CONTINENTAL  PHILOSOPHY  GROUP

POPULAR  PHILOSOPHY

A  Contemporary  Reflection

Lindsay  Mell

Continental  Philosophy  Group

Seminar  Paper

CONTINENTAL  PHILOSOPHY  GROUP
9  November  2003

Ideology and philosophy – the place of friendship, trust, faith and love

Everyone retains certain ideas and ideals which we hold dear, which we value and esteem substantially, and which are crucial in importance for us. 

Thus to validly extrapolate from this position we can assert that everybody also holds an ideological affirmation which they progressively formulate, from their valued ideas and ideals, and which is more or less variable, depending on the person concerned and the cohesion of their perspectives.  Along with these considerations, the propensity for someone to hold a core set of formulated ideas, ideals and beliefs will bear considerably on how firmly they will hold to their ideological commitment. 

Consequently, everyone will be an ideologue, per se, bound in tight service and/or complicity to their chosen ideology, and keen to advocate for it at every available opportunity … Moreover, we probably all are idealists to some extent or other, holding dear those ideas and ideals we value; just as we can also be palpably pragmatic at other times, and thereby willing to concede or advance pragmatic so-called ‘solutions’. 

However, what is often ignored in this essentially even-handed scenario is that each of us probably harbours a preponderance for one form or another in this, for either ‘idealism’ or ‘pragmatism’, say – or perhaps for something else not identifiable through either of these forms, yet retaining characteristics of one or the other. 

So it is probably excruciatingly difficult not to be either preponderantly an idealist or a pragmatist – unless we strive for a finely tuned structural ‘balance’ in all this, and thereby compromise whatever is our more natural predisposition in such a form that we effectively surrender any aspiration to be earnestly authentic in all this. 

Furthermore, just as everyone holds to a particular ideology, we also subscribe to a certain given philosophy, or philosophical position, formed from our respective predispositions in this particular realm of thought and intellect. 

We are all philosophers to the extent we each hold certain positions relative to what we consider to be  ‘… the truths and principles underlying all knowledge and being (or reality) …’ (336), or what is often regarded as ‘metaphysics’ (336). 

Indeed, there is a sense in which philosophy is considered essentially synonymous with ‘ideology’ when regarded in the context of a ‘school of thought’ (336).  Ideology is more commonly regarded as  ‘… a doctrine of a social movement, institution, class …’ (229), but it may also be validly considered more generally as a ‘creed’, or where espoused truth is concerned as ‘dogma’ (229).  

What was traditionally neglected in the context of philosophical endeavour was the realm of ‘feeling’, given the obvious immediate concern which seems to self-evidently attend the aspect of ‘intellect’, or ‘thought’, in the exploration of ‘knowledge’ and ‘principles’.  More recently, such preoccupation has been emphatically challenged, at times, and ‘feelings’, particularly in the context of ‘sense’, have become a much more prevalent focus of philosophical concern.  Nevertheless, the realm of overt, spontaneous expression of feeling, such as through passion and ebullience, still seems to remain basically uncharted terrain in the context of many perspectives of philosophical analysis.  

Among those philosophers brave enough to address this situation was 
Michel de Montaigne.  More inclined to accept a philosophical perspective through which personal destiny would have a viable place, Montaigne was much more partial to this beneficent influence than his mentor, Seneca, who relied on ‘fortune’, expressed through the implacable impunity of a deity as its essence. 

Montaigne was alert to the benefits of ‘learning’ through distinctive lived experience as the basis of the greater attribute of our ‘wisdom’.  We could then develop our own path throughout life, and effectively empower ourselves in this sense. 

‘Friendship’ is a prevalent and formidable element on the contemporary agenda of popular philosophy, yet is not always considered comprehensively through the substantial lens of traditional philosophic perspective.  Accordingly, ‘trust’ tends to be recognised and valued as a vital facet of friendship, yet certainly is not generally advocated as such in other than a fairly ephemeral sense. 

What is often lost through popular perspectives in respect to friendship is the broad and deep regard which is required to truly substantiate the value of friendship.  Meanwhile, the elemental reality that, trust which supports, sustains and nourishes friendship, requires often copious, even debilitating, courage and persistence, expressed over time, often fails to really appear in any great definitive clarity on the radar screen of popular philosophic preoccupations. 

Trust, in itself, even as courage and persistence, is ultimately grounded in ‘faith’, which is most difficult to sustain without some form of spiritual context in all this, to provide significance, meaning, relevance and resonance to all these elements through a cohesive and consistent ethos … So we reach back to the relevance of destiny – ‘to be, or not to be’?! 

People cannot just assume these deep elements as customary to their being and reality, as if they were donning items of clothing to weather the reality of life, of course.  All these qualities and/or attributes are incrementally and spontaneously acquired through experience over time, at the very least to a certain extent.  What people can do is so nurture and/or develop a quality and depth of (inter)personal experience and life journeying such that these vital elements are accorded ample sufficiency of expression and evolution through the character and nature of those concerned, along with the resilient substance of their deep friendships. 

Mimetic behaviour will ever become interposed in all this, as people tend to form into peer groups, and other such associational composites, with the outcome being the most pervasive confluence from these collective contexts often to the extent that individuality is effectively vanquished, and those concerned find it excruciating to express themselves openly. 

However, it is feasible for people to take the forms of popular culture and employ these to purvey their deepest distinctive (inter)personal expression and cultural contributions in this context.  Nevertheless, to do this in the broadest (inter)personal sense, those concerned must apply resources of courage and persistence to keep their initiatives in place. 

While, earlier in his work, Arthur Schopenhauer subscribes to the interaction of ‘want and illusion’ in the sustenance of life, later he raises the tenor and significance of the basic human wants to the point where they take on the more insistent influence of ‘drives’ essentially. 

All these attributes eventually condense down into the whole life context through the characteristic state of ‘equilibrium’, or ‘motion in balance’. 

Given this ostensible relative soup of wants and spontaneous influences, it may seem plausible to subscribe to chance, and fate in this sense, as the imperative which generates human existence.  However, the stronger elements of desire, motive and intent remain resonant in Schopenhauer’s analysis – all contributing in their various ways to the prevalent equilibrium. 

Yet, through my own analysis, character, individuality, identity and destiny are all aspects of the human condition through which personal motives and intent blend to directly constitute in some sense the prevalent situation and circumstances.  This analysis still holds however these elements figure through the perspective of human enterprise, relative to individuals as they proceed with their lives (inter)personally. 

According to a Schopenhauerean interpretation of contemporary relationships, as discussed by de Botton, lovers and friends become embroiled in prospective relationships only to often soon express reservations, despite being intensely, even intensively, most ardently involved at the outset.  Such diabolical cross-purposes are explained by Schopenhauer through de Botton as the abrupt sudden realisation, like a bolt out of the blue (!), that ‘balance’ of character in any prospective infant from this union would be compromised and/or inadequate. 

Whatever may be our evolutionary antecedents burgeoning forth from primordial times, the reality is that there are myriad realms of human existence and experience which have other forms of focus … the realm of work, career, or vocation, extended family, peer groups, communal and regional location, cultural and social context … All these realms of interaction bring their respective variations of influence on each hapless individual – except that each of us as individuals has a distinctive place in this.  We can situate ourselves in each and all of our respective interpersonal realms in whatever ways and forms we so decide, through our own distinctive choices and motives.  However, we are beholden to respect, acknowledge and appreciate the place of others in all this, of course. 

If we become or are involved interpersonally with anyone, especially through deep friendship, at the least we can sustain and affirm our trust, courage and persistence enough to allow whatever propensities and prospects which may be there to proceed in the course of time. 

At the very least, such a situation is worthy of as much basic sustained consideration and respect as primordial evolutionary antecedents. 

Through de Botton’s interpretation of Schopenhauer’s analysis what is attempted is what for some if not many, would be considered a convoluted and possibly somewhat curious attempt to absolve lovers of responsibility, autonomy, and ultimately maturity, in carrying forward any negative response they may purvey in refusing appeals to love.  

At the outset here, de Botton’s interpretation of how ‘love’ is constituted is limited and constrained by strict dimensional parameters.  There are many, such as myself, who consider love to be a facet of every form of friendship, or even any mutual association and/or endeavour. 

Although observed in myriad forms, and to different extents, the reality would be perceived as emanating from the common source element of love.  Thence, love could certainly not be confined to the constrained enterprise of producing progeny and/or driving evolutionary dynamics. 

Consequently, love perceived on this basis would broadly expand the prospects of (inter)personal responsibility and autonomy, along with the place of maturity, in the context of love … Otherwise, if love is driven only be progenic evolutionary progression, there would be either an effectively inconsequential, or at least severely debilitated place for any substantial (inter)personal responsibility. 

We would then be faced with the challenge of why such dynamic well-situated perception and sense of responsibility is so manifest and elemental in human nature and character.  As we clearly retain such a vital human quality, then it follows for us to explore and cite its place and application in all its fullness. 

Accordingly, Schopenhauer, as interpreted by de Botton, posed our human state as little different from that of animals, except in a particular critical respect – we have artistic and intellectual sensibilities and potential.  Yet, it is such quality of nature and character which enables us to explore and expand our circumstances and/or situations in the very context through which we are able to realise (inter)personal responsibility, autonomy and maturity, along with the place of these attributes for ourselves, others, and our existence in the universal aspect … Except, I maintain there is so much more to our mutual character and nature than only these attributes.  Vital in this is the attribute of perception, which I maintain enables us to associate our being and reality with whatever is beyond this. 

