Letters from a Stoic

Luxury

2011-08-06T06:33:00.006+02:00

There are those who surround themselves with costly and refined items, dwell exclusively in select and exquisite environments, and provide themselves with pleasant experiences in excess of what their basic and natural needs would be — those who, in other words, seek luxuries in their lives.

What counts as basic and natural needs varies, of course, with a range of historical, regional, and cultural conditions. While there are certain obvious minimal requirements with respect to nutrition, housing, health, and human dignity (which are still not met in many portions of today's global society) the bar might be even higher in some places, where the overall social and economic conditions have been so fortunate, over a long period of time, that the level of what is commonly taken as 'minimal' and 'basic' has raised considerably. For example, the ability to move around freely and easily every day, by car or public transport, in an area so large that it would take a whole day on foot, just to be able to get to work, school, or go shopping, is no longer the privilege of a very few that it was, just as access to information in books or news media (such as television or papers) isn't for a minority any more. (There is certainly also the aspect of inequality within societies, which complicates the question what exactly counts as luxury in a particular instance even more.)

Wherever the line runs, however, in a given society, there is a sense in which some go beyond it and indulge in what clearly exceeds the basic and the normal — and that's where luxury, in the sense we're discussing here, begins. Is it bad to seek luxuries, in that sense, from the point of view of reflection on living a good life? Does it reveal a faulty character, or misguided choices of what to aim for in your life?

Well, if you can afford it, why shouldn't you choose to have a beautiful house with an ocean view, with a white marble terrace, where you sit watching sunsets while drinking noble wines? (Or insert here whatever your idea of a luxurious life style is.)

Notice, however, that there is an 'if' in this formulation. That is the 'if' of reason. It would be foolish not to choose something that is a real option for you. (Unless, perhaps, other choices seem even more sensible.) Luxuries may be within your reach when you are, say, wealthy enough to develop an expensive taste (and you can't come up with other ideas to which use you might want to put it). As with any external things, luxuries can be selected, provided they are among your options; and selecting carefully among our options is precisely how we should use those rational capacities we're endowed with as human beings.

A conditional choice such as this, a choice under an 'if' condition, puts these abilities to good use; it all gets problematic, however, when the drive towards luxury becomes unconditional; when it turns its object into a value, something that directs your actions, views and feelings. A clear mark of this is when when people get emotional (be it suspiciously protective or exuberantly excited); or judgmental about the luxuries which they enjoy themselves or those they see others indulge in (jealous looks and sniding remarks speak the same language here); or even start taking foolish actions (buy things they can't afford, or take to excesses like bathing in Champagne).

That is because emotions include a valuation: an emotion shows that you take something as valuable. (And luxuries aren't that — they're indifferents, which may be rationally selected, but not unconditionally.) When people get emotional about something, this indicates that they care more about it than that thing probably warrants; emotions incorporate an uncompromising attitude towards something as good or bad, as opposed to seeing it as simply preferable or dispreferable under certain given conditions. Likewise, when people get judgmental, they again imply that something of value, something of import under all circumstances, is at stake; and once more: that's not the case with luxuries. Finally, people display their values in how they act; and actions plainly incorporate the wrong values when aiming at things that can be clearly seen, with just a minimum of consideration, as utterly out of proportion, or downright stupid and disadvantageous in the long run.

Luxuries, being externals, things that can come from blind accident and might be taken away by a wilful turn of events, aren't really of value; they're not of the stuff that makes a life go well (or badly), they're mere indifferents as far as that overarching goal is concerned. Treating them as anything else, in your emotions, views, or actions, is mistaken (and will hurt the way your life goes, in the long haul). Take care.

The goal

2011-07-31T09:01:00.000+02:00

When we say that our goal is to live our lives well, what does that mean?

Think for a moment about different people's lives. I mean that. Take a minute and do think about whole lives: your grandparents, some relatives or acquaintances who've lived long ago but whose lives you know about, historical persons whose biographies you've read, characters in those epic novels that portray the lives of entire families through many generations; think of your friends, your children, your workmates and your boss, your neighbors and each of the people who sit on the same bus every morning, your hairdresser, your local MP — and think over all those people's lives: their childhood, youth, work life, parenthood, their best days and periods of illness, their special moments and dull everyday routines, their dreams and anxieties, wins and losses, triumphs and disappointments; think about what they would count as achieving their goals in live, and how they might rate their overall success or failure in achieving them so far (or having achieved them, if they've already passed away).

Now, after looking at all that diversity, there's one thing with which you surely would agree: it's not an unimportant question we're discussing here. In fact, there could hardly be anything more important for any one of us than finding and achieving the goal of our respective lives, wouldn't you say?

I hope you will also agree that such a goal can't spring simply from a moment's feeling. One can't have one goal of one's life today and a different one tomorrow, just to replace either by something else entirely next week.

(Perhaps the overall goal of our live can change from time to time, in large intervals — I won't rule that out. But if it changes, the new goal will then be the goal of your life; it will take the place of the old one as the overall aim, and should you fail to achieve it, then you've failed to reach the goal of your life, even if that previous goal has meanwhile been fulfilled. You can't simply 'fall back' on some former goal. That is so partly because it was your decision to change your goal; botching a decision as far-reaching as that is in itself a major failure, and that can hardly fit in any success story about the whole of your life.)

What, then, is the goal? What does it mean to live a life well? Of course, a detailed description will have to turn out differently for each of us: such a goal would have to be a guide to do the right thing in all sorts of situations, to being the person we should be, making the best of whatever has been dealt to us. Obviously, much of this will depend on the particular circumstances we'll find ourselves in. But is there perhaps a general description, a generic formula that covers what a goal would have to look like? (Even if that would need some spelling out for the various different circumstances.) Can we find some minimal criteria which a proper goal would have to fit?

In ancient times, there was a formula on which many philosophers agreed: they all found that 'happiness' was the goal in each of our lives. Of course, just as I said, what this would mean specifically might be different for you and for me, and then again different for anyone else. But still, so the ancient view goes, in each of the cases a good life would be one that makes you 'happy'.

Unfortunately, there is a widespread error in many people's understanding today of that ancient formula. The error stems from the fact that 'happiness' has come to mean something different in our modern time from what it meant then — it's come to mean a feeling; to be 'happy' means today to feel happy, and it didn't necessarily mean that in ancient times. And so people misunderstand the ancient formulation (that the goal of a good life would be to be 'happy') to the effect that they should live their lives so as to feel good as often, or as intensely, as possible. But that is not a sensible goal (and neither is it, in fact, what was meant by the ancient formula).

Actually, feelings are not a sensible goal of any achievement, much less a sensible goal for an entire life. To see this, take an example: suppose you want to climb the highest mountain of your country. That's an ambitious long-term project. It requires that you learn new skills, undergo hard training, practice many times by going up smaller mountains; often enough you'll have doubts that you will ever make it, you'll experience tough setbacks in your training excursions, perhaps you'll even get injured and have to endure much physical pain combined with fears of permanent incapacity that leaves you unable to make that ultimate ascent. And yet you go on stubbornly, until you finally face that big challenge. When you take the last few inches and realize that you eventually did it, that you've now mastered the highest peak there is, that all the hard work and determination have not been in vain and you've fulfilled your dream, then you will experience a feeling of deep and intense satisfaction, a feeling that is doubtless incomparable to anything you'll have experienced before.

But it is still a mistake to assume that it is this feeling for which you've lived and worked so long. The feeling isn't the goal; and it never has been. No doubt, it's an experience that is now part of your life, and your emotional memory will be all the richer and deeper for having felt it. And very probably, every successful life will have episodes of that sort of experience along the path, as side-effects of reaching important goals. Yet don't confuse a concomitant emotional coloring of experience with what is really valuable in those achievements.

Think just a little further into the future. For the rest of your life, you will be able to look back upon that great achievement. And when you do so, you will look back at the whole project, not just (not even especially) at that climactic moment. You will remember the moment you first thought about that idea seriously, the moment you decided to actually embark on the path, the enormous amount of energy you put into it, the greatest obstacles you had to overcome, the people who inspired or encouraged you, and much more. You may tell yourself now that you have managed to do something which only few others can claim to have done; you can be honestly proud of your strength of will, your long-term motivation, patience and determinedness, of your wise management of your training process, and much more.

Nothing of this depends in any way on what you felt in those moments on the peak. The strength of character you had to develop, just as the physical fitness you've gained, are still there! They're an achievement themselves in many ways — arguably more useful and even valuable than that fleeting feeling, which was gone after a short while and will never serve you again, save as a distant and shadowy memory.

Furthermore, think about how others may now see you. Imagine people choose to take your achievement as a source of inspiration for their own projects. Do you believe what they think about is primarily that they want to feel what you might have felt? Or isn't it more likely that they would admire your capacity to go a long way, to overcome difficulties and doubts, to follow through and finally make your dream happen? Think of people who've been an inspiration to you. What has made them so? Their qualities of character? Their extraordinary abilities, efforts or achievements? Their unfailing commitment to humanity in adverse circumstances? Whatever it may be, it's unlikely that you have been moved in any way by pondering how they might have felt at some point or other, is it?

It's an illusion, this idea that feelings have what it takes to make a good goal for a life; thus, 'happiness' can't be the goal, if understood in its modern sense of a happy feeling. (And, just to repeat, that was in fact not how it was meant at ancient times, when 'happiness' was used as a formula for what I have called 'the goal'.)

Still, we can take some results with us from our reflections on the goal: if it is to be a worthy one, it would apply to the whole of your life, and definitely so: neither could it be something you can have more or less of, nor could it be something today and something other tomorrow — you either have it in your life, or you haven't — and if you have it, you have it once and for the whole of it. Also, it should be something that can be seen with admiration and approval, with appreciation and applause: reaching the goal makes your life an inspiration and example for others.

Any life that has reached such a goal has some remarkable qualities: it's the best possible life; and this couldn't even be changed if it happens to be longer or shorter. Take a few years off, or add some more as you please, in the end it will be a good life, and not better or worse for that extra time more or less. A good life is marked by a quality, and doesn't depend on anything that can be added to or subtracted from (like more time, money, power, celebrity, or pleasant feelings). These things are just materials, and how much of those we have available is never fully in our control. It's what you make out of them that brings you towards the goal. Just like the goal of sleeping is to be eventually refreshed, awake and full of energy for your next day, and just like that goal is reached for some by sleeping long hours and for others by just a little nap — so is the goal of living a good life reached by some who live many years as well as by others who only have been granted a short lifetime. Nothing that is unable to fulfill that function for you could be an acceptable goal, a candidate for what it means to live your life well. Take care.

Consuming and producing

2011-07-30T05:28:00.001+02:00

Doing philosophy means more than just reading books, or listening to lectures. One thing it means, in addition to that, is that you have to live your life according to your insights, that you have to put them into practice. Your actions, views, and emotions must be formed so that they incorporate the insights you gain from philosophy; and that is decidedly something that must come on top of just taking in things. But it's not what I have in mind this time.

Articulating your own ideas, both in conversation and in writing, is just as important as learning about those you find already. There should be a balance between reading and writing, consuming and producing, taking in and bringing out.

