Know thyself … inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde
That old admonition “don’t force a square peg into a round hole” is a quiet philosophy of alignment. It asks a simple but difficult question: what actually fits? It applies across almost every domain of life.
At the personal level, the “square peg” is your temperament: your natural inclinations, rhythms, and sensitivities. The “round hole” is what the world expects: career paths, social roles, society’s definitions of success, and worst of all: sycophantism. The warning is against misfit disguised as virtue. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann said it best: Humility is so much easier than honesty because it is compatible with sloth. The biggest public display of sycophantism today is at any of our President’s cabinet meetings. It will be interesting to see how these meeting play out in history.
If you are contemplative but force yourself into constant performance, or independent but force yourself into rigid hierarchy, you will struggle and distort. A life well lived is one where the inner shape gradually finds its outer form. Forcing the fit leads to neurosis. Finding alignment leads to energy.
In human relationships the metaphor becomes ethical. The danger in family and politics is the quiet slide from honesty into servility or from persuasion into coercion. When you fake it or insist on fit, you stop listening and learning. The result isn’t harmony, it’s fracture, resentment, or silence. Understanding is not agreement. Coexistence is not conversion. In this sense, the admonition is a guardrail against ideological rigidity. It echoes the idea that different, even conflicting, ways of life can be valid.
Walter Kaufmann expresses this succinctly:
Diversity helps to prevent stagnation and smugness; and a teacher should acquaint his students with diversity and prize careful criticism far above agreement. His noblest duty is to lead others to think for themselves.
When it comes to the unknown, the mysteries of religion, science and philosophy, the metaphor becomes epistemological. The “peg” here is reality itself, vast, irregular, and evolving. When we force a fit, we reduce the mystery. We simplify what should remain open. We assert certainty where objectivity is more appropriate. This is where Richard Feynman’s “open channel” comes into play, his insistence on “not knowing” as a form of integrity. Not forcing the peg is, in this realm, a kind of intellectual honesty.
A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. Richard Feynman
Across all these domains, the underlying idea is the same. Reality has shape. So do you. Wisdom is learning the difference between shaping and forcing. Shaping is dialogue, growth, and adaptation. Forcing is denial, distortion, and conflict. The mature stance is not passivity, it’s attunement. Where can I adapt without losing myself? Where must I accept difference rather than resolve it? Where is the unknown something to explore, not conquer? We need such wisdom today more than ever.
If you never try anything new, you stagnate. If you force everything, you break things. The art of living lies in a delicate balance. Test the fit but don’t impose it. Stretch but don’t distort. Engage but don’t erase difference.
In Albert Camus’s short story Jonas or the Artist at Work, Jonas begins by fitting. He is successful, admired, and socially absorbed. Yet, the more he fits, the more he dissolves. He feels himself disappearing in the fit. This leads him to question if the fit is false. Why assume the “hole” is right?
Jonas is an individualist, an eccentric. While others seek agreement, coherence, and belonging, Jonas seeks his inner necessity, authenticity, and a form that matches his being. Jonas echoes Albert Camus’s deeper concern for lucidity over conformity. Jonas withdraws not because he hates others, but because he senses that his life has become a performance. He is being “fitted” by praise, by expectation, and by success itself. Success is a trap that he falls into.
There is a cost to authenticity. To refuse the “round hole” is to risk misunderstanding, loneliness, and even failure in conventional terms. Jonas ends up painting less and speaking less. He retreats into a kind of suspended state. His final gesture is ambiguous, quiet, and almost unreadable. Authenticity may not produce clarity or triumph. Ironically, to be true to oneself may mean to become unintelligible to others. Yet, there is a greater danger. The danger is not that you won’t fit. The danger is that you will fit too well and forget who you are.
Of course, who you are is not so easy to know as John Fowles shows us in The Magus. The “self” is shaped by culture, desire, vanity and fear. Maybe, as the Buddhists tell us, there is no stable identity. Maybe true freedom is a perpetual refusal to be fixed.
Fowles explodes identity while Camus pares it down. You think you’re free, but you’re acting out a script. Even your rebellion may be scripted. The “self” is suspect. Fowles would have us believe “You are not who you think you are” while Camus would say “You are who you think you are, but you are losing it.”
Two different prescriptions follow. Fowles seems to say: “Engage the world, be tested, deceived, and unmasked. Constantly revise yourself. Freedom is active, risky, and social.” Camus (through Jonas) tells us: “Withdraw from noise. Refuse external definitions. Sit in silence, even ambiguity. Freedom is quiet, inward, almost monastic.” Jonas climbs into his loft to escape the world. Fowles would likely say: “That loft could become just another role.”
If we combine Fowles and Camus we end up with an almost impossible ethic. Camus says “Guard your inner necessity. Don’t let the world dissolve you.” Fowles counters with: “Distrust even that necessity. It may be another script.” Putting the two together we arrive at: Be yourself but never fully trust who that self is.
Jonas in his loft tries to hear a voice that is purely his own. Fowles’ protagonist (Nicholas) in the maze realizes that every voice including his own may be staged. One moves toward silence to find truth. The other moves through illusion to dismantle it.
Square pegs, round holes. Perhaps I’m making too much of this sphinxlike enigma.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. Albert Camus, Intuitions, October 1932
Accept that man has the possibility of a limited freedom, and if this is so, he must be responsible for his actions. To be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans. John Fowles letter on The Magus