Insight into Insight, But Not Too Much

So: Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, man the questioner and question. We question everything, including ourselves. 

This ability to inquire into ourselves is, by the way, proof of our immateriality, since no material substance can double back on itself and have a look. In order to look at ourselves physically we need a mirror. But in order to look at ourselves psychically we have only to… 

Just what are we doing when we do that, and how is it done, anyway? It’s not something we think about, rather, just assume its existence, but it is without a doubt one of the weirdest and most unexpected things we could possibly imagine, let alone with no explanation of what it’s doing here and why we have it.

Is it even functional? If so, why are the people conspicuously lacking in insight so successful at the polls? Joe Biden has no insight into anything, least of all himself.       

I don’t recall any deep discussion of the origins of insight in grad school. It is at once assumed, although one learns in Psychopathology 101 that it is one of the measures of health. That is, healthy people have good insight, while neurotic people have less and crazy people have none.  

I suppose insight is also central to Philosophy 101. Indeed, it’s hard to miss, since it’s inscribed right there above the entrance to the sanctuary at Delphi: Know Thyself. 

Interestingly, two other maxims were inscribed there, “nothing to excess” and “certainty brings insanity.” Therefore, know thyself, but let’s not get carried away; and what amounts to an early version of Gödel’s theorems, in that completeness is purchased at the price of consistency and vice versa. Or, just know you're not God.

Having known this, why then did Gödel go insane? Or did it take an insane person to see outside the matrix (and indeed, ideological matrices as such)? There’s something to the latter. But just because crazy people can see the world in novel ways, it doesn’t mean that people who see the world in novel ways are crazy.  

Of course, back in the 1960s there was a whole movement in psychology that pretended the insane are actually persecuted mystics with a higher vision of reality. Look up R.D. Laing, whose books I still own, having read them with approval back before I even imagined becoming a psychologist. Rather, I must have been attracted to the idea that I could be considered normal, the crazier the better.

Who would have guessed? "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.” In other words, poorly developed insight:

If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. 

The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call "schizophrenia" was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.

First of all, did he just assume the gender of future beings? That’s crazy!

We are at a crossroads. Actually, it’s more of a Y-shaped intersection: get back to the point; continue fumfering around; or end the post and start over tomorrow. Or maybe get a head start on tomorrow’s post:

In-Sight. What is its principle? I wonder if the Son is the Father’s insight into himSelf, so speak? Certainly it is His perfect “reflection." I recall one of the early fathers saying something to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God’s icon of man and man's icon of God, and that's enough insight for one day. Nothing to excess, and no, I'm not totally certain.