Knowledge gives us a sense of who we are. To what extent is this true in the Human Sciences and Ethics?

by studiousity (student)

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

“Knowledge gives us a sense of who we are.” To what extent is this true in the Human Sciences and Ethics?

Socrates once said, “” [1]. In similar vein, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know” [1]. A great Indian master, Nisargadatta Maharaj once quoted, “To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not” [2]. What were Socrates, Emerson, Nisargadatta hinting at?

Is there any such thing as ‘knowledge’ and if so, can this knowledge ever give us a sense of who we are? Is there one concrete sense of ‘who we are’ that persists all throughout our lives or is our sense of identity a montage of ever-changing psychological and behavioral dynamics? Is the knower even capable of using ways of knowing to grasp a sense of who he/she is? If so, which way of knowing is more trustworthy and which area of knowledge should these ways of knowing be applied to, to get a better sense of who one is?

Human sciences provides a sense of how we behave in the social context but not a sense of who we are at a personal level while Natural sciences while Thesis (….) I will be limiting my areas of knowledge to Human Sciences and Natural Sciences.

Human Sciences, Psychology in particular, does attempt to answer questions about why and how people think, feel, and behave as they do. In a sense, it does attempt to give humans a ‘sense of how they behave’ but it doesn’t really give us a sense of who we ‘are’. Let’s consider Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram was a Yale University Psychologist who, in the 1960s, conducted a series of obedience experiments to test that if an authority figure ordered one to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person, would one follow orders? [3]. When the same question was posed to random Yale University students, it was predicted that only 3 out of 100 would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks [4]. ‘Bystander effect’ is another monstrous revelation of abnormal human behavior in social circumstances. The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others hinder an individual from intervening in an emergency situation [5]. A recent case of the bystander effect was the running over of 2 year old Chinese toddler twice as dozens just watched her succumbing to her injuries without offering any help [6].

Many other startling revelations from the world of Social Psychology demonstrate ‘how we behave’ in society but does this knowledge really give us a sense of who we are as individuals? Although these experiments and many others, to a large extent, do accurately provide a sense of how humans behave in public, I feel that such studies erroneously generalize human identity in terms of how they behave in society but this doesn’t provide a concrete sense of who one really is at the core. Just because one, under the multifarious dynamics of public pressure, behaves in a certain way might ...

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On the other hand, there are those who would claim that one is what one behaves i.e. one’s actions are what gives on a sense of who one is. One always has the free will to choose to behave in a certain way. This choice indicates a certain taste of personal character. The circmstance might not be in control but the ability to react and act accordingly is a reflection of who one is. As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do” [7]. In that sense, our repeated actions, even if initially not part of who we really are, if repeated long enough, will get amalgamated into our core sense of who we are.

Apart from actions, language too has an important role to play in giving solidity to identity. Language influences and gives rise to a sense of belonging because language is itself a universal medium of communication in exchanging ideas. In turn, cultural knowledge from generations is passed down to the next generation in local dialects. With the development of different societies, different cultures and languages integrate into a deeper part of humans. All in all, over time, such cultural acclimatization forms one’s sense of identity. Even though, the cultural idiosyncrasies defined through diverse language interpretations are subjective, as part of a race, tribe or group in society, the language used is objective, unaffected by the growing circumstances of humans. Therefore, although humans are a specific species of animals, social and cultural knowledge gives us a larger sense of who we are as collective bodies. But does this Cultural and language identity, give one a sense of who one really is? Isn’t it wise to first understand what is this ‘sense of identity’ that we are applying this knowledge to ? In the first place, is there a common identity that we humans share? Or, are we individual bubbles with our own unique set of psychological and physiological identities?

National and cultural identities aim to segregate humans to different sense of belongings, but knowledge about such social roles may not define who each individual really is. A certain culture of humans may have a sense of nationalistic or cultural identity, however, each individual is free and entitled to their own rights, opinions and unrestricted in their thoughts. Thus, knowledge in the human sciences does not give humans a sense of who they are but rather, it only gives humans a sense of who they are in terms of social position and function, but not what differentiates them from other humans as unique beings.

