Don't get a FitBit (CBS Photo Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
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Philosophers have seldom lived up to the ideal of radical doubt that they often claim as the prime directive of their tradition. They insist on questioning everything, while nonetheless holding onto many pieties. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the commandment handed down from the Oracle at Delphi and characterised by Plato as a life-motto of his master Socrates: “Know thyself.”
While this may seem an unassailable injunction, it is at least somewhat at odds with an equally ancient demand of Western philosophy, which may in fact be offered up in direct response to what the oracle says: “Don’t tell me what to do.” This response gets close to the spirit of the Cynics, who, like Plato, also believed they were following the teachings of Socrates, yet took his philosophy not to require some arduous process of self-examination, but only a simple and immediate decision to conduct one’s life according only to the law dictated by nature.
There are good reasons to defy the oracle beyond simply a distaste for taking orders. For one thing, it is not a settled matter that the commandment to “know thyself” can be followed at all, since it is not clear that there is anything to know. In the end the self may be the greatest “nothingburger” of all; there may simply be nothing there. The self may be an illusion, as most strains of classical Buddhist philosophy held; or it may be a “hole in being at the heart of Being”, as Jean-Paul Sartre disconsolingly suggested; or it may be perfectly real, but by definition beyond the bounds of knowability.
If you become convinced that the self is unknowable, there are a few different ways you might react. You might decide to “go with the flow”, to live out your days in happy ignorance of your “true” nature, but in sentimental harmony with the world around you. Or you might turn your attention to the body, as the closest thing you’re ever going to get to the self itself, and learn everything you can about it. In doing this, over time you and your peers might come to believe that the information derived from such investigation counts as self-knowledge in the fullest sense, that it is not just as good as it gets, but good purely and simply.
This impression that knowledge of the body’s “vital stats” is good in itself may come to appear particularly compelling when it presents itself not only as good, but as cool. And there is no more effective way to make learning cool than to make it depend on the intermediation of some sleek new device, some bit of technology, a gadget that did not exist at all just a few years before. In a world flooded with such new devices, it is not at all surprising to find that many people now are not even aware of any aspiration to self-knowledge beyond what may be revealed by the AppleWatch or the Fitbit.
Of course, these devices are only the tip of the iceberg. For some years we have heard reports of “tech bros” willingly cyborgising themselves to monitor a constant stream of data concerning their blood-sugar levels, or the chemical composition of their urine or sweat. Nor is such pervasive monitoring always part of a project of self-cultivation, nor even is it always voluntary. Doctors are increasingly able to monitor the vital signs of outpatients going about their lives far from the centres of medical care, and now we are starting to hear of pills that can send an electronic signal once they have arrived in their swallower’s stomach: a potential way of ensuring that a patient is adhering to some court-ordered medical regime of anti-psychotics, or even, potentially, of chemical castration.
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SubscribeWell, that was cheery. Good stuff nonetheless. Attaching some reward – tangible, like video game progress, to arbitrary, like “streaks” – to everyday tasks like walking does seem to be in line with both the interests of tech companies who want you to integrate their product with your life and interact with it as much as possible, and with the interests of governments like China. Already the latter assigns “social credits” (or deducts them, if one is bold enough to object against the Chinese government online) to mundane chores like attending yoga sessions or visiting a relative. Like the author said, perhaps some mystique is overdue in our attitude towards human nature. Drop the behavioural psychology and freedom-damning neuroscience. Give us back the mysterious, unplumbed mind full of possibilities and staunchly untouched by the outside world. Paradoxically, we might just learn more about what it means to be human with that approach, anyways.
Well said. Though I’m not sure we have to totally drop the behavioural psychology. Some gamerfication in ones life can be both fun & useful. For example, when I do an online learning course, I love the points, levelling up & badges, and I think it helps me learn better, faster & with more enjoyment. But yes, the neuroscience should not be at the expense of the mysterious and the invsible world.
Everything able to be data vacuumed will be commoditized. Humans will increasingly function mostly as robots for the elite who live in an entirely different reality. The sooner the elite can replace them with ACTUAL robots, the better in their minds.
I worry about this. A small part of me wonders if the current tensions being stoked up by US politics and media are really about gearing people up to attack groups with strong individualistic tendencies.
Thanks for a stimulating article. Nietzsche’s take on “Know thyself” is interesting: “A thing known is a thing no longer of concern.” So “Know thyself” could be seen as an injunction to become objective and direct ones attention almost entirely to the outer world.
But for me Socrates meant it literally, or at least that was one of his intended meanings. He was an alchemist and as such practiced what is perhaps the only reliable set of methods to succeed at the undertaking, which involves a deep dive into the perilous unconscious. An undertaking that while involving an interior transformation, also brings down Heaven into Earth, and hence can benefit all people, and Nature herself. Sadly it’s an almost impossible task in the current age. Napoleon is said to have felt a calling to alchemy, but even back then it seemed easier to him to set out to conquer the external world, rather than face the realm within.
So a deep dive into the now neglected unconscious is not for everyone, unless they’re up for a major risk of wasted time at best and psychosis or death at worst. But all can benefit from looking after their unconscious a bit better. If your fitbit is saying you need a walk, try and take it in nature. And it doesnt have to be an ‘opportunity for reflection’, (which seems the common way left brained folk like to see it) but it can be a chance just to attend to nature and not consciously think at all, giving the unconscious a chance. The same with brief moments when one encounters unmetricised art. I guess I couldnt agree less about our proper selves being “grounded only in phenomenal consciousness, and following no rule.” But still an excellent article overall.
