Know Thyself

Gnōthi seauton, 'know thyself', was the most celebrated of the Delphic maxims, carved at the entrance to Apollo's temple. On its surface it was a warning to mortals: know that you are human, not a god — remember your limits before the divine. But in the hands of the philosophers it became something far deeper.

The Socratic turn

Socrates made the Delphic command the charter of his life's work. In the Apology he obeys the oracle of Apollo by examining himself and others; in the Phaedrus he says he cannot study myths until he has, 'as the inscription at Delphi bids', come to know himself. To know oneself, for Socrates, is to know that one does not know — and so to begin the examined life, without which life is not worth living.

The care of the soul

Plato carried the maxim further still. In the First Alcibiades he argues that the self one must know is not the body but the soul, and that to know the soul is to glimpse the divine within it as in a mirror — so that self-knowledge becomes the beginning of the soul's ascent to its source. Through the Neoplatonists this reading deepened into a mystical programme of return, and it passed, transformed, into the gnosis of the Hermetists and the mystics: to know thyself truly is to know the god from whom the soul came.