A Blog about Personhood, Philosophy, etc.

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog, "The Mind That Knows Itself..."!  The purpose of this blog is to wax philosophical about anything and everything that tickles my philosophical fancy.  I will focus my attention on issues pertaining to the human condition, to personal experience, as without this grounding philosophy is truly a house built on sand.  This does little to limit the overall scope of the blog, however, and over the course of its existence I hope to touch on many areas of life--not only philosophy proper but also more popular subjects such as sports and music.  I hope you can bear with my amateurish attempts at depth and meaning; it is my desire that we all learn from this dialectical process!

As for the name of the blog, it is inspired by the song "The Mistress Witch from McClure (Or, the Mind That Knows Itself)" by Sufjan Stevens.  This little ditty paints the picture of a child and his siblings walking in on on their father having an affair (quite a situation!), and the chaos that subsequently follows.  Three lines heard strewn throughout song struck me as poignant as I was kicking around ideas for the blog, "The mind that knows itself has a mind to serve the other...A mind that knows itself is a mind that knows much more...A mind that knows itself has a mind to kill another."  These existential realizations are born out of the concrete experience of betrayal, anger, and loss found in the almost-archetypal image of the cheating dad.  The potencies of man, the animal who can know, range from total denial of self for others to some of the basest atrocities conceivable, namely cheating and murder.  The horizon of rational animality spreads from the near-angelic to the sub-animal, as no non-rational being is capable of committing evil, properly speaking.  This potent insight can be gleaned easily from the study of history, as the history of mankind appears to be the biggest mixed bag in the history of history.  The dot-dot-dot after the title symbolizes that this mind-that-knows-itself is largely a work in progress, an unknown commodity, filled with many potencies, from exultant to wretched.  Furthermore, echoing the sage Socratic utterance, the mind that knows itself is truly a mind that knows much more, as without the crucial pearl of self-knowledge, man truly wanders aimlessly throughout life purposelessly.  How can man expect to live properly lest he know what, who he is?  These are the questions I wish to investigate in this blog, and while it may truly sound audacious and naive to embark on such a quest, I hope that the journey will not be disappointing.  One of the greatest philosophers, Socrates, points to the endpoint of this odyssey when he says, "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."  I hope that, through an honest and candid dialectic, we may become so astute as to admit this with him.

Peace be with you,
   William