Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Interpretation
Self-knowledge reveals uncomfortable truths about ourselves that cannot be ignored.
Michael Sandel's quote highlights the complexity of self-knowledge, suggesting that while it can be disconcerting or challenging, the understanding we gain about ourselves is an irreversible process. Just as lost innocence cannot be regained, once we have acquired self-knowledge, we can no longer return to a state of ignorance, leading to a deeper awareness of our identities and choices.
In practice
In a personal development workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of confronting one's true self.
First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.
Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.
The villany you teach me I shall execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.