| There’s one subject everyone should be an expert on: themselves. But how many of us are? For something so close and immediate to us, our own minds and characters remain mysteriously obscure.
“Why is it a lifelong project for me to gain insight into my own thoughts, habits, impulses, reasons for acting, or the nature of the mind itself?” wondered philosophy professor Therese Cory. “This is called the ‘problem of self-opacity,’ and we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it.” Cory explains that philosophers as far back as ancient Greece and medieval Europe weighed and wondered at the mystery of the self—and the challenges of grasping it.
“It’s a common scholarly myth that early modern philosophers (starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the human being as a ‘self’ or ‘subject,’” Cory noted. “Like philosophers and neuroscientists today, medieval thinkers were just as curious about why the mind is so intimately familiar, and yet so inaccessible, to itself. (In fact, long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic thinkers were speculating about a subconscious, inaccessible realm in the mind.)”
These traditional thinkers offer wisdom that helps us understand both why and how to gain greater self-knowledge. Their thought remains as applicable today as when they first contemplated the mysterious and elusive substance of the human soul.
Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the link between self-knowledge and the rationality that defines us as human beings. “These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination,” he wrote in his “Meditations.” The rational soul ought to engage in these practices of self-reflection, and when it does so, “It reaps its own harvest. ... It succeeds in its own purpose.”
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