Such realisation is thereby amenable to anyone, not only ‘the poet’ and/or philosopher, as Schopenhauer suggests. 

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher who certainly realised the vital place and potential of attributes of character and nature, which may be among the reasons why he eventually eschewed Schopenhauer’s mentorship, after warmly embracing Schopenhauer’s theoretical postulates earlier in his life. 

However, the attributes Nietzsche nominated as admirable represented his own curious combination, with ostensibly meagre sustantiation as to why he advanced these particular favoured attributes over others. 

What Nietzsche revealed and Schopenhauer missed was the fulfilment of human potential to realise and sustain existence beyond mere mediocrity, along with superficial ephemeral nature often characteristic of contemporary existence … Such a course would require the sustained engagement of difficulty and challenges, through which context only those of sterling character would have the personal resources to strive forth to ultimate fulfilment. 

How we journey through the challenge, difficulty and privation of pain ultimately depends on our ‘sagacity’ – or our capacity to deal wisely with such formidable prospects, according to Nietzsche. 

Although, in all this there are what may be considered as consistent principles through which to proceed through such problematic (inter)personal terrain. 

Among these principles is one invoked from Montaigne by de Botton of blending harmony with discord, the good with the ill, so these all form ‘one substance with our life …’ (224)  The other principle is from Nietzsche himself, that the way through which to ‘express’ human qualities and attributes together is to ‘successfully garden [cultivate] …’ the positive and negative so that something ‘beautiful’ eventually emerges from all this (228).  This is the Nietzschean perspective of ‘culture’ (230). 

Nietzsche’s most profound complaint was basically with people who attempted to pre-empt life, rather than live in the moment of existential reality, with all its substantial challenges, difficulties and complexities. 

Hence he criticised the false attempt to resolve polarities through what he posed as the superficial ephemeral doctrine of Utilitarianism. 

Yet Nietzsche himself invoked an adherence to polarity through his complaint that Christians, and by implication people in general to a great extent, are too comfortably placed to pursue relentlessly what they really want, yet uphold what they don’t want ‘but happen to have’ (238). 

All such analysis proceeds from the presumption that people ought only really be interested in the pursuit of extremes, or extreme states – which is an ideological stance situated in a dogma or doctrine of polarity. 

However, as far as the position of people in general is concerned, it is time that a paradoxical dilemma is placed to emerge from all this in that people tend to be prone to compromise, complicity and co-optation not predominantly because they favour what is ‘easy’ – actually people have now made life probably as complex as it could possibly ever become. 

What is palpably more likely is that people opt for a life of complexity and compromise, emphatically knowing this will be the more difficult and tenuous course throughout life for them.  This they do because they don’t recognise any other option, given the profound extent to which our contemporary existence is so socially engineered and structured. 

This deplete situation is further aggravated by the reality many people don’t appear to resonantly really know what they want for their lives.  The outcome is then a collective effect through which many people are unsure of, or even oblivious to, this consideration.  Hence, as a collective social entity, we are each and all rendered deplete in this respect. 

Although, Nietzsche’s foremost aspiration – ‘to be someone who no longer denies (243) – is clearly resonant here in that the wholesale collective flight into complicity and compromise among people in general really constitutes a profound widespread from of ‘denial’. 

  

Equanimity in the context of humanity

If my proposed guiding principle of authentic equanimity were to become resonant throughout the socio-cultural context, philosophers would likely be among the most respected beneficiaries of this development. 

Socrates has long been regarded as among the most pre-eminent of philosophers and certainly for character an exemplar par excellence. 

Moreover, the essential nature of Socrates’ character was one of equanimity.  Throughout his court trial, brought on through the civil action of ‘three Athenian citizens … Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity,’ writes 
Alain de Botton in The Consolations of Philosophy (2000: 4). 

‘Though afforded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular.’ (4) 

Socrates’ death marked  ‘… a defining moment in the history of philosophy’, 
de Botton observes (4). 

Further, de Botton notes how such initiative and responsibility contrasted considerably with much of what I have described as the malaise of complicity, co-optation and entrenched compromise which prevails in the contemporary context, with de Botton including himself comprehensively among those so afflicted, at least earlier in his life. 

‘In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth.  
A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play.  With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel – salival enthusiasm born of a morbid, indiscriminate desire for affection.  I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed …’ (7) 

Conversely, Socrates remained resolute in the face of banal populism.  

‘But the philosopher [Socrates] had not buckled before unpopularity and the condemnation of the state.  He had not retracted his thoughts because others had complained.  Moreover, his confidence had sprung from a more profound sense than hot-headedness or bull-like courage.  It had been grounded in philosophy.  Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions …’ (7) 

When it comes to a broad analysis of ‘common sense’, de Botton advances quite a comprehensively circumstantial notion of this facet of human endowment than might be expected from a philosophic dimension. 

‘Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity.  Some of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical and practical judgements described as ‘common sense’, which dictates what we should wear, which financial values we should adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow and what domestic life we should lead … If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgements are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny.’ (9) 

Only in a dictatorship do such codes of common sense really ‘dictate’ our behaviour, of course.  But they do considerably influence us, and they may prevail over our more astute discernment if we allow this. 

Fortunately, many of us certainly haven’t reached such desperation that:  ‘… It would scarcely seem acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work (9).  Or to ask a recently married couple to explain in full the reasons behind their decision (10).’ 

Certainly, such questions would be asked in public situations in which I’m likely to be involved, however this may have more to do with the situations in which I choose to be involved, or seek out, and with whom, particularly relative to the age group.  The point is that, increasingly in the public domain, people are becoming more pressured to accept such inane criteria of common sense.  

They are more prone to capitulate to such oppressive standards, as they lack the gradually acquired insight and (inter)personal resources to posit a comprehensive personal defense and/or reaction. 

Meanwhile, de Botton resolutely fleshes out his perspective.  

‘But it is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo.  

‘Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time.  It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would be alone in noticing the fact.  We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truths … it is for help in overcoming our meekness that we may turn to the philosopher (13) … 

‘If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is … primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right … [Socrates] raised a plethora of questions to determine whether what was popular happened to make any sense.’ (16) 

Certainly, de Botton is justified in confirming the association of popularity with ‘what is right’, given the comprehensive propensity to complicity and co-optation in effectively all socio-cultural contexts.  However, there seems to me no real prima facie evidence which would confirm our ‘internal sense that societal conventions’ must be ‘sound’.  

Further, it seems to me anyone with any broad experience of socio-cultural relations would realise how misguided so-called social consensus can be, with ‘society’ in and of itself being an entity which cannot initiate anything, other than through its members, each of these being differently positioned in this.  
Any substantial analysis of the process of public opinion would reveal this. 

Socrates bases his method substantially on pure reason, or rationality, according to de Botton.  ‘… A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted.  A statement is true if it cannot be disproved.  If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.’ (14) 

There is one exception to this method allowed by Socrates.  ‘Without following a Socratic method, we may realise that people with no money may be called virtuous if they have lived through situations in which it was impossible to be virtuous and make money, or that acting courageously can involve retreat in battle.  But we risk not knowing how to respond to people who don’t agree with us, unless we have first thought through the objections to our position logically … The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove.  It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.’ (25) 

However, the actual reality is that such a position will only enable us to know what something is not, if indeed our logic and reason are not flawed.  While in our humanity we realise we are ever prone to fallibility in this respect, as in all else.  So we must at the outset be prepared to appreciate and accept our essential humanity and fallibility in this sense. 

What may well be more important, substantial and significant for us is to know by experience, hermeneutically and/or phenomenologically, as this will be the more convincing method for us (inter)personally, aside from what others may think or feel about us.  Crucial to our response to what others may consider is often, if not invariably, for us to know what is appropriate for ourselves in all this. 

Besides, whatever is proved ‘true’ will only be so according to the particular method and individual concerned seeking to so prove the truth.  This does not necessarily constitute a universal truth, in and of itself. 

‘We are justified in taking unpopularity seriously not only for pragmatic reasons, for reasons of promotion or survival, but more importantly because being jeered at can seem an unequivocal sign that we have gone astray. (29) 

‘What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.  We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it (29-30) … It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval.’ (30) 

However, an over-emphasis on method and reasons may render us insensitive, or even impervious, to the vital place of context in our lives, along with the considerable implications and consequences which devolve from this. 

We cannot remain sensitive, alert to, and appreciate, the comprehensive intricate facets of contextual realities if we absorb our attention in method and reason. 

Socrates proposed people should abide substantially by the opinion of experts in seeking to establish truth. 

This ‘… sounded elitist, and it was … Yet Socrates’ elitism had no trace of snobbery or prejudice.  He might have discriminated in the views he attended to, but the discrimination operated … on the basis of rigid reason …’ (33) 

Yet, to rely on the constrained perspectives of experts, while perhaps temporarily expedient and pragmatic, will not provide us with a reliable broad holistic perspective, as Alfred North Whitehead established so emphatically.  

Nevertheless, the gravity of Socrates’ execution and death as a good man with noble aspirations serves as an enduring source of encouragement for us. 