If you're taking in only, it may keep you current on all sorts of things, but it will make you merely a dead mirror of the (more or less arbitrary) sequence of events that rolls out around you as you sail through your life. You can quote as many thoughts of others as you wish, if you haven't got something to add to them, don't connect them with each other, or build upon them so that you have to say something of your own, then it's not really producing, just parroting.

On the other hand, producing-only will have you spin frictionlessly in your own thought. Philosophy, as every other form of intellectual project, is based on a tradition and its records, an ongoing exchange with others, and a constant testing of your insights in your everyday views and actions. Your ideas must be informed by what others have achieved thus far, or you'll be damned to laborously re-invent the already known; you must also strive to incorporate what counts as state of the art, to renew and refresh, remember and reinforce, recognize and at the same time critically adapt that which has been achieved so far; and finally, your insights have to stand the trial of their worth in practice — the practice of living your life, which is, in the end, the only practice that really matters.

Moreover, philosophy must not be ignorant of intellectual achievement elsewhere, in any of the other disciplines that matter to us: the sciences and arts, all kinds of inquiry in social and political matters, local goings-on and global trends — in short, since we're interested in reflecting on what matters in our lives, we have to be aware of everything that can help to understand what is going on and find the best available attitude towards it. Traditionally, philosophers have thought about the concepts and ideas in all these intellectual trends, their methodologies and terminologies, about what's presupposed in them and what's implied. More recently, there's also been a movement towards focusing once more on the art of living well, which looks back to older traditions particularly in ancient Greece and Rome, where this has been the the undisputed primary goal of philosophy. And all of this is worth knowing.

But then, once more, to counterbalance the risk of becoming a mere sponge that just soaks up a lot of interesting information, you always need to try and make a contribution: come up with your own ideas, fresh views and interpretations, new concepts and visions; discover shortcut alternatives to well-trodden paths; produce new substance for discussion and debate by finding good arguments for and against commonly held attitudes; be not afraid of critically opposing what you find unconvincing, but remember to acknowledge and appreciate excellence wherever you find it (even if it is in a defender of a rival view); connect, organize, and systematize results from different fields of inquiry; reflect on their terms and methods; be a translator and interpreter when you find yourself in a dialogue between two parties talking past each other, especially if you are proficient in both their languages. Above all, be serious about learning the truth — and honor it by being truthful in everything you write and say, even if it means you have to retract a former opinion of yours. (Covering up the truth for fear of losing face is shameful.) Not only will you find a deep satisfaction in this: you will also note that your own insights grow more quickly and your intellectual reach will extend further than you'd ever thought possible. Take care.

Self-relinquishment: intoxication

2011-02-27T08:48:00.000+01:00

When intoxication is taken to the point at which you're losing hold of yourself, it becomes another form of self-relinquishment. And yet many seem to be drawn by a strange attraction to that kind of experience. It doesn't always have to be alcoholic intoxication: inebriation, drugs, sexual abandon, a love of driving at high speeds, dangers generally — all these ways of getting you away from yourself, of getting lost in an experience in which you are no longer in charge of what you think and do, are sought and sometimes even cherished by people. Why is that?

The more you think about it, the more difficult it is to understand: the experience we're talking about comes almost necessarily from an excess and is thus (in a sense) unnatural; the trail of its subject is often indecorous (let's not even mention how the subsequent hangovers feel); in the long run its effects will harm them physiologically, potentially also damaging the physiological basis for their mental capacities, and they can harm them socially, if they drunkenly misbehave and annoy people; it supports and increases temptations from all the other vices, prominently anger (it can lead to brutalization), by lowering the inhibition threshold for giving in to them that comes from shame and other social constraints (not that those are always good for you; at times you may even have to break them deliberately — but not out of drunkenness, of course).

It also carries a risk of becoming addictive. (Most addictions in this area are substance addictions that work on a physiological level, but even so, there's a psychological component to it: you wouldn't expose yourself to addictive substances in the first place if there wasn't some attraction to them that's no yet rooted in their physiological aspect — physiological addiction can explain why it is so hard to get rid of the habit once you're in it, but it can't be the whole story of why people get into it to begin with).

In short, that experience of losing yourself in intoxication confuses conscious perception and lowers control over your reactions, and it brings almost exclusively negative effects in the long run. Again, you might expect this to deter people from overstepping the line — whereas in fact it exerts a magnetic appeal. Some can resist that appeal (in which case we call it moderation and count it among the excellences of character), some can't. But almost everyone can feel it.

(There's a fine distinction we have to make here. It's most easily understood from the example of alcohol: up to a point, it sharpens the senses, gives interactions energy and a bit of an edge, increases the fun level. If overdone, of course, it pulls you away from yourself, and that reverses all these small benefits (which are nice, but still just that: nice, something external) into something genuinely harmful. If, in cases of losing control and relinquishing your grip on yourself, you merely haven't been careful or watchful enough and let yourself slip out of good measure, it's rather a kind of lack of skill than an escape from reality. But we're trying to identify the source of attraction behind the idea of getting away from yourself, and nobody is attracted by an expression of their own perceived lack of skill. Therefore, what exerts that pull of attraction must be in the promised escape from reality rather than in the unnoticed slip out of fine control.)

So what's attractive seems to lie not in the long- and mid-term effects, but in the quality of the feeling itself; it must be something that's contained exclusively in the moment. (Which explains also why it needs some excess: because the feeling must be so strong and sweeping that it eradicates most consideration of future consequences; a slight tipsiness wouldn't achieve that, you need to be heavily drunk.)

But then again, that seems not quite to capture it. It's not really so that the state is overwhelmingly pleasant: most of your sense experiences are blacked out; the detail level of perception decreases, at the same time response time increases; clarity of thinking goes down along with the capacity for articulating yourself; feelings get rougher and less discriminate. It's not really an exquisite feast of the senses: we disengage from sensuality just as much as from reasoning when we try to get away from ourselves.

So it seems that the motivation must lie in a kind of escape from reality, where the reality in question is more the reality of your own person than that of your surroundings: what you try to get away from is you, and perhaps your perceptions and views of the world, but not the world itself (nobody thinks that the world really goes away when you can't look straight at it any more). The whole thing is more about losing yourself than about finding yourself in the experience. (When you return to yourself later on, you're typically empty, not inspired, and you also have the matching bodily feelings during the hangover.)

In what sense is it still you if you're successfully got away from yourself? When you 'lost' yourself in an overpowering experience?

Legally, you are still held responsible for what you do; the grounds for this accountability aren't directly in an attributed responsibility for your actions, but in the fact that you got yourself into that state. Responsibility is inherited here, it's indirectly attached to your actions from a wider context which is still something you have to answer for. It's a case where you're responsible for things that you can't control, but rightly so, for that you can't control your actions is something that you are responsible for by bringing yourself into that state, or by allowing yourself to be brought into it. In the limiting case, where the surrounding context is wider than your entire sphere of control, you're no longer considered a full person in the legal sense anymore; you're no longer responsible, but you also lose any entitlements belonging to that status. Even most morality systems would still hold you responsible (although some moralities based on religion or cult actually assign a high moral status to some out-of-mind experiences, if they seem to convey some spiritual truth).

Thus, if there is still a recognizable legal and moral person in your actions and views while you've lost yourself, the sense in which you are 'away' from yourself can only be ethical: you take a vacation from your character as a person, from the project of making the best out of your possibilities, of living a good life, of becoming the best person you can. It's in this way that you give up yourself, and just as in all the other forms of self-relinquishment, it does go (attractive though it may seem for a moment) against your own best interests.

Life is worth living not because of the moments where we get out of it and let ourselves be swept away, or drowned in uncontrollable feeling. It's worth living because of what we do with our time: what we achieve in the world, contributions we make, insights we have; perhaps some value is also in distinct experiences, in variety, subtlety and nuance; certainly it's worthwhile to connect to others and form relationships. It's true that all of these, although they bring value and beauty into our lives, are inseparably bound up with effort, pains and disappointment. Taking charge and accepting responsibility for them means to accept, and to learn to deal with, these undesirable aspects as well. Trying to escape from that is cheap and cowardly, and not just because you would be timidly trying to get a vacation from those negative aspects — it's also because you de-value, at the same time, the positive values that make life worthwhile. Take care.

Self-relinquishment: softness

2011-02-18T22:27:00.000+01:00

The softness which I have in mind, and which is yet another kind of self-relinquishment, is what you can observe in people who get used too much to warm and sunny, pleasant weather: they grow hesitant, after a while, to do things that would expose them to a harsh and cold wind, rain and darkness. (Obviously, not everybody who lives in favorable climates gets soft in this sense, there's no necessary causal connection between weather conditions and strength of character. But you know the kind of personal development, or rather personal decline, I'm here referring to, don't you?)

Just as an aversion to bad weather can be what makes you soft, it could be any other sort of disagreeable external as well: if you have a fear of conflict, a dread of poverty, a secret thirst of social standing with a corresponding need for recognition — each of these might lure you gradually into a habit of avoiding things. You're getting used to the pain-free zone so much that you become unable to thrive elsewhere, you shy away from anything outside the range of comfort, and finally wind up avoiding everything else just for your convenience, delaying initiatives towards goals that once were important in your live, finding yourself taking actions against your better judgment, developing self-deceptive views and self-defeating feelings.

Why is softness a form of self-relinquishment? Because it is dependence: it makes you dependent on externals, makes you rate externals higher than they should be rated, and so any accidental lack in externals could lead you away from what you should be doing to doing something to deal with that lack. Only if you gain independence from externals can you fully be yourself. (And in consequence, be free.) If inconvenience or unpleasantness, conflict or bad luck, unfortunate material or social circumstances can keep you from doing the right thing, then you aren't making progress on your path (that is: your path); and you don't live your own life quite as fully as you could. Softness is a way of losing sight of this, a form of giving up the focus on what matters most: how you live your life, and who you are — you, as a person.

There is nothing wrong with being sensitive to other people's feelings, and caring — that's not necessarily softness of the kind we're looking at. Softness means to be untrue to yourself, and you're not untrue to yourself if you care about other people. On the contrary, being kind and comforting can be the exactly right thing to do in a given situation; you're rather giving in to softness the moment you put on a cold face because a bully has just entered the room and you don't want to risk looking weak. That's softness. (However, being nice and smooth also can be a form of softness, if your main motivation for it is to avoid a conflict that you should be rather facing head-on.) The rule that tells if something's softness can't be simply found in descriptions of overt behavior; the fundamental indicator that you're getting soft is that you sacrifice your personal integrity for something that's external: you're relinquishing courage, kindness, honesty, or any sensible behavior in tune with good character in exchange for gains in money or in reputation, pleasure or convenience. Softness is an expression of valuing something external higher than the integral qualities of your person.

It is also self-perpetuating: you are getting soft and softer progressively, and you're gradually putting more and more priority on comfort or convenience, thus tacitly valuing them higher than doing the right thing, working on your character, living a good life (which all bring with them hardship, inconvenience, roughness, disappointment, danger, maybe even death). You'll get more likely to give in to resistance; you'll grow incapable of changing what goes on around you; fears and foolish hopes will get the better of you more and more. All that softness gains you will be more of it. But the flip-side of that process is a loss of what makes you into yourself. No convenience in the world is worth that. Take care.