And at Christmas-time, when that old bard is singing and strumming his guitar, busking for change, in the metro, and he whispers “Merry Christmas” or “God Bless” to somebody who drops a coin into his cap, could he look forward to a “Merry Christmas to you, too” in return?
Maybe a tepid “And to you, too” to “God bless.” Maybe a harsh “Don’t mention it”? Maybe, heaven help us, “Happy Holidays” to the bard’s “Merry Christmas,” followed by a wan smile to the down-on-his luck entertainer.
Maybe the coin is the most important sign of genuine recognition. But then cash is frowned upon now and folk want to shed the cash.
Nope, not persuaded that the unmeasurable is some wonderful elixir that brings us back to our humanity. What is our humanity?
For all the limitations and risks of relying on materialism (and there are many as the article suggests) the idea of ‘proper selves’ grounded only in phenomenal consciousness is also limited and risky. Especially when the great and good set themselves up to guide the huddled masses to the glorious uplands.
And to think that I was against “videoing” my wedding 35 years ago for the same reasons. Some things are meant to be preserved for the memory only. I still enjoy getting completely “lost” in a museum or antique store on a Saturday afternoon, completely oblivious to the outside world. I feel more human afterwards.
I no longer go on things like facebook, but when I did i was saddened by the people I know going on holiday and spending more time documenting it on facebook than actually enjoyIng it! I have gone away with my family and forgotten to take pictures because I was too busy enjoying the moment!
I don’t own a FitBit, but I do own an Apple Watch. While I recognize the author’s concerns, it has objectively made me fitter.
Julian — has it made you body fitter? Or the whole of you?
Like Heidegger intimated the world has been ‘pictured’, we picture everything now, nothing is a real unfolding, everything is framed and copied even history itself; not that history doesn’t repeat, it does, but that we lack the imagination and distance to create properly new culture and history. Fukuyama was also right in that the ‘end of history’ would look something like the whole of the 21st century so far and that technological self-knowledge would not necessarily tell a more meaningful story than the past humanistic attempts. I.e. We might survive more easily in the 21C but perhaps not equally mean more, or feel more certain about who or what we are or what we are doing with ourselves. That can only come to those who entertain an integrated humanity instead of a reductionist humanity.
Knowledge of self is asymptotic, always expanding but never complete.
Data is not knowledge.
Knowledge of self is gained when behaviour is changed in light of experience, when the data is fed back in and applied.
There are no contradictions or mysteries here. Simply a lack of interest on the part of most people, together with an obsession with the idea of progress, a means by which people can pin responsibility for their life on a series of externalities.
This excellent essay got me thinking along with it!
The oracle was Delphic after all. And Plato’s Apology draws out brilliantly the irony of Socrates’ “obedience” to the divine command to “know thyself”/”don’t tell me what to do”.
Also, the flip side of money colonizing art is art colonizing money: Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” would seem to describe the NFT and the digital token (that is, its tokos), albeit in different senses.
Two thoughts I wish you would have explored as well: 1) Aristotle did not list deliberation (i.e., choosing among weighable options) as a particularly good form of thinking. 2) St. Maximus the Confessor’s concept of gnomic willing seemed to at least parallel Aristotle’s viewpoint about deliberation.
For the thought of both of those men, quantification of everything (and, sadly, of everyone) is necessary for deliberative thought to work. St. Maximus contrasted gnomic willing with natural willing. The differences between those two forms of willing (or rather, the consequences of adopting one or the other as normative for the human condition) are astounding, imo.
Which is a very long way of saying that, yes, your Fitbit may indeed be in the process of stealing your soul.
Re: those “rough and sweet airs of an old bard’s singing voice” – The once-universal view of humans as mysterious, half-divine *creatures* was bound to be replaced by a model of Man-as-Animal, once the Creator was removed from Creation. Now that even Nature has been atomized into her bits and bytes, dying in the process of dissection, we are left with the model of Man-as-Machine, and as usual the arts – particularly music – are ahead of most of society in illustrating that model. Music has become easy to create, wide-open, freely-accessible – and ultimately unsatisfying, as an overview of global music consumption shows.
But the human needs for *security* and *significance* remain, unsatisfied by any number of “likes” or social credit points. We hear the echo of our searching in those “rough and sweet airs” in the metro stations. But only the echo.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
William Bruce Cameron
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
William Bruce Cameron
Seems like black mirror SS1 EP2 turning out to be real.
I play the fit bit metric game. I am subject to countless algorithms and I consume many copies of art and engage in allographic pursuits. So what? Take self-knowledge to its proper ends and authenticity disappear along with the allographic. Trying to avoid algorithmic existence and pretend you are following along some kind of authentic existence is illusory in itself. The fit bit is just another tool. It helps me align my bodily feelings with bodily facts. Culture has warped my perceptions of myself. Advertising, subsidizing, and presentation of junky food has destroyed my body’s ability to make healthy choices. I had a warped sense of what it means to be healthy before the fit bit came along. The fit bit grounds me to some extent.
It seems like a straw man argument to make fit bits and other tools of healthy living out to be soul destroying pursuits. There is a reason the Buddha came along when he did, before fit bits and mass advertising. People have been suffering for eons. The fit bit and algorithms did not cause this. Like anything in life they can make us be too attached to them and we need to learn how to use them with mindfulness. It is hubris to assume that we can’t do this and that there is a way to view art that is better.
My faith in my FitBit was dented somewhat when after having forgotten to put it back on after a shower, it nevertheless turned in a night’s worth of sleep-tracking data for me, the following morning.
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