Open Discussion: On Knowing Oneself

This meeting will be a live discussion of the title topic. This sort of discussion can't be settled in any particular way, but remains relevant for beginners and initiates to philosophy.

Here are some questions and comments that may help guide the conversation (feel free to bring questions of your own, as well):

How do we understand the Delphic maxim, "know thyself" (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν)? For example, are we to know ourselves as a specific individual, or to know our nature, and so, something universal that we participate in? Is there a way of separating these approaches without missing something crucial?

What relation does this question have to philosophy? Is this a question that ranks among others within philosophy, or the principal issue?

Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. How does this maxim to examine life relate to knowing oneself? How would knowing oneself make life worth living? Does anything else make life worth living without bearing some relationship to self-knowledge? How?

Excerpt from Plato's Phaedrus:
Socrates: If I disbelieved, as the wise men do, I should not be extraordinary; then I might give a rational explanation, that a blast of Boreas, the north wind, pushed her off the neighboring rocks as she was playing with Pharmacea, and that when she had died in this manner she was said to have been carried off by Boreas. But I, Phaedrus, think such explanations are very pretty in general, but are the inventions of a very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable man, for no other reason than because after this he must explain the forms of the Centaurs, and then that of the Chimaera, and there presses in upon him a whole crowd of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegas, and multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures. If anyone disbelieves in these, and with a rustic sort of wisdom, undertakes to explain each in accordance with probability, he will need a great deal of leisure. But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things. And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them, as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature. But, my friend, while we were talking, is not this the tree to which you were leading us?