Self-relinquishment: trust and overreliance

2011-02-13T19:07:00.000+01:00

Let us now look at one form of self-relinquishment, of giving up our sense of our own self, and trading it for some sort of dependence: let's look at overreliance. What I mean by this is an attitude of relying on someone because we've done something for them and expect some reciprocation: waiting for others to repay favors, keep their promises, or merely treat us well as a consequence of some good judgment they've passed on us sometime past.

I call the excessive form I have in mind overreliance because naturally there is some reliance we must put into such situations: the game of give-and-take in social and business contexts that is based on this behavior pervades our lives, and there is nothing wrong with it, as long as everybody involved understands what happens, and where the limits are. Overreliance begins where we make it a habit to depend on others for central goals of our lives, for things that we take as important, things that have a personal significance for us — and where we consciously build on others' providing them for us. Then we start giving not for the sake of giving, but for the sake of receiving something in exchange: we start giving with an agenda in the background. And the badness of that sort of behavior again lies in that we weaken our own sense of self in the course of that change; by locating the source of success and happiness in the actions of others (however cleverly we think we've manipulated their motives for those actions, and however much we tell ourselves that this manipulation would be justified by the consequences, which are after all of supreme importance to us), we locate them somewhere else than where they should be located: in ourselves.

Overreliance does not just imply that you are constantly calculating what people owe you, you're on the flip side also checking with everything they do whether it counts as having paid you back already. This habit, however, prevents you from being grateful. Ungratefulness is a character fault; and as always, the reason why you should avoid character faults comes from your own best interest. It's better for you to be a grateful person than not being it, because being ungrateful weakens your character and thus puts you at a disadvantage in the long run. All badness of character damages the subject (the person who acts badly, thinks or feels badly) more than it damages its target. The target may suffer, but it suffers from something external, something it cannot control. The integral part, the character of the person who is the target, can never be damaged by suffering caused by externals. If that part is strong enough, it will be capable to deal with the suffering and display strength of character even within that suffering. (If it's not strong enough, then the problem lies with neglect of shaping a strong character rather than with the external influence. The external suffering thus would be at best an indicator for a weakness on the target's behalf, but not the real cause of it.)

Overreliance, then, is different from the normal reliance we trade in everyday life in that it goes further and deeper; it is also significantly different from trust. Trusting someone always means to take a risk. If it wasn't risky, there would be no value in trust. Let's look at this more carefully: what makes trust valuable, as compared to the overreliance I've defined above?

Taking a risk means to accept a possibility of loss (what you lose would be an external, such as money or convenience, property or reputation, even health or, in extreme cases, your life) and projecting into the other person the qualities of skillfulness, resourcefulness and courage, honesty and reliability needed to make sure, to the best of their ability, that you don't suffer that loss. (There is a sort of trust, a blind trust, which simply unthinkingly assumes trustworthiness and thus doesn't calculate the risk, but merely ignores it. That's not the sort of trust I'm talking about here.)

Trusting means that you still keep the responsibility. If something goes wrong, you cannot blame them, for it was you who trusted them, and whether they just failed or even betrayed you, there's something for you to at least take responsibility for, and learn from. You decide to trust, and you retain responsibility for that decision.

So in summary, one difference between trust and overreliance is that in trusting you remain responsible, and so you're in charge of your actions yourself; another one is in that you assume, or project, qualities of character in others whom you trust, instead of expecting a debt structure to work for you (which in general boils down to expecting social pressure to do the job for you, and in effect that's a mere manipulation of others); furthermore, when trusting someone you put an emphasis, in your actions and views, on the right sort of thing: on people's character instead of a fictional value calculation about externals (such as money or reputation). Not just do you highlight the right sort of value in others, you also express the right choice in your own behavior: you know what to treat as valuable and what as indifferent. This way you exhibit valuable behavior yourself. Take care.

Dealing with distractions

2010-10-05T22:21:00.000+02:00

Finding a goal, while being in a mode of reflection, is not yet the same as actually pursuing (let alone achieving) that goal. As soon as you're back in everyday life, responding to the ever changing stream of new situations, interactions with people, the successes and disappointments of your actions in the world, you'll find it difficult to remain focused on the goals you have decided to be the most valuable for you to follow. The ebb and flow of life is full of distractions, and even after you have managed to keep your goals at least in view (which, to be sure, is not a small achievement), you'll most probably find yourself in fact pulled away from them more often than not, by a myriad of little things that grab your attention instead, and actually doing something that is not in line with them.

(There is a temptation here to talk about 'real life' versus what you think about when reflecting: life as thought about 'in theory'. But talk of 'real life' here is misleading at best; at worst, it's a cheap excuse for failing to transform into action the results of your reflection. What you think about when you reflect on the whole of your life, on what's good and what's bad, both in itself and with respect to some specific aim, on what sort of person you should be and how you ought to work on improving your actions, views and feelings — what you think about when you reflect on all this is no less 'real' than what you encounter when you take action in everyday situations. If anything, it's more real, for it takes into account a lot more than what you are able to perceive while involved, when you're necessarily subject to a constrained viewpoint and under pressure to decide in time, which may leave you with insufficient resources to think everything through to a satisfactory level of depth. This talk about 'real life', as compared to what you look at in ethical reflection, is a sham. It merely is a plea to give priority to unconsidered impulses of the moment over considered principles and maxims; to give priority to ingrained behavior you've been conditioned to exhibit long ago over purposeful, sustained pursuit of goals you've found to have meaning in your life; to give priority to indulging weaknesses and yielding to easy comfort instead of doing what it takes to become the person that you ought to be. 'Real life', if that phrase has any sensible meaning at all, is the life you choose to life, after having carefully considered everything that matters in such a far-reaching decision. 'Real' it can only be if it is indeed the real thing, not the thing it seems to be just for a passing moment.)

Distractions, then, consist of two components: an external occasion, and your own tendency, or willingness, to allow that occasion (or some element within it) to pull you out of what you're doing and to induce you to do something else, or refrain from doing anything. (However mechanically it is that you follow a distraction, it is always you who is responsible for doing so.)

Part of the strategy will be to shut out those external occasions which lead to distractions — when it's possible. At many times, it's in your power to withdraw to somewhere quiet and secluded. This can be appropriate for tasks on which you work alone. (And that includes reflection on your own life, character and goals.) But that isn't always an option. It is equally important to remain in touch with reality, which requires seeking feedback, trying things out, and in general putting your views and strategies to the test of how they fare in the world of action. (That includes, again, reflection on your own life, character and goals.) It's important, then, to learn how to deal with distractions even when you're not able to prevent the external occasions from even happening.

The way to do this is to carefully and patiently register every time a distraction falls in, refrain from acting too quickly, check against your real goals and inclinations (those that come from your reflections), and only then take action. Initially, this won't always work, but you will make progress sooner or later, which will show mostly in your ability to recognize potential distractions early, controlling your own impulses to follow them mechanically, leaving you to choose actively more often instead. As so often, everything you need is patience, and a willingness to actively and deliberately shape your habits. (Note that these again are qualities of character of the sort you're going for.) With time, you'll notice that you get instinctively aware of many of the typical distractions, and now you'll find yourself almost mechanically refusing to be led astray by them. That's the habit you want to establish. Take care.

Conquer fears: feeling misjudged

2010-10-01T08:21:00.000+02:00

What's the opinions of others to you, that you are anxious they're in your favor?

Knowing what other people think of you and your actions, how they perceive your behavior, can be important feedback. There are, however, differences in the way people express such feedback. The most helpful sort is descriptive: when people simply describe what they see you doing, and what the effects are, you can match this with your goals and your own sense of the situation. Unfortunately, that's not the prevalent sort of response we normally encounter. More often, people are judgmental. When they express their judgments of good and bad (however muddled, for what people think is good, or bad, most often lacks refinement and reflection), it's often rather hurting than helping. Especially those who are themselves timid and insecure tend towards dismissive, sweepingly negative statements; of course they often don't notice how much attitudes of that sort reflect on themselves rather than on what they're talking about. Yet, for all that, weak and foolish attitudes are contagious, and an echo of their insecurity will fall back on you, luring you into taking their judgments as valid measurement of the worth and value in your actions. Thus instead of ignoring the judgmental portion of their responses, you become afraid of it, and anxious to please those with the loudest voice and with the most judgmental style of responding to you. But that means to please exactly those who deserve it least: it's not for the judgments of others that we live our lives. Instead, you need to figure out how to distinguish descriptive from judgmental feedback behavior; try to learn from the former and practice keeping a healthy reserve against the latter.

(Also, in this line of thought there's something to learn for your own responses towards others: try to avoid judgment, be perceptive, descriptive and reflective. There's a time for criticism, and for claims about value, good and bad, and right and wrong. But it's appropriate less often than you might think, especially in everyday life.)

It's not just negative judgment that one should be skeptical about; there is also a danger in praise, including that praise which is often triggered by excellence. Since excellence of character is what we're trying to achieve in leading our lives, we might be tempted to take praise from others as a mark of achievement of that goal. That would be misguided. Not only can you be excellent without it being acknowledged, or even noticed; recognition may follow only later on; you also might be seen as excellent without actually being so — and thus from praise you can never infer you're making good progress. (Consider also how high the chances are that those who praise and call you excellent in truth are bad judges of excellence, being neither excellent themselves nor used to having it around them.)

It's a weakness, this anxiousness to appear excellent in the eyes of others. Be prepared to be excellent without anyone taking notice of it! Such anxiousness is always wrong: if you have excellence in some matter, you already have the more choiceworthy thing. Recognition may follow, or maybe it won't. But even if it does, it's secondary. It's even worse if you don't actually have the excellence in question: then it amounts to willing deception. You are deceiving both yourself and others if you go for the appearance of an excellence only.

As long as you can find so many faults just by looking at yourself, you have no business believing yourself excellent from someone else's saying so. The latter shouldn't be a goal for you at all. Take care.

Conquer fears: sickness and pain

2010-09-30T06:29:00.000+02:00

What is pain to you, that it makes you fearful of it?

Pain is one of the most effective destroyers of momentum in living our lives. It can destroy motivation, hinder our ability to concentrate and think clearly, and block or veil our senses and so prevent us from perceiving our environment correctly and interacting with it effectively. Since it makes us feel bad, we fail to radiate positive energy, and our surroundings respond correspondingly, drawing the general mood into a downward spiral.

Since pain is often an effect of bodily sickness, fear of pain usually extends to fear of falling ill. And it's not just the accompanying pain that makes illness something to avoid: there's also often an anxiety that it may be 'serious', that it might hamper one's subsequent life by leaving some permanent damage (even the possibility of minor impairments can cause fear: some people are afraid of a strict dietary regime), or even might be terminal.

Observe, however, that this type of fear arises rarely in situations in which there is direct evidence that an illness is serious in this sense; rather, when it is clear what's to expect, people are often calm and composed. This suggests that it is more often the unacknowledged possibility, suddenly coming to consciousness, which disturbs, while a more composed stance comes into play when the actual course of future events is predictable.

Sometimes people report that a sudden heavy illness has transformed their lives by making them aware of the fragility of good health, and the uncertainty of their future in general. (Although in truth this is a little dishonest, for they knew about that all along for some time before; it's just that only now they started to take it seriously.) This does go down further on the path of reflection than many others ever achieve over their whole lives. That's because it makes them take their the whole life into account, not only the current stage with its actual painfulness.

