Let's talk about this complex subject that always gets people talking. Yes, no one denies that this word has a deeper meaning, but nowadays it is glamourised and often used as a filler in motivational talks, cheap self-help manuals and, of course, in the photo captions of some gurus. It all seems very simple, you search on the internet and some websites appear advertising a practical step-by-step guide with the techniques to be applied, as if self-knowledge were a cake recipe that you just need to follow in a specific order.
All very nice and all, but somewhere between the low-quality entertainment, the promise of easy answers, the existential angst of the moment and the procrastination of everyday life those little questions keep echoing in the mind: ‘What did I do to deserve it?’, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ and so on... These inconvenient questions lead us to another question, the biggest, oldest and most dreaded, the mother of all questions: ‘Who am I anyway?’
It's usually in the midst of this chaos of emotions, contradictions and problems that the subject of self-knowledge comes to the fore, but before you think I'm about to give you a tragic story with an epic twist or an instruction manual worthy of a washing machine, you should take a deep breath because the path is full of surprises.
Let's get down to it!
What is self-knowledge?
Why on earth is this important and why are more and more people selling courses about it? Yes, if you've ever invested your hard-earned cash in a course that promised miracles, then welcome to the club!
Let's just say that this whole getting to know yourself thing is, in essence, the art of deciphering the most complex enigma you'll ever encounter: yourself. Let me give you an example: imagine that your mind is a piece of software that is constantly being updated, where emotional bugs and system glitches combine to create a unique version of you - or at least, a version that gives you a headache every time the dreaded error screen appears. Well, self-knowledge in this case doesn't just mean running a diagnostic or rebooting the system, no, knowing yourself works like an upgrade!
How to practise self-knowledge?
Yes, you have to learn, study and put it into practice! With that in mind, we'll tackle the inevitable, diving into an ocean of thoughts and theories that sometimes seem to dialogue (or even argue heatedly) with each other. Different strands of thought have already tackled this labyrinth in quite different ways, and honestly sometimes it seems that each of them only holds part of the map, but it's still interesting to see what some of them say about it.
Let's start philosophising and talk about Socrates, the famous philosopher who loved a maxim and who loved irony. He said: ‘Know thyself’, in his view, this was not a luxury, but a necessity for ethical living. Plato, his disciple, would agree, but with an air of having had enough of hearing this phrase and also because his ideas were somewhat different. He and his Allegory of the Cave would say that we are fated to see the world in a distorted way, we only see the shadows projected on a wall and believe that this is all there is, while the true reality is out there, under the sun and we just don't experience it because the cave is more comfortable.
But if you find the ideas of the ancients a bit confusing and you're more of an irreverent type, preferring something less ‘straightforward’, let's say that Nietzsche can help you. He didn't believe in a fixed ‘I’. Instead, the true self would be a continuous construction, something always in transformation. ‘Know yourself? Good luck with that!’ he would say, with a teasing tone. It would be like trying to hit a moving target - frustrating at first but with the advantage of always being interesting.
Freud, on the other hand, insisted that to understand oneself was to uncover the recesses of the unconscious - that dark little place where we create and hide our inner demons, repressed desires and childhood traumas. Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology and Freud's contemporary, also had one foot in the basement. He brought us his concept of archetypes, suggesting that within each of us dwells a collective universe of symbols and images that mould our personality.
But while the two above delve into the intricacies of the psyche with the seriousness of a crime investigator, Simone de Beauvoir, always surgical in her speech and ahead of her time, points out that self-knowledge is also a question of freedom and existential responsibility. ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman,’ she said, reminding us that the process of getting to know oneself and transforming oneself is as crucial as the social constructions that mould us.
The unmistakable Oscar Wilde joked about the idea of authenticity when he said that ‘being natural is a difficult pose to maintain’. Knowing yourself can therefore be seen as a kind of performance - a dance between what you are, what you want to be and what the world expects of you.
Now Monsieur Jean-Paul Sartre, with his existentialist perspective and philosophical sarcasm, suggests that the ‘I’ is a construction that we carry out throughout our lives - and that we are therefore free to reinvent ourselves, but we are also condemned to this freedom. He argues that self-knowledge is not so much about discovering a hidden essence as it is about reinventing oneself every day, which, frankly, seems like a good excuse to justify existential crises as being ‘part of the process’.
