No, you can concur all you like. But you do not understand.
The Burns poem is not about knowing yourself, but seeing yourself through the eyes of others.
I suggest you have no clue on this front.
Posting a pic of Delphi is indicative of that misunderstanding.
To know yourself, is to know all the myraid of those who were Your predecessors. So if You take the trouble of finding a genealogy of those who came before You, it will take a lot of mystery out of it.
This goes a long way, to compound the feedback coming to You from others. Sometimes, simply trying to ignore these factors, may give a wrong idea of who you really are.
What do you mean predecessors?
Do you mean a literal genealogy?
If so I think you are trapped in a racist determinism, which ignores the uniqueness of each person.
No, no…dear Lev. I understood you, my friend. I suggest that I do have a clue on this front. I simply acknowledged that " Knowing Thyself " is not merely some narcissistic endeavor, but a multifaceted process that can involve, say, " seeing yourself through the eyes of others." The picture of Delphi wasn’t directed at you, but rather to compliment the thread.
Carry on
I do not think so. I did qualify this as one factor among others. Your actual geneology can not be ignored, as can be seen from the ongoing debate about the nurture/genetic split, as determenitive. Even without such a determination, it cannot but be assumed that genetic tracers signify a lot about who we are, even presumed under the most basic assumption of direct relations between genetic structure and psychic traits.
I think looking at you relatives is a big mistake. You so easily build your world on a set of familial, racist, and cultural determinisms.
To the degree these things are real, are the extent that they are unchangeable.
TO know and understand yourself you need to eschew all the clothes of your childhood, and put on your manly gown and make you own life free from the prejudice of the past.
All the things that are important about YOU as an individual are all the spaces in your personality that you fill with your own live and experience.
You don’t need your ancestors, not your parents. You need to find yourself.
I agree with that, Lev, however it is not simply a looking of one’s self which is determinitive, or even one of understanding how you got to the place You are basing a kind of self analysis. It is most likely, that where most of the determination is going on is
the incongruous nature of the way things appear, (looking at Your self-as a conjunction with where You happen to be at the moment, with how and what you
are thinking about),within context. The process of
extricating one’s self from adverse situations, is problamatic to the extent, that it may partly determine the nature and quality of the analysis it’s
self.
Your primary context within a societal matrix is the genealogical makeup, and the strength of it extends
into the farthest reach of the social community. Shedding adverse effects of those, are primary and preceede the subsequent quality of a successful self
evaluation. Kind of puttng the horse before the
carriage. I presume only a minority can proceeds otherwise, and ironically, they are usually the ones who do not need analysis.
It’s icy fingers grip us and bind us to the past; the source of nearly all human conflict and war.
That’s not necessarily true, you know.
I think that is indeed necessarily true, but worse than that we ourselves can never know the real us, “me”, as if that were a meaningful object of knowledge.
We are only party to a limited view of what we are: the conscious part. As for others they only see what is outwardly perceivable.
Lev,
Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others (that is when we know they are unbiased) IS simply just another way of [coming] to know ourselves. There are multitudinous ways to come to know ourselves. Nature is another way or tool which we have at our disposal if we allow it to speak to us. There are so many ways in which human beings mimic nature - and the elements for that matter.
I wouldn’t say that knowing ourselves without that is narcissist BUT deliberately ignoring that way of coming to know ourselves could be narcissistic or a form of fear, not facing who we are, as seen by another.
Lev,
When I said that it wasn’t necessarily true, I meant because many of us do have a habit of lying to ourselves for the sake of self-esteem or for the sake of thinking that we are better than others, or for the sake of comfort in the face of grabbing onto straws which are really not a part of who we are. You said it yourself when you put that poem in, Lev - and I agree with that and I also feel that there are people, our closest friends who do know us even better at times than we know ourselves.
Even those who we consider to be our enemies - they too might know us better than we know ourselves. We have those kinds of friends who will only tell us what they think we want to hear. Our enemies may at times be more our friends than our so-called friends.
But it is at least for me. Coming to know ourselves is never finished. It’s an ongoing process. How can it not be meaningful if we are to grow, to evolve, to become more… I don’t mean this in a narcisstic or a vain sense. If you’re a scientist, you want to learn more about your area of expertise, the same with a psychologist, mathematician, et cetera. If you’re a human, why wouldn’t you want to learn more about what it means to be a human, what it means to be you? That’s not narcissism - that’s intelligence and wonderment. lol
Thinking further on it, I can say that there is truth to this, there would have to be but I also think that it would depend on the calibre of the individual him/her self. Some of us don’t like to dive that deeply into self or what counts for self to examine and to know who we are at our core, and to embrace that knowledge or to grow out of it into something else…ad continuum.
I was amused by your phrase “when we know they are unbiased”.
An unbiased person is a dead person.
Lev,
Well, would you agree with me that there are people who have the gift to be unbiased? They know us pretty well and at the same time they have the ability to speak their truth to us? These people can be objectively honest and unbiased. They are able to find the right words which will not hurt or harm or offend. This in itself is a gift. They have the capacity for constructive criticism but at the same time have empathy and compassion and so we feel safe emotionally with them. These people can be unbiased, especially when they realize that the other is seeking the truth and not a lie.
But I know what you mean.