We have to distinguish, however, between two main groups in this: one would be those who learn from such an experience that life time is limited, and wasting it for anything that's not of real value is something they will painfully regret. Those in that group have gained a real insight; chances are that they will now reflect much more carefully about their lives and what they're going to do with them. But there's a second group: those who constantly have to remind everybody (whether they want to hear it or not) how badly a pain they had to go through. This is a habit more targeted at exploiting empathy and feelings of pity (or sometimes a kind of boasting with the terrible things you've been through), and needless to say, it's not a helpful way of looking back for anyone. Again, there's a difference between looking at past ordeals as helping you to become a more solid and determined person in your quest for excellence, and taking them as a mere occasion for some yammering. (Add to this that complaining and whinging invariably increases the perceived badness of any pain, because the imagination amplifies exactly what you're fearing. As with any sort of fear, if you try to retreat from it, the badness will follow you; but if you stand up against it, it will ebb back.)

Remember that pain and illness themselves are indifferent — it's not they that make your live good or bad, but your attitude to whatever happens, including pain and illness. (Obviously, if you fail to avoid some preventable pain because of some foolishness, that is bad in a strict sense, but even then it's not the pain itself that is bad, but your foolishness that brought it about.) In this sense, painful experiences in themselves don't make your life better or worse, but pathetic whining makes it bad, while firm endurance makes it good, despite the misfortunes in it. (Some people's unimpressed holding out against severe illness and unfazed pursuit of their goals in spite of it has made them even widely known and admired for it. Enduring illness is an instance of courage.) It's not the amount of pain that counts in the end, for that's not something you can choose: it's rather how you treat it. Take care.

Conquer fears: death

2010-09-28T07:20:00.000+02:00

What is your death to you, that it can frighten you?

Fear of death is a rather diffuse fear, and you'll find it tends to be elusive when you reflect and try to get a grip on it. Being dead is not like an experience (at least none that we can know of, or could have had any previous encounters with); it's not possible to imagine what it is like. And that's not because it is an experience that's so incredibly dreadful, but because it isn't an experience at all. When you're dead, you are no longer there to experience anything, and thus there is no such thing as you, experiencing whatever it may be like to be death. You can of course imagine a pitch-black darkness, accompanied by deep silence. But what you'd imagine here would still be you, as experiencing a situation in which there is no input to the senses — but not a situation in which you're no longer there. You can't imagine being dead, because there is no experience here to present to the imagination.

Sometimes what people imagine when they are afraid is not so much death itself, but the process of dying; they might imagine it as painful, or as involving inabilities for long periods. Another worry might concern the dignity they hope to be capable of during their last moments; this is often more about the perceptions of others than about themselves. These sorts of fear aren't quite as intangible as fear of death, but they're of a different sort, and we'll deal with them some other time.

Likewise, you can of course imagine how the life of others, such as your friends and children, might look like once you're gone, how they will live on without you. You can fear the impact that your death will have on the life of others, and that's indeed a deeper point: certainly the well-being of at least some people around you should be a matter important to you. And obviously, this significance lasts longer than merely to the end of your life's time. (Whereas your own sorrow and pain does end at that point.) In fact, most of us make some provisions for those we love exactly because we envisage the possibility we might not be around at all those future times when they might come into some need.

However, while it is a valid concern to some extent, we must also consider that as a matter of fact life will go on for all those we leave behind. In most cases at least, they will eventually recover from their loss. (And this is also what we should wish for them, unflattering for ourselves though it may be. If a person can never go on with their life after the loss of someone, however close they may have been, that shows something deeply problematic about the relationship that's been between them: it would look more like one of dependence and needfulness rather than one between people in full possession of their own integrity as a person.)

Another fear is that of an unusually early death, one at a time that marks perhaps only the middle of the average life time of the people around you. The sources of this fear are sometimes obviously questionable or outright foolish (such as jealousy: are others better than I am, so that fate lets them live longer? — or a kind of greed: wouldn't I've been able to travel to even more interesting locations, or could I've enjoyed more good food and wine if I'd lived twice as long?) In other cases, what disturbs those with this kind of fear rather is the thought that some of their important projects will be spoiled: they won't be able to complete some work that is most dear to them. This thought, though it's a worthier worry, still betrays a mild confusion. It has been clear and certain all along that death may catch you early, forcefully ending some projects you hoped you'd be able to complete; it's an ever-present possibility that you may fail to achieve some of the goals you think of as important. That's not of course a reason to refrain from taking on these goals at all; yet there has never been a guarantee that you would reach them, and if, in the end, you don't, that is not a basis for justified disappointment. If there's disappointment, then it comes from some false hope which you adopted in the course of pursuing your projects.

If you've come to make a project of such a sort a life-defining project, then you've chosen a project of the wrong sort. A proper life-defining project, a project that results in making your life a good one, can't rely on the assumption that your life will last a certain minimum amount of time (an assumption which cannot be guaranteed).

Death can happen at any time, in any one of many different ways. But even if it puts an end to a good life, the mere fact of its ending doesn't make that life less good. How could it? Every life has to end at some time, and when that time is will be arbitrary. Goodness of life is a quality, not a quantity. A life is good because of how well it's lived, not because of how long it continues. Take care.

Make excellence your aim

2010-09-27T07:58:00.000+02:00

What sort of person lives a good life? An excellent person, a person of excellence. But then what does excellence mean? Since it is excellence as a person, we're talking about a quality of character.

Changing the center of discussion to talking about a good life in terms of the excellence of persons is an important move. Many things that happen in lives are accidental; not everything about them is within our sphere of influence. In matters of character however, of seeking correct views and developing adequate feelings about what's going on around you, of choosing carefully and aiming to do the right thing, it's always clear who is responsible: you are. Thus, although it doesn't add anything specific yet, the change of perspective from looking at what makes a life good (the entry point of ethical discussion) to asking what sort of person would lead a good life marks some progress already. Of course, this is still only the beginning of the journey, since now we've our work cut out in saying more specifically what it means to be excellent.

The term 'excellence', for one thing, can mean different things. One of its typical senses is that of being outstanding, being better at something, or more of something, than others. This sense implies a comparison with someone else; it's not what I mean by excellence. (It's not a helpful notion, for it makes excellence something that depends on external circumstance: you might be a bad person indeed, but live among a group of much worse ones, and in abominable circumstances — does that make you an excellent person? In that common sense, it would seem so. But not in the sense which I use; one wouldn't be excellent if one were just simply the smallest evildoer within sight.) And if it is not a notion based on a comparison, then we can't explain it in terms of degree either, for that would require some quantitative scale, some unit in which to measure.

It's often easier to recognize failure to be excellent than to detect excellence itself. (Candidates for excellent behavior may still turn out to fall short of actual excellence for many reasons, although it didn't show at first sight, whereas apparent non-excellence is rarely re-interpretable as being in fact excellent.) Worse, however, than failing to be excellent in a particular situation, is not even accepting that excellence is what we should go for (if we want to lead a good life). Not managing to achieve it, in a given instance, does at worst mean that you have to try harder next time, that you're not yet where you want to be (which, in all probability, will be the case most of the time). Not even aiming at it, on the other hand, indicates you're seriously misdirected, and with time you won't get closer, but you'll drift away from your most important goal (that of leading a good life, and spending your time wisely).

Such misdirection can show itself in many different ways. It may lead you towards greed in one of its myriads of forms: going for pleasure and convenience, splendor and luxury, power and wealth, fame and celebrity — any one of those false aims (or a combination of them) which have no measure built into them, which will drive you into wanting more and more, which will get stale under your hands even before your enjoyment of them ends, which will leave you with nothing of real substance after you have thrown a lot of precious life time after them; it may have you pushed around by fears and weaknesses: cherishing foolish hopes and illusions, giving in to nebulous anxieties and unsubstantiated fears, indulging in pointless lamentations and uncontrolled flare-ups, favoring aimless industriousness and taking the line of least resistance whenever there's a chance of getting through with it — all of them currents that will take you into regions where they get stronger and stronger, draining away your strength and freedom little by little every time you go along with them. The only way to lead a good life is to resist them always; in effect, that is what it means to become excellent. It may not work in many instances, but unless you make it your primary goal, the cases in which you fail and end up drifting in the wrong direction will outweigh those in which you do the right thing, form correct views and respond with adequate feelings. Unless you make a constant and determined effort to move in the direction of living a good life, unless, that is, you aim to become excellent, you will lose this struggle. It's an upstream swim: you can't hand yourself over to the current, let things drift just as they want, and still reach your destination. Take care.

Varieties of falling short

2010-09-25T08:19:00.000+02:00

Once you've figured out that quality and strength of character is the single determining goal that should structure a life, a complicated net of paths to achieving that goal is laid out for you. Choices must be made all the time, and there are plenty ways of going wrong.

Let's start with feelings. Some people get emotional about the wrong sort of thing all the time; take for instance those who are unduly concerned with the opinions of others. They will be angry at you if on some occasion you spoil the effect they intended to make; they'll become nervous when they're running into a situation where they suspect they look bad; they are elated and inordinately cheerful when they've just landed a hit with their audience.

When people acquire such a disposition, then it isn't just their feelings which harden into a pattern. Actions follow: they will begin to do foolish things just to make a good impression, refrain from doing sensible things if there isn't an effect to make, they will make it a priority to seek occasions where they're seen in a positive light, ignoring other options which might have been better for them, all things considered. And finally, their views will be distorted: they will form opinions and beliefs, especially on what is good and what is bad for them, which are above all influenced by how well people think of them, and not by what is actually the case.

Just as the opinion of others can play this role of a false good, other things might as well. Some people get emotional whenever wealth and money are concerned, some when their personal wellness is touched, when physical comfort and the pleasantness of their surroundings is affected. As with those who are fixated on the opinions of others, those who make money or well-being the central concern of their lives are not just disposed to slide into progressively stronger feelings about them; they will also quickly have their actions, views and with them their long-term goals and projects influenced and finally dominated by them. In the end, there is a good chance that they'll have spent their whole lives chasing a false good, something that, as they are likely to find out, is not, and never has been, worth it.

Chasing false goods, however, is only one way of going wrong. Another one is to develop an aversion. Bodily pain, for instance, or being in a crowd with other people, is something that occurs from time to time in anybody's life. But if you've got an aversion against that sort of thing, then you will try to avoid it at all costs, and whenever possible. In the end, even having to face a single instance begins to look unbearable to you. In reality, you can at times avoid unpleasant or painful experiences, but you can't avoid them altogether, and avoiding is not always among the sensible options. Those who drift into strong feelings whenever there's even a small probability that they will have painful or unpleasant experiences, those who, that is, are subject to aversions of this sort, display the same pattern as those who chase false goods — they're just not chasing, but fleeing, and it's not false goods, but false evils which they are obsessed with. And again, it isn't just their feelings which become ingrained as a pattern: in their views and actions they will show the same unbecoming tendencies, they will form incorrect beliefs and act insensibly whenever their false evil is at the horizon.

