For Socrates and Plato, ’I’ as in any object of knowledge is beyond all appearances in a
realm of utter nonsense (The Symposium).
Since one can’t have it as Delphi, Socrates,
a nd Plato would have it, how could or would one have it? As I get it, my self appears in
my experience as a body of appearances. So my self, insofar as I ‘know’ or am
acquainted with, it is an analytic of experience. To Socrates/Plato ‘I’ cannot be known
within experience. But I am acquainted with my self only in experience as a growing,
changing being. In relation ton experience in general, an acquaintance of mine
characterized the brain as a multi-media studio serving the mind as its phantom captain.
As I have said, ‘I’(myself) am a growing changing being subject to my on-going analysis
of much complexity.which is not cut and dried.
As Judge Learned Hand said (Proceedings in memory of Mr. Justice Brandeis)
“If a man’s life, like a piece of tapestry, is
made up of many strands which interwoven
make a pattern, to separate a single one and
look at it alone not only destroys the whole but
gives the strand itself a false value.”