Efforts to improve the self may well lead us to realise the Self, writes V
TANKHA. Hence the move to better ourselves leads to the asking of philosophical
questions Is it not good if we try to improve ourselves? We take lessons in
language, cooking or dance; walk to improve our health or a sense of the past.
There are courses for anger and management, accounts, jewellery design, comic
book illustration. Study, we know, will make us better: certainly at
something.
Learning requires time, effort as well as natural talent (and money). While what we learn may not make us better persons (imagine someone paying for that!), we may become more interesting as persons, not focused only on the pragmatics of making and keeping money, or advancing a career.
Are there any limits to self-improvement? To answer this question, we must clear up who we are, falling inevitably into the coils of philosophy. ‘Who are you?’ is sometimes a question of how you want to be seen. You want, in this world of images, as much to look good as to be good. Are there limits to how good you can look?
Care Of The Self
A person who dyes his hair is not regarded as excessively concerned with his looks, because many others do as well. Some people spend small fortunes in hair styling. Is that not self-improvement? Is the body, and by extension, its hair, not as much a part of the self as the mind, or the kidneys?
You would scarcely blame someone who did not drink because he believed he could damage his kidneys. But if that’s okay, how many steps is it to having a double or triple chin removed, and a few wrinkles ironed out? What’s wrong after all about preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet?
Bodily self-improvements attract little moral interest or concern. Clothes make the man, says your tailor. It is true that what we wear will more often than not define us, at some level. Appearances after all are important. But an exclusive concern with them is seen as detrimental to moral development because it shifts our focus from what are thought to be core issues, concerned with who we are and how we relate to others not through our appearance but through our words and deeds.
Wisdom, we are told, lies in overlooking appearances, reaching behind them to a reality more difficult to discern.
Face Value
The visible is, however, often a clue to the invisible: appearances, if read aright, often direct us to truth. If we think we can see through the actions and motives of others, they can see through ours. What look should we cultivate in order to really look good? Simply gathering a repertoire of skills is not enough. Like filling a resume with trivial pastimes, paper qualifications add no weight to the personality.
We need to develop depth as well as breadth. If we want to expand our horizons, we need to expand our vision. Travel to difficult and exotic places will feed conversational skills. But what is it that will make our silences meaningful? What will breathe life into the death that is the lot of every instant of passing time? Not the cut of your coat or the cost of what is strapped around your neck: these are additions, not an expansion of horizons.
Can we make sense of the Self as the aim of our quest: the knowledge that the ancients prized as the acme of wisdom, what did it consist in? Surely, it was more than simply learning, important as that was, what one is not?
Self And Not Self
Let us not be dismayed by the apparent difficulty of self-improvement when still unsure of what that Self is which we want to improve. Let us also not think nothing of negations. In fact, the philosopher Spinoza summarily characterised all determination as negation. Meaning by this that every assertion or characterisation, while it addresses its particular subject, simultaneously excludes all that is not proper to that subject. To say that something is a white elephant is to deny that it is a pink giraffe.
You might well wonder how far such wisdom will actually take you. But reflecting on the search for one’s own self, apply the converse of Spinoza principle: every negation is a determination. To exclude from the ambit of the Self what one does not think proper to it, is to take a step, however small, towards Self-knowledge. To stop short of this or that, with the thought: that’s not me, is to draw afresh the boundaries of the Self, oneself. Self-knowledge is as much this coming to know oneself as the final knowledge of it one hopes to achieve.
Perhaps, the coming-to-know is the knowledge we seek, without which there can be no self-improvement at all. For we must, at least, know this: what we are not, what we do not want.
Learning requires time, effort as well as natural talent (and money). While what we learn may not make us better persons (imagine someone paying for that!), we may become more interesting as persons, not focused only on the pragmatics of making and keeping money, or advancing a career.
Are there any limits to self-improvement? To answer this question, we must clear up who we are, falling inevitably into the coils of philosophy. ‘Who are you?’ is sometimes a question of how you want to be seen. You want, in this world of images, as much to look good as to be good. Are there limits to how good you can look?
Care Of The Self
A person who dyes his hair is not regarded as excessively concerned with his looks, because many others do as well. Some people spend small fortunes in hair styling. Is that not self-improvement? Is the body, and by extension, its hair, not as much a part of the self as the mind, or the kidneys?
You would scarcely blame someone who did not drink because he believed he could damage his kidneys. But if that’s okay, how many steps is it to having a double or triple chin removed, and a few wrinkles ironed out? What’s wrong after all about preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet?
Bodily self-improvements attract little moral interest or concern. Clothes make the man, says your tailor. It is true that what we wear will more often than not define us, at some level. Appearances after all are important. But an exclusive concern with them is seen as detrimental to moral development because it shifts our focus from what are thought to be core issues, concerned with who we are and how we relate to others not through our appearance but through our words and deeds.
Wisdom, we are told, lies in overlooking appearances, reaching behind them to a reality more difficult to discern.
Face Value
The visible is, however, often a clue to the invisible: appearances, if read aright, often direct us to truth. If we think we can see through the actions and motives of others, they can see through ours. What look should we cultivate in order to really look good? Simply gathering a repertoire of skills is not enough. Like filling a resume with trivial pastimes, paper qualifications add no weight to the personality.
We need to develop depth as well as breadth. If we want to expand our horizons, we need to expand our vision. Travel to difficult and exotic places will feed conversational skills. But what is it that will make our silences meaningful? What will breathe life into the death that is the lot of every instant of passing time? Not the cut of your coat or the cost of what is strapped around your neck: these are additions, not an expansion of horizons.
Can we make sense of the Self as the aim of our quest: the knowledge that the ancients prized as the acme of wisdom, what did it consist in? Surely, it was more than simply learning, important as that was, what one is not?
Self And Not Self
Let us not be dismayed by the apparent difficulty of self-improvement when still unsure of what that Self is which we want to improve. Let us also not think nothing of negations. In fact, the philosopher Spinoza summarily characterised all determination as negation. Meaning by this that every assertion or characterisation, while it addresses its particular subject, simultaneously excludes all that is not proper to that subject. To say that something is a white elephant is to deny that it is a pink giraffe.
You might well wonder how far such wisdom will actually take you. But reflecting on the search for one’s own self, apply the converse of Spinoza principle: every negation is a determination. To exclude from the ambit of the Self what one does not think proper to it, is to take a step, however small, towards Self-knowledge. To stop short of this or that, with the thought: that’s not me, is to draw afresh the boundaries of the Self, oneself. Self-knowledge is as much this coming to know oneself as the final knowledge of it one hopes to achieve.
Perhaps, the coming-to-know is the knowledge we seek, without which there can be no self-improvement at all. For we must, at least, know this: what we are not, what we do not want.
No comments:
Post a Comment