(Especially if you think of more specific aversions, for instance to certain animals such as spiders, there are of course psychological or psychoanalytical explanations for these phenomena. After all, psychology includes exactly that: the study of these phenomena, and possible therapies. In addition, however, to what the best psychological theories take them to be, we always have to ask ourselves what stance to take to them in the first place: we should find an evaluative attitude that is based on reflection, and related to what we think is good or bad for us. If we don't, how could we ever know which of them to fight and which to tolerate? So, are we to simply accept them into our psyche? Perhaps even cite, as an excuse, certain reductionist theories which tell us that everything is hard-wired into our genes anyway, or that our childhood experiences will determine how we feel and what we do, whether we recognize it or not? Are we going to settle for an 'I will try my best, sometimes, perhaps'-kind of stance? Or shall we rather think it through what exactly the impact of such personality attributes on our own lives would be, and work hard to eliminate them, as a priority, exactly to the extent we take them to be harmful — even if that means to engage in a life-long battle with ourselves?)

So far we've only looked at getting emotional about the wrong sort of thing. There is another way to go wrong in your feelings, actions and views: you can become disposed to getting emotional about a range of different things, but always with the same emotion. This is what's called a proclivity: a habit of falling into the same sort of emotion all over, whether it's appropriate or not. Examples are timidity, or enviousness. If anything can frighten you (including a lot of things that most people wouldn't be afraid of), or if everything you see in use or in possession of someone else inflames your desire, then you're certainly not on a good path. It's this time not so much a wrong evaluation, taking a false good (or a false evil) as something that is genuinely good (or bad). It's rather a habit of falling into an emotion type too quickly and too easily, a proneness to fall for them on too many occasions, most of the times inadequately.

All sorts of habits (in feelings, actions, and in views) are in fact rooted in repetition, and learning: learning proceeds often by repeating some behavior. Habits thus originate in oft-repeated behavior which has transformed into dispositions to act the same way again and again. They've become traits of your personality, and so form an important aspect of what you are. And once they are in place, in many situations feelings, views and actions flow in a natural and often involuntary way from them. When they are thus ingrained, it is not easy to even recognize them; and you cannot change them immediately at will; but you can change them by building up alternative habits from more appropriate responses, which look to the real value of things. Of course, that requires patience and will. But it can be done.

And because patience and determination themselves are qualities of character, from a lack of them in forming good habits comes yet another way of going wrong: your good habits can be unstable, not yet capable of persisting through unfavorable circumstances, of remaining constant over a broad range of situations. That's what is called an infirmity of character: when a habit isn't hardened enough, and there are relapses. Infirmities are both a good sign and a bad one: for they show that you are on the right path, but they also indicate that you must push on and get further on it. Take care.

Good, bad, and indifferent

2010-09-01T08:18:00.000+02:00

When reflecting, have you noticed that good and bad are mostly the categories that come to mind when deciding what to go after and what to avoid? Motivation comes from values, and we value what we're judging good or bad. (Values can be positive or negative, and these two directions correspond to what we take as good or bad in what we go for, or avoid.)

As before, what is meant by good or bad here has a strict and special meaning. 'Good' and 'bad' are titles reserved for what makes our life (seen as a whole), a good, successful one, or prevents it from being so. And that is not meant in a superficial sense of success; it is only if you think that you could die at any moment and still find that, all things considered, no things kept secret, everything reflected on as thoroughly as possible, that this life was well worth living it, then that's a good life. If you think you've been the person that you should have been, that you've made the best from what you've been dealt, that's what makes your life successful. Whatever brings your life closer to this condition can be called 'good', in the strict sense that we're talking about. What keeps your life from being so is 'bad'. The good and bad are precisely those things that make a difference in shaping your life. (Everything else, all that is neither good nor bad, is indifferent, in that it doesn't make a difference.)

Are money, fame or reputation good? No, they are not. Are weak and unthinking decisions bad? Yes indeed, they are. Are pain and losses bad things? No, they are indifferent. Are kindness, courage, generosity good things? Yes, for they do make a difference. You get the idea.

Indifferents are usually not undifferentiated when compared with each other: there are better or worse choices with respect to external things. Pleasant experiences are preferable over painful ones; a well-paying job, or one that brings a higher reputation, would be preferred over one that doesn't; if you can reach a goal easier, you'd avoid hardship or efforts.

However, that there is a better or worse choice with respect to something (for you to make) doesn't already make that something good or bad. Whether the objects of your choices (the things you choose from) are good, bad, or indifferent, depends on what those objects are. They're always merely indifferents if they're externals. Making good choices itself, on the other hand, is a good thing; deciding in an unconsidered or weak manner is bad; for how you exercise your choices (both those regarding externals and those in matters of character) depends on what sort of person you are, and how in general you live your live.

It may seem surprising, even harsh, to think of pains and losses, as I said, as indifferents. Is not the loss of a loved one, say, a bad thing for you, and quite obviously so? And isn't this true in general of the pain that comes from personal relationships that don't work out: the agony of being rejected, the fear of accidents that might bereave us, the nightmare of seeing ourselves betrayed by those we had loved and trusted, and who now turn away and hurt us? What can be called a bad thing if it's not that sort of experience?

The very last word in this formulation is revealing: should, in your view, an experience, a simple quality of how it feels, be significant enough to give it reign over the whole of your life? Is any pain, however intense it may be felt at first, a matter so important that the whole weight of your character, all your views and all your actions, should be focused on avoiding it, or coping with it once it's clear it couldn't be avoided? Think again: if you permit a single sort of unpleasant experience, a mere feeling of pain, such authority; if you allow the accidents of life around you shape the goals and contents of the only thing that's really, truly, yours (that is: your life time) — isn't that a most unworthy discount of that which really matters, and in the interest of nothing more than a mere passing pain?

There is no question that the experience of loss is intense, and treating losses as indifferents does not imply to take them lightly. As long as there's a choice (and as long as it is compatible with good qualities of character), you'll certainly do whatever is required to avoid them. Caution against dangers, a dedication to the well-being of those you love; a general pro-attitude towards what's in their best interest — all these are usually good indicators for the right priorities and good choices in what you do. Nor means treating losses as indifferents a discounting of the value of that person whom you lost, or of that relationship's value. It does mean treating the event, the turn of fate that brought about this loss as something that you don't give control over your life. If it had to be so that a loved one was with you for only a given time, then that is how it had to be; your life's been all the better for it, while it lasted. Unless you brought about the end of your relationship yourself by acting wrongly (whether it was wicked or just careless), that end isn't something within your control, and thus it can't be bad, just indifferent.

Of course, you might think that compared with what could have been, with a possible longer time together if things'd have gone differently, you are now off worse. But that comparison is vain. Once more: if some action of your own made things go badly, then there'd be room for regret. You might compare what is the case now with what might have been the case, and thus get clear about the consequences which your action had. But if it wasn't up to you, then there is nothing much to learn from that comparison. That which comes out of external circumstance alone is neither good nor bad, but indifferent.

In addition you should note that all personal relationships, even the most intense and stable ones, have their end date written on them; nothing lasts forever, and the chances are that you will live through quite a number of times when things are taken out of your hands and you're powerless. The other half of a relationship may leave it, or may even die. If you hope, of any of your current relationships, that somehow you'll avoid its end indefinitely, then you live a foolish hope. (You're only spared that experience when the other half outlives you; but then, the lot of loss will fall to them. That doesn't make it any better, at least not if you seriously cared about that other person.) The good in love and friendship is in the valuable time that you can spend in those relationships as long as they last; and if that time ends in the case of one of them, it wouldn't be wise to let all others suffer by wasting energy on something that is irretrievable now. Take care.

Gratefulness

2010-08-30T08:18:00.000+02:00

When we reflect we quickly notice that much that happens in our lives is at best partly up to us. As long as I'm free to pick my surroundings, I'll select pleasant ones over dire ones; when it is open to me, I'll select being with interesting people who help me get along better over those of the boring, self-centered or deceitful kind; if I can choose, I'll select peace and stability over a life of strife and uncertainty — who wouldn't? But we're often not in a position to choose with respect to such external circumstances (external in the sense that they're outside our own control). Whatever depends on them is subject to risk and uncertainty.

The only thing we can choose, and in effect have to choose, are we ourselves; that is, we choose our own selves. (We cannot not choose these.) Still, 'choosing' here means setting a goal and then working for it — there is no free ride in these matters; choice doesn't mean here that you simply choose and automatically are guaranteed to receive. Yet if we choose here we can achieve those goals, and whether we do achieve them is in our own power. That's a deep difference between choices in matters of character, of our own selves, and choices in external things. And this means, among other things, that choosing carefully and well here is vital.

A choice in matters of your own self has a higher impact on the success of your life than any choice in externals. In a sense, it has a more direct impact, for how you exercise choices in external things depends on who you are, and which goals you have set for being the person that you should be; thus choices in external things are better or worse in how well they fit with those primary choices. And from this it should also be clear that choices in external things shouldn't dominate choices in matters of character. They're secondary. Doing your own thing is more important than whatever else may happen to you from the accidental circumstances around you.

However, doing your own thing isn't a license to be careless or arrogant with others and what they do. Remember that attitudes such as these are elements of your character too, and thus part of those primary choices that shape your character and, in effect, your life. And you don't want to have your character influenced by carelessness and arrogance. Moreover, there's another, deeper point here.

When we select, there normally is a positive gain. For example, when you can choose and select a pleasant environment for your day; say, you decide to spend it in a beautiful park just outside town; then there's an option that's more pleasant for you than other options, which is why you choose it. But of course the set of options often isn't fully random. It's no accident that there are beautiful parks to spend some time in. (And they must be kept in order, safe from animals, chemical pollution, criminals or whatever else might spoil it as a place of recreation, and so on.) Similarly, if you can choose being with people who inspire, or living in peace and prosperity, that will partly be because someone keeps up these options. Many of the positive gains which are there for you to select come from the work of other people; sharing in the fruits of their efforts constitutes an interpersonal relationship with them: you owe them a debt of gratitude. (Some other gains are just given by nature or the result of blind circumstance, and of course there's then no point in being thankful for those.) Gratefulness then is a counterpart to the freedom to select. As other attitudes, this one should also be a part of your character; it's a primary choice as well. Take care.

Constancy in reflection

2010-08-23T07:18:00.000+02:00

When we reflect is up to us (generally, the more often the better). And there is good reason not to accept delays.

It seems to be a fairly common tendency to postpone reflecting on what you want to do with your life to some later time: when you have the requisite leisure, say, or when you've made sure that your career is well on its way. Sometimes people who have this tendency make that decision expressly, but mostly it just remains implicit in what they do (and in what they don't do). But it's easy to see the error in this choice. If you postpone reflection on your character and on the whole of your life in order to do something else first, then whatever it is that you do first has a higher priority for you, whether you admit it even to yourself or not. What's worse: because you haven't even thought about it, it is very likely that your choice is a result of some influence (who says that building your career is the best and most valuable thing to do with your life?) rather than your own considered views. In other words: whatever reasons there may be for choosing as you did, they were not really the reasons for you to make that choice. There may always be better or worse choices for what you could do with your life than the one which you actually made — but not choosing at all is certainly one of the worst.

If, on the other hand, you do choose, and if you take care to reflect well, the reward will be a sense of direction for the whole of your activities, an overall state of control of your life, a calm and conscious enjoyment of the best possible condition you could be in: a state of excellence, of having actualized your potential, of happiness that grounds in your own self and not in accidental turns and twists controlled by chance nor lucky gifts from fate and fortune.