‘We might never have been jeered at for a physical deformity, nor condemned to death for our life’s work, but there is something universal in the scenario of being misunderstood of which these stories are tragic, consummate examples …  

‘Social life is beset with disparities between other’s perceptions of us and our reality (40) … In the hatred unfairly directed towards an innocent philosopher we recognise an echo of the hurt we ourselves encounter at the hands of those who are either unable or unwilling to do us justice.’ (41) 

‘The philosopher [Socrates] had predicted that Athens would eventually see things his way, and it did.  Such redemption can be hard to believe in.  We forget that time may be needed for prejudices to fall away and envy to recede …  

‘The story encourages us to interpret our own unpopularity other than through the mocking eyes of local juries … We may not convince local juries in time to help ourselves, but we can be consoled by the prospect of posterity’s verdict.’ (41) 

‘The validity of an idea or action is determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled but by whether it obeys the rules of logic … 

‘The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions:  that we should always, or never, listen to the dictates of public opinion … (42) 

Meanwhile, the guiding principle Epicurus applied as the basis of his ethos was:  ‘Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life … I don’t know how I shall conceive of the good if I take away the pleasures of taste, … sexual pleasure, the pleasure of learning, … the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of beautiful forms.’ (50) 

Yet ‘pleasure’ is clearly not the same as ‘the good’, or even ‘happiness’.  

Each of these attributes and/or qualities are different from each other.  

Even definitionally, their meanings diverge. 

Consequently, when de Botton shifts to a faith in happiness based on material wealth to substantiate his trust in utilitarian method and logic his position seems to slide even further into untenable realms, for me. 

‘… ‘What do I need for a happy life?’ is far from a challenging question when money is no object’ (53), de Botton gloats, ostensibly inadvertently letting slip his real ethos in all this. 

‘Our souls do not spell out their troubles more clearly than our bodies, and our intuitive diagnoses are rarely any more accurate,’ writes de Botton (54).  

Does he seek to infer intuition has no place in life and experience?  And, if not, what place would it have, and why? 

What follows is a reversion to the authority of hierarchy which would warm the heart of any imperious dictator.  ‘Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the lay person will be in about what is wrong with them, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically …’ (54) 

Then the perspective of Epicurus :  ‘… The task of philosophy was … to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire … We were to cease acting on first impulse and instead investigate the rationality of our desires according to a method close to that used by Socrates …’ (55) 

When he comes to describe Epicurus’ analysis of the elements inherent in pleasure he reverts to more modest criteria, yet this belies how he really regards happiness is constituted. 

Through his quest to establish what would now be termed an ‘intentional community’, Epicurus advanced some vital observations:  ‘Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship … Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink:  for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.’ (57) 

Then de Botton explains:  ‘The household of Epicurus resembled a large family …’ founded on ‘sympathy and gentleness … We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness (57) … Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not … (57-58) 

‘Epicurus and his friends made [another] radical innovation.  In order not to have to work for people they didn’t like, and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens …’ (58) 

The ideal of ‘freedom’ was also crucial for Epicurus, along with the efficacy of ‘thought’, particularly expressed in written form (58ff).   ‘In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge.  And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics:  confusion, displacement, surprise … There was much encouragement to think in the Garden, as Epicurus’ community became known,’ de Botton notes (58-58). 

‘If one thought about mortality, one would, Epicurus argued, realise that there was nothing but oblivion after death, and that ‘what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation … There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living’,’ (59). 

However, to posit ‘there is nothing terrible in not living’ is clearly not to capitulate to a prospective state of ‘oblivion after death’, as de Botton proclaims.  

Rather, Epicurus validly and astutely leaves the prospect open of what might proceed after death, as he realises he cannot authoritatively speculate on the nature of what is beyond this life. 

Whereas de Botton presumes, with no evidence cited, that only ‘oblivion’ follows life as we know it. 

What has become known these days as contingency analysis is offered by Epicurus as the method through which to evaluate desire.  ‘To avoid acquiring what we do not need or regretting what we cannot afford, we should ask rigorously the moment we desire an expensive object whether we are right to do so.  We should undertake a series of thought experiments in which we imagine ourselves projected in time to the moment when our desires have been realised, in order to gauge our likely degree of happiness. 

‘The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: 
What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished?
What will happen if it is not accomplished?’  [Epicurus] (63) 

Wisely, Epicurus explains:  ‘The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to remarkable joy.’ (64) 

‘Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? … because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand.  Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one.  We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves.  We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. 

‘We are not solely to blame for our confusions.  Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed the ‘idle opinions’ of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasising luxury and riches, seldom friendship freedom and thought.  The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence.  It is in the interests of commercial enterprises to skew the hierarchy of our needs …’ (65) 

So now, through dynamic imagery, de Botton astutely tracks and explains the general collective complicity and co-optation which abounds in the context of contemporary modernity.  ‘Advertising would not be so prevalent if we were not such suggestive creatures.  We want things when they are beautifully presented on walls, and lose interest when they are ignored or not well spoken of.  Lucretius lamented the way in which what we want is ‘chosen by hearsay rather than by the evidence of [our] own senses’ … Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary settings and individuals.  We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications … Art may help to correct the bias …’ (68) 

Hence a formidable challenge arises to the progressive acquisition of wealth, as Epicurus envisages this, and as described by de Botton.  ‘Because, for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-awareness and appreciation of simplicity … (70) 

‘Lucretius articulated [this situation] … In a world without Epicurean values:  

‘… Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to growth of genuine pleasure’ …’ (70)  

Living out life in quiet desperation?!

Another philosopher legendary in facing the challenges and tribulations of life with what I would characterise as a broad deep sense of authentic equanimity would be Seneca.  Indeed, like Socrates, whom he emulated, Seneca faced his ultimate excruciating demise ‘in torment but with equanimity’, according to de Botton (77). 

‘Seneca had helped to create an enduring association, together with other Stoic thinkers, between the very word ‘philosophical’ and a temperate, self-possessed approach to disaster.  He had from the first conceived philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality …’ (78) 

The Senecan worldview is grounded in being prepared for whatever may proceed for us as our exigencies in life, as de Botton explains.  ‘A single idea recurs throughout his work:  that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expect and cannot fathom.  Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions …’ (81) 

Considered from a certain prevalent perspective, Seneca’s insight boldly sheers through the presumption that our lives and existence are governed absolutely by determinist influences, at least to the extent that we cannot feasibly attempt to reason away any ethic of personal responsibility.  ‘… The angry … appeal to a predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty, the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by passionate feelings which reason neither identifies with nor can be held responsible for (82) … 

‘This account runs directly counter to Seneca’s view of the mind, according to which anger results not from an uncontrollable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and correctable) error of reasoning.  Reason does not always govern our actions, he conceded:  … if fingers are flicked over our eyes, we have to blink.  But anger does not belong in the category of involuntary physical movement, it can only break out on the back of certain rationally held ideas; if we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger. (82-83) 

‘And in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like … How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal (83) … We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful …’ (85) 

Yet such analysis relies on a split duality of our ‘involuntary physical’ from our emotional reflective behaviour, whereas behaviour is verifiable as integrated in an holistic organismic sense.  Also, thought is privileged at the expense of feeling and emotion through this essentially pragmatic perspective, which would exacerbate the notorious mind/body split, along with the consequences then likely to ensue. 

‘Fortune’, the deity invoked by Seneca to substantiate his philosophical analysis, seems more akin and aligned to a notion of Fate than the proactive beneficially providential aspect of ‘fortune’ which at least metaphorically is broadly intended to prevail in the modernist Western socio-cultural context. 

‘The cornucopia was a symbol of her [Fortune’s] power to bestow favours, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies … Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times, proposed Seneca.’ (87) 

Moreover, the form of destiny Seneca envisages and promulgates is fixed firmly within a life span frame, however this may work out, with no sustained attention at all to destiny as a patterned providential phenomenon.  ‘We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.  Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.  Reckon on everything, expect everything.’ – Seneca (91) 

While, as de Botton comments:  ‘The same could naturally have been conveyed in other ways.  In more sober philosophical language, one could say that a subject’s agency is only one of the causal factors determining events in the course of his or her life (91) …’ 

Allowance for, and appreciation of, an active place for personal destiny, with spiritual consequences, would foster a greater more hopeful context for ‘justice’.  

‘But we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our moral worth:  we may be cursed and blessed without justice behind either.  Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something.’ (93) 

However, personal destiny is ultimately about each of us as much as all of us.  

Meanwhile, for Seneca:  ‘The intervention of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical, introduced a random element into human destinies.’ (95) 

How to deal with ‘anxiety’ is a further concern of Seneca.  It is customary, in the broad contemporary social context, to consider ‘anxiety’ as a fairly familiar experience.  

So it raises some substantial concern to realise anxiety may well be the debilitating experience de Botton claims it is.  He defines anxiety as:  ‘A condition of agitation … [which] typically leaves sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social … Even in sublime settings the anxious could remain preoccupied by private anticipations of ruin …’ (96)  

So how would Seneca respond to our contemporary epidemic of anxiety? 

‘The traditional form of comfort is reassurance … But can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety.  Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass.  Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear …’ (96) 

A remarkable resemblance to contemporary deconstructive materialist perspectives derives from the Stoic position on ‘wealth’.  ‘… Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it …  

‘It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a production, a preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime …’ (98) 

Meanwhile, those of us who resolutely partake in the intensive (inter)personal journeying activity of the ‘International Year of Community’ Project would be buoyed by the resonant authenticity of this Senecan perspective, derived through Hecato: ‘ ‘What progress, you ask, have I made?  I have begun to be a friend to myself’ [Hecato]  That was indeed a great benefit … you may be sure such a man is a friend to all mankind.’ (103) 

The propensity to distinguish aspects of interpretation is a core value in Senecan analysis, as evident in this proposition:  ‘Abject interpretation:  The builder is hammering in order to annoy me.  Friendly interpretation:  The builder is hammering and I am annoyed. (104) 

However, ultimately, necessity becomes the essential arbiter of how each and all of our courses throughout life will proceed:  ‘… for Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. (107) 

‘Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities …’ (109)  

But how can we be so sure, or even know in any inevitable sense, that any specific prospective form of necessity, really is so necessary? 

