One of the many striking things about walnut kernels, alongside their delicate and noble flavour and the neatness with which they can be extracted from their shells, is their uncanny resemblance to the lobes of the human brain. The comparison is deflationary and, with wry sympathy, slightly mocking. We may think of ourselves as extraordinary creatures capable of mighty feats, but we are in the end reliant on a highly flawed, walnut-like contraption that gets an awful lot wrong. Acknowledging this, far from a defeatist move, is the beginning of wisdom. Socrates remarked: I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don’t know. The more closely we introspect, the more we start to appreciate the range of tricks our minds play on us - and therefore the more we appreciate the extent to which we will continually misjudge situations and the feelings they provoke. This critical attitude towards our own thought-processes is technically called scepticism, after the Ancient Greek philosophical sceptics (from the Greek word 'skepsis', meaning questioning or examination), a group who first concentrated on showing up how flawed and unreliable our minds can be, in large and small ways. We desire excessively and inaccurately. Our sexual drives wreak havoc on our sense of priorities. Our whole assessment of the world can be transformed according to how much water we have drunk or sleep we have had. The instrument through which we interpret reality, our 1260 or so cubic centimeters of brain matter, has a treacherous proclivity for throwing out faulty readings. For the sceptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our faulty walnuts is the start of the only kind of intelligence of which we are ever capable; just as we are never as foolish as when we fail to suspect we might be so. We should keep a walnut within eyeshot to remind ourselves of our ongoin need for intellectual modesty.
This article is from The School Of Life
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