issue200求拍

mollytengUID: 2773475

“The most elusive knowledge is self-knowledge, and it is usually acquired through solitude, rather than through interaction with others."


I agree with the statement thatself-knowledge is indeed the most elusive, as there is the old saying inChinese that "smart people know others, wise people know themselves".However, regarding the way of acquiring self-knowledge, I think both solitudeand interaction with others are important and that it is hard to weigh one overanother.

On the one hand, to know oneself, people doneed to look into themselves, which means they need to shift the focus ofattention from the outer world to their inner world. This is more easily andnaturally achieved when one is alone. However, being alone does not garanteeself-consciouseness. Only when your mind is freed from the occupations ofoutside world problems and issues can you ponder over issues about youself. Aspredicted by Maslow's hierachy of needs - food, clothes and security needs comebefore self-actualization needs. As we interact with the world, the worldlyworries constantly keep our minds busy and self-directed thinking don't havemuch chance to surface to our consciouseness. Only when we are alone and have apeace of mind which will let us enjoy the solitude, do we start to shift ourattention to ourselves.

On the other hand, when you have theintention to know yourself better, many times you need interactions with othersand their feedbacks to be informed about yourself more objectively. There isthe old Chinese wisdom that says "to know your appearance, you need tolook into a mirror; to know yourself, you need to look into how other peoplesee you". Because we have biases and limited insights, and that we arehuman beings who have psychological tendencies to make ourselves feel goodabout ourselves, there are a lot of things that we simply would overlook orwrongly interpret when we try to inspect ourselves. Feedback from others couldlend us the chance to step outside our own shoes and see how we are perceivedby others. It can overcome our cognitive biases as well as our tendencies toavoid unpleasant conclusions about ourselves, leading us to a more accurateconclusion about ourselves.

Moreover, there are many aspects ofself-knowledge which are inseparatable from the interaction of others. Forexample, many of the personality traits such asextrovertedness/introvertedness, warmth and patience, only express themselveswhen one is interacting with others. You can never tell whether you can be apatient parent untill when you have your own children - no matter how patientyou feel about yourself when dealing with daily activities. At the same time,people constantly change. Personalities can be modified, maybe not drastically,but nonstop by the interactions between the person and his/her environment.This is like a feedback loop - the way you treat people decide how people treatyou back, and that further determines how you are going to treat people in thefuture. Interactions with the outside world are at the same time theexpressions of and the forces that shape one's personalities. They are anintegrated part of one's self-knowledge and the latter can not be measuredseparately.

In conclusion, I think that self-knowledgeneeds to be acquired through the combination of solitude and interaction withothers. Because of its elusiveness, people need to use all sources of informantto accurately know themselves.