of the queen is for us to become, mutatis mutandis, Luther’s million churches of one. Thus, by stealth and connivance, by smuggling contraband ways of thinking past the ideological border guards, by transferring our reading habits to those who sought wisdom rather than sales or a favourable position on a best-seller list, we bring a company with us. These are the true courtiers to the queen. But will she, can she ever return?