Know thyself (translation “know yourself” or “Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton”).
The dictum written at the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi has engendered discussions since the time of Heraclitus—and probably before. We have our own versions, such as “going off in search of oneself.”
There’s no way to know when we humans began to wonder about identity, but surely any human brain during the history of our species could have sought such self-knowledge, especially in the context of a life lived among others: Others past and present represented by oral and written expressions of what it means to have (or be) an identity.
Lost?
Have we been programmed since the time of Freud to believe we are “lost”? Is there a pervasive enculturation of identity crisis that has, for example, led to addiction on the heavy end and new-age-grasping at pseudo-psych on the light end of the scale of Self? Or is the search for identity driven early on by teenage hormones and the drive to determine one’s destiny through independence that frees a person from known parental and adult controls possibly into a dependence on charismatic leaders?
There are two ways to find identity, one easy and the other hard. The easy way lies in attaching oneself to a group: Political, religious, craft, labor (union), cult, military, philosophical. The hard way involves extensive soul-searching, often in isolation or in some quest. I suppose there’s a third way: Through mind-bending enhanced by drugs of some kind, some so potent they remove the Self during out-of-body experiences.
The Quest
The search for identity has long been a theme in the arts, from Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus to the characters in James Joyce’s and John Updike’s novels. The plethora of self-help books is testimony to this tradition. I confess that I initiated this website as a guide to Self through mental mapping because knowing WHERE we are is often the context of WHO we are.
Such a tie between place and Self is the context in any society for “appropriateness” and “inappropriateness.” Obvious examples? Senator John Fetterman in hoody and shorts in the Capitol; cussing loudly in a library’s reading room; playing loud music on public transportation. In fact, place plays such an important role in the search for identity that some people travel to natural wonders they believe to house mystical gateways to identity, like the Grand Canyon, Kilimanjaro, and to sites like Sonoma and Lhasa, where they believe they can “find themselves.” I suppose that such mystical places have increased by several orders of magnitude with the advent of Zoom calls, FaceTime, and virtual reality.
Can Identity Be Found outside the Context of Place?
An anecdote: I remember being home one morning when a friend FaceTimed me from Siccar Point in Scotland, a geologic feature that inspired a key insight of the “Father of Geology” James Hutton and through his writings, influenced me. I had put Siccar Point on an unrealistic bucket list I could never complete, and yet there I was via FaceTime at a place that had captivated my own thinking and informed my enthusiasm for geology, a key to the way I see the world and my place in it. Through the tech of that call I was and simultaneously wasn’t in a place that had influenced my Weltanschauung and my sense of who I was on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. As Hutton wrote about the geology he had observed, the planet was one formed by processes rooted in the deep past and that continues not just in the present, but will continue to an indefinite future. “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,” Hutton concluded, “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Such a conclusion became part of my perspective on my own finite existence, one that I will live out in places that were and will be different from what I can know in just a short lifetime.
Searches Made Easy
Self-help books, YouTube videos, social media connections, actual travel, and self-examination: Searching for one’s identity is easy nowadays—if it weren’t so difficult. The difficulty lies in the myriad options and the pressures to define oneself or to wear the appropriate mask. A number of TikTok shorts reveals a wide swath of humans desperate to define their identities as unique through body piercings, tattoos,“gender identifiers” like plural pronouns, and behavior deemed to deviate from traditional cultural standards or stretch them into hyperbole.
Identity Shapes World View; World View Shapes Identity
I know that my own identity fits into the mold of western civilization with some faint echoes of eastern thought. The West is largely the product of ancient Greek thought and Christian philosophy and theology. That Weltanschauung is a basis of my identity that I probably can’t shake. If I seek myself, I will inevitably do so in that context. I might adopt some characteristics of Orientals, but they will be addenda to a life already lived as an Occidental.
Find oneself? Are we as lost as contemporary society wants us to think we are? Maybe we need merely to understand our world views sufficiently to articulate them to achieve a sense of identity. Know oneself? Does the quest for such self knowledge lead to unnecessary doubt and anxiety? Do modern searches for identity occur under predetermined archetypes framed by culture? If so, then in finding ourselves, we are really finding others, and knowing ourselves means knowing others or stereotypes.