Last but not least, and for those who are fans of a more ‘zen’ approach, the vision of Eastern philosophy can be an option. In Buddhism, for example, the ‘I’ is seen as a temporary construct, a tangle of desires, sensations and thoughts that appear and disappear. In other words, the concept of ‘I’ is nothing more than an illusion, so if we want to find something stable and definitive, we'd better wait until we're lying down, because the search will be long and fruitless. Laozi, a master of Taoism, would say in an enigmatic tone: ‘Stop trying to find yourself and just be.’ Simple, isn't it?
It's a shame that this concept of ‘just being’ is almost offensive to the Western mind, which lives to dissect, label, diagnose and fit every aspect of our identity into pretty, comfortable little boxes, bought at the latest ‘stock clearance’ at an unbeatable price.
What's next? What to do with so much information?
When we put all these different perspectives together, we realise that self-knowledge is ultimately a process where knowing other people's opinions can provide us with insights, but in the end it can leave us more confused than when we started, everything is a kind of discovery that only we ourselves can handle. There are those who prefer to ignore it, there are those who prefer everything to go back to ‘normal or the way it was before...’ I'm sorry to say that once this process begins, there's no turning back. And it's precisely at this moment that we realise that we haven't learned to look at ourselves with the eyes of understanding and realise how cruel we are to ourselves.
We've learnt to always have a word of comfort for those who come to us to let off steam, we welcome them, we lend our shoulder... But when it comes to ourselves, things are completely different. Self-knowledge is the gateway for us to learn to accept ourselves, to realise that we're not perfect and that it's okay, that we deserve our own affection and understanding. But in order to do this, we need to put aside the ‘lash of penance’, we need courage and practice, yes, but above all persistence because, in my opinion, this is one of the only ‘jobs’ that is really worth every drop of sweat.
You may disagree with everything I've written here, that's your right, you have your ‘own’ world view. What we have in common is that we are human beings who are learning and want the best for our lives. Nobody makes mistakes on purpose (with exceptions), we're all trying to get it right, each in our own way.
The exercise is undoubtedly paradoxical, the more we try to get to know ourselves the more layers emerge and this can become confusing, so here's a tip - don't get carried away by clashes of the type: be rational OR emotional. Where on the one hand, cold, calculating logic tells you to analyse your feelings with the precision of a mathematician; on the other, the chaotic, passionate mess that is the human heart. There's no such thing as having to choose between being a robot programmed for efficiency and being a poet who refuses to follow grammatical rules.
Freedom can be achieved when we embrace our own duality, accepting that sometimes being free means living with the absurdity and imperfection inherent in our condition.
Calm down, take a deep breath, you're on the right track! Believe it!
Self-knowledge, in my opinion, is an indispensable tool for living more consciously. Even if sometimes we feel like sending everything to that place or our path is full of disconcerting surprises (and idiotic people), or those situations that provoke a certain nervous laughter accompanied by the thought ‘Give me patience and not force...’, at some point we will learn to deal with our own faults and those of others, without being charged. Each in their own time, there's no rush, because after all, if life wasn't also a comedy of errors, how could we learn to appreciate the true meaning of being human?
Nietzsche, the one who liked to set the cabaret on fire with his ideas, used a maxim that I have adopted for my life, which is: ‘Become who you are!’, which to me sounds like a call not only to embrace myself, but also to face head-on the absurdities and contradictions that come my way.
In short, getting to know yourself is like dismantling and reassembling your own puzzle (without the instructions), it's embracing yourself and your own duality, it's recognising that each step (however clumsy we think it is) is part of our journey of continuous self-discovery.
And in this story there is no full stop, only ellipses.
So if you've got this far, congratulations! It means that your curiosity is fuelling the engine of your self-knowledge. Don't stop here! I invite you to explore the other articles on the blog, where other equally thought-provoking topics full of (often inconvenient) reflections await your visit. Feel free to interact - leave your comments, suggestions for topics and questions, share your experiences, even complain :)
Oh, and don't forget to recommend the blog to anyone you know!
PS: Now if you're really curious, pay a visit to our UN4RT website - our virtual ‘backstage’ that brings together exclusive and differentiated content, made especially for those who really thirst for knowledge and like irreverence.
Keep exploring, questioning and, above all, getting to know yourself - because, after all, this is the most fun, surprising and insane adventure we can experience! You are both the artist and the work. So get to work!
‘Illusion crumbles when we question reality’. - UN4RT
If you want to delve deeper into this subject and find out a little more about what was mentioned in the article, below are my sources, references and inspirations. But don't complain afterwards!
Socrates, Maxims of Delphi.
Plato, Apology of Socrates and The Republic (Allegory of the Cave).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the ID.
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy and Man and his Symbols.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
Laozi or Lao Zi also known as Lao-Tzu and Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching.
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