Self-Other Misconceptions

“Val doesn't give a sigh what other people think of him.” My friend said that about me, meaning it as a compliment. I understood what she meant, and took it that way. But the exact opposite is the truth.

I've often had the experience of someone, even a person one-fourth my age, treating me with contempt. My friend would imagine from my equanimity about it that I “don't care” about what such people feel about me, but the truth is that I take these others' viewpoints immediately and seriously, which enables me to see very clearly that they are inexperienced or imperceptive. It's impossible for me to give a sigh over what such people think of me – having put myself in their shoes!

What I really feel in this situation is sorrow that there is such a prevalent, widespread misunderstanding about the fact that self-hood, self-knowledge, self-awareness, individuation, is actually derived from taking seriously the viewpoints of others. It's the only way to see yourself – getting outside one's self. And just in general, putting ourselves in others' shoes is always a good thing, even seeing through the eyes of our enemies. It's the ethical imperative, too, the “Golden Rule” - do unto others as you would have them do to you requires it. The ability to put ourselves in the other's place to see and feel how he sees and feels is the best definition around of the word “humanity.”

These reflections are much in my mind now because I've just read best-selling memoir entitled “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” by Bronnie Ware. The “top five regrets” that she lists are her own choices based on her own qualitative observations as a home care worker with the dying, rather than the quantitative results of a scientific survey:

Regret 1: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

Regret 2: I wish I hadn't worked so hard

Regret 3: I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings

Regret 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

Regret 5: I wish I had let myself be happier

Now, my friend who thinks that I “don't give a sigh” would understand immediately what Bronnie Ware is saying here, as have the millions who have read Ware's book and website. All of the “regrets” express a person's sense of not having achieved true individuation, true self-knowledge and integration.

We all know the thing she is trying to deal with here. But I find this to be just heart-breaking because, despite all the beautiful, deep perceptions and citations of others who have tried to deal with it, I don't think that she surmounts the misunderstanding of the self-other connection, the self-other paradox.

“Know thyself” is an ancient quest and is at least one expression of the purpose of our lives. Self-knowledge is the central part of the Biblical Genesis teaching and the Greek gnothi seauton tradition and in Egypt before that.

It's the point and central theme of the Grail legends, and of fairy tales and of philosopher's stone, and of dreams and of the attempt by depth psychologists to recover lost and hidden fragments of the self to re-integrate them. The alchemists wanting to find the true gold was the same thing.

So I ask, why it is that the central quest of all these generations of highly intelligent and learned people has yielded, say, George Bush and Barack Obama? What went wrong, where is the difficulty? Why is achieving self-hood such an all-encompassing, mistake-fraught, difficult, “life-long heroic struggle?”

Recovering, finding, achieving genuine self-hood can not be found through selfishness. That seems to me to be the crucial paradox. There has to be a real identification with others – not just a solipsistic imagining what others feel – but a genuine communion and identification in which the other is equal in importance and reality.

The implications of this paradox are infinite. And the vision that immediately comes to me on this, and about which I hope to write in the future, is that cleverness, and abstruse, complicated, massive learning is absolutely no closer to resolving it than complete stupidity.

It think that the “me-me-me” meme of the last forty-five years is actually a widespread attempt to resolve the self-other problem, but which has not been successful because self and other are actually in the same existential field. It has been deflected into selfishness, greed and "Screw you" which is just as unsatisfactory and unworkable as the communism it so vehemently rejects.