"To come to know oneself has rewards but also pains, both in the process and in the product. For in the change of self, old manners, habits which give comfort, a residue of much living, is worried out of existence and an undefended character is born. Reorganization occurs, and reorganization means partial disorganization. Each partly new structure must in time in turn be superseded, else thought and feeling loose their spiritual status, and the man recedes into the animal kingdom. Self-development is the only alternative to that recession: it is not possible to stand still.
"Hegel's phrase 'the labor of the negative' covers this rending work of self-interrogation and self-alteration. Labour, because it is hard; negative, because it is destructive. And the model of a human being, moving painfully in stages to self-knowledge, helps us to understand the larger movement of human history as Hegel conceived it."
And yet, knowing ones' self must imply understanding history because it is one of the major forces of our conditioning, no? This, it seems to me is the major contribution of Marxism to philosophy, because in the absence of an understanding of how we are made by history: "knowing oneself" would involve the same tasks whether one undertook it 20,000 years ago or today. And, I doubt that's the case.
Joanna