Insomnia.... again

Yet again I cannot sleep. I put this down to the fact that I have spent 8 hours working and so my mind switched off. As soon as I lay down to try to sleep my internal dialogue switched itself back on and will not shut up. I try to tell it to be quiet, but it will not listen... not so boring this time, just droning on about self-other relationships that I don't want to be thinking about at 2:30am. Rather than let it babble at me I have decided to give it it's voice, smoke my last cigarette and write something about self-other. It may become garbled as internal dialogue never seems to make as much sense when written down but I need to sleep and writing here might make it go away.

So anyway, I was thinking the usual before sleeping nonsense, thinking about conversations and people and relations with other people. I ended up thinking about how I think about myself, and how other people percieve me; these things must be entirely different I think. Then my self becomes 'self how I see myself,' and 'self as others see me.' What then constitutes my relation to the other, and I as an other in respect to other people who are selves. The 'self how I see myself,' would be bound up in the same, yet at the same time it is the other for it as an other that cannot be grasped as people will never know how I see myself, just as I can never grasp how it is that others see themselves. When I thought about the 'self as others see me' I wondered whether this self was same or other. This self would be same and yet not same, other and yet not other. It would be same as it constitutes who I am, but not same because it's not something that I can ever really know and attribute to my self. Other because it comes from the other, yet not because it is also from me.

Then the self that I think I am can never really be the self that I truly am because part of what I am is already other and unable to be comprehended fully by the self that is same. What my self is then is never really whole but fragments (thats assuming that a self does exist at all) and to know my self in its entirity I would have to become the Other which I can't do so I'll never really know it.


Apologies for garbled madness of internal dialogue but it needed to be freed. I should really write about something by some philosopher or other, everyone else seems to be writing sense. But despite my being proved wrong about it, I can still not bring myself to blog about Kant or Hegel (might write about Heidegger or Levinas sometime) and they're about all I'm reading.

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