Socrates once said, 'Know thyself'. This is the goal of metaphysics, to think about the thinker. To do so requires thinking about other things such as, 'What is a thought? What is being? What is man? What is nature? What is God?' To some, the self is nothing more than a conglomeration of parts - to 'know thyself' would amount to no more than mapping each part of their body, what it does, and how it acts. But the self is quite obviously not a matter of a particular combination of parts - as Dr. Frankenstein discovers.

Enter the Bard, who places on the tongue of the image-conscious, worldly-wise Polonius:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

We could talk about what Polonius is meant by William to mean by this, and we can also talk about what the platitude he utters actually means, given its proper context. However, this same concept rears its head in various other places, also perhaps taking on the quality of a platitude. What can we make of the phrase, 'Believe in yourself'? (Is this to mean we ought to have faith that we exist?)

On the face, it just appears to be a platitude expressing a vanilla sentiment of self-esteem or self-confidence, i.e, 'cheer up, you can do it!' However, I've begun to suspect that this is not the only thing this statement means, In the animated feature, 'The Cat Returns', the heroine is repeatedly told by the Baron, an animate statue of a baron, to 'believe in yourself'. In the context of the film she has little need for self-confidence; she is not really a failure - other than at not getting up in time or having much direction in life - and the end of the story does not find her getting up the confidence to ask out the guy that she has a crush on.

Most of the action of the film - the important decisions perhaps - are not made by the heroine, but by those who are bound to assist her. Indeed, her problem is that she doesn't know herself, so much that she is duped into marrying the prince of cats, and is in the process turned into a cat herself.

She is self-forgetful in the worst sense; she loses her humanity; she gives it away because she hardly knew she even had it. The baron, who is not a human nor really a cat, shows far more humanity than anyone else; indeed he even utters the words, 'I am exactly who I appear to be' - which is exactly the idea Polonius is trying to communicate to his son, 'then to no man can you be false.' The baron's appearance of being a cat who is adorned as a baron does not distract from his character or virtue, in fact his material nature (whatever we may assume it to be) does not at all make it impossible for him to be human in the right sense of the word. He wears no mask at all.

My suspicion is that you can replace 'Believe in yourself' in many cases with, 'Do not forget who you are', (but how can a girl who doesn't know at all who or what she is 'not forget'?) and derive a much richer realization - one probably unintended by certain writers and authors.

I suspect 'believe in yourself' is the only advice that can be offered to one lacking self-knowledge, any concept of nature or ontology, sense of place or loyalty of blood, or direction and telos. That Socrates' 'Know Thyself' hardly suffered dilution from his time to William Shakespeare's 'To thine own self be true,' but in the matter of a few centuries can be rendered no clearer than 'Believe in yourself' shows how impoverished the mind of man has become and how vague and useless his language.

Then again, we always have the option to 'know ourselves' and to 'not forget who we are'. That is, we are made in the image of God. Everything else follows from this: 'In His image and likeness He made them.'