At a dinner party we hosted this Saturday, the topic came up about knowing oneself. It all started with one of the folks saying that one keeps discovering new things about themselves. I was of the opinion that one can never know oneself, and the younger one is the more sure they are about knowing themselves. Someone else opined that the self itself doesn't have an independent existence, without context. And the person who started the topic shot back saying that there is an invariant part of the Self, to which this person (to my surprise), said "ok, you mean the inner self...". I thought all along that his stand was that there was no "inner self"... anyway, it got me thinking... what is "inner self"? How is it different from the Self in general? People undergo many transformations, sometimes they are even fundamental... so what is the Self? It seems to me that the only strand connecting me to my way-back past, is memory and context (people I knew then whom I still know, and the relationships we share)... other than that, I find it hard to connect with, for e.g., my school girl self. Quite often I even find it uncomfortable, in a way that is hard to explain. Makes me wonder about people who always want to be connected with everyone from the past... Anyway, I put it down here... I really don't know who 'I' is (yes, I am talking about who 'I' is, not who 'I' am), and what in 'me' since 'my' birth, has been constant, in terms of attributes, qualities, characteristics and such...
My sense about all this, and also about other hard metaphysical questions is that people very often jump onto one boat or another, in terms of schools of thinking/belief- this is largely driven by their circumstances, and this takes us back to context, at any given time- and then they find arguments to support its rationality. It seems like the most rational thing to do is to first go through the painful process of open reflection and consideration of various possibilities... But who is to say it will be fruitful?
Anyway, that said, what exactly is that process? How does one conduct it? Objective analysis is beyond optimism and pessimism, but without optimism, conducting the process of inquiry is even harder, from a psychological perspective.
Another problem is that most conversations end up with the primary focus on what people believe in. To the contrary, this is less important. What is more important is what the truth is...
My sense about all this, and also about other hard metaphysical questions is that people very often jump onto one boat or another, in terms of schools of thinking/belief- this is largely driven by their circumstances, and this takes us back to context, at any given time- and then they find arguments to support its rationality. It seems like the most rational thing to do is to first go through the painful process of open reflection and consideration of various possibilities... But who is to say it will be fruitful?
Anyway, that said, what exactly is that process? How does one conduct it? Objective analysis is beyond optimism and pessimism, but without optimism, conducting the process of inquiry is even harder, from a psychological perspective.
Another problem is that most conversations end up with the primary focus on what people believe in. To the contrary, this is less important. What is more important is what the truth is...
1 comment:
This is something that I wonder about frequently, and can never come to a stable meeting point of where these two selves meet- the one that conducts the 'objective' analysis, and the one that motivates that analysis with optimism/ pessimism.
I can be objective, or I can be my 'self'. If I think of these two states as flickering curves, there are moments(or less) when the two come together. I could probably count them on my fingers. And I am still trying to figure out how they intersected.
P.S: Great post :)
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