know thyself

“Men have no knowledge of their own lives: they see them and act them out via ideological themes and ethical values.

In particular they have an inadequate knowledge of their needs and their own fundamental attitudes; they express them badly; they delude themselves about their needs and aspirations except for the most general and the most basic ones.

And yet it is their lives, and their consciousness of life; but only the philosopher, and the sociologist informed by the dialectic, and maybe the novelist, manage to join together the lived and the real, formal structure and content.

Thus ideology is at one and the same time within everyday life and outside of it.”

– Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life (volume I)