The expression of us can be usually subconsciously found in our feelings. Feelings are expression of our emotional state. Hence, we express ourselves through our inside emotional state. What does our emotional state depends on? As I see it, it depends on connection between outside world and us. There are a lot of areas of knowledge which influence this connection such as physics (if we are spending time in a dark place for a long time we feeling down and getting sad), chemistry (different substances which influence our mind=>mental condition), even mathematics (we can be obsessed in something which even does not exists for example on the number, for example 23).
How do I personally understand the expression of myself? This is another side of reflection. Reflection is self recognizing and expression is telling who you are to the others. Through expression we advance our life conditions. "The advancement of life is a name for whatever improves life, remaking it stronger, discovering and distilling its vital essence and opening wide the body-and-mind to pour that essence forth. The beneficial side-effects of this life-advancing coincide often with many things well-established as desirable: happiness, satisfaction, plenty, understanding, wisdom, achievement. These are often named as goals in themselves, but they do not happen independently of the great goal, the advancement of what is essential to a life." - The Promethean Manifesto. But what essence is that? And how can we understand it? As I understand essence is self’s own personality and it’s what we show when we express ourselves.
The capacity or power of persons or things is a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behaviour and opinions. But not always we can understand the reason of behaviour or action of others as our perception is limited. It is limited due to such factors as the nature of our sense organs (e.g. biological diseases: near sighting, blindness, deafness) or mental limitations (as we see what we want to see, hallucinations). Due to all these factors the way we express ourselves=perceive ourselves= expression is formed from our perception makes a barrier on our understanding of others. The way we express ourselves definitely influences on our understanding of others. Expression goes from self-perception; self-perception goes to perception of outside world. If B leads to A, and B leads to C, then A leads to C. But how deeply does in influence? Does it limits or helps our understanding of others? First of all I think it is needed to define the ways in which we can express ourselves.
Art, speaking, dancing, sport are all the areas which allow us express ourselves in. I’m going to take the Arts as a sample. This includes painting, sculpturing, performing music, composing music, architecture, ballet, etc. How can we cognize art? Through perception, reason, emotion, language. We perceive what we see. Perception of every individual is different so everyone perceives art differently. Reason is the reasoning of the message implied through the piece of artwork (incorporates language). Emotion alters the reasoning of the knower, when the knower relates the artwork to a personal experience, the emotion related with the experience has a part in the reasoning. Different people might have different emotions regarding the same experience, and different people might also relate the artwork to different experiences that they have undergone. Therefore, most peoples' reasoning would be different as well as perception.
In my own point of view understanding others from the one self’s expression is limitation more than a ‘bonus’. When we evaluate someone or something we do it with a limitation of our own confinements. “Persuasion is cause of behaviour”. As I understand it the process of our behaviour is determined by our thinking. We convince ourselves, make up beliefs on the assumption of what we do. Same with the understanding of other. We understand others, evaluating them with ourselves, sometimes not understanding that our own presentation of ourselves can be wrong. That’s the key. To understand others on our expression of ourselves first at all we have to make sure that our own expression is right, otherwise we limit it. It is not good to compare someone with yourself, as you have to be individuality, but not someone else. When we understand others by our own expression of ourselves, others become more similar to us, as they become being part of us, as we compare them from our subconscious ourselves. But from the other point of you, seeing others on our own expression could be helpful. For example, I am doing ballet dancing and understanding other dancers from my own expression can be useful as I will have something to evaluate is. If I’ll have my own picture of myself I’ll be able to compare and find all pros and cons of how I dance.
Our perception is infinitely limited. We are even limited to perceive ourselves correctly, so the understanding of others is even fuzzier. To understand others – first of all we have to make up a picture of who we are. If we understand it we will be able to communicate with others and outside world with a minimized number of limitations. So does the way we express ourselves helps or limits our understanding of others? Due to my mini-debate more limits. But I understand that my perception is also limited and I see the problem with all limitations of my conception of the given terms. Terms, because all the following conditions, expressions, understanding are subjective and I’m not sure they are even exist. So in conclusion, I’d like to mention that perhaps we don’t need to understand ourselves nor others as we are not sure these connections between people exist and we have to cognize them.
