Holistic Self-Awareness

It is never rational or truly beneficial to regard oneself in an incomplete way through reductionism or denial of entire parts of one's person.  One of the most harmful consequences of non-rationalism is precisely this: a distorted or incomplete understanding of one's own self.  In actuality, many people are content to avoid thinking abstractly or deeply about themselves because they might be scared of what they might find.  It takes the intentionality of a rationalist to realize the truth without assumptions, but it also takes the strength of sincerity and humility to look within oneself and not misperceive.  Thankfully, introspection provides an infallibly certain glance into one's mind and is never without its benefits.  To not engage in rationalistic introspection is to leave oneself open to a host of avoidable difficulties.

Ignorance of one's self in the sense of failing to explore one's desires, emotions, and beliefs while submitting to reason always closes off chances to be more stable.  It will never be helpful for a person to ignore the fact that they are a mind-body composite or a sexual or individualistic being, to name just a handful of examples.  Perhaps it will seem convenient or necessary to some to pretend like they are something other than what they truly are, but no one has to fall prey to the fallacious lies of reductionism, to a lack of self-awareness, or to a philosophical fog surrounding their identity and recognition of that identity.  Only to someone under the sway of assumptions, misperceptions, or social conditioning will something besides the knowable parts of the true nature as a conscious being and an individual person seem valid.

Not only is it philosophically invalid and erroneous to believe false things about one's nature and its interlocking components that span the mind and body, but it is personally disastrous, or at least it is either objectively harmful or dooms one to a lesser understanding of oneself.  A lesser understanding of oneself, in turn, limits one's self-acceptance (not that everything about every person needs to or should be accepted as it is), restricts one's range of intellectual and emotional flourishing, and always has the potential to spawn some additional misunderstanding that will wreak havoc on one's life.  Misunderstandings are erroneous and dangerous.

Each component of a person connects with at least some other components, making a holistic self-awareness necessary for the best understanding of what it means to be an individual being.  How much one is willing to face and understand spirituality will impact how one looks to and understands sexuality, which in turn impacts the extent one understands individuality and sociality, which connects with how a person treats other people, and so on.  Starting with the foundation of rationalism, putting together the various provable truths about one's nature as a conscious being is vital to both philosophical unity and the deepest kind of personal fulfillment.

Holistic self-awareness is also necessary to understand as much of reality as can be logically proven.  One's own mind and all of its contents are still a part of reality even if there is a difference between perceptions and logic and the world itself.  As such, self-awareness is not just a helpful knowledge of oneself; it is also literally a pathway to one of the only kinds of knowledge that is truly certain.  Other people might be illusions of perception and the external world might be very different from how it appears, but thoughts and perceptions cannot themselves be illusions.  Looking into one's own mind and firmly confronting whatever it might hold with the light of reason is, along with focusing on reason and using it to illuminate itself, one of the only ways one can know things with absolute certainty, regardless of life circumstances.