Shaking the Rust Off

It frightens me how much people confine themselves by defining themselves. It frightens me even more how this concept of identity is most often supported by the Socratic maxim “Know thyself”.

Self is a verb people. At least any sort of ’self’ we would recognize with our 5 sense. The kind of self that rights blogs, talks to others, etc. This self is a verb, until it dies. Selfhood is a process, a growing, a shrinking, a loving, a hating… a changing.

If you ask yourself “who am I?” You change who you are as a result of answering the question. The question itself is unanswerable. Not due to incoherence, or lack of information, but do to the fact that the subject matter is the observer. To study the subject is to change the subject of study.

If we ask questions as a mode of definition we will never understand things truly. We must ask questions in hopes of understanding – a process that might have no terminal horizon in some categories. This questions most often occur when looking inward, toward the self. The toughest questions, as it turns out, are those closest to our grasps, not furthest away.

Who knows more about you than you? Yet, even in the perfection of our mind and spirit, we cannot pull a summation of our existence from our self. We cannot pin ourselves down. Because human selfhoods change. They are change. They are becoming. Hence, there is no reason to fear death, but I digress.

What bugs me are the people who are ‘individuals’ who ‘know themselves’. How are they ever free? How do they ever grow? We must try to be someone we are not if we ever aim to grow, or become better, or to adapt. Almost all limitations are ones we set for ourselves. Usually out of fear or comfort. There are exceptions, of course, but most of the time this is the cause of it.

We need to begin to understand that not all questions are answerable, and just because a question is unanswerable does not mean it isn’t worth asking.