On the Path to Success: A Philosophical Perspective on a Successful Life: A Philosophical Perspective on a Successful Life

Author: Wang Xuechuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-10-01
Features: Indeed, understanding oneself and obtaining the answer to "Who am I?" is a difficult task. Someone once asked the philosopher Diogenes, "What is the hardest thing to achieve in the world?" The philosopher replied, "Know thyself." In our understanding, the difficulty of self-awareness stems from two aspects: On the one hand, every "self" is a complex and multi-dimensional world: the self is both biological and social; both internal and external; both constant and changing. On the other hand, as the French philosopher Pascal claimed, "Our judgment of the self is always subject to our emotions." Therefore, in our concepts and consciousness, the real, possible, biased, imagined, hopeful, and fantastical intertwine, forming each unique and complex self. Perhaps for this very reason, Buddhism may consider the question "Who am I?" to be impermanent and that the concept of impermanence can help grasp the true existence of the self. This statement undoubtedly has a certain rationality. The difficulty of understanding oneself lies in the fact that the self is often elusive. Even from a common sense perspective, we often find that the same path sometimes feels long and sometimes feels short; the same thing sometimes seems interesting and sometimes seems boring; the same person sometimes feels (kind) toward them and sometimes feels annoyed by them; sometimes you believe you are capable of everything, while at other times you believe you will achieve nothing, and so on. This makes the self sometimes joyful and content, ambitious and confident, and at other times melancholic and lost. Yet all of this "impermanence" is real. Perhaps it is from this very perspective that the French philosopher Diderot asserted: "To say that humans are a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness is not to condemn them but to define them." And each self is indeed such a contradictory compound. Human understanding is almost on the verge of despair when facing the self.