Self-Awareness

Self-awareness has been seen as the foundation of Wisdom for millennia. Gnōthi seauton, awareness-of-self, is the ancient Greek admonition inscribed on the threshold of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. We see everything in the world through the lens of our nature, knowing this nature allows us to develop the attributes of wisdom. If we do not know our nature, we will continually see through the same static lens — the content of our view may change but not our perspective. Grappling to understand our nature is a lifelong exploration, an endless recursive process. As we learn about ourselves we change, opening-up new areas for learning.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

Self-knowledge requires the capacity to reflect on the emotional nature of our consciousness. The primacy of emotions in shaping all other levels of consciousness was known to the Stoics in ancient Greece and has been verified by contemporary-depth psychologists. Through understanding our emotional self, we gain perspective on our desires, values, motivations, and ultimately, a view into our nature. Increased emotional consciousness helps us contextualize our experiences and worldview. When we have a contextualized view of ourselves, we actually move a bit outside of ourselves and can discover a meta-self-perspective that is creative, purposeful, and potentially transcendent.

Phronimos curates resources that can help you discover ways to advance your self-knowing. Through literature, psychology, and culture, we can increase our self-knowing in a manner and language suited to our individual nature. Like many things in life, the ancient Greek admonition know thyself is both difficult and enigmatic. Postmodern thought has shown us the contextual nature of truth — equally chimeric, the very meaning of knowledge and self-knowing is thrown into question.
Self-Doubt as Self-Knowledge

We might best define the self as United States Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stevens, defined pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Similarly, we know our sense of self when we are looking at ourselves. However, there is one critical caveat — the self is not a singularity. When we look at it, we see it and it is our self; however, at another time, we look again and it is our self, but it is not the same self we saw before or will see later.
The Illusion the Unitary a Sense of Self

The self is a powerful innate force that organizes our experience, shapes our reality, and gives us a sense of existing. This sense of self that seems to have such veracity belies its contextual origins.
Origins of the Self