From a personal point of view, I feel that human identity is like a psychological onion, each layer representing a sub-identity. One layer might be a layer of nationalistic identity, while another might be a common identity of musical taste or scientific ethics. There seem to be many such layers, each one derived from the unique desires, past experiences, knowledge concepts from various areas of knowledge employing different ways of knowing and so on. In that sense, the ‘I’ seems to be the sum total of all these mannerisms, cultural traits, experiences, and knowledge concepts learnt so far. But, is there an area of knowledge, in particular that is closer to the ‘true’ identity of the person or does all knowledge contribute to the sense of who we are with equal strength? Does knowledge that come by way of emotion or sense perception occupy a large share of our sense of identity than that that comes by way of reason or language?

In Natural sciences, scientists have enabled human identities to be formed based on the determination of the single differentiating molecule of all life – The Gene. Knowledge of how genes are the determining factors of a wide array of physical and pyschological traits gives scientists a sense of who we humans are. At the external level, the number of genes differentieats the humans from other specieas. From the human comparitier level, the ramdom variation of each of these genes and their unique combinatory permutaions, creates no two individuals alike. This scientific genetic determinim seems to be at the core of what one really is. Inductive and deductive reasoning have placed ‘Homo Homo Sapiens’ at the forefront of evolution. Geneticists can by the mere perception of genetic fingerprints tell to which evoliutionary branh does the particular species get identified to. In this sense, this ‘genetic’ identity is very rudimentary to attributing the human species a sense of who they are to human species in purely bio-chemical world.

But, as a knower, can one’s sense of who one is be irreducibly boiled down to molecular variation? Since, Genes, are in fact, at the basic level just macromolecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other elements, just like everything else around us, how is it that we are any different from anything around us? Doesn’t this shove ‘identity’ in the realm of paradigm shift?

Genetic determinimsm is a belief that genes along witth a host of enviromental conditions determine morphology and behavioral phenotype of species. In a sense, it shows that humans gain everything from a common ancestral genetic pool, but if that so, then how can there be an‘individuality’ unique to each one of us? ‘Nurture’ gives humans a unique conditioning variation which clashes with the regularizing ‘Nature’ impact of biological identity.

On a different note, Free will might be the solution that reconcilles the apparent gap between ‘Nature’ and ‘Nurture’. Free will, by providing us the choices to form our own individual identity, is at the core of giving us a sense of who we are. By the very exercise of free will, one has the ability to go beyond the ‘Knowledge’ of who one is. In that sense, various areas of knowledge do provide us a foundational sense of who we are but free will is the final ingredeient in the creation of the unique person that each one of us is.

On a more philosophical note, is there a part of one’s identity that is beyond of knowledge? In other words, is there a sense of the knower that isn’t derived from knowledge concepts? Enlightened mystics have claimed time and again that there is an unchanging ‘self’ that is devoid of all knowledge labels. In fact, Indian mystic U.G. Krishnamurthi, once said that, “We are using the neurons, our memory, constantly to maintain our identity. Whether you are awake, asleep or dreaming, this process is carried on. But, it is wearing you out… The so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover” [13]. If U.G is given the benefit of the doubt, then with what ways of knowing does the knower traverse on the inward path of self-realization? If Socrates’ statement that true knowledge is knowing that one knows nothing is agreed with, then does Knowledge, in the TOK sense of the word, still give one a sense of what one really is?

Having said this though, in the normal sense of who we think we are, Ethics, as an area of knowledge, by way of emotions/intuition, provides a strong sense of who we are. On the other hand, since reason, sense perception and language are part of knowledge acquisition in most Human Science fields, one has to exercise caution to prevent being a victim of fallacious deductive and inductive reasoning traps in one’s buildup of identity.

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