“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Teach Different with Aristotle/Plato

Transcript

Dan Fouts (00:10)

Hey everybody. Welcome to Teach Different. We’re ready for another podcast episode and we have a really cool quote from, actually we don’t exactly know who has said this particular quote, but it’s a very interesting one often attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and also Laozi, a Chinese philosopher, and it’s about wisdom and self-knowledge. So we’ll get to that in a moment. And before we do, just to review the protocol for Teach Different, we’re gonna share that profound quote with you. And then we’re gonna look at what does it mean? What does it mean to you, your personal experiences, how it relates to your life? And then we’re gonna push back on it, do a little critical thinking, see the world from a different perspective, and then ask some questions throughout. And you know, Steve, we’re doing this now in a community setting in addition to doing this in schools. And we’re finding, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re finding that it fits in any setting, this structure and this way of organizing conversations.

 

Steve Fouts (01:16)

Yeah, it’s particularly good in a group setting. Obviously we just do it on the podcast and it’s usually two people or maybe three or four, but it can, you know, provide a framework for a room in a safe space for people just to have conversations about things that matter and be authentic and get a chance to share their lived experiences with things. So what I’d like to do sometime is record one of these community conversations somehow. And, you know, put one of those up on a podcast if we can do that at some point, but that’s exciting. And one other thing to mention, we’re looking for people who are listening, who are parents that want to be part of building something with us and want to kind of be an experiment with us and try out some of our programming to teach the method to you so that you can teach it to your kid or your kids. And we’re developing a system pretty much to do that to help with conversations at home. So just go to our website and click contact us. Say you heard us on the podcast, give us your name or whatever, we’ll follow up and we’re gonna do that this summer. So putting that out there for anybody who’s interested in, I guess getting to know Steve and Dan Fouts a little bit, but that’s great.

 

Dan Fouts (02:53)

You know, it’s overwhelming, Steve, when you think about the fact that this is the fifth year of the podcast and we’re realizing that what started as something that we thought would only connect with students and teachers is now being appreciated by everyone. Parents, community members. I mean, it’s very gratifying and overwhelming at the same time. Yeah. OK, all right. Here we go.

 

Steve Fouts (03:12)

Yeah.This is fantastic.

 

Dan Fouts (03:21)

Here we go. We got our quote. I’m going to say it a few times. And again, we’re going to attribute this to Plato, Aristotle, Laozi and probably others. You know, a lot of these get lost in translations as well. So it’s, it’s very hard to identify exactly which author said it and why, but what’s important here. And I stress this for you, when you use this method with anyone, it’s the ideas and themes that are most important that are important to focus on. So here we go.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Okay, what do you think this is claiming?

 

Steve Fouts (04:08)

Well, wisdom is the word here. And I don’t know if you want to Google that if you can while we’re doing this, but it’s saying that being introspective and I guess thinking about your own motivations and your own kind of take on something and critiquing yourself is the key to really knowing something well. You’ve got to look inward and not outward when you’re learning.

And I don’t know, it sounds a bit very conceptual right now. I want to bring this down to earth a bit, but I’m going to start off with that. This is very self-reflective and it’s treating knowledge and truth and wisdom as something that’s very internal.

 

Dan Fouts (05:08)

Yeah, I think it’s treating knowledge as something that’s internal to you. The prevailing wisdom, I think, of knowledge is that you’re learning about other things that are external to you and you’re accumulating things in your brain. And in doing so, you’re becoming wise and becoming more knowledgeable. I think then it’s playing on this idea that knowledge is something that is internal and personal, and that knowing yourself is the beginning of it. You can’t be a wise person without knowing who you are. It’s not just about knowing other people and knowing other things. 

 

Steve Fouts (05:55)

Okay, here’s an example. Let’s say you, let’s say you hear someone’s opinion on something. Let’s say you have an opinion about immigration and whether or not, you know, people should be able to come to the country, go through a process, you know, get naturalized, become a citizen and whether or not that’s good or bad. Someone who lacks self-knowledge will just have that opinion and it doesn’t matter what their opinion is they’ll just have the opinion and then they’ll be ready to go they’ll be ready to argue with someone they’ll be ready to discuss it they’ll be ready to defend their position whereas someone with self-knowledge might ask a question like I don’t think that immigration should be a very important, you I don’t think it should be a policy. I think that we should keep people that live in a certain country, they should all be naturally born here. Okay. A person with self-knowledge would say, well, why do I think that?

