As promised at the conclusion of the first post, I will jump back to “the beginning” and explore—helpfully, I hope, if not fully or extensively–where the phrase and the notion, “know thyself,” came from and something of its history. As I have been guilty of doing before, let me preview “the conclusion of the matter” before providing a few details.
The maxim “Know thyself” is so pervasive that it has bordered on becoming a “personal development cliché”—at least in the Western world, to which, with some apology, I will limit myself for the sake of brevity. That said, one hardly knows where to start, or stop, in tracing the use, interpretations, and applications of this concept. It is clear that the ancient Greeks seemed to have known and valued it, since they are said to have carved the motto above the portal of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in the 4th Century BCE. Still, “know thyself,” is most often associated with Socrates (470–399 BCE)—who is not known to have written anything and is accessed, therefore, primarily through Plato’s dialogues—and who went even further, declaring that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
From there—with the exception of the Middle Ages, as will be noted momentarily—use and development of the concept sprouted like invasive bamboo! Here are a few examples to give you, hopefully, some sense of its prevalence, starting, of course, with the philosophers.
- According to Socrates, as portrayed for us by Plato, true wisdom is knowing what you do not know. So knowing yourself starts with recognizing the limits of your own wisdom and understanding. Yet, he also argues the importance of knowing your true nature, which is best discovered, as shown by Plato’s many Socratic dialogues, in the context of question and answer, of conversation and argument.
- Plato, in addition to his apparent agreement with Socrates, considered most people to be like prisoners living their entire lives staring at the wall of a cave, mistaking dimly lit shadows for reality. Knowing oneself is a matter of escaping from that allegorical cave’s “chains of ignorance,” and crawling your way into the sunlight of genuine knowledge. For Plato, as for Socrates, the starting point is self-reflectively recollecting things your immortal soul already knows.
- As Mitchell Green notes (See Sources Consulted/Cited), since the Middle Ages was a time when the focus was primarily on knowing God, we find little emphasis on knowing the self. It was not until the first half of the 17th century that “we begin to get more of a focus on . . . understanding ourselves by looking within,” particularly with the appearance of the rationalist Rene Descartes, who believed that the mind/soul, the seat of our consciousness, gives us our identity and our sense of self.
- And “across the aisle,” as Zachary Fruhling put it (See Sources Consulted/Cited)—although a half-to-a-century later— are the empiricist philosophers, such as John Locke, who posited that we begin life with a tabula rasa (blank slate) for a mind, upon which copies of our sensory perceptions are impressed and then “sorted” by our rational mind. This assumes—as another empiricist, David Hume, who “followed in Locke’s footsteps” a half-century later, also argued—that “to know oneself is to understand the ways in which your past experiences have shaped and defined you.”
- And from there, one could go on, and on, to other towering philosophical figures–to Immanuel Kant, for instance, particularly pivotal for having prodigiously synthesized empiricism and rationalism, or to Existentialists, either from the Christian tradition such as Soren Kierkegaard or Paul Tillich, or the atheistic approach like John Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, all of whom affirm in their own ways that we possess the free will to define our own lives. But enough for the philosophers!
As indicated earlier, there are a host of well-known and virtually unknown writers out there who have explored this subject, so I want to call attention to a few (See Sources Consulted/cited for Wikipedia and No Sweat Shakespeare). First of all, some poets.
- Alexander Pope wrote a poem entitled “An Essay on Man, Epistle II”, which begins “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem titled “Know Thyself”—which, like much of his poetry, is too long and complex to quote here—is a sort of “anthem” to Emerson’s belief that to “know thyself” meant knowing the God that existed within each person.
- And, in this context, one could hardly ignore this triplet from Shakespeare:
This above all- to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
It’s rather ironic that these lines from Hamlet are spoken by Polonius, a rather unsavory character. Nevertheless, being true to oneself is, undeniably, a noble aspiration.
- And then, although not known as a poet, in Poor Richard’s Almanac Benjamin Franklin , observed, “There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.”
