freddyg

This shows my archaeological nerd-itude, but one of the things that I think can never be found archaeologically is the individual. Perhaps this concept applies to our present archaeologies? Meaning that, especially in the case of other people, all we can discover are material correlates of their behaviors. We cannot explicitly know motivation or pretense outside our own. And even then... we sometimes bury our desires so deeply that we "don't know" the exact cause of our doing something. I believe it is possible for us to know ourselves... but not others.

i have to agree with your analogy, we can not see the choices made by any individual, past or present, but only the results of those choices. perhaps the only difference is that with people alive today, we may be able to reach a more concrete understanding through deep explanation directly from the individual. but i still believe that we have so many things about ourselves that we dont understand, that in most cases, even the individual in question cannot completely convey the underlying cause of their choices.

i do agree that at some point (different for everyone) we should be able to reach an understanding of ourselves. part of the problem is that i think that it is just recently (in the human evolution) that people have really wanted to understand themselves, and we dont know how to figure that out yet (as a population)

to break it down, i agree with everything you said. its a matter of degree, i think i have less faith in the knowing of oneself, than you do.