Knowledge and Self-Knowledge

Smith and Watson stress the importance of taking into consideration how the narrator writes about various forms of Knowledge or produces forms of Self-Knowledge when examining autobiographical texts. They implore the reader to make connections between the narrator’s knowledge of the world and knowledge of others or self knowledge, and in doing so they ask if the “narrative itself generate alternative sources of knowledge” (RA 245)? Analyzing the different channels of knowledge that the narrator exhibits in his/her self-life writing provides great insight into how they perceive their world, the people in it, and their own knowledge of human understanding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” serves as a wonderful example of how different forms of knowledge are explored, challenged, and proposed in self-life writing. In this text Emerson discusses his personal experiences to proclaim that mankind is not truly living; humanity is just scratching the surface of life, and there is no real depth or meaning in contemporary society as everyone is blindly engaging in mundane routines and haughty temperaments. Emerson feels that humanity is in a false-conscious state of being which has inhibited true or substantial knowledge to burgeon forth. The Following quotes describe Emerson’s outlook on mankind:

“We fall soft on thought” (Emerson 28).

“Our relations to each other are oblique and casual” (29).

“Temperament [has] shut us in a prison of glass which we cannot see” (31).

“That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist” (33).

“There is no power of expansion in men” (33).

Emerson is beseeching people to live in the moment, be spontaneous, and yet do not live in extremes; find the golden mean. He claimed that “Everything good is on the highway,” which suggest progression and movement; he is tired of mankind’s obsession with superficial knowledge that stagnates in its rigidity. Emerson claims “All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators” (39). Emerson’s self-life writing generates alternative sources of knowledge for the reader.

Personal Take:

One great way to think about Smith and Watson’s Knowledge and Self-Knowledge section in the tool kit is to consider the multiple forms of knowledge that they allude to. If I were to write an autobiography there would definitely be a paragraph were I would illustrate how both, book and street smarts,  have influenced my mode of thinking, acting, writing, and moreover—how I would write my own biography. I would also distinguish the knowledge I gain everyday from reading literature, listening to music, or any other daily form of exposure to knowledge. However, I feel as if the ‘self-knowledge’ Smith and Watson discuss is more or less equivalent to how people perceive their lives and the things that they experience, a more philosophical kind of knowledge, if you will. For example, in my autobiography I would demonstrate my self-knowledge by writing about things in a platonic sense, or the idea of the ‘form’ put forth in Plato’s Republic. I would also probably demonstrate how I was influenced by my history seminar paper in which I did extensive research into metaphysics and German ‘New Objectivity’. In doing so I would write about things—aesthetic objects, art, music, literature, film, thought—in a sense to capture their essence. By essence I mean I would take an outside approach to something as a whole, not what its various parts constitute its existence, but its ultimate goal or purpose. This is how my version of ‘self-knowledge’ would evince itself in my text by showing the reader the modus operandi of my experience with things, people, and ideas.

-Joe Fleming