‘In the human world, we grow to believe that we may always alter our destinies, and hope and worry accordingly.  It is apparent from the heedless pounding of the oceans or the flight of comets across the night sky that there are forces entirely indifferent to our desires …’ (111) 

Yet how would we know what our ‘destiny’ might be in this context, when there is no real initiative to establish how we might, or would, decipher ‘our’ destiny, nor to situate or position our destiny in the greater dimension or realm of existence?  … And what would be the nature of our ‘desires’?  How would these relate to ‘our’ other characteristics, attributes, values and/or qualities, and thence to the greater context of significance, memory and relevance implied? 

If we are not prepared or placed to deal with these broader facets of ‘our’ collective and (inter)personal reality and experience, then we are resisting or denying a whole relevant perspective of our lives in the pretence that it has no relevant or essential place for us, merely because it is too tedious or difficult to be considered … Perhaps we might reflect on one of Albert Einstein’s most incisive statements: 

‘We live in eternal question.’ 

May ‘we’ always remember this. 

Blending ‘friendship’ and ‘love’ – a paradox revisited

Cicero praises ‘scholarship’ in a passage from the Tusculan Disputations, quoted by de Botton.  ‘There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship … scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation.’ (118) 

Then de Botton responds to this perspective with an observation from 
Michel de Montaigne, which actually is intended as a retort to this very passage from Cicero. 

‘In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives [than Cicero] …’ (118-119) 

What is ignored through this perspective from Montaigne is that we are all different people, variously situated in life, with varying distinctive attributes, qualities and initiatives to bring forward and provide in the collective and/or universal context of humanity.  It is not our place in life, and the context of Providence, for all and each of us to live as ‘little women’ in remote villages.  While de Botton may be reluctant to acknowledge this, given his own experience of life, the approach he proposes constitutes effectively an insular conservative philosophy which privileges unanimity over diversity in the socio-cultural context, and would ultimately serve as a recipe for uni-dimensional social engineering. 

Thus what requires exploration is the way through which Montaigne’s preferred ‘more equable and more constant’ form of life can be modified so that genuine appreciation, acceptance and respect of difference, diversity and (inter)personal authenticity is incorporated into the prevalent socio-communal and cultural context.  

However, to expect each and all of us to be fundamentally ‘gentle’ in our attitudes is too myopic, in my view.  My perspective is that a demeanour derived through authentic equanimity could satisfy the foregoing criteria without impairing the delicate essential fabric of socio-cultural diversity. 

Nevertheless, if suitably situated in the relevant context, there can be a refreshing genuine modesty which emanates from Montaigne’s earthy precepts:  ‘… if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery we did not have, we stood to find – in Montaigne’s generous, redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate …’ writes de Botton (121).  

‘Montaigne’s philosophy is one of reconciliation:  ‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being,’ Montaigne proposed …’ (123)  Accordingly, he advocated resolute patient persistence in matters of (inter)personal relations, intimacy and Love:  ‘… a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all,’ he wrote. (125)  

‘Montaigne attributed our problems with our bodies in part to an absence of honest discussion about them in polite circles … (125) 

‘Montaigne was faulting our conventional portraits for leaving out so much of what we are … He abandoned millennia of authorial coyness to write about himself.  He set out to describe as explicitly as possible the workings of his own mind and body – declaring his intention in the preface to the Essays (1580) (128) … He was concerned with the whole man, with the creation of an alternative to the portraits which had left out most of what man was (129) …’ de Botton observes. 

Clearly, Montaigne was aware of the phenomenon of collective complicity, co-optation, the influence of fashion for its own sake, and the generalised mediocrity which could emerge from all this. 

‘If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves.  What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame,’ de Botton notes (129).  

Yet Montaigne remained reasonably optimistic throughout these complex exigencies.  ‘It is not that wisdom is impossible, rather it is the definition of wisdom that Montaigne was seeking to nuance.  True wisdom must involve an accommodation with our baser selves, it must adopt a modest view about the role that intelligence and high culture can play in any life and accept the urgent and at times deeply unedifying demands of our mortal frame …’ (130) 

The often extreme polarised duality which plagues contemporary interpersonal relations, even frequently expressed as adversarial intransigence, is adeptly noted by de Botton.  He pertinently reveals how this disdainful condition is really a form of marginalisation. 

‘Another cause of a sense of inadequacy is the speed and arrogance with which people seem to divide the world into two camps:  the camp of the normal and that of the abnormal.  Our experience and beliefs are liable frequently to be dismissed with a quizzical, slightly alarmed, ‘Really?  How weird,’ accompanied by a raised eyebrow, amounting in a small way to a denial of our legitimacy and humanity.’ (131) 

Accordingly, Montaigne, during his time, reflected on the propensity for people cloistered in isolated situations to become insular in their aspect, with reference to regional French people in this respect.  

‘French travellers were prone to be very upset by … differences,’ notes de Botton (132). 

Then he quotes Montaigne:  ‘Once out of their villages, they feel like a fish out of water.  Wherever they go they cling to a fellow countryman … they celebrate the event … With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks, and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.’ (132) 

Montaigne was patently aware of just how entrenched cultural differences and perspectives can be.  ‘Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.’ (135) 

‘Montaigne … attempt[ed] to broaden his reader’s provincial conception of the normal – following in the footsteps of his favourite philosopher: 

‘When they asked Socrates where he came from, he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’.’ (135) 

Hence Montaigne considered problematic the aspect of familiarity and adherence to national influences as these effectively became manifest through what would now essentially constitute ideology. 

‘Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country.  There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything’ – Montaigne’ (142). 

Here Montaigne was clearly stating the situation as he proposed it existed.  However, he was not, as de Botton interprets, seeking to assert that:  

‘Our country might have many virtues, but these did not depend on it being our country.’ (142)  Nor was he necessarily stating that:  ‘… Nationality and familiarity were absurd criteria by which to decide on the good.’ (143)  Rather, his point was palpably that there is no other ‘criterion’ for learning cross-cultural respect than predominantly through ‘the opinions and customs of our own country’ (142).  

We were born into such a socio-cultural context, so we could not readily distend ourselves from this influence. 

‘Careful reasoning rather than prejudice was to be the means of evaluating behaviour,’ according to Montaigne (143). 

‘Perhaps we should remember the degree to which accusations of abnormality are regionally and historically founded.  To loosen their toll on us, we need only expose ourselves to the diversity of customs across time and space.  What is considered abnormal in one group at one moment may not and will not always be deemed so.  We may cross borders in our minds.’ (143-144) 

‘Every man may bear the whole form of the human condition, but it seems that no single country can tolerate the complexity of this condition.’ (145-146) 

How these admonitions work out in reality, in a teleologic and ontologic sense and context, through to our contemporary time, is that they prefigure and indicate the continuous consistent legacy, heritage and relevance of each or our distinctive (inter)personal contributions in the whole context of humanity, together with the broad context of universality in this sense.  This project, or prospect, extends beyond limited generational and national or group cultural parameters to constitute and purvey meaning, significance, relevance and resonance in the greater context of civilisation, humanity and universality. 

Friendship was accordingly a vital element in all this for Montaigne.  

‘Another consolation for accusations of abnormality is friendship, a friend being, among other things, someone kind enough to consider more of us normal than most people do.  We may share judgements with friends that would in ordinary company be censured for being too caustic, sexual, despairing, daft, clever or vulnerable – friendship is a minor conspiracy against what other people think of as reasonable,’ (146). 

Perhaps … However, the paradox here is that true friends are essentially honest and authentic with and for us.  They can challenge us, and thereby strengthen our perspectives, through fine-grained critical analysis … through deep sensitive honesty which ‘acquaintances’ – rather than the established friends to whom de Botton refers – would not venture, given lack of courage or trust, or the influence of fear. 

Montaigne actually sketched out the nature and character of such deep abiding friendship.  ‘What we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other.  In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.’ – Montaigne (147). 

Such a perspective thoroughly complements my own sense of the blend of dimensional accord through which distinctive (inter)personal threads of meaning and significance can interact and integrate to form a whole patterned consistent continuous context. 

For Montaigne, his good close friend, La Boetie, was his inspirational source of support in this endeavour. 

‘He alone had the privilege of my true portrait.’ – Montaigne (147). 

Correspondingly, de Botton observes of La Boetie:  ‘… He allowed him [Montaigne] to be himself; through his psychological acuity, he enabled him to be so.  He offered scope for valuable and yet until then neglected dimensions of Montaigne’s character – which suggests that we pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.’ (147) 

Who ‘we think we are’ … or who we are actually … or how much of who we are we choose to reveal?  All of these apply because, after all, ultimately we are actually entities in some sense, regardless of the extent to which we presume we are entities.  Accordingly, there is a sense in which we don’t completely choose our friends because they are just spontaneously there, ready to become who they will be for us over time, regardless of how they are for us when we are yet to realise, and become aware of, their comprehensive substantial place, meaning and significance for us.  

