What’s your version?
Titles are important. That’s true for movies, songs, paintings and essays—especially for essays. A title can pique your curiosity and beckon you to read further. Or it can send up a warning flare cautioning you to enter at your own risk. The title of this week’s BLOG straddles both of these possibilities. If you find it foreboding or off-putting, fear not. I haven’t written about sexuality, gender, race, religion or politics. But it is about something that is quite personal and revealing about you, and me, which I hope will entice you to continue.
Among the many maxims that shuffle through my mental Rolodex, two are often attributed to Socrates: Know Thyself and Knowledge is Power. Each has inspired and motivated me throughout my life, and taken together they afford a third bit of wisdom worth pondering: knowing yourself is powerful. Who can argue with that? Self-knowledge, however, is anything but a simple or straightforward acquisition. Can anyone really know himself or herself? And if such knowledge were attainable, what would it do to us or make of us? Would it render us more self-assured and in control, or would it reduce us to a bundle of self-doubt and confusion?
In embarking on this inward journey I find it helpful to recall the French verbs for knowing: savoir and connaitre. The first entails knowing oneself in a factual or informational sense: our age, hair color, height, weight, race, nationality—the things we fill out on a questionnaire when we visit the doctor or apply for a job. All of us carry this knowledge of ourselves in the data of the timelines and resumes we fashion during the years we walk this earth. And savoir is how the world comes to know us too, chronicled in the catalogue of certificates, licenses, transcripts, press clippings and obituaries that mark our arrival, our departure, and a few notable points in between.
The second word, connaitre, is about knowing oneself or others in ways that are familiar, intimate, up close and personal. Whenever I say that I connais another person, I am admitting that they are more than a name on a roster, or a face in the crowd. I have met them, spoken with them, broken bread with them, gotten a feel for who they are and have a fair understanding of what makes them tick. It is these varying levels of connaitre that entitle us to distinguish them friends, good friends, best friends, or maybe even soul mates. That is also how we are best known by those who profess to love us. Or as the old song put it, “to know, know, know you, is to love, love, love you.”
When it comes to the knowledge we may have about someone else, savior is essentially knowing about them, while connaitre is knowing them inwardly, at least as far as they can be known by anyone. When we really do know someone else in some depth of their being, we are powerfully joined with them in relationship, stirring in us either an empathy for them or giving us tools to manipulate them.
A number of times during my professional life I was given the opportunity to learn more about myself through completing a Myers-Briggs personality assessment. The most lasting insight I took from this exercise was the realization that I tilt strongly in the direction of introversion. While not a complete revelation to me, it ran counter to what I had long concluded about myself. How could a sarcastic jokester who enjoyed teasing people to get their attention be an introvert? Weren’t introverts all wallflowers who shrunk as violets in the company of others, or hermits content in their cabin or basement hideaways? If introverted, how could I regularly stand up in front of congregations and school assemblies and deliver sermons and lectures? And would I not flee from those stages where I often sang solos or delivered one-person dramatic monologues? A show off, maybe. But an introvert? Hardly.
My thinking about this self I thought I knew shifted when I began to realize how Myers-Briggs defined both human “versions.” Neither were really about how people outwardly expressed themselves. Introversion and extroversion were direction signs pointing to where these types of folks drew their inner strength and identity. Introverts discover their values, ideas, sensitivities, energy and self-reliance much more from within their own thoughts and feelings than they do from others. They know themselves from the inside out as it were, and it is upon those interior feelings and judgments that they most rely and trust. This is why they often appear introspective, independent, aloof or even shy and retiring, and in such terms they are easily typecast. In contrast, extroverts know themselves from the outside in. They find their strength and convictions in the opinions, energy and judgments they share with others. This makes them quite at home in lively discussions, in clubs and associations, walking crowded streets and joining the throngs who let loose in concerts and stadiums. Extroverts are party animals!
No doubt introversion and extroversion are far more complex than these quick and clean generalizations. Neither type can be aptly distilled into either-or dichotomies of personality and temperament. In reality most of us fall somewhere across a continuum of versions, for which the prefixes ambi- or omni- might best be applied. Like the Asian yin/yang synthesis, introversion and extroversion represent ways in which we know ourselves and relate to others across a spectrum of inward driven and outward turning personality preferences. When both “versions” are present, whether in balance or tension, they give us our best chance to experience life in both its interior and exterior dimensions. It was this knowledge that helped me realize that, although I’m likely an introvert at heart, by occupation I have had to learn how to express the extroverted sides of my personality. It has not always been easy or natural for me to do. Yet in the retrospective glance of retirement, I realize how necessary and important it has been for me to recognize and express both these versions of who I really am.
Perhaps that is what Socrates had in mind in elevating knowledge above all other pursuits. For it empowers us to open that transformative door into understanding who we are, and just importantly, knowing who are these others, so like us, to whom we are drawn in purpose, community, and love.
