This is http://www.essayz.com/a9801292.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %KNOWING OTHERS THROUGH OUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS 980129 The only way we can meaningfully know other persons is through our personal relationships with them. We may pretend that we meaningfully know other persons apart from our personal relationships with them; but such pretense is dishonest, and leads us into deepening levels of alienation between us and other persons. "Objective" knowledge about other persons in personal isolation does not constitute meaningfully knowing other persons. We need to beware of "objective" statements made about other persons in isolation of relationships with those people with whom they are most intimately involved. Such statements-in-isolation are likely to be misleading; because in the absence of any acknowledgement of the importance of the personal relationships within which the other persons can be known --- the statements about them are likely to be dominated by pretense, dishonesty, and alienation --- each of which make true personal knowledge all be impossible. Persons and relationships need to be recognized as mutually interdependent realities. People create relationships. Relationships create people. We can personally know about people and their relationships only within the contexts of our personal relationships with them. Pretending otherwise is pretentious, dishonest, misleading and unreliable. People who are disposed to pass judgments and condemn other people --- without acknowledging the importance of all of relationships within which the judged/condemned people are participants --- do not help anybody by imposing judgments or condemnations. Such impositions of judgment and condemnation are usually attempts to achieve some form of self-righteousness; rather than efforts to facilitate and promote both personal and communal integrity. Such impositions often deny the importance of the alienative relationships between the people engaging in such exercises, and the people who are judged and condemned. Such alienative relationships may have played important roles in setting up the circumstances which have elicited the judgments and condemnations. To pretend otherwise is dishonest and tragically disintegrative. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================