‘The friendship [with La Boetie] would not have been so valuable if most people had not been so disappointing – if Montaigne had not had to hide so much of himself from them.’ (147) 

But perhaps in not pursuing the initiative to trust and faith in those other ‘acquaintances’, despite any consequences, but rather fearing them such that he wouldn’t express himself to them, Montaigne actually thwarted other opportunities to realise the close sharing he experience with La Boetie … and, after all, actually chose such a course himself fairly comprehensively. 

This is the greater broader perspective of the reality in question, in my view. 

Meanwhile, de Botton continues:  ‘He was never to be blessed again in his friendships [after La Boetie passed away suddenly], but he discovered the finest form of compensation.  In the Essays, he recreated in another medium the true portrait of himself that La Boetie had recognised.  He became himself on the page as he had been himself in the company of his friend … He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:  

‘Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.’ – Montaigne (148).  ‘And yet we should be grateful for the paradox.  Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely …’ (148) 

Montaigne considered there were much broader perspectives from which life ought to be understood and valued than through basic ‘learning’, per se, as de Botton explains this. 

‘If a man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life,’ Montaigne wrote (152). 

‘Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding …’ is how de Botton interprets Montaigne’s quest (152). 

‘To understand why … men could … [be] both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge, learning and wisdom … in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.’ (153) 

Again, Montaigne:  ‘I gladly come back to the theme of our education:  its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned.  And it has succeeded …  

‘It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom:  it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology …

‘We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best …  

‘We work merely to fill the memory, having the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.’ (153) 

What were most cogent for Montaigne were ‘… the challenges of quotidian life:  love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.’ (155) 

‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being,’ wrote Montaigne (156). 

Thus, for de Botton, the question is raised:  ‘How much love should one have for oneself?’ (156). 

Accordingly:  ‘… measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new elite.  Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognised as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.’ (156) 

Yet, isn’t this effectively really how modernist Western society and culture is now already structured, with the broadest possible so-called ‘middle class’ democratic(?) elite as the amorphous and mediocre virtually absentee landlords in this tyranny of generalised common wealth?! … Even though there is also an even greater privileged ‘class’ of individuals beyond this. 

‘I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than university rectors,’ writes Montaigne (157).  However, he seems to lack a fine-grained justification for this position, given such academics could each be ‘happy’ in their own distinctive ways.

‘Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with mysterious books:  ‘I cannot have lengthy commerce with [them],’ he wrote, ‘I only like pleasurable, easy [ones] which tickle my interest.’ (157) 

However, as de Botton notes:  ‘… If Montaigne enjoyed presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence during philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose.  The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good writing … Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.’ (158) 

Philosophers were advised to present their ideas and theoretical perspectives in basic forms of communication and expression by Montaigne.  

‘There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market: 

‘Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal and or unusual fashion, so too in speech;  the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent school-masterish ambition …’ (159) 

‘But writing with simplicity requires courage …’ (159) 

Moreover, Montaigne recognised the value of erudite insight and expression gleaned from the traditional wisdom of former distinguished authors. 

‘It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match.  They know us better than we know ourselves.  What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them …’ (161) 

Yet experience suggests our faith in such a process certainly may not be always altogether well placed.  

‘There are authors too clever for our own good.  Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word.  Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in their successors …’ (162)  After all, Aristotle ‘… rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him …’ (163)  But why would ‘irreverence’ be so ‘vital to creative work’?  This is something de Botton fails to really address and explain. 

While, ‘… commentators may be criticised’ for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers, they cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves – which was a reason why Montaigne included so many quotations and passages of commentary in the Essays (163). 

Yet, perhaps he regretted this approach, as might be construed from his ultimate confession:  ‘If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may … (164) 

‘If he lacked confidence, it was because the closer one came to him in time and place, the less his thoughts were likely to be treated as though they might be … valid …’ (164).  A most curious phenomenon! 

‘Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves:  

‘ … We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’;  … But what have we got to say?  What judgements do we make?  What are we doing?  A parrot could talk as well as we do …’  Parroting wouldn’t be the scholar’s way of describing what it takes to write a commentary …’ (165) 

While we might just as readily, even validly, be inclined to bark back resolutely:  ‘Speak for yourself!’ 

‘But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life …  

‘However modest our stories we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old: 

‘Were I a good scholar, I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise.  Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger … sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle.  Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition (166) … We are richer than we think, each one of us … You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff (167) …’ 

… Or, as de Botton concludes:  ‘A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.’ (168) 

Thence, de Botton provides an account of the life of Arthur Schopenhauer, accompanied by the argument that his famous profound woes, pessimism and gloom were the outcome of blighted love. 

Although presented as eminently plausible, this analysis is simplistic and even improbable, from my perspective.  Schopenhauer enjoyed an extensive ten good years with his ultimate loved one, throughout all of which he was supported with the option of marriage.  Clearly, he may not have been inclined to marriage.  

Yet he would have either consciously or implicitly realised his ten good years of relationship would have advantaged him light years beyond the many people who never know such substantial relationship throughout their lifetimes. 

What would have been truly soul-destroying for Schopenhauer, as a seasoned philosopher, would have been his attempts to lecture at Berlin University from 1820, only to have five attendee students for each lecture, while Hegel lectured at the same university then, in audible proximity, to audiences of 300 students (176).  This most probably would have chilled Schopenhauer to the core of his being. 

Along with this setback, his less than ‘consoling’ encounter with Goethe, when Schopenhauer was 25, with his ‘feelings for the writer … never wholly reciprocated’ (174), and with Schopenhauer penning his Chamfort lines about Goethe:  ‘Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be what they are not’ (175) … all this would likely have tainted Schopenhauer’s interpersonal expectations.  

Moreover, the reality his father committed suicide when Arthur was a little tacker would not have been conducive to a wholesome life trajectory (172). 

Meanwhile, the reception of his core work was clearly less than ameliorating for these expectations, with only 230 copies of The World as Will and Representation sold from its appearance in 1819.  A substantial and intriguing insight into Schopenhauer’s basic character is evident through his declaration on conclusion of this work, in 1818, that:  ‘A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?’ (175) 

Preoccupied with amusement at Schopenhauer’s apparent attempt to charm the 17-year-old Flora Weiss, when Schopenhauer was aged 43, de Botton seems to regard this event with great significance.  Schopenhauer ‘smiles’ and ‘offers’ the girl a bunch of white grapes ‘during a boating party’ (177).  Such behaviour could hardly be a pretext for considering Schopenhauer’s actions as in any way inappropriate, or even unconventional, even if he did intend to ‘charm’ the girl, which would not be aberrant behaviour in itself. 

The deeper more entrenched reality here is likely to be a form of paradox. 

While the girl in question writes privately in her diary that she is affronted by Schopenhauer’s friendly demeanour, in reality she more than like actually appreciates Schopenhauer’s attention to her, at least in some basic way. 

After all, it is in essence somewhat courageous of Schopenhauer to so regard the girl in question, and she would realise this.  There would at least be some sense in which this is a case of ‘the girl doth protest too much’, from my perspective. 

Being 17, she is at an age where she could appreciate something of the dynamics of what is happening.  Although this propensity would be variable, depending on the capacity and maturity of her personal development – which would vary depending on her individuality, whatever her age and place in the whole of life.  

If the girl was not disposed to be friendly in the company of Schopenhauer, why would she be in the boat with him in the first place? 

Schopenhauer’s response in the face of such interpersonal difficulty at the time is therefore understandable:  ‘Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’ (177) 

When the stark reality and substantial significance of Schopenhauer’s work finally edges its way into the mostly ephemeral consciousness of people collectively, transforming the severe marginalisation and ostracism which has debilitated his already long life, Schopenhauer is aged 63. 

‘After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with dreams and trumpets …’ Schopenhauer laments (181). 

Although this situation may have constituted something of a blessing in disguise for Schopenhauer, such a reality was not worthy of an exoneration of reasonable collective responsibility and maturity in this context.   

‘Would anyone with a great mind ever have been able to attain his goal and create a permanent and perennial work, if he had taken as his guiding star the bobbing will-o’-the-wisp of public opinion, that is to say the opinion of small minds?’ comments Schopenhauer (181). 

So much for the prospective veracity of opinion polls !! … Indeed, an insightful declaration. 

What perplexed Schopenhauer emphatically was his realisation that philosophers were not inclined to consider matters of Love.  ‘We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material,’ he proposed (185). 

‘The neglect seemed the result of a pompous denial of a side of life which violated man’s rational self-image.  Schopenhauer insisted on the awkward reality: 

‘Love … interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds.  It does not hesitate … to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned.  It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts … It sometimes demands the sacrifice of … health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness.’ (185) 

Like Montaigne, ‘… Schopenhauer was concerned with what made man – supposedly the most rational of all creatures – less than reasonable …’ (185)  

Correspondingly, Schopenhauer identified what he posited as  ‘… a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason’s plans and judgements, and which he termed the will-to-life … defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce … (185-186) 

‘Schopenhauer might have resented the disruption of love (it isn’t easy to proffer grapes to schoolgirls [de Botton’s comment]); but he refused to conceive of it as either disproportionate or accidental …’ (186) 

Accordingly, Schopenhauer thence presented the deep profundity of this situation:  ‘… It is no trifle that is here in question; on the contrary, the importance of the matter is perfectly in keeping with the earnestness and ardour of the effort.  The ultimate aim of all love-affairs … is actually more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. 

