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Saturday, March 9, 2019

Hegel's Know thyself

Know thyself—whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance—is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self."
- Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

Firstly, where is an individual's unity?  Point out it's location directly to me.  If you say it is the soul then indicate exactly where in the body that soul is. I defy you to discover that to any reasonable standard. What is our identity if you can't locate it?

Koestler points out biological beings may be holonic rather than individual. Both on and off, alive and dead, many and one.  Can anyone prove we are not alive and dead at the same time? At any one time cells are dying and dead as others are created and living. This is known scientific fact. Can anyone say the living cells are outside our humanity while the dead ones aren't? Live cells are equally inside our body and outside: when we defecate there are live cells within that matter that are outside of ourselves. There are dead cells within us as we exist. The self, in the real, is by itself a problematic condition.

Secondly, what is inside our knowledge if we can't prove under solipsism if we exist outside our own thoughts?

Self-knowledge is like self-language: both are artificial constructs founded as a way to ground the appearance of other dubious things that we can't prove exist.

If you can't prove self-knowledge rests within a non-definable individual, you can't prove that self-knowledge exists.


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