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Know Thyself: Western Identity from Classical Greece to the Renaissance - Hardcover

Rossellini, Ingrid

 
9780385541886: Know Thyself: Western Identity from Classical Greece to the Renaissance
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385541880 ISBN 13: 9780385541886
Verlag: Doubleday, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018

A lively and timely introduction to the roots of self-understanding--who we are and how we should act--in the cultures of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Middle Ages and the Renaissance

     "Know thyself"--this fundamental imperative appeared for the first time in ancient Greece, specifically in Delphi, the temple of the god Apollo, who represented the enlightened power of reason. For the Greeks, self-knowledge and identity were the basics of their civilization and their sources were to be found in where one was born and into which social group. These determined who you were and what your duties were. In this book the independent scholar Ingrid Rossellini surveys the major ideas that, from Greek and Roman antiquity through the Christian medieval era up to the dawn of modernity in the Renaissance, have guided the Western project of self-knowledge. Addressing the curious lay reader with an interdisciplinary approach that includes numerous references to the visual arts, Know Thyself will reintroduce readers to the most profound and enduring ways our civilization has framed the issues of self and society, in the process helping us rediscover the very building blocks of our personality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

INGRID ROSSELLINI was born in Rome and educated there, and later received a BA, master's, and Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Columbia, writing her dissertation on Petrarch. She has taught literature and Italian film at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Princeton, and other universities. She is the daughter of the actress Ingrid Bergman and the director Roberto Rossellini; Isabella Rossellini is her sister. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

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Preface


Who are you?

If someone asked that question today, most people would offer answers that, aside from general references to gender, nationality, and ethnicity, would essentially focus on their personal characteristics, choices, and preferences. The common assumption is that the individual self is a fully autonomous and original entity, capable of selecting whatever path he or she decides to entertain in a way that is completely independent from traditional views and expectations. Individual identity, as we conceptualize it today, is something like a kit whose parts can be chosen, styled, and assembled at will: a do-it-yourself enterprise.

Although that is for the most part true, psychologists never fail to remind us that what we experienced as children remains an essential factor in the shaping of our adult selves. In order to understand our present, we need to revisit our past. The same thing could be said about our collective history: understanding who we were remains an essential component in understanding who we are today.

Do I mean to imply that Know Thyself is a sort of psychological guide to a more rewarding and fulfilling relation with our true selves? Yes, in fact, but definitely not in a conventional way. What I mean is that this is not a book about psychology but a book about history with a psychological slant: in other words, a book that, besides describing crucial moments of history from Greek antiquity to the Renaissance, highlights how the different definitions that the “self” has received contributed to the creation of the values and ideals that, down the centuries, have shaped and motivated the choices and actions of people and the makeup of their society.

In choosing this particular lens for observation, I was inspired by the nineteenth-century French historian Fustel de Coulanges, who claimed that recollecting facts is an insufficient way to look at history without an equal focus on the nature and development of the human personality. What that perspective reveals is that history is a complex tapestry woven from actual events but also from the narratives that we humans have imposed upon those facts to try to make sense of ourselves and our reality.

This book is meant to be not an academic treatise but a guide addressed to the lay reader who, while genuinely curious to explore the past, often feels intimidated by the excessive complexity of scholarly studies. Things have only gotten worse in these last decades: because as the disciplines we generally label humanities have become increasingly neglected in our academic curricula, understanding earlier ways of thinking has become, for many, ever more difficult and frustrating.

To try to remedy that confusion and make this book as clear and accessible as possible, I chose to avoid the over-detailed style typical of specialized approaches, to offer instead an interdisciplinary overview that, although simplified, still provides a comprehensive map of major patterns of history and culture. To clarify the discussion, I have also included many references to the visual arts. This choice is based on the fact that for thousands of years—at least until the invention of the printing press, in the middle of the fifteenth century—visual art was the only available means of mass communication capable of conveying, to a population that was largely illiterate, the models of excellence that the political, philosophical, and/or religious ideology of the times considered best fitted to exemplify what a human being was expected to be.

An important theme that we will explore while looking at the ideals that different epochs nurtured concerns the recurrent creation of legendary and mythical facts—the narratives that, for the sake of inspiration, tradition fostered with an intensity that often appears much too exuberant for the rigorous test of credibility as Joseph Campbell indicated when he wrote that a “myth is something that has never happened, and is happening all the time.”

To begin, let me bring you back to Delphi of ancient Greece, where people went to consult the oracle of Apollo: the Greek god of reason who was also the only pagan divinity who appeared willing to respond to the people who came to seek his advice.

I use the verb “to appear” because how Apollo’s oracle worked was more ambiguous than revelatory, in the sense that rather than offering clear guidance, it only provided cryptic hints and scattered pieces of information. These were as confusing and indirect as the language of his messenger—the priestess, called Pythia, who in delirious fits of trance channeled the voice of Apollo, by whom she claimed to be possessed. The paradox of the oracle was that because it forced people to interpret the vagueness of those utterances, the ball was implicitly returned right back to those who sought its guidance. That way, rather than having the god clearly telling them what to do, people were indirectly led to use their own intellectual faculties to come up with the answers best fitted for their particular challenges and problems.

The key to that clever strategy was expressed in the motto etched at the top of Apollo’s temple: “Know thyself.” The dictum essentially meant this: because the meaning you give to your life is what propels your actions, before asking what to do, ask yourself who you are.

This was (and is) by no means an easy endeavor, as proven by the endlessly varied answers that we humans have come up with all along the centuries.

Take our modern view of identity, for example. To encourage self-awareness in a child, we say, discover the talents and qualities that make you the very special and original person that you are. The corollary idea is that only by developing one’s distinct and unique identity can one become a good member of the “larger self” that society represents.

If confronted with such an example of fierce individualism, the Greeks of early times would have recoiled in horror. To the Greeks, attributing ultimate value to choices and preferences that focused on the singular over the collective self would have been considered an absolutely unethical, if not completely unthinkable, proposition. For the Greeks, one’s place of origin represented not simply a geographic setting but rather the place of one’s family and community and as such the overriding source of one’s identity. Where you were born and the social group to which you belonged determined who you were and consequently what was expected from you. Individual freedom of choice, the way we understand the term today, had little to do with that older mentality. For that reason, the command to “know thyself” essentially meant that you should use the guidance of reason to fulfill, in the best way possible, the ethical duties and obligations that your role as a member of the larger community entails.

This dramatic difference of interpretation may lead us to think that between that past and our present no direct connection can be drawn. As this book will show, however, that’s not at all true. Even if our balance has dramatically shifted toward the singular self, finding a point of convergence between the individual and the collective still remains a very pressing concern of our contemporary existence. What that tells us is that despite the ever-evolving patterns of history, the concept of identity has always involved two fundamental dimensions: who we are independently, and who we are in relation to one another.

The latter aspect has prompted endless debate throughout our cultural history. Are we naturally predisposed to live with others, as Aristotle believed, when he famously stated that man is a “political...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385541880
ISBN 13 
9780385541886
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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