But obviously it can be stable only if you do something for it. It needs a certain constancy and some determination to keep up reflection; it's essential that you never cease to think about your life afresh, to scrutinize yourself and ask what you can do to get more closer to becoming the person that you want to be, to check if all your actions, views and feelings correspond to what they should be if you'd reached that goal. There is no such thing in life as a premature decisive win. Once you are committed to a life of excellence, with every new day you will have to find out where you stand and work on steadying and improving that current status. Every time you don't, you'll just fall back and have to win the lost ground back in what will be an uphill struggle. It is wise to not get there right from the start. You can avoid predicaments like that by never tolerating a delay in that vital reflection on your life and character. Take care.

Ground your life in excellence

2010-08-21T22:17:00.000+02:00

When we reflect about the whole of our lives the question we ask ourselves is whether there is a way that makes them worthwhile, something that is a ground for a life's being a good life, a way for someone (that is, for you and me) to be the person we should be, the best we can make of us and of what's being dealt to us by blind fate and the accidental circumstances of our lives. Once you've found an answer to that question (even if it's only a tentative one), there's a new project for you, one that grounds your life.

Not all kinds of project are well-suite for playing this role in your life, however. You neither know when and where your life begins nor when and how it ends, in the relevant sense of beginning and ending: it begins only when you start reflecting on the whole of your life, when you figure out what to do with that life, what sort of person you want to become; it ends when all your actions have played out and their consequences are felt and consumed in the world (part of which might well happen even after your death). But the crucial thing here is that you cannot know. No-one ever can. And that imposes a constraint on the grounding project of your life: it excludes a certain type of project, the type that has a structure stretching over time, builds up and ends in a climax, reaching a high point which serves as a focal point: projects such as winning a championship, or becoming the CEO. There is nothing wrong of course with such projects in themselves; but they aren't suitable as grounding projects for the whole of your life.

Partly that's because in a project of that sort you can fail simply by succeeding. Your life is not a movie that can end with the images of the climactic moment — there is always a period after it, and though that may be fine if all this only was a project among others (you might enjoy being the CEO even more than you enjoyed becoming it, or use your status as the champion to work on training the young or become an ambassador for the environment), it's bad for you if it was the sole, defining purpose of your life, for this would mean that now you have a meaningless life on your hands.

And if your project fails for some external cause (external, in this case, means outside your own strength and activity), then stupid circumstance has had the power to defeat the purpose of your life. Thus it is not a good idea to make a project that depends on a certain structure playing out in time a grounding project.

The grounding project, then, must not be something that's exhausted in a single climactic moment. It has to be something that results in a stable condition — something that can't be taken away from you by causes external to your control. So, if we can choose, we should choose something with which we don't run that risk: a condition. Excellence.

(And of course we can choose. Remember: the starting point was reflecting on what a good life would be for you, what sort of person you would want to be. If there is anything that you can choose yourself, this is it. Everything else may be subject to an unlimited variety of factors outside of your control. This single thing is what's in your control entirely. You decide.)

Excellence of character is the condition that you're looking for. It provides a general purpose, a ground for your life. It's got the potential to make your life a good life, and successful (for success consists in achieving this goal, and if anything is, this is in your control); it can give it a primary direction, and guide decisions in specifics; it will make it worthwhile, and one worthy of a good person.

Of course, in pointing to excellence as the condition that grounds a successful life, I am merely gesturing at something that is not yet very specific; it has to be refined partly in response to the particular situation you're in. (That is, both to the circumstances around you and the current state of your character.) Just calling it the grounding project of a good life to achieve this condition doesn't make it really clear what it would mean for you to get there. So far it's just a slogan, not yet an idea that simply can supplant some serious reflection of your own. Take care.

The end and the beginning

2010-08-08T08:16:00.000+02:00

When we reflect, we take a stance to our lives as a whole; as a whole, a life has a beginning — and an end. There are things that don't have a beginning and an end: circles, the universe perhaps, and the boundless possibilities of human freedom. But your life, as a whole, has a beginning and an end.

Contrary to first appearance, the relevant beginning and end of a life don't have to be very definite. Let's start with the beginning: when does your life in the relevant sense start? That's difficult to pinpoint: is it the moment of your birth? Or your conception? Some time in between? Most would agree today that our existence as a conscious being sets in at some time between our conception and our birth, but only somewhat after our biological existence begins we become a person, with an awareness of our surroundings and a capacity to interact with our environment. Even then it will take some time until we are sufficiently capable to make our own decisions, and that is a capacity which we reach at different stages in our early lives with respect to different sorts of decisions.

For formal and official purposes there is the notion of legally coming of age; but for the question we are concerned with here, that stipulated point in our biographies is too late to count as the starting point. Think of someone who gets interested in music early in her childhood and pesters here parents to buy her an instrument, say: a violin. She starts learning it, receives lessons, enjoys performing at school concerts — and it grows so important that she already knows she wants to do this all her life, discover the endless repertoire, become a professional musician, be on stage every day... Sure enough, for many of us that sort of thing may just a passing fancy, or a mere stage in our youth that phases out later and loses its seriousness and relevance. But that's not so for all people, and many of those who achieve admirable heights in the sports, arts or sciences actually have had this sort of childhood determination. And isn't that an exemplary form of taking charge of your life? At least for cases like these, the relevant beginning of a life as a whole is much earlier than the legally fixed one. And probably the same applies to most of us: the beginning, in the relevant sense, of our life as a whole, the life we choose and shape when we reflect, is when we take it in our own hands. For some, it's a momentous decision at some definite time in their youth; for some, it may be a continuous process; and it can set in much earlier, or somewhat earlier, or for some it might even come later than the legal coming of age. (For some, that moment never comes, and that is certainly a bad thing: for if you never take control of your own life, ever content to be defined by whoever happened to have influenced your ways, if you are simply drifting lazily and indecisively along, that is a life that doesn't justice to your potential as a human being, endowed with reason and the freedom to choose and direct yourself where you're going — however 'normal' and developed you may appear to those around you, it'd be quite as good if you'd never even been around; it would be justified to say that in a certain sense, the sense that we're discussing here, you haven't really lived your life at all.)

The moment when our live ends is not that definite either. In a strictly biological sense, your life ends at your death; however, there can be extreme conditions (such as a coma, or a radical deterioration) which put a stop, often a final one, to everything that matters. What remains then is a continuation of life only in a biological sense: can this count as still being in charge of your life? Doesn't the relevant period in which you are in charge rather end with the loss of your ability to take your own decisions? (Although it is a matter of considerable debate exactly where to draw the line, there is general consensus of a distinction between someone's being a living person and their merely being alive in a biological sense; a human being can lose the ability to function as a person before ceasing to function in a biological sense.) This would not mean your value and your status as a human being, and with them the respect that we pay to any human life as a matter of principle, would be lost. But once again we see that legal rights, moral worth, and ethical relevance do not have to coincide with respect to their timing, and in fact they rarely do.

Thus, paradoxical as it may sound, your life can end before your death (in a strict sense) — or it can extend till after your death (in the same strict sense). Think of lasting works which may outlive you; or examples of heroic action: you might die while you explore the unknown territories (nowadays these might be space, perhaps, the arctic or the deep sea), and still, as long as you reach the goal of your expedition, then your life as a whole has fulfilled the purpose that you chose, whether or not you can yourself enjoy the success, its fruit and recognition by the world and others.

What applies to achievement can apply to failure, too: in the same way in which the whole purpose of your life can be fulfilled after you have died, it can also be defeated. Imagine, for example, you have dedicated all your energy to the single goal of building a school in a poor region. When you're dying after years of effort, and you take a final look at your work, it seems to run now on its own steam; you have left it to capable successors whom you trust; you have recently noticed how it's generally appreciated in the village — and yet, by a cruel turn of fate, just a couple of days after your own peaceful death, a stupid strife destroys the school in a single bomb drop, along with most of the village, and kills or drives away many of those you had hoped would have a better future thanks in part to your contribution.

So, with the end of your life (in the relevant sense) it is just the same as with the beginning: it is not necessarily a definite moment in time, such as your biological death. It can be earlier or later than that; it can even draw out over quite some period. And unsurprisingly, just as with the beginning, there's a lot about your end that cannot be controlled.

A first important step to get a grip on your life as a whole is to accept that there will be an end: that yours is only a limited amount of time, that you will, sooner or later, have to take stock — but also that for all that, it is not generally under your control just when the end will be, or how it comes about. How much time is left to us, how long the period remaining will be between now and the end (whenever it is), is never known to us.

Nobody can choose to be born, of course, but what about your death? Don't we have at least some control about the end? Let's assume that in some cases it makes sense for you to decide that the end should be brought about right now. Whether that means to sacrifice your life for some higher purpose (as countless martyrs have chosen to do, though often in decisions that seem open to question from the point of view of calm reflection) or to end it in the face of some unbearable condition (illness, perhaps, or political repression), it is obviously possible: you can decide to put a stop on your life, and act on that decision.

Of course, you can only stop it in the biological sense. But as we've seen, this is not an exercise of control over the end of your life (in the relevant sense discussed here). Whether your life is successful or not, whether in the end it is a good life or not, is determined only in the end, and that end may not coincide with your biological death. A decision to bring about your biological death about is an act of control within your life (and as such is a decision that must be responsibly taken; it is probably one of the hardest decisions at all to take, for its irreversibility and the enormous significance it will have, not only for yourself, but also for many of those who know and love you). It is not, however, an act of controlling your end. There's no such thing. Take care.

Resist enticements

2010-07-31T22:16:00.000+02:00

Whenever you look around, there are so many small things that look attractive at first glance: opportunities to gain some money quickly, easy pleasures or unthinking applause from those who don't know what's worth praise and what isn't.

Perhaps you have some social skills, some power or influence somewhere — then there's a constant temptation to misuse them for gaining quick advantage; or you know you'll get away with some weak and improvised performance most of the time — so you take your chances more often than you should, skipping thorough preparations; you know that some promise of gain will open doors — and thus you give such a promise, bringing harm either to yourself when you don't keep it or to others when you do, and signal them that it's not merit that counts but only whom you know and owe.

It takes some practice to recognize enticements of that sort, and some caution and will to resist them. But resist them we should. They harden bad habits, making it more and more difficult to get rid of them. All decline of character is progressive. Every time you yield to it, it gets more and more ingrained. What's worse: unless you have stabilized better habits for a long time, and very strictly, it's horribly easy to slip back. A small indulgence can be sufficient to bring it all to the front again and toss you right back to where you started. Alertness is in order, and a strict and rigorous weeding out of all temptation. What looks like only taking small and inconsequential steps that really shouldn't matter will inevitably turn out such that you will pay for it, albeit later. Take care.

Ostentatious reclusiveness

2010-07-29T22:15:00.000+02:00

Reflection is a quiet business that requires focus, and it often helps to actively seek solitude, to keep distractions away and to avoid the influence of those who promote competing values. (Such things as people take for values, like money, fame or pleasure.)

When you withdraw, observe yourself: do you subtly make sure that people notice it, that you are seen as doing something that looks grave and important? Do you manipulate the perception of others so that your reclusiveness looks like a deliberately chosen way of living, do you try to make that impression?