They would stop the whole momentum of something that they believe in. And they would get maybe psychological and ask themselves, well, how was that constructed? Because there’s other people that I love, I respect, I like, that think something different. So what is it about me? How did I develop that? That’s an example of introspection. That’s a self-knowledge.

That’s the beginning of a pursuit of self-knowledge, where you got your own opinion, that many people would not go, they wouldn’t even start that journey.

 

Dan Fouts (07:56)

It’s an acknowledgement of the perspective that you bring to a conversation, for instance. And it is an acknowledgement, I think that inside that is the idea of humility. I’m saying something right now, but I understand it’s also coming from a certain perspective. I’ve had certain experiences, they’re different from yours. So what I’m going to say here is gonna be part of a larger

drive towards knowing something. I know myself well enough to know that I have a limited perspective and I can’t speak for everyone else. And I think that that’s wisdom in many ways to be able to say that. I’m just going with the claim here. I like that. It’s knowing yourself, who you are, where you came from, and how your thoughts fit into the larger body of knowledge. That’s great. Okay, well great. Let’s–

 

Steve Fouts (08:55)

Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Well, let me, before we go, let me say one more thing about it. Humility. I think that’s a key word here. I’m going to go to Socrates, who was famous for saying, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. I think that self-knowledge requires humility and an ability to step outside of yourself and critique your own beliefs that without humility, you are never gonna go there. Okay, I’m gonna liken humility to self-knowledge and this quote and that the opposite of humility, whatever we wanna call that arrogance, hubris, people who think they know everything and sometimes worse yet, they may not know something, but they give it their best shot and they stipulate in the best way. They make an argument, even not knowing whether or not they’re right. They’re just trying to see if they can convince someone. Those types of people don’t have self-knowledge. So I want to just mention humility before we go to this counterclaim.

 

Dan Fouts (10:14)

Yeah, I think humility is an important concept to bring in here. And this makes sense. Plato, Aristotle, Laozi, whoever, you know, the spirit of this is definitely hiding inside the Greeks and what they thought knowledge was and the role of the individual in gaining knowledge and wisdom. And that’s what they were all about. I’m thinking of a counterclaim here. I’m just going to mess with the claim. Knowing other things or knowing other people, knowing things outside yourself is the beginning of wisdom. You’ll never know who you are. That’s impossible because you’re already part of who you are. It’s hard to be reflective enough and understand. It’s almost like you have to look at yourself from an objective perspective. That’s not realistic. And so knowing other people and knowing other things externally is the beginning of wisdom. And wisdom should be tied to external things, not to internal things. That’s where I would go with the counterclaim.

 

Steve Fouts (11:19)

Thank you. We have that African proverb quote that we have a podcast on. I am because you are. I think the counterclaim going with your thought wisdom can also be acquired by watching others and hearing other people and listening and educating yourself. And I guess you could bring in humility as well as part of that. But I’m agreeing with you in that if it’s all about self-knowledge, if that’s the beginning of wisdom, you’re going to try to understand yourself independent of everybody else and your whole environment, and you’re going to put all of that inside yourself. This is what gets people in mental institutions. You know, this is where people feel a slippery slope in not really having a grounding for themselves anymore because they think that the truth is somehow in their own head when you’ve forgotten about the other parts of the world especially other people so there’s a counterclaim right?

 

Dan Fouts (12:40)

Yeah, and just to mess with it a little more, I would say something like, knowing yourself is a consequence of understanding others. In other words, it’s not the beginning, it’s a consequence. It comes last. So maybe Plato, Aristotle, said this or ever speaks like this or has this attitude, maybe they just had the wrong order to things is one way to look at the counterclaim.

 

Steve Fouts (13:16)

Yeah, and the back to the –

 

Dan Fouts (13:18)

There’s a great quote, sorry to interrupt, before I forget this. Nietzsche had a, I think it was Nietzsche, had a great quote of all the treasures in life. It is our own that we dig up last. He was referring to the fact that sometimes we don’t understand ourselves until the end. Anyway, I just had to throw that out.

 

Steve Fouts (13:39)

No, I see that. It’s built over time. It’s not the beginning. I was gonna throw out the word observation. Okay. Some people are observers. I can’t remember what test you can take that shows whether or not you’re a type of learner. Some people sit back and observe others and learn that way. Okay, you can learn from somebody else’s mistake and become wise if they’re close to you and you’re watching their decision-making process and they didn’t even confide it in you. There’s people that are like this who really just take a lot of wisdom from other people’s experiences. And it’s another way of saying, you don’t have to make the mistake yourself in order to become wise about it. You can see its effects on other people. Like let’s even say infidelity in a relationship. Right? If you’re in a relationship and you are faithful, that’s a good thing. Right? You might have some friends who you see that aren’t and you see what happens to that, those situations. And you don’t want that for yourself. You’re building wisdom, you’re learning something and it’s not self-knowledge. It’s more you’re attuned to other people’s experiences. Anyway, I’m throwing out another kind of way to do the counterclaim.