Finally, to draw this set of examples to a close, let me acknowledge gratefully that—as we shall see— “old white males” are not the only ones who have contributed to an exploration of the concept, “know thyself.” First of all, although still males, some “persons of color” (See Sources Consulted/Cited for BrainyQuote, Brewminate, BrightDrops, Seattle Times).
- Note these quotes from Mahatma Ghandi:
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. . . . To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face, one must be able to Love the meanest of all creation as oneself.”
- The Dalai Lama created a “personality test” designed to help a person Know Yourself. These brief quotations are but a “drop” from a “full pail” of exploration and directions.
“I have great interest . . . in all the orders of Tibetan Buddhism that their systems come down to . . . . the same final basic insight about innermost awareness. In texts we inherited from India,. . . . the basic principle is sometimes called the ‘fundamental innate mind of clear light’ . . . while in yet others it is called the ‘jewel mind’.” (from The Heart of Meditation)
- These two brief quotations are from Confucius:
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
“The more you know yourself, the more you forgive yourself .”
- In a sermon in 1967 at New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago, Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted the late Jewish rabbi, Joshua Leibman, whose book, Peace of Mind, has a chapter entitled “Love Thyself Properly.” King agrees with Leibman that to know ourselves, we have to love ourselves, which, King says, “means that you’ve got to accept yourself. . . . The principle of self-acceptance is a basic principle in life,” which means accepting our “tools”—our abilities—and our limitations” (See Sources Consulted/Cited, the Seattle Times).
Finally (really!) for this post, we turn to—Yes—a few examples from a host of women writers on self discovery..
- In The Art of Finding Yourself, author Fiona Robertson asserts that our identities are built on the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences, other people, and the world. It’s an inner journey to examine and dispel the stories that make you feel separate, inadequate, or otherwise “wrong.”
- The book, The Art of Talking to Yourself, by Veronika Tugaleva, is a plea for self-trust and a gentle guide to self-awareness. Instead of helping you become who you think you should be, Tugaleva hopes to introduce you to someone more interesting: who you are.
- In an article in Psychology Today, Meg Selig uses VITALS as an acronym for the six building blocks of the self. The letters stand for: Values, Interests, Temperament, Around-the-Clock, Life Mission and Goals, and Strengths/Skills. After explaining how these contribute to knowing yourself, she acknowledges that it’s hard to remain true to yourself because you are constantly changing and because society’s values often conflict with your own (See Sources Consulted/Cited).
Hoping that you will agree that this is “’nuff said” for today, in the next post I will outline what I have chosen to call my own “common sense” approach to the ponderous two-word concept, Know Thyself, and proceed to offer—after the already (really!) small sample from across centuries of history—my own understanding of what it means and how one might approach accomplishing it.
And, for whatever it’s worth, I will enter some areas that involve sharing several personal accounts of times, places, and circumstances when I have sought to “know myself.” I hope you’ll be interested enough to follow along.
2 Responses
I have often thought about the tabula rasa concept and that we spend the first couple or three decades of our lives with other people doing most of the writing on our blank slates as they tell us what they think of us, where we excel or have talents, and what are our limitations. We then spend some time trying to live up to the image others have drawn on our slate, and if we are fortunate, we begin to erase parts of the picture and many of the words and write our own stories until we create a self we recognize, know, and can love. It is, it seems to me, the erasing process, the weeding of our mental garden, that provides the fertile ground or the space for the wisdom of knowing ourselves. Your pieces illuminate this for me.
Ah, David, you always surprise me and amaze me! You always manage to single out something I’ve said—or, in this case, simply referenced—and creatively use it as “springboard” either to dive more deeply into it or to apply it to the context of the topic at hand in a way I had not thought to do . . . or, as in this comment, both!! And, as I’ve said before, I often read something you’ve said, either a comment on one of my blogs or in FB, and find myself saying, “Geez, I wish I’d said that!” And that is very true of your comment here! It is so insightfully relevant to the blog, particularly some posts coming up that deal with the very process you describe so profoundly and vividly that the time might come—since I did not/could not say it—that I ask you to let me quote you. We’ll see. Meanwhile, thank you once again for your faithful reading and oh, so helpful comments.