It is all well that you are searching for truth in self-dialogue, seeking out weaknesses in yourself, in your actions, views and feelings, your character and your overall ideas of how to live your life. And these are things of some momentum; they really are important; they are the only things that matter in the end. But then what other people think (or perceive) should be of no interest here, right? This should be a dialogue exclusively with yourself. Perhaps you'll ask others for advice, or discuss ideas with them — in this sense, it's not required to exclude others. But obviously, these are not activities you have to withdraw for, quite the contrary. When your withdrawal has a hidden agenda with respect to others, then it never is an interest in getting their support, but in being recognized: a desire to be admired for it. Turning your back on people is a showy sort of action; think hard, however: what would be that important about your not being around? Priding yourself on your retreat and your philosophy is itself a sort of ambition and of boasting.

And so is being too secretive and totally withdrawn from people's eyes — it is more subtle, and it takes a little longer for people to notice, but the idea comes from the same source. It's attention-getting in disguise (making your absence felt so that it draws people's attention).

There's not much point in trying to persuade yourself (and others) that you are someone who thinks so important thoughts that your solitude mustn't be interrupted for the good of mankind. If you want to be able to focus, by all means make room for it, and take care that you get the quiet you need. But it's not something that anyone besides yourself needs to know. Take care.

Unfavorable situations

2010-07-27T22:15:00.000+02:00

Good qualities of character never come easily. Not only do you have to recognize a deficit in your own attitudes in the first place before you can begin correcting it; not only do you have to work for a long time and take a lot of setbacks to effect a lasting change; but even when you are in general capable to do the right thing in all sorts of situation, it takes an effort every single time. When people show, for instance, admirable composure and control under stress, that is not usually so because it's 'just their personality' — it's something they have mastered in a long and rigorous quest, and in addition, it's an act of will to do it freshly on every new occasion. It is an excellence of character that manifests itself in such endurance; an excellence that has been built up successfully and yet requires energy and determination again and again. And some qualities, such as endurance indeed, couldn't even be found in situations other than those which bring stress, confusion, pain and injustice.

By now it can begin to seem that quality of character is inextricably bound to unfavorable circumstances in order to be applied. If it is good to show courage opposite danger, patience when facing tedium, moderation in view of temptations: are then not danger, tedium and temptations good things as well, at least in the sense that they can give occasion for good attitude? And what about bravely enduring pain, say, during medical treatment, or even, more dramatically, under torture? Justice, if you know you have been treated badly? Calm and restraint in the middle of a nervous crowd? If these are admirable qualities, then are not pain and torture, grievance and turmoil also of some good? Should you (a sort of pervert argument might go) even wish for these if you're intent on building a good character?

Not so fast. In every situation there are aspects that we can control, and others which we cannot influence. In general, our attitudes are of the former sort: it's up to you how you behave in any kind of circumstance. (Although we may at times experience ourselves as unable to control our attitude in the heat of the situation, that is a shortcoming that can be addressed in the long run.) We cannot always choose the situations which we'll find ourselves in, but we can choose what attitude to take once we are in them. And if we cannot choose whether we get into a certain situation (say, a medical treatment, as in the example above, with all the pain that may go along with it), then there's no point in wishing or hoping for it to happen (or, in this case, to being prevented from happening). It's just a waste of energy. We can, however, wish to take a decent attitude, and wishing this can eventually motivate us to invest the effort that is necessary to actually do it: to take that decent attitude. (A side remark: there is no point in hoping here, either; you don't hope that you'll behave properly, it's something that you have to do.)

It is consistent with this view to avoid unfavorable situations, if that's in our control (and if we do not compromise ourselves by it: caution is a good quality of character, cowardice is a bad one). That is because situations of this kind are precisely not good, or bad, just in themselves. However, if we do in fact get mixed up in such a situation (or even if we just envisage the possibility), then there is a choice: namely, the choice of which attitude to take; and here we wish for exercising that choice correctly: in favor of a good attitude (in this example that's endurance, not giving in and compromising self-respect and love for others just for being relieved from pain or getting off the hook quickly).

In truth, what's good or bad are only the character qualities themselves, not the situations. The conditions of our surroundings obtain independently of someone displaying good or bad character in them. People may be in painful or stressful situations and fail to endure them, they may act weakly and immorally. Or they may act admirably, refusing to let themselves be driven by stress-induced confusion or the desire to avoid pain, achieving control and even success from within such adverse surroundings. What is good, and thus worthy of wishing for, are not the circumstances, but that we act in them just as we should. Take care.

Ethical perfection

2010-07-27T06:14:00.000+02:00

When we work to improve our character (and thus our lives), the limiting point for this activity is ethical perfection. Perfection is the state where no more improvement is conceivable, the ideal state in which everything fits. This is a very interesting concept. To get more clear about it, let's speculate a little about what having a perfect character would be like.

Perfection is not a 'more or less' concept. You can't be perfect to a greater or lesser degree. You can't be perfect in just one sense, but not in another, too. You also can't be perfect at some times only, and not at other times. If you were perfect, that would show itself in your judging, feeling and acting exactly right, in every respect, under any circumstances.

Take honesty as an example. Ethical perfection would mean, among other things, to be honest on every occasion that requires it. (Moralists disagree over whether it is always wrong to be untruthful, or whether it depends on the context, or the consequences; let's for the moment assume there is an answer which settles this general philosophical question: 'being honest on every occasion that requires it' then means for our purposes being truthful at least on all occasions which are determined by that answer as requiring it.) And of course, that means honesty not only in your overt actions, but also in your views and feelings.

But you wouldn't have a perfect character (even with respect to this single trait, honesty) yet; it's not enough to be in fact honest on all these occasions, if you get into them. It takes more: you'd have to be honest under all conceivable circumstances in which it would be required. Your character must be such that you'd be honest on every possible occasion, whether life happens to bring you into that situation or not. Let's assume you are disposed so that you are honest at each and every sort of occasion, with only a single exception: in periods of sleep deprivation (in which you become, by a curious quirk of personality, a compulsive liar). Now assume further that in fact, you never get into a situation in which you suffer sleep deprivation, that the whole circumstances of your life make it extremely improbable that you'd ever come near such a condition. So you're never lying, you're never even likely to do so, you don't have the resemblance of a serious thought of it — and still, that doesn't count as perfection. It's not perfection for the mere possibility of your lying which isn't eliminated, even though it never comes to be actualized.

Psychological studies have shown that people's behavior in accordance with a given character trait depends much on context: many people aren't reliably honest at all, and even those who are often cease to be dependable in unusual contexts, or contexts unfamiliar to them. (Which doesn't show, of course, that there aren't character traits, such as honesty. It does show, however, that the stability of a person's characters isn't a given from birth, and even those who set out to improve theirs have much more work cut out for them than just that of making it stable for common circumstances. It's a more extensive task than it seems at first glance.) The goodness that we're looking for in perfection of character is something that includes stability over all circumstances, even the merely remotely possible ones. It's not that of the 'good enough', or that of the 'good for most purposes'.

Ethical perfection, like everything else in matters of good and bad, does not depend on circumstance. What can be either so or otherwise, just by a different turn of events, must not count in when we examine the quality and success of our life and character. A perfect, but by chance untested, character would be as good as an imperfect, but untested, character would be bad. It doesn't matter whether it's exercised, for the question of perfection what counts is only the condition itself, not whether and how often it is tested by actual circumstances.

And of course, just as the mere lack of occasion doesn't make a character weakness irrelevant for perfection, the converse does also hold: nothing in a circumstance of life can make it even better for someone who already has reached perfection. If you're in that condition, then no turn of luck can add anything relevant (it wouldn't have been perfection, if that were possible). To remain with our example: if you are perfect in that you are honest at all occasions which require it, then you are not made better or worse by a course of life that brings you more or less often into such situations. What counts is ethical perfection as such, and not how often it shows itself in concrete circumstance.

Remember, though, that we have looked only at a single quality of character here as an example, namely honesty. It goes without saying that perfection would include not only this one trait, but a host of others: courage and justice, steadfastness and moderation, kindness and generosity, prudence and thoughtful reflectiveness; they're all just names for your arriving at correct views and adequate feelings, and acting well in the endlessly varying constellations of our lives. If you'd get it right in every single instance, that would be the sort of ethical perfection we were talking about. Take care.

What there is

2010-05-01T08:54:00.000+02:00

There is a branch of philosophy, called 'metaphysics', that is concerned with the general structure of reality: what it is made up of, and why it is this way rather than another.

What sorts of things are there in the world? It's not quite clear, to begin with, that 'thing' is even the right word; certainly there are those familiar physical items around us, such as tables and trees, and they quite naturally fall under that label. But what about cultural items, like stories and songs? And when we look into our inner lives, aren't there also such psychological items as memories and moods, or, on the more complex side, logical reasoning or angry resentment? And what about rather abstract kinds of things? Take numbers, nation states, or natural laws. Are these all real? What does it mean if we count such different things as numbers and trees into one and the same category, that of the real? (Note how by now we've come to use the term 'thing' very broadly.)

And do we also include what we can't observe, but might postulate in order to explain phenomena? Evolutionary processes, elementary particles — in what sense can these be taken to be real? One could well make the case that they must count at least in some sense, since much of our account of the rest of reality hangs upon them; and don't we make a difference still between those postulated entities that we do accept (like electrons, for instance) and those we don't (like ether)?

From this latter case, we can also see something like a criterion emerge for what counts as real and what doesn't: at least as long as we talk about things which we have to assume for their explanatory value, that very explanatory value accounts for why we think they are part of reality. Indeed, an influential line of thought sees practical and explanatory value as the prime indicator of reality. (The idea here is that in the long run, nothing could have that sort of value if it wasn't really there.)

In more ordinary contexts, we can distinguish between objects which are artificially made, with some purpose, and those which are already there, which we just find in our encounters with the world around us. We can distinguish between the natural and the artificial; this includes a recognition, and perhaps, in fact, an appreciation of what's man-made. (Making this distinction requires not just an idea of the value that is in something man-made, i.e. the life time of effort spent on it, but also an idea of what it would mean, or what it did mean, to someone to produce the thing in question.) And as with theoretical items, artifacts seem to owe at least some of their reality to that practical (or perhaps in some instances, aesthetic) value that comes from being purposefully made.

In some sense or other, things fill up our world. I've used some made-up categories to group them together (with categories like 'physical', 'cultural', 'psychological', 'abstract' and 'theoretical', 'natural' and 'artificial'). And groupings such as these come easily from the way we use language to refer to them. But does that fact reflect a real structure, one within reality itself, or is it just a matter of convenience for our practical purposes, and arbitrary? Are some of these categorizations better, more natural, more adequate than others? And if they are, what makes them so?

Moreover, we have still just looked at things (and their categories). But is it actually correct to assume that reality primarily consists of things? Doesn't it also include facts, such as that it is raining here and now? And what about mere possibilities (which aren't the case, but might have been, such as that there's a rainbow over there)? Perhaps, as some insist, once we've admitted facts and possibilities, there's actually no need anymore to reserve a section for things, for things are already included in the totality of facts (facts always cover one or more things, as we know them, but they are more comprehensive, since they account for relations between things as well).