 

Dan Fouts (15:20)

Yeah, and I don’t know if this is claim or counterclaim, but one thing I’ve done in classes, and we could do this in an adult community setting as well, or even with parents and kids, that oftentimes, if you want to understand who you are, it’s not that you have self-knowledge, it’s when you realize that other people perceive you a certain way, we’ve done these activities in class where how are you perceived by others? And I find it so interesting when students hear other students’ perceptions of them and they have no idea how they’re coming off. They have no idea how they are in a public setting. And so that seems to provide evidence that we’ll never know. It’s hard to have wisdom of who we are because who we are is understood through the lens of other people.

 

Steve Fouts (16:24)

Well, say it like this. It’s hard to have wisdom of who we are if we’re only looking inward. If we’re doing both, that is a better way to do this, right? Find out.

 

Dan Fouts (16:33)

Here’s an essential question. Which knowledge is more authentic? The one that you think that when you’re considering who you are yourself, knowledge of yourself or other people’s knowledge of you, what makes up your true identity and who you are? Okay, that’s really psychological, but–

 

Steve Fouts (17:00)

What’s more legitimate?

 

Dan Fouts (17:06)

We are defined by others.

 

Steve Fouts (17:12)

We are, and that’s aggravating. And I’m not saying it’s always bad, but that can create a life of real, real disappointment, confusion, confinement, when you feel like you’re trapped by other people’s opinions. But that doesn’t change it from being true in a way, right? We are something that other people think we are.

 

Dan Fouts (17:12)

Okay, we’re in the weeds here. Yeah.

 

Steve Fouts (17:42)

Partly. But you know, hey, I’m always going to be arguing that self-knowledge and like defining who you are yourself is so, so important, you know, for your own happiness and your achievements, your success.

 

Dan Fouts (18:02)

And you get that through reflection, quiet reflection. You also get that through learning about how you’re perceived by others in groups. It ends up becoming, wisdom ends up becoming a combination of the two. So, all right, here are some questions then, right? What role do other people’s perceptions play in knowledge of yourself? What role should you play in defining yourself?

 

Steve Fouts (18:10)

There you go, that’s wisdom. Yeah. I want to throw in something about humility. You know, let me start with what is wisdom? I think that’s a good mini conversation that needs to be had because it needs to be differentiated from something like knowledge or being clever or, you know, the different traits we associate with people who have mental acuity about something. There’s something about wisdom that’s different.

 

Dan Fouts (18:37)

What is wisdom? It’s another question. Yeah, right. What does it mean?

 

Steve Fouts (19:01)

That’s worth a question. And I’ll just throw something out like, you know, how do I, how do I stay humble? How do people stay humble without getting humbled? All right, because everybody gets humbled at some point, right? You have hubris, you have an arrogance, and then you get that bully who shows you that, hey, you’re not everything. I get that type of humility. But how do you develop your own sense of being humble that you could use to become wise and to get self-knowledge? I’ve always wondered that. What turns it on?

 

Dan Fouts (19:53)

Why or in what way is self-knowledge, self-wisdom important? Why is knowing yourself important? How does it…

 

Steve Fouts (20:07)

How does it help you? Because sometimes it makes you overly anxious.

 

Dan Fouts (20:13)

And you question yourself and you over question yourself. And so what’s the real benefit of knowing yourself? To say it’s the beginning of all wisdom makes it seem like we should be pursuing it. Why? What’s the value of that? You know, what’s the end goal? What’s the holy grail there? Yeah, this could fit in a lot of settings.

 

Steve Fouts (20:17)

Yeah, to get that’s great.

 

Dan Fouts (20:43)

And I think that, you know, part of it is that as you get older, you think that knowing yourself is easier. I think it gets harder in many ways because there’s more baggage that you have to sift through. Yeah. Okay. Well, knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle, Plato, Laozi, whoever said this or whoever conveyed this in the spirit of this, you’ve left a really profound quote and a theme that is relevant to everyone today. And hopefully you’re able to use the Teach Different Method to work with this and see if it can bear some fruit for you. So thanks everybody and I’m looking forward to the next podcast.