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twenty three - first of all i must say, it has been a while since I have updated my journal....i am sorry for that but i was in europe and then i got back and was mentally drained from the basically month long spring break - for any new readers i have to suggest starting from 1 and making it to number 23, then you will understand me and my "journal
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i love reading your stuff. Hilllaaarious. Anyway, Morose means melancholy, or morbid, or gloomy.
As to the present journal entry...i believe that you have touched on something much deeper than a catch 22 which can be solved simply by knowing yourself; for to know oneself is to know oneself in relationship to others. There is no independent "I" apart from relationship with other "I"s that we call "You"s. So we need others to help us discern who we are. And this involves sober judgement both by other people and ourselves. For they help tell us who we are. We must understand our place in the cosmos, how our presence in it affects others and how others affect us. The simple endeavor to know yourself requires engaging the world beyond you, not for the purpose of selfish self-fulfillment- i.e. for getting what you desire. For we all have inappropriate desires which, when we fulfill them, leave us empty and hollow. Rather, engagement with the world must be properly ordered such that we are placed in a proper relationship with all things.
So you have touched, not on a catch 22, but on the paradox of reality- a reality which is not singular but multifarious and diverse. TO know oneself is perhaps the goal of life. But this presupposes that we know everything else to help figure out who we are(and subsequently who we are not). And in order to understand who we are, I contend that we must know who we have been created to be- which implies, as you know from conversations we have had, that we understand ourselves in relationship to our Creator.
In summary, Knowing yourself, while a noble endeavor, requires not looking "in" necessarily, but also looking out to see how we affect other "I"s. And any confidence obtained from socrates' famous dictum to "know thyself", is thus derivative from knowing one's place in the created world (which is a slanted way of knowing one's purpose in the world).
Obviously this is incredibly difficult, given that one would have to be "all-knowing" to know the world completely enough to know oneself. Hence, I believe, the necessity for divine revelation to understand who we are. And true confidence, if it is what it is and is not cockiness, is seen in those who understand reality and their place in it.
furthermore, the irony of cofidence is that the less you care about transitory and peripheral things (like confidence), the more confidence you will have. Which is relly a blessing when you think about it, because it helps differentiate between confidence and cockiness.
Holla back- j.
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