If you want to know anything at all, what could be more important than knowing yourself? You may know many people, but what does this matter if you are a stranger to yourself? 

Yet who really engages in the effort to know themselves? 

After all, you do not necessarily need to know yourself in order to become a billionaire before you are thirty, win an Olympic gold medal, or become the prime minister or president of your country. In fact, some people may see the attempt to know yourself as a waste of valuable time that could be used to get on in life. 

Yet, among all the living beings on earth, we are the only ones gifted with a conscious intelligence that allows us to know ourselves. Does it not seem strange that we go through life without ever making use of this capacity? The Greek philosopher Aristotle famously said, “all men [and women] desire to know.” 

Why do so many of us avoid knowing ourselves?

The dilemma of soul-searching

First, it has to be admitted that it is no easy thing to know oneself. If yesterday I was happy and today I am sad, which is the real me? 

When you are nervous about going for an important job interview, someone might give you the advice: “Just be yourself!” But, who am I when I am not being myself?

The author Walker Percy asked, “Why is it that, in your entire lifetime, you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else in a 10-second glance?”

Or, if I was mean or unkind to someone, do I really want to know myself in all my meanness and unkindness, or would I rather not go there? If I suspect that others find me obnoxious, it is only natural that in my own eyes, I would rather defend myself than recognize this as being the truth about myself. 

Here too, it is easier to admire myself in a mirror than to engage in any deep soul-searching. 

Do I actually exist?

However, what if I really do try to know myself, where might I begin? The French philosopher Descartes began with a truly radical question: Do I actually exist? He reasoned that he would only be able to ask that question if he existed. And so he concluded, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ 

St. Augustine asked an even more radical question. He wanted to know the source of the ‘I’ that is doing the thinking. Since his ‘I’ did not bring itself into existence and, therefore, cannot know the source of how it came to be, he puts the question to God. He writes in his Confessions:

“What was there even before [I entered my mother’s womb], my joy, my God? Was I anywhere or anyone? I have no one to tell me this, neither father nor mother could do so, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Do you laugh at me for questioning you about such things?”

The gift of existence

However, Augustine only came to the point of asking this question after a long and troubled search to find what, unknowingly, his restless heart was seeking. His quest ended when he found God as his place of rest. In this encounter with God, he found the answer to his question about the origin of his ‘I.’ Again, in his Confessions he writes: 

“Where except from you, O Lord, could come such a living being? Who has the art and power to make himself? Is there any channel, through which being and life flow into us that comes from any source but you, Lord who have made us?”

Another way of saying this is that I have been gifted with existence, just as every other existing thing in the universe. Yet, that is not all. The ‘I’ that has been gifted to me is a conscious ‘I.’ This means that I can know that I am not the cause of my own existence. 

That is why I am such a mystery to myself. For a scientist, the mystery is solved when a cause is found. However, I have not been ‘caused.’ I have been ‘created,’ ‘gifted’ to myself. It is only natural then that the desire to know myself should lead on to the desire to know the one who gave me the gift of myself. 

It is at this point that knowing and loving become intertwined. My desire to know God is, at the same time, my desire to be with God. For “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.”

Robbie Young

(New City, London)