We shiver in the chill of a new advice age. People want to know how to live and how to get what they want. They spend their dwindling money and attention on filling their helium balloon heads with other airy substances.
A rolling gas cloud of questions, searches, of how to’s. Rules, lists, guidelines, plans, programs and systems. Coaches and trainers and consultants and counselors. Society seems so disorderly for lack of overriding principles but on the ground floor rules run amok. The chaos of everyday life is in part an effect of all the orders in miniature, the segmented and private systems at odds with each other.
So many orientations get a little disorienting. There are more advisors on life than there are ways to make a living. Most instructional material today addresses the individual as a being determined by accidents of birth yet charged with unique potential. Environment provides the initial influences and then science and ideology aid self-development. The person inherits a pasted together nature, a combination of time and place and social practice, and then they shape themselves into an expression of their own ideals. Even the practical advice of today that aims at conventional success tends to assume an open-endedness of the person’s future and a contingent aspect to the person’s past.
We’re historical animals, able to adapt but in need of instruction on how to identify and express ourselves in a changing environment without lasting models. A person today, unsure of himself, with boundless appetites and vague yearnings, looking for techniques to develop his potential and achieve a mastery he can hardly imagine, will feel poorly served by the life counsel of Arthur Schopenhauer.
In addition to expounding a complete metaphysical system, Schopenhauer wrote a book of advice. The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims is a lesser-known work that begins with a proviso. Schopenhauer’s recommendations count as wisdom only if we pretend that life is worth living. According to his metaphysics, life has no value, but if we’re to continue living, we can organize ourselves to make the best of a bad deal.
In contrast with our time, Schopenhauer insists on the primacy of inborn character. Ever since existentialism, we tend to see the facts of our existence as crucial for our character, while, for Schopenhauer, our given temperament decides the quality of our experience and the importance we grant to particular facts.
(I should note that the existentialist prioritizes action and decision as necessary ingredients in the establishment of facts that go on to influence us and our descendants. We fashion ourselves from our actions, which become facts of our nature.)
Circumstance is relative to character. How we see and order our lives comes down to who we are, not what has arbitrarily happened to us. We bring ourselves, our essential selves, to meet all our events. It could also be said like this: what happens to us is the unfolding of our character; we experience what we do because of who we are and not the other way around.
Although our surroundings can bring out different aspects of our nature, the vagaries of history alter our surface but never our core; a miserable person stays miserable even when transplanted into lavish settings, while a cheerful person retains his essentially upbeat attitude in squalor and devastation.
This school of wisdom rests on the acceptance of a fate irreducible to history, to specific economic and political conditions, and from there, devises outlooks and habits that might help us avoid suffering more than we must.
The key to minimizing pain and disappointment is to lower our expectations as much as possible, and to content ourselves with a relative freedom and security in a world gripped by insatiable evil. Rather than fling ourselves into the melee of history, we should stand back and cultivate gratitude for each untroubled moment. Instead of stoking ambition and desire, crafting schemes and seeking out intrigues, we should focus on quiet and modest self-sufficiency, even if it leaves attractive prospects beyond our grasp.
What strikes a reader of Wisdom of Life is how unfashionable Schopenhauer’s thought is compared to most philosophies from the 19th century on, which tend to stress the power of historical change and the force of circumstance, some calling for return to earlier times and others demanding further revolution. Our thoughts almost always veer between progress and reaction, and we study specific time periods for clues to better and worse ways of life. The alternative views human nature as essentially unchangeable; history plays out distracting variations on a theme.
If we must adapt, then we do so not to the specifics of our time and place, but to the foundational elements of our nature and the cosmos. We can be out of step with the immutable, but never the times, because the times will soon enough lose their footing.
I’d argue that Schopenhauer overstates his case a bit, as we must contend with history and its profound workings, while also not bowing to every new article as if no part of our character stands apart from the ephemeral. And we’d also do well to remind ourselves of our dependence on others and the reciprocal duties that come with shared living. But Schopenhauer does help us elaborate a critical perspective on the present, highlighting some of its weaknesses and superficialities.
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A new morning with its mix of the current and the timeless. At the moment I’m free from debilitating pains and humiliating scandals. I should strengthen my consciousness of these blessings instead of tormenting myself with visions of illusory pleasures. The dominant mode of awareness today centers on what we don’t have, what someone or some system prevents us from obtaining, what we could get if only we had enough support or resources. We can all too easily inject ourselves with extra doses of anxiety, envy and hostility, and spoil otherwise peaceful circumstances with imported worries and simulated crises.
Of course I won’t be able to block out all the noise of the world, the torturous comparisons and damning judgements. The dread and loneliness and frustrated ambition. But if I can’t secure a moment of contentment as I am now, I shouldn’t expect some future state to fulfill me either.
I'm somewhat familiar with Marcel, and have read Ellul's The Technological Society. I've been meaning to get around to Maritain for a while.
To the extent that I can understand myself, I think I have something of a dual loyalty, or two primary competing views of human life. One is based on a transhistorical individual soul given to each of us, something of possibly divine origin, with certain aims and interests that must be protected and fleshed out. And then there's the contingent, materialist side of life, where we are animals in thrall to environmental and technological influences that demand thoroughgoing analysis.
Personalism is another interesting philosophy of life, Caleb.
You know? That french milieu of G. Marcel, J. Maritain, E. Mounier, P. Maurin, even Ellul, in its first years. And many others, of course. I recommend.