Being cognizant or incognizant, are terms that express our stance towards a known element.
If recognizing some known item means affirming its existence, the incognizance of a known item signifies a refusal to confirm its existence. In this way, recognition expands or narrows our horizons and guides our activities and selects our aims.
Recognition's natural activity in man's life is in the domain of improving his qualities and function, bringing people closer together and creating social harmony. Incognizance, by contrast, operates in the opposite direction.
Recognition, its limits and expressions
A resistance to recognize certain things forms within us. An improved self-image is required in order to recognize our weaknesses and the other's strengths, thereby recognizing our rights and duties as human beings.
We usually recognize those who agree with us, who make us feel good and who raise our importance, and have difficulty recognizing someone who provokes the opposite emotions. Recognizing someone signifies recognizing their entire self, with all their qualities and defects. Recognizing someone also means seeing his qualities, the good that is in him. In the same format, not recognizing someone, signifies seeing his defects and the bad within him.
One is recognizing that the other possesses a high self-worth since he was created in God's image, which confirms the good within him and rejects the bad; the other is the recognition that the other is a sinner and tainted, rejecting his good and affirming the bad within him.
Just as important as recognition is in itself, is the truth it encapsulates. The conscious verbal recognition of something may in some cases contain elements of untruth. This is not the case when a person spontaneously expresses his recognition. Therefore, if you want to examine the sincerity and truth of a person's recognition, search for it in his reactions, actions and slips of tongue.
This spontaneous expression also reveals to us considerable information regarding an opponent's intentions, without his being aware of it. This way, he unwittingly places himself in an inferior position. As regards a representative body's formal declarations; despite their importance, their truth must be scrutinized through their being implemented in practice.
Incognizance
Incognizance as a defensive tool when facing something embarrassing:
A person tends to avoid recognizing his weaknesses, immoral actions and the advantages the other has over him. He therefore chooses to overlook them, as though ignoring these disturbing facts him will cause them to vanish. This is a type of escape from reality. Incognizance is used to solve a weak person's problems with his conscience, or is used by an institution with a similar weakness. When we aren't mentally prepared or are equipped to withstand the shame and humiliation that results in recognizing something embarrassing, we respond by not recognizing it, as though it doesn't really exist; and if it doesn't exist, there is also no shame. In more extreme cases, this incognizance may lead someone to truly forget the subject of embarrassment; it then serves as a type of emotional defense, shielding the individual from a severe emotional experience.
These phenomena should be seen as a human weaknesses; an emotional blockage, obstructing the improvement of a person's self image. It is a harmful tool that must be discarded.
I would like to point out some of the most tragic events that were shielded through incognizance. The disregard and refusal on the part of the nations who ruled the world in the run up to the Second World War, to recognize the horrors Nazism may inflict on the world. The disregard and refusal, by the nations involved in the Second World War, to recognize their responsibility for what took place in the war, resulted in their not doing enough to prevent the future occurrence of similar horrors. This wrought a decline to the world's morality, and lead to the increase of violence, to the formation of Neo-Nazi movements in the world, to the spread of terror and of drugs, to the rise of fundamentalist Islam and to the world's standing on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.
I would like to point out a unique disregard: that disregard and refusal by some of the Christian community to recognize the people of Israel, as the nation from which it was born and sprung up. This brought about the spread of malicious rumors, to the hatred of Jews, to their humiliation, expulsion, and continual murder throughout the generations. This disregard bears a not inconsiderable part in forming the Arab-Israeli conflict, which continues to this very day.
These days, things of a similar nature, or even worse, occur, on the part of the Arabs who refer to themselves as Palestinians, with whom Israel has reached agreements with the goal of signing a peace treaty. The same thing will happen between Israel and Syria, unless Israel's leaders will be smart enough to ask for this recognition to be one of the conditions for a peace treaty between the two states.
Note: Naturally, as an Israeli, I presented examples relating to my country. I am convinced that similar disregards and incognizance's exist in other countries, causing great misery and inequities.
Recognition as a tool for improving man's qualities
We have to recognize our mistakes, weaknesses and immoral actions prior to fixing them.
The first step towards obtaining knowledge is to recognize that you are ignorant.
The first step towards strengthening yourself is to recognize that you are weak.
The first step towards attaining redemption is to recognize that you are a sinner.
Then, these same forces, which worked against us and that led to the formation of these weaknesses, will act in our favor and assist us to attain the improvement mentioned above.
People and nations truly approaching each other by means of recognition
The first obstacle to be eliminated is incognizance itself. History is capable of pointing to numerous tragic cases in which a peace treaty or was abused when these conditions went unfulfilled. Prior to each such agreement, examine the existence of this recognition in their leaders' actions, stance and reactions and insist on its being implemented in practice.
As regards the Arab-Israeli conflict, the first step towards the attainment of true peace between the Arab states and Israel, lies in recognizing that the people of Israel have religious and historical rights in the land of Israel. The reality on the ground demonstrates that such recognition is lacking. Clearly and to the same extent, Israel must recognize the Arab nation's rights.
Without mutual recognition of these nations' rights, a peace deal between Israel and Syria, Egypt and the Palestinians, would not be worth the scrap of paper it would be written on.
Improving the ability to bestow recognition
Already some 3500 years ago, Israel's bible demanded the observance of commandments, some of which were directly intended to improve this capacity of recognition. Among these commandments was also a command of offering a sacrifice to atone for a sin. We are familiar with similar activity in other ancient nations. These activities are actually actions through which man confesses his sins. This confession may sound approximately as follows: I admit that that I sinned, I request your forgiveness, it won't happen again. I offer this sacrifice as a sign of recognizing the sin I have committed. I will seek more moral ways of realizing my goals.
The most dramatic tool that brings each person to an adequate expression of recognition is in accepting the divine statement that man was created in God's own image; the content of which was also supplied by Israel's bible. The moment you internalize this idea, you recognize your inherent high self-worth and treat the other as possessing a similar value; the weakness of incognizance vanishes by itself.
This leads to your beginning to get in touch with this marvelous being in order to recognize it as such and to affirm its great value. With every such affirmation, you will also recognize and reaffirm your own value and due to that, will be granted wonderful positive feelings, which are the "reward" this recognition bestows.
Abraham Adar
www.adar-publishing.com [http://www.adar-publishing.com]
The author is a Holocaust survivor and has resided in Israel since 1948. In his book and this website he expresses concern regarding the dangers which ambush Man today, as well as to the continuous rampant "Jewish tragedy".
His sensitivity to Man's fundamental problems and the genuine need to find a proper and efficient solution to these problems, have lead him to present humanity this unique way of life.