Know yourself!

The human look is always turned outward and when it looks to the inside it is usually to enjoy its own glory, its honor - or to rescue it. One could also formulate it in a different way; one can find beautiful words to describe it. But self-knowledge is normally not objective. That means that one does not look at himself as an object, but that one looks at his subject with his subject.

There are objective impulses that come up spontaneously. For example there is that voice of the conscience. It does not speak about honor; it speaks about value, about dignity. And it is not the dignity that one grants oneself, but it is the dignity that is entitled to you objectively in the great cosmic existence. The conscience speaks when this value, this dignity is diminished, or is threatened to be. It speaks originally.

Besides that, in our modern times, there is a free impulse possible to obtain objective self-knowledge. It is free, because this impulse is only there when one initiates it oneself. It is objective because one takes a step by which one observes the most objective in oneself as object.

The most objective thing in the human soul is the capacity to know, to obtain knowledge. It is thinking that has an objectivating effect, because it places everything in a light that shines for everyone in the same way. That there are also differences of opinion is not in contradiction with it. Opinions are not based on pure thinking; they are formed by the subject and are kept alive subjectively. They are the basis for all subjective judgments. True knowing is something very different. In pure thinking it is the contexts in truth itself that direct the contexts of thoughts. In pure thinking, objective knowing, the soul is already in an element that is not busy with the self.

But another step can be taken, through which this thinking about everything but the self can nevertheless become self-knowledge – that can't be anything else but pure, unblurred. The thinking instance can make itself to the object of thought. That is that he must place himself outside himself as a thinker, in order to be able to observe himself as thinker. As long as one is inside something, one can't observe it. One must first retire from it and look at it from the outside.

Then, as an experienced reality, it becomes clear that real freedom starts only here. It is not a freedom that is based on a philosophical observation of the concept of freedom, or a freedom that one has as an imagination – it is the true experienced freedom of all subjective restrictions.

The observing look expands to a new surveying awareness, that does no longer only observe the thinking activity, but that expands to the observation of feeling and will – looked at from the outside. Then gradually a moral self-knowledge commences, a new, self-impulsed conscience.

Of course this 'Gnothi seauton!' has now left the domain of philosophy. There is no oracle needed anymore, but also no abstract philosophical theory.

In the days before Easter this self-initiated form of conscience is especially active. And this form that occurs, brought completely in accordance with the modern self-consciousness, is what used to be awakened in church in earlier times: confession and atonement heard and issued by the objective human self-consciousness itself.

 
Rafael, School of Athens (1509-1511)Know yourself! by Mieke Mosmuller