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.