‘What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation … the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come.’ (186) 

Meanwhile, ‘the intellect’ remains captive to ‘the will’ in all this.  ‘[The intellect] does not penetrate into the secret workshop of the will’s decisions.  It is, of course, a confidant of the will, yet a confidant that does not get to know everything … [It] remains … much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.’ (187) 

Thence de Botton elaborates:  ‘An exclusion which explains how we may consciously feel nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again, while unconsciously being drive by a force aiming at the reproduction of the next generation.’ (187)  Consequently, de Botton observes that such an  ‘… analysis surely violates a rational self-image …’ (187) 

What characterises de Botton’s analysis of Schopenhauer’s ideas is a most utilitarian perspective of what is customarily considered to be the nefarious quality of love:  ‘… why, despite good intentions, were we unable to develop a sexual interest in certain others [as alternative partners], who were perhaps objectively as attractive and might have been more convenient to live with?’ (189)  

Apart from the evident aspect of love being situated in such a coldly calculated paradigm, Schopenhauer commits himself to a substantial emphatic prospect and project in this respect. 

‘We are not free to fall in love with everyone [‘anyone’ may be the more pertinent designation here] because we cannot produce healthy children with everyone.  Our will-to-life drives us towards people who will raise our chances of producing beautiful and intelligent offspring, and repulses us away from those who lower these same chances.  Love is nothing but the conscious manifestation of the will-to-life’s discovery of an ideal co-parent … (189) 

‘The will-to-life must ensure that the next generation will be psychologically and physiologically fit enough to survive in a hazardous world, and so it seeks that children be well-proportioned in limb … and stable of mind …’ (190) 

This initiative ultimately translates into a broad aspiration towards ‘balance’.  

‘… Since our parents made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves.  We have typically come out too tall, too masculine, too feminine [and so on] … If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder in oddity …  

‘The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own … and hence help us to restore physical and psychological balance in the next generation.’ (191) 

Schopenhauer describes the nature of this process, as quoted by de Botton.  

‘Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated, or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced … 

‘The neutralisation of the two individualities … requires that the particular degree of his manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of her womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other.’ (191)  

However, while the broad principle of balance clearly applies to the evolution and propagation of children, it doesn’t apply consistently forthwith to the quality and continuity of relations and relationships:  ‘… a person who is highly suitable for our child is almost never (though we cannot realise it at the time …) very suitable for us’ (191). 

As Schopenhauer puts this:  ‘That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune’ … (191) 

‘The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years.  We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends: 

‘Love … casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover.  But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him … He is thus completely infatuated by their delusion, which vanishes as soon as the will of the species is satisfied, and leaves behind a detested partner for life … for ultimately he seeks not his interest, but that of a third person who has yet to come into existence, although he is involved in the delusion that what he seeks is his own interest,’ Schopenhauer maintains. 

‘So one day, a boyish woman and a girlish man will approach the altar with motives neither they, nor anyone … will have fathomed.’ (192) 

Then Schopenhauer:  ‘It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly … The coming generation … is provided for at the expense of the present.’ (193) 

What Schopenhauer then encouraged was effectively greater more comprehensive holistic personal acceptance of the consequences of our human situation. 

‘The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection – the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal … Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising the greatest happiness we could imagine.  To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves … 

‘What is more, we are not inherently unlovable.  There is nothing wrong with us per se.  Our characters are not repellent, nor our faces abhorrent.  The union collapsed because we were unfit to produce a balanced child with one particular person … One day we will come across someone who can find us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally natural and open with us … (194) 

‘We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors.  The break-up was not their choice.  In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualise an essentially unconscious negative verdict formulated by the will-to-life …’ (194-195) 

As Schopenhauer put all this:  ‘What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children’ … ‘We should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love:  ‘… between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organised, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself’ … We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was not – a greater reason to surrender our grip on love,’ de Botton then comments (195). 

‘The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels [to other animals] …  

‘We pursue love affairs, chat in cafes with prospective partners and have children with as much choice in the matter as moles and ants – and are rarely any happier … He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness.  It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.  The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering …’ (197-198) 

Poignancy was another core element vital to genuine appreciation of love and its aesthetic expression, as I have emphasised in the context of The Community Project life journey exploration over the past decade. 

‘We do have one advantage over moles.  We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems – and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life …   

‘What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image.  Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own … In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.’ (199) 

‘… The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us. (199) 

As Schopenhauer put it:  ‘The … poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in his way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times.  From this it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apothegms, find frequent application in real life.’ (200) 

Goethe’s classic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was Schopenhauer’s oracle and trusty reference resource for his paradigmatic principles.  

‘Goethe’s readers not only recognised themselves in The Sorrows of Young Werther, they also understood themselves better as a result … He had, for example, perfectly captured the apparently kind – yet infinitely cruel – manner with which the person who does not love deals with the one who does … 

‘The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,’ knew Schopenhauer.’ (200) 

‘But by reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the organising drive to propagate the species (201) … 

‘Schopenhauer remarks:  ‘In the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself … more as a knower than as a sufferer. 

‘We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.’ (202) 

The conundrum of personal character

Meanwhile:  ‘Few philosophers have thought highly of feeling wretched.  A wise life has traditionally been assisted with an attempt to reduce suffering:  anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache,’ writes de Botton (205). 

However, a notable exception is Friedrich Nietzsche, as de Botton puts this.  Nietzsche was impeccably alert to the commonality and preponderance of constrained conventional perspectives and perception.  

‘In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time … usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make,’ Nietzsche wrote (206).  

During his youth, Nietzsche discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and forthwith took it to heart.  It became his inspiration.  

Thus Nietzsche described his first encounter with Schopenhauer:  

‘I took [Schopenhauer’s book] in my hand as something unfamiliar and turned the pages.  I don’t know which daimon was whispering to me:  ‘Take this book home.’  In any case, it happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise never rushing into buying a book.  Back at the house I threw myself into a corner of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work on me.  Each line cried out with renunciation, negation, resignation.’ (207)  

Accordingly, an Aristotelian remark from the Nicomachean Ethics is cited from Nietzsche by de Botton as the essence of such analysis:  ‘The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.’ (207) 

‘The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognise the impossibility of fulfilment and to avoid the troubles and anxiety that we typically encounter in its pursuit,’ de Botton writes (207). 

Yet, sometime later, Nietzsche began to renounce core Schopenhaurean propositions.  ‘One of these propositions being that, because fulfilment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly …’ (210) which Nietzsche considered tantamount to being ‘hidden in forests like shy deer’ (210).  Rather:  ‘Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognising its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good,’ as de Botton interprets Nietzsche (210). 

Nietzsche maintained that quality of life in any human context, or for humanity, depended on ‘Ubermenschen’, which would be interpreted as ‘good character’.  Those few people with such personal quality  ‘… had explored their possibilities, they possessed what Nietzsche called ‘life’, which suggested courage, ambition, dignity, strength of character, humour and independence (and a parallel absence of sanctimoniousness, conformity, resentment and prissiness),’ as explained by de Botton (211-212).  

For instance, Nietzsche called Goethe, as a consummate candidate for ‘Ubermenschen’, ‘magnificent’:  ‘… He made us of … practical activity … he did not divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it … [he] took as much as possible upon himself … What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.’ (214) 

Nietzsche’s prescription on the crucial place of raw lived experience is clear.  ‘Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms …’ (215) 

Hence, de Botton comments:  ‘Why?  Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.  We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. 

‘Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.’ (215) 

‘The philosophy amounted to a curious mixture of extreme faith in human potential (fulfilment is open to us all …) and extreme toughness … It was in order to accustom us to the legitimacy of pain that Nietzsche spent so much time talking about mountains’ … (217) 

‘In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain:  either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow,’ wrote Nietzsche (218). 

The Nietzschean trajectory through which mediocrity is transcended by pain to culminate in fulfilment is linked by de Botton to forms of mountain metaphor and analogy reminiscent of Nietzschean philosophy.  ‘There is an extraordinary stillness in the air, it seems one can touch the roof of the world.  The height leaves one out of breath but curiously slated.  It is hard not to start grinning, perhaps laughing, for no particular reason, an innocent laughter that comes from the core of one’s being and expresses a primal delight at being alive to see such beauty.’ (220-221) 

Correspondingly, in the context of humanity, savagery is situated as a precursor to a more amenable form of civilisation.  ‘So it is, too, in the history of mankind:  the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilisation might raise its house …’ (223) 

Then de Botton continues.  ‘But frightful difficulties are sadly, of course, not enough.  All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met.  Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer …’ (224) 

The thread of the sustained profile for the place of pain is taken forward in a greater definitive form through a core insight from Montaigne, quoted by de Botton in this context.  

‘We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid.  Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones … [We have] got to know how to use all of them and blend them together.  So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life …’ (224) 

This interpretation of blended dualities from Montaigne is further formed into a more specific Nietzschean analysis of evidence of ‘qualities’ in the context of human development.  ‘Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents!  One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted.  They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ … through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak … they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.’ (226) 

Nietzsche proposed an equitable cultivation of all emotions in each human context, as each emotion, or ‘drive’, retained a beneficial significance in the whole context:  ‘… in life, at the root level, there may be difficult emotions and situations which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the greatest achievements and joys,’ was how de Botton stated the Nietzschean position in this respect (227). 

‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger … belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a negative successfully gardened [or cultivated] … We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.’ (228) 

Then a Nietzschean perspective or ‘culture’ emerges.  ‘The greater and more terrible the passions are that an age, a people, an individual can permit themselves, because they are capable of employing them as a means, the higher stands their culture’ – Nietzsche. 

‘Fulfilment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart.  Nietzsche urged us to endure,’ was how de Botton expressed the epitome of the Nietzschean principle here (230). 

Life was to be lived to the max, in all its suffering, with this being its definitive characteristic from Nietzsche’s perspective.  ‘If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defeat of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the religion of comfortableness …’ (232-233) 

Prime among such ‘religion’ would have been ‘Utilitarianism’ for Nietzsche.  ‘Nietzsche [expressed trenchant] antipathy … to what had been the dominant British school of moral philosophy:  Utilitarianism, and its greatest proponent, John Stuart Mill.  The Utilitarians had argued that in a world beset by moral ambiguities, the way to judge whether an action was right or wrong was to measure the amount of pleasure and pain it gave rise to.  Mill proposed that:  ‘Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.  By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.’   

So what is ultimately implied here is the quest to invoke a ‘balanced’ approach as an antidote to ‘ambiguity’.  Utilitarianism is all about ‘balance’. 

Yet, as de Botton pertinently points out, Nietzsche  ‘… was, of course, also striving for happiness; he simply believed that it could not be attained as painlessly as the Utilitarians appeared to be suggesting …’ (233) 

While Nietzsche deplored Christianity, most ironically, at the one time of his life when he acquired just a smidgeon of surplus income from a publication settlement  ‘… in 1885, he ordered a large headstone for his father’s grave on which he had carved a quotation from the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians (I Corinthians 13: 8):  ‘Charity [Love] never faileth …’ (235) 

Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity was deeply embedded in his analyses.  ‘Christians had rushed to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded.  They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have (237-238) … Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.’ (238) 

Hence it could be interpreted from Nietzsche’s complaint that Christians were trapped on the horns of a profound diabolical paradox. 

Moreover:  ‘… we all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have;  when we blithely say we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health … How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our setbacks?  To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never.’ (238)  

However, what we may well encounter is the dilemma or challenge of realising precisely what it is we really want, given the variable dynamics of each changing situation, and to what extent we want this, I would contend. 

This is what I would pose as the paradox of proportion … It is the profound paradox which arises whenever we seek a state of ‘balance’, or even ‘equilibrium’, as the predominant principle for our lives. 

Conclusion:  
 
After denial – continuity as it relates to responsibility, destiny and fulfilment 

When de Botton cites ‘the mocking eyes of local juries’ (41) what he is effectively referring to are peer groups.  It was once the case that we could remain free of conviction from ‘a jury of [our] peers’ and remain ‘still crazy, after all these years’, as Paul Simon confesses in one of his famous songs.  But the public propensity for even the formerly most notably radical and socially profligate babyboomers to rely on such implicit respect and appreciation has flagged decrepitly in recent times. 

Why? … Because the attrition of massive denial has substantially kicked into this situation.  As a now predominant generation of conventionally servile babyboomers, many of us can no longer remember even what it might be like to aspire towards earnest, consistent and continuous authenticity.  We have already sold our souls to the dodgy shifty logic of opinion polling and the relentless mantras of spin doctors badgering us into whatever dubious perspectives they seek to purvey, often in the cause of commodification, consumerism, and as always, globalism. 

However, our denial ushers in a collective relationship steeped in virtuality.  For, although we often fervently foster such denial, we pretend we are aware of its reach and any potential consequences it brings with it.  

Consequently, we convince ourselves we can proceed to engage the denial, and yet presume this doesn’t matter, as we are often well aware of the reality.  

As long as we maintain our implicit awareness we are free of the preponderance of collective insistence and myopia, we reason. 

Moreover, ‘the jury of our peers’ is not an indiscriminate form brought forward on the pretext of a hypothetical whim.  The substantive socio-political and cultural superstructure of convention, precedent and narrow principle constitutes the grounding of these infinitely convened myriad forums which either consciously or intuitively roll into session as soon as a variation in perspective intervenes in the life course of one or many in any given situation … This is our challenge … 

And this is what so many of us seem prone or condemned to deny. 

This is a more insidious form of challenge than perhaps even Socrates faced, in some way.  Because the apparent evident response is nowhere near as stark and obvious to discern.  While the core consequence of a long tedious ignominious life of quiet desperation may be just as debilitating as a consequence as virtually immediate death. 

Most pertinently, Epicurus realised the vital element in all this was the company we keep – it was all about friendship. 

More particularly, Epicurus recognised that the crucial aspect in this context was the propensity of those concerned to effectively explore their character and prospects as friends. 

The point here was to broaden and affirm the scope and potential of relations with friends, so that they would be fruitful.  All that could be achieved, or to which we aspire, would then be within the realm of propensity. 

Love and respect were possible among or between friends, whereas nothing of a material nature could culminate in only true appreciation of the pre-eminent place and significance of friends for our lives. 

Clearly, also, Socrates was aware of this evident reality as far as the substantial place and value of friends were concerned. 

However, the essential criterion which is definitive in this context is the aspect of trust.  The experience of friendship in the extensive shared sense through which Epicurus envisages this will only thrive and remain nourished through the vibrant interactive continuity of trust. 

Lack of trust is why ‘the jury of [one’s] peers’ can slide into operation as a supremely structural pragmatic entity from which ‘love and respect’ tend to dissipate.  So it is vital to nurture this aspect of trust copiously if good robust authentic (inter)personal relations are to be retained, thereby to form the basic antidote to denial, whether or not this proliferates in a widely collective and intimately (inter)personal context. 

Many of us would maintain, along with Seneca in this, that the optimal way through which we may appreciate being friends with and among each other is to be a good friend to ourselves (103). 

However, for such an experience to remain truly authentic it would be vital for us, in effect, to ‘know ourselves’, or at least be aware of the intricacy of our being in the whole complex context of life and experience.  It would be crucial for us to realise substantially how we have come to be constituted, and how we are situated, in the greater realm of our humanity and existence. 

Hence, in this endeavour, it is important for us to be thoroughly aware of our (inter)personal being in the comprehensive perspective of how our lives have become manifest teleologically.  This implies the nurture of clarity around the place, significance, meaning and relevance of our respective distinctive (inter)personal journeys throughout our lives and experience. 

Such an (inter)personal challenge and prospect requires broad interpretation and elucidation of our perspectives relative to our personal experience in the context of collective endeavour, of course. 

Acceptance of responsibility for our place and initiative in this is crucial, along with a propensity to accept and appreciate broad perspectival dimensions, as Seneca admonished, especially through a propensity to retain moderate expectations in life and experience (85ff).  Such congruent expectations would also apply particularly in the human behavioural context of what is mutually acceptable in this sense. 

However, the Senecan analysis of ‘Fortune’ is much less credible (87ff). 

If fortune were merely ‘fate’, then why not so regard it accordingly?  Why envisage a form of fate which is commonly much more closely aligned with what might be termed ‘Providence’ than the less proactive version or interpretation of fate.  

If fate is to be a comprehensively determinist influence, as Seneca suggests, then this is not truly fortune, at least in the contemporary sense.  

Seneca was able to justify his position by invoking an influential deity, of course.  However, in the much more sanguine contemporary context, such an option is not effectively sustainable unless substantiated through direct lived experience.  The more plausible prospect is that people individually and collectively have some propensity to influence and channel their aspirations and experience, given certain dimensional parameters.  This can be validly posited as ‘destiny’, which raises a whole other realm of contention for the Senecan perspective – a realm which is not explored by Seneca. 

The Senecan position was one with which Montaigne was most palpably familiar through his own experience and deliberations, observing that we could learn more of and for ourselves from the experience of our own emotions and situations than through any of the great conventional interpretations of what constitutes and signifies our lived experience (161ff).  Montaigne distinguished between ‘learning’ and ‘wisdom’ in this respect (153ff). 

Therefore, Montaigne was more inclined to accept a position of personal destiny in the face of ostensibly blighted humanity than was Seneca.  This was because Montaigne clearly recognised the considerable propensities of people as individuals in the collective mutual context to form, and perhaps shape, their (inter)personal experience, and thereby also the essential reality of their lives and existence. 

People were thereby effectively empowered somewhat through this experience.  They were no longer prevailed on to remain as the ‘little women’ in remote villages (118-119) who were unable to aspire or interact beyond their limited socio-cultural context.  However, people could remain constrained through their own lack of initiative, of course, as did the ‘French travellers’ of Montaigne’s own time, who tended to remain culturally and regionally myopic and insular in their experience, according to Montaigne (132). 

Where what might be regarded as deep friendship was concerned, it was better to seek to be persistent in proving ourselves in our relations with others, rather than insisting on our inadequacy, for Montaigne (123-125ff).  We were admonished to remain essentially honest in sharing mutually, and of ourselves, in what could be considered a true spirit of authenticity (125ff).  Mostly, we remain severely marginalised by standard entrenched conventions and perspectives of what is popularly considered ‘normal’ in this respect (131ff). 

Deep friendship thereby requires courage to be sustained, as much as trust is required to retain the honesty of its essential nature, from my perspective.  

These elements can blend and be so blended in a dimensional accord, through which such deep friendship can be realised through a basically consistent and continuous expression of the significance and meaning inherent in the substantial mutual (inter)personal relations thereby established. 

