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i think "know thyself" was inscribed over the doorway through which you would pass if you were consulting the oracle at delphi.
so it was a threshold abjuration--the oracle operated at a remove from convetional rationality, relaying messages across this (implicit) divide that usually seemed to be in code--so the inscription could mean "know what you are asking for" or "know why you are asking"....given that, "know thyself" would obtain at the moment prior to a leap into the unknown.
there is another take on this inscription of course, but it seems to come from a much later period, a christian period, and to have the effects of erasing the oracle of delphi as a specific site involving a specific type of activity on the one hand, and of positing a kind of existential project of self-knowledge that only really makes sense if you assume that the self is unchanging across time, that it is endowed with an essence, that is has a soul.
if you do not assume that the "i" or ego has an essence, then it follows that you cannot treat it as an object in the world, which would mean then that it cannot be known in the way an object might (an x that bears a series of predicates that must be present for the object ot be itself and not something else--an essence). instead, self-knowledge becomes a kind of ongoing project involving reflexivity--an open-ended interrogation that would not result in an accomplished Knowledge....what this reflexive project entails is a function of the schema of the "ego" that one brings to bear a priori--which would determine the extent to which one could seperate the self from the social-historical contexts in whcih it operates, for example.
birth death in-between: a thoroughly christian conception of the priorities of the matter--this life, the in-between, is epiphenomenon--the real drama involves the soul which is cast into a body, goes through a series of adventures, and goes out again, back where it came from, to begin the Real Adventure in some Afterlife.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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