To "Know Thyself"
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion." ~Aldous Huxley Aldous Leonard Huxley, (born July 26, 1894 in Godalming, Surrey (England); † November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles) was a British writer and philosopher. Philosophical Term For the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, self-knowledge is the condition of morality. The motto Gnothi seauton (“Know Thyself”), handed down by Heraclitus and often attributed to Thales or the Seven Wise Men, adorned the entrance of the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The demand for self-knowledge is thus one of the oldest and still most important demands of philosophy on the individual. Epistemologically, the philosophical structure of self-knowledge is based on turning the knowledge process back to the person who knows it (see also hermeneutics). The incentive for this recognition is to overcome the "subject-object split". According to Karl Jaspers, self-re...