There is a deeply spontaneous quality associated with friendship.  Those who become our friends are simply just there with us initially.  Then, over time, our friendship grows as it is enriched through our mutual experience until this eventually becomes a close and secure appreciation, and essential understanding, for those concerned. 

Thence trust, which proves true progressively over time, tends to culminate in a firmly grounded faith in each other from those concerned. 

Montaigne recognised the importance of being able to express philosophical ideas and principles through popular venues, such as the marketplace, but he also emphasised that the prospect and potential of these ideas to be understood was crucial in this context (159). 

Traditional wisdom from great legendary mentors for us in ideas and their expression could provide good substantial inspiration for us in this respect (161ff).  However, it was vital for the equivalent of sufficient and suitable deep fine-grained analysis of any insights discerned to be brought forward in ways which fostered comprehensive awareness of the place, significance and relevance of the work considered and advanced. 

Montaigne’s supreme insight may be evidenced through his keen appreciation of the distinctive life experience of each individual, along with the special respective relevance and resonance of each experiential journey in the whole context of (inter)personal endeavour. 

Accordingly, mimetic behaviour and response, as Montaigne identifies this (165), will always be evident in popular culture and social relations.  As long as individuals are able to retain suitable means and opportunities to explore and express their distinctive individuality, and contribute to their respective socio-cultural contexts distinctively in ways which are well recognised and appreciated, mimetic behaviour will remain perspectively sustainable.  However, crucial to such true appreciation and awareness is always the comprehensive situation of these distinctive (inter)personal contributions in the whole context.  There will always be some mimetic essence as the basis of whatever contemporary principles are brought forward from earlier ideas and notions. 

Deep friendship for Arthur Schopenhauer gravitates around the core love relationship with a specific partner, which effectively defines the (inter)personal endeavours of a lifetime.  Schopenhauer concurs with Montaigne’s quest to elucidate the humanity of the human condition (185), while Montaigne, from his experience with La Boetie, would empathise with Schopenhauer’s finely concentrated focus on the single most influential relationship in a given lifetime. 

‘Want and illusion’ are the interactive elements which sustain ‘life’, however they do so through the form of progressive ‘motion’ (177).  Schopenhauer would probably envisage this as ‘equilibrium’, as this life state would constitute ‘motion in balance’ for him.  My perspective is that the situation is more precisely one of flux, with a blend, or dimensional accord of the respective elements evident … Except that personal ‘want’ is a more complex characteristic, which aggregates and congeals into complex (inter)personal motives and intent, from my perspective. 

Schopenhauer would likely maintain that ‘want(s)’ becomes complex because it aligns with ‘will’, as a given evolutionary drive, which thereby engenders a subconscious influence which cannot be modified or thwarted, even by the conscious immediate ‘wants’ of any person.  Consequently, people ‘fall in love’, and attend to love with precision, through the more elementary ‘drive’ to propagate the species, which overrides simple human ‘wants’. 

Where I believe Schopenhauer misses the greater aspect of this perspective is through his preoccupation with ‘balance’ in all this (191ff). 

Essentially, what I consider occurs is that basic wants and wishes, even expectations, as these proceed forth, complexify into a greater more palpable and passionate realm of motive and intent.  Desire would be an expression of this realm, for instance.  These expressions of individual character, individuality, identity and destiny then blend, even seamlessly, with the progenitive influences (or ‘drives’) of will and evolutionary progression, together with a teleological element of being in all this.  However, to assert any form of ‘balance’ in this is to prefigure what is actually happening, thereby interposing an artificial conventional structured edifice in all this.  

It is not possible, nor positive, to attempt to presume the dimensions of this complex interactive process, in my view.  Nobody can really reliably discern authoritatively how the dynamics of this process are constituted, or form out, in my view.  There is a blend, or flux, of (inter)personal facets of being, character and experience evident … This is all that can be implied or construed.  

Although we can know the elements involved are primarily those already identified here. 

Schopenhauer’s propensity to isolate and separate out these elements in some form, such as ‘intellect’ from ‘will’ (187), for the sake of ‘balance’, effectively impairs the authenticity of such qualities, even though Schopenhauer recognises these are situated in interactive relationship.  The point is they are structured into a contrived hierarchy of influence. 

The eventual consequence of Schopenhauer’s preoccupation with structural parameters and compartmentalisation is the formation of a split duality.  

The tendency to what is effectively the splitting of reality, existence and being into categories often goes this way, as people are so prone to definition through the contrast of opposites.  

For Schopenhauer, this works out as the distinction of the progenitive drive from the relationship dynamics of human evolution (191ff).  Hence, in the context of (inter)personal relationships it is to be expected partners who choose to be with each other will be incompatible, as greater diversity will render a more finely tuned ‘balance’ of evolutionary qualities in the resultant progeny, while the prime evolutionary purpose of the relationship is simply to hoodwink the partners into producing children (193ff).  The partners may actually do well to separate once their progeny are produced. 

Even if this were a valid broad overview of the actual dynamics in process, we would be justified in enquiring, if so, why would these dynamics be figured in such an ostensibly haphazard relative way, and just how would this advance thence be implied as some grand teleological purpose as the logical extension of this analysis? 

Why would the human entity be so unsuitably adapted at the outset to have to endure such a debilitating evolutionary process, and what would be the significance of this in the context of humanity?  Only recourse to a sense of evolutionary and (inter)personal destiny may be configured to explain this, I believe, through which the place of deep friendship and relationship would thereby be validated and affirmed. 

The very reality that writers and artists tend to create and develop their work, and thereby proceed through an intuitive sense of universality, which is then often invoked and emboldened through those who recognise the place and significance of their work (200ff), bears testimony to this aspect of prevalent inherent destiny – collectively and personally, I believe.  

Further, this reality serves to enliven the prospect of the place and significance, relevance and meaning, of such work being brought forward in the context of popular culture and philosophy, and for such propensity to be encouraged among people in general, collectively and (inter)personally as a most positive prospective outcome and experience. 

Meanwhile, in his own passionate way, Friedrich Nietzsche was emphatically aware of how such vital (inter)personal dynamics could constitute the inspiration and potential fulfilment of human existence and experience. 

Nietzsche explained how people of ‘good character exuded dynamic personal qualities which distinguished their lives through their remarkable contributions (211-212). 

However, authentic appreciation of such deep interactive characteristics and their fulfilment only proceeds from bitter, often tortuous, raw lived experience, which hews our qualities into beautiful form over time. 

Yet, as Nietzsche’s mentor, Schopenhauer, adeptly revealed, the deep complexity which comprises our greater being is often oblivious to most people, especially in a public context, who only notice our most broadly evident traits and qualities (206). 

Consequently, collective popular perspective and perception often tends to be quite ephemeral and insubstantial – a reality often entrenched through obsessive peer groups and the like.  

This affirmation and confidence in the human spirit evident through character rendered Nietzsche somewhat more partial to the prospect of destiny, purveyed through providence, than the notion of fate, grounded in chance.  As if it were his destiny, Nietzsche seemed drawn to acquire and read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation when he found a copy of it in a local bookstore (107). 

What Nietzsche effectively does is take the delicate, fragile, tragic aspect of complex attributes deftly tracked through by Schopenhauer, then polarises and accentuates these.  So that what emerges are stark contrasts, even though these are recognised as experienced concurrently, with each being essential to comprehensively experienced life and existence, along with the cultivation of all these attributes in a ‘whole’ consistent context (228). 

Montaigne had revealed how qualities of pain and suffering, along with discord, could be blended with harmony and positive experience to realise aspirations for authentic fulfilment (224). 

The ‘religion of comfortableness’ (232-233) represented the moral servitude of conventional complexity and co-optation for Nietzsche, and this condition was epitomised most palpably through the contrived broadly ‘balanced’ parameters of Utilitarian ethics, through which a calculus of pleasure and pain was sought so human aspirations could be oriented towards the maximisation of pleasure (233). 

Yet, ironically, Nietzschean ethics and fulfilment was also predominantly based on notions of optimal balance, also … the prospect of balanced polarities of emotion and passion in the context of their open validation and expression. 

The sense of balanced parameters and polarities extolled by Nietzsche is evident in abundance throughout the contemporary socio-cultural and communal realm.  These elements appear through the pervasive plethora of socially structured and engineered situations and initiatives through which our lives are substantiated. 

Montaigne earlier revealed how contrived dualities could be brought to convergence through aspirations to authentic fulfilment in the context of (inter)personal and collective relations. 

Hence, rather than the contemporary popular emphasis on ‘equilibrium’, or ‘motion in balance’, as the pre-eminent philosophical principle, I hereby interpose the notion of authentic equanimity as the preferable principle. 

Equanimity draws specifically on the original philosophic values of mutual appreciation and acceptance which epitomised what was precisely implied by the term ‘philosophy’ in the context of metaphysics and daily existence. 

Equanimity remains the distinctive nature and character of philosophic endeavour.  It embodies the resolve of those who are philosophically inclined, or intellectuals, to strive to comprehensively respect this precious context through which (inter)personal and mutual experience is established and substantiated for all concerned as prevalently as is feasible throughout time. 

 

REFERENCES

Botton, Alain de 2000:  The Consolations of Philosophy,
		Hamish Hamilton:  Penguin edition 2001,
		Ringwood, Australia.

The Pocket Macquarie Dictionary 1991:
		The Macquarie Library, Macquarie University, Australia.
		Ann Atkinson – General Editor.

		For definitions, pp.1-2.

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