Like me, you may have been told that there are no bad questions. If we suppose that we don’t know what we don’t know then maybe there is truth to that. But, I’ve found that if there are no bad questions there are at least some questions that are very good. There is no direct intention to provide answers here, rather, I’d like to ask more very good questions.
There’s an interview with British psychotherapist Adam Phillips with The Paris Review that’s available online. In it, Adam Phillips suggests that maybe we have a bit too much knowledge of ourselves—that awareness or rather regular inquisition into our mind is possibly unhelpful. In a basic sense, the idea that ruminating on how we feel all the time could lead to increased anxiety. Psychologists and neuroscientists are very familiar with this phenomenon (e.g., ironic processes of the mind, obsessions, etc.).
More interestingly, it’s lightly suggested that questions of that ilk may be at best uninteresting because our reality is likely to change from moment to moment… or… our reality is greater than the sum of its parts.
Phillips says:
In the same way, a psychoanalysis bent on understanding people is going to be very limited. It’s not about redescribing somebody such that they become like a character in a novel. It’s really showing you how much your wish to know yourself is a consequence of an anxiety state—and how it might be to live as yourself not knowing much about what’s going on.
…
When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks. These are formulas, we’ve all got about ten formulas about who we are, what we like, the kind of people we like, all that stuff. The disparity between these phrases and how one experiences oneself minute by minute is ludicrous. It’s like the caption under a painting. You think, Well, yeah, I can see it’s called that. But you need to look at the picture.
This makes me think about the very first (maybe the only?) thing I ever learned about quantum theory. In an episode of Futurama, the team is at some sort of galactic racing track and the professor, eager to see if his horse (?) had won, was disappointed at the results when they were recorded because, he opines, “you changed the outcome by measuring it!”.
How much do you know about yourself?