Immediate Self-Observation is Not Enough

Immediate Self-Observation is Not Enough One quote from the course's text that stuck with me is: "Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels. We are, after all, nothing but our sensation at every moment of this continued flow. Even here, when we wish to step down into the stream of our most peculiar and personal development, Heraclitus' aphorism, "You cannot step twice into the same river," holds good (Russell).” The excerpt asserts that human identities are rooted in the past, and reconstructing the diversity of past human experiences over time allows us to achieve a profound and ever-changing understanding of ourselves. We are the product of ancient societies and civilizations in innumerable ways, and it is only by investigating their ideas, cultural practices, values, and institutions that we gain a more comprehensive perspective of ourselves. Examining the lived experiences of those who came before us or even our past improves how we understand ourselves and results in a different effect every time.
Our perspective keeps changing every time we examine history; therefore, we are never the same person each time we arrive at new understandings or information. However, a new problem arises when the subject of examining our past to acquire a deeper understanding of ourselves is concerned: should we examine history for its own sake, or should we interrogate it to see what should be continued and what should be discarded or should we even examine hist...