The dictum written at the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi has engendered discussions since the time of Heraclitus—and probably before. We have our own versions, such as “going off in search of oneself.”
There’s no way to know when we humans began to wonder about identity, but surely any human brain during the history of our species could have sought such self-knowledge, especially in the context of a life lived among others: Others past and present represented by oral and written expressions of what it means to have (or be) an identity.
Lost?
Have we been programmed since the time of Freud to believe we are “lost”? Is there a pervasive enculturation of identity crisis that has, for example, led to addiction on the heavy end and new-age-grasping at pseudo-psych on the light end of the scale of Self? Or is the search for identity driven early on by teenage hormones and the drive to determine one’s destiny through independence that frees a person from known parental and adult controls possibly into a dependence on charismatic leaders?
There are two ways to find identity, one easy and the other hard. The easy way lies in attaching oneself to a group: Political, religious, craft, labor (union), cult, military, philosophical. The hard way involves extensive soul-searching, often in isolation or in some quest. I suppose there’s a third way: Through mind-bending enhanced by drugs of some kind, some so potent they remove the Self during out-of-body experiences.
The Quest
The search for identity has long been a theme in the arts, from Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus to the characters in James Joyce’s and John Updike’s novels. The plethora of self-help books is testimony to this tradition. I confess that I initiated this website as a guide to Self through mental mapping because knowing WHERE we are is often the context of WHO we are.
Such a tie between place and Self is the context in any society for “appropriateness” and “inappropriateness.” Obvious examples? Senator John Fetterman in hoody and shorts in the Capitol; cussing loudly in a library’s reading room; playing loud music on public transportation. In fact, place plays such an important role in the search for identity that some people travel to natural wonders they believe to house mystical gateways to identity, like the Grand Canyon, Kilimanjaro, and to sites like Sonoma and Lhasa, where they believe they can “find themselves.” I suppose that such mystical places have increased by several orders of magnitude with the advent of Zoom calls, FaceTime, and virtual reality.
Can Identity Be Found outside the Context of Place?
An anecdote: I remember being home one morning when a friend FaceTimed me from Siccar Point in Scotland, a geologic feature that inspired a key insight of the “Father of Geology” James Hutton and through his writings, influenced me. I had put Siccar Point on an unrealistic bucket list I could never complete, and yet there I was via FaceTime at a place that had captivated my own thinking and informed my enthusiasm for geology, a key to the way I see the world and my place in it. Through the tech of that call I was and simultaneously wasn’t in a place that had influenced my Weltanschauung and my sense of who I was on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. As Hutton wrote about the geology he had observed, the planet was one formed by processes rooted in the deep past and that continues not just in the present, but will continue to an indefinite future. “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,” Hutton concluded, “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Such a conclusion became part of my perspective on my own finite existence, one that I will live out in places that were and will be different from what I can know in just a short lifetime.
Searches Made Easy
Self-help books, YouTube videos, social media connections, actual travel, and self-examination: Searching for one’s identity is easy nowadays—if it weren’t so difficult. The difficulty lies in the myriad options and the pressures to define oneself or to wear the appropriate mask. A number of TikTok shorts reveals a wide swath of humans desperate to define their identities as unique through body piercings, tattoos,“gender identifiers” like plural pronouns, and behavior deemed to deviate from traditional cultural standards or stretch them into hyperbole.
Identity Shapes World View; World View Shapes Identity
I know that my own identity fits into the mold of western civilization with some faint echoes of eastern thought. The West is largely the product of ancient Greek thought and Christian philosophy and theology. That Weltanschauung is a basis of my identity that I probably can’t shake. If I seek myself, I will inevitably do so in that context. I might adopt some characteristics of Orientals, but they will be addenda to a life already lived as an Occidental.
Find oneself? Are we as lost as contemporary society wants us to think we are? Maybe we need merely to understand our world views sufficiently to articulate them to achieve a sense of identity. Know oneself? Does the quest for such self knowledge lead to unnecessary doubt and anxiety? Do modern searches for identity occur under predetermined archetypes framed by culture? If so, then in finding ourselves, we are really finding others, and knowing ourselves means knowing others or stereotypes.
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