Article January 26, 2004 Issue

the POWER of KNOWING your own HEART

By Annette Kreutziger-Herr

"Know thyself. " If you trace the footsteps of thought back hundreds, even thousands of years, and then return to today's bookstores and think tanks, you will find that one constant counsel running like a golden thread linking then and now.

In Greece at the temple of Apollo in Delphi you can still see an inscription that transliterates as Gnòthi seautòn. "Get to know yourself" was the central motto of antiquity. Today, browse through a bookstore's self-help section, and you'll find titles such as Know Thyself by Richard Lynch; Know Thyself, Show Thyself: A Guide to Becoming the Person You're Always Dreamed of Being by Victor August; and Martin S. Bergmann's study The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is, about knowing oneself as the one important starting point in life. Bergmann based his study on Erich Fromm's famous book, The Art of Loving. Seeking to know one's deepest self is as key to ancient philosophy as it is to modern psychology and the postmodernist worldview.