Tuesday, January 22, 2013

All our meanings are built into us from the outside!

"I once wrote that I thought the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others. This is what gives us a "selfand a superego. Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own. How could we?-I argued-since we feel ourselves in many ways guilty and beholden to others, a lesser creation of theirs, indebted to them for our very birth."

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