A Consequence of Knowing that We Know

Now, if the gulls and the fish [and other animals] do not philosophize, they have no consciousness of life being “good” as a whole or “bad” as a whole . . .

Isn’t it, then, an enormous relief for us humans to see that the plant and animal world is not a problem to itself, and that we are wasting intellectual energy in making moral judgements about it. But, of course, we can’t return to the unreflective consciousness of the animal world without becoming monstrous in a way that animals are not. To be human is precisely to have that extra circuit of consciousness which enables us to know that we know, and thus to take an attitude towards all that we experience. The mistake which we have made — and this, if anything, is the fall of humanity — is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude toward the rest of life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one’s essential self, that — in other words — our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator. We forget, because we learn to ignore so subtly, the larger organismic fact that self-consciousness is simply a subordinate part and an instrument of our whole being, a sort of mental counterpart of the finger-thumb opposition in the human hand. Now which is really you, the finger or the thumb?

Alan Watts
from Cloud-Hidden; Whereabouts Unknown — A Mountain Journal