It's a wide field, and we can get carried away quickly into regions quite abstract and general. Why do we ask questions about these matters? It's not only for practical purposes; though it's partly that: categorizations and generalizations come in useful in science and technology (they enable explanation and prediction for many kinds of phenomena), so it should be of some use to look at how and wyh we build concepts, and categorize them. Nor is it just for inspiration or edification; though in part it's that as well: we inquire into what there is, into why there is anything at all in the world, into what makes everything move in order to learn about our place in all this, to get a sense of our own relative importance. Having a glance at the whole of reality is a way of breaking free from reactive mode, from being controlled by local influences and circumstances. In this it's similar to looking at the whole of one's life, which brings a similar correction of perspective.

Perhaps the most important motive, however, for asking these questions is to get more clear about the foundation of our ethics. Ultimately, what we want to know is how we should live — and no one can live a good life who gets out of touch with reality. For our way of living, and our goal of forming a good character, we are looking for a firm and reliable grounding in an account of the world as a whole, of nature and society, and our place in them, both as an individual and all together. Take care.

Novelty

2010-03-28T13:27:00.000+02:00

The philosophical literature is like an intellectual stream, running through the centuries. Some of its stretches are fast and quirky, some are broad and calm: novel ideas have been generated at times in astonishing number over a short period, while at other times a systematic working out took place, slowly and carefully elaborating details rather than shaking up the foundations. In part these philosophical texts constitute a dialogue, an exchange between past and present writers, with the later minds trying to understand the questions (and the answers) of the earlier minds, as expressed in their writing. Partly, it's a process of differentiation: getting deeper, more subtle, more thorough than anyone before. (In this respect, there is a parallel with science: we can today analyze natural phenomena much more finely, deeply and comprehensively than our predecessors, not least because technology has advanced so much.) In addition, it is also a process of transcending what's there, of overcoming old hindrances and stepping across borders. It's not merely stacking up more knowledge then, not simply adding to, but a genuine going beyond what's known already — broadening the scope of our intellectual endeavors further and further.

Yet these days, since we have a wealth of historical data and heaps of interpretations of them, any intellectual achievement might appear small in range and impact compared to what is already there. It's natural for it to seem so. But what this shows is not that intellectual achievements aren't what they were anymore, but that we should be wary of the instinct to automatically compare everything with what we take to be its historical peers. Good things are good because they're good, and not because they are like similar things in the past. (Part of the instinct to take something as good only if there is a historical parallel is the expectation, supported by long experience and observation, that something that worked well once will probably work well again. And there is nothing wrong with that; it's just that it doesn't follow that something which doesn't have a parallel in the past will for that reason fail to work.)

We must be weary of the expectation that only the novel is worthwhile, and especially suspicious of the notion that primarily the spectacularly novel merits attention. Let us trace back this expectation a little.

When we admire novelty, what exactly is it that we admire? The arts provide us with an instructive parallel: we have come to admire novelty as a mark of great art, originality counts above all else (even beauty). Don't we discount a work of art, or a performance, if it doesn't do anything new, if it doesn't show us anything that wasn't seen or heard before? Is it not a quick and nearly instinctive critical response to point out a similar work or performance that came earlier and did the same thing? Contrast this with former times; what was relevant then wasn't so much originality, but mastery of the material and the inherent rules of the game that was appreciated in art. It was a human excellence, not a historic event (the emergence of something novel) that was admired. Just copying things did not count as good, of course (since copying other works doesn't display mastery on your part), but there was nothing wrong with a simply conventional, though artfully crafted piece of work: you didn't have to break with all conventions and produce something historically unique in order to be appreciated. What guided appreciation was something else.

Philosophy is different both from science and art: it's not just about collecting truths and insights and building theories and systems out of them (thought it is partly that); and it's not just about bringing about something novel and unique (though it's partly that as well). Mere novelty and mere truth are not enough, they aren't the central thing. (They are part of it, however, and thus philosophy does overlap with, and connect to, both science and art.) There is an ongoing intellectual exchange in it, which is part of our culture; or more strictly, it is part of any culture, even though not everybody in any culture would participate in it. It is first and foremost an attempt and effort to understand the whole of reality; and it involves a sedimentation of insights and attitudes from earlier traditions (and other cultures). That it is ongoing means to constantly take up, interpret, digest and assimilate earlier thought; it also means, however, to develop novel thought in response to changes in the world, emerging new insights elsewhere, observation of success and failure, and much more. When we engage with the literature in the intellectual stream of philosophy, running, as it is, through the centuries, we must at the same time admire and recognize great depth and difference, and have the courage to strive for it ourselves. Take care.

Prepare for losses

2009-12-23T08:27:00.000+01:00

The world around us is a pretty unstable and unreliable place; circumstances that we took for granted yesterday simply don't hold anymore today, things or conditions we relied on break away, and people may come into our lives and then drop out of them again. While some of these developments can be foreseen, we must expect surprises all the time as well. And in particular when people are involved, these surprises have the potential to hit us heavily. An unexpected encounter with someone for the first time can change much of the world around you (just think of falling in love); but equally can sudden loss of someone whom you loved and met with much affection tear the universe apart.

This sort of risk inheres in any kind of relationship, in fact, in any sort of attitude towards what's outside our own control. And obviously, there is no way of avoiding that risk, short of avoiding attitudes and relationships at all — which would leave us in an impossibly impoverished situation. Taking a stance towards things and circumstances, and getting engaged in relationships with people (on a broad range of types of relationships) is part of what makes us what we are: rational agents, beings capable of thinking about, feeling toward, and acting upon our environments, communicating and interacting in innumerable ways (not least of the affectionate sort) with fellow humans, those who find themselves in that very same condition. If that is what we are, then risk is unalterably built into everything that goes on between ourselves and the world around us. Nothing there is stable or reliable, or if it is, then that is merely relative and tied to some condition; in general, there is no guarantee for anything we may assume. And while we often have to act as if we could take things for granted, while for many stretches of our lives we can more or less safely ignore the pervasive risks inherent in our condition, and while that assumption frequently is even borne out by the events, still we must be clear that sudden loss will come over us, from time to time, with or without warning, and sometimes where it hurts incredibly much.

If risk is what we have to accept, is there anything to be said, or to be done, then? Being aware of it can help you, in at least two ways: you can, in the event of loss, react properly and with strength; and you can prepare yourself (which is something that you can only achieve by constant awareness of the fact, and by moulding your responses deliberately). The latter is, of course, requisite for the former. It's very difficult to respond in a decent way to a great loss if you haven't worked beforehand to facilitate just that kind of response.

The emotion triggered by loss (especially loss of a person we loved) is grief; and compared to many other emotions, it is a very strong and intensely felt one. However, your should be aware that the intensity of your grieving is not a measure for how deep your love was; and neither is its duration in time. I know this may sound cold and cruel, and perhaps you'll find it also counterintuitive. You may think that the depth of your relationship, the strength of your affection, the importance of the lost one, should show itself proportionally in the intensity of the emotions that result from your loss. And conversely, would not a relatively calm and composed emotional condition rather indicate a similarly passionless antecedent attachment?

Tempting as this line of thought may be, it doesn't hold in the face of psychological fact. Scientific studies have shown that most people get over deep loss after a relatively short time. There is variation, but also a discernible mean period after which grief symptoms recede and the impact on feelings cools down substantially. Given the variety in relationship importance, this comparatively invariable resilience seems to suggest that there isn't that much of a correlation after all between how important someone was for you and how long you're entangled in grief.

And if you think about it, why should we assume that an acknowledgment of someone's importance in your life would have to be expressed primarily in an inability? Why should we think that it is appropriate and sensible to no longer think clearly and feel appropriately, to stop and cut back engaging in important projects in our lives — in response to an event that has disrupted us already? Why increase that effect by giving in to its tendency and letting it grow? Any loss will touch us; if we have appropriate feelings towards someone, then we will feel deeply at the sad news that this person is no longer, and that we won't enjoy their presence any more. Still, feeling this and giving way to the emotion are two separate things: we might refuse to be controlled by what is, in the end, a feeling only. And even though it's difficult (quite possibly an almost unreachable ideal, something that only few might attain at all, and something that we possibly can only reach in an imperfect way), is it not important to decisively counteract that feeling in all the places where it doesn't belong? Of course, in a period of grief, after a heavy loss, there are moments when we meditate and perhaps open up ourselves to that feeling of loss. At other times, however, life must continue, and then a proper attitude would rather call for strength and self-control — for, after all, it is your life that continues here, and it's no good wasting it for what, on reflection, isn't much better than self-pity or indulgence in weakness.

There's not much point in trying to convince you (and others) how excessively you loved someone after they're gone. If your own stance towards them was consciously appreciative, you know how much you loved them; and if that love could manifest itself in any outwardly discernible behavior, it could have done so only while they were here. You can't gather affection points, as it were, in retrospect. (Neither before yourself nor in the eyes of others.) And obviously, you will remember them as long as you live — not just as long as you grieve. In fact, keeping someone in loving memory does not require you to be intensely distressed. (If it did, your loved one, if they loved you likewise, would probably have wished not to be remembered at all, don't you think?) Quite the contrary: if anything, a loving memory should be a positive one, one that appreciates all the goodness in your relationship, and its value. As soon as you can save that value from being eclipsed by emotions of grief, you'll give your love a more appropriate tribute. Take care.

Choices

2009-12-16T19:27:00.000+01:00

There is a curious thing about freedom: you might think that it is something that depends on how things are around you, that it is not up to you whether you are free to do something or not. But that's not so.

So you're sitting on a commuter train for hours every day; you have to attend to mundane details of live, such as shopping, cleaning your home or doing pointless paperwork to please the bureaucracy; your day is full of little waiting times, much too short and inconvenient to do anything useful within them. You just don't have the option to do something more fruitful with much of your time; it simply is not possible; you are not free to do so. And it's not just that. Because of the tedium, the paralyzing monotonousness that drains all motivation, it's not just that you cannot do the things you'd rather do, you're even blocked from thinking and reflecting; it's the leaden routine of everyday life that makes your thoughts and feelings become stale and pale — and again, this isn't something you could do anything about.

Well, really? What does it mean to be free in this context? It seems to refer primarily to the ability to decide on how to act, what to make of a given situation. That includes also, in some sense, what to think and how to feel. (We may not always be able to control that in a given event, but at the very least we can work towards a character that would dispose us to slide into the right thinking, the appropriate feeling, as often as possible.) And of course, the ability referred to must also go further: namely, it must cover actually succeeding with what you've decided to do.

Let's get this clearer with an example. So you would love to get into philosophy; into studying the theory of what it means to live a good life; into reflection on what truth is, or beauty, on how to tell the difference between real knowledge and mere opinion, on what the fundamental structure of reality and the world around us turn out to be. But you can't. You are not free to do so. (Because, let's say, you actually do sit on a commuter train every day for hours.) And what we mean by 'freedom' when we use the word in this sense is exactly that the constellation that we find ourselves in, the whole setup of our life, job and family simply must allow an occupation like that. Yet for many of us, it doesn't — so we are not free (in the sense we're reflecting on here).

And the interesting aspect of this sort of thinking is that it makes your freedom fully depend on external circumstances, on how things happen to be, on that, precisely, in your life which you supposedly cannot change. You're basically saying that you don't have a choice here, that you might have tried to get into philosophy had the situation of your life been different, but that this simply isn't an option. The idea of a choice is crucial here, for if there is no choice, that means there is nothing to decide; or at any rate, even if decided, there wouldn't really be a way of acting after that decision, so it would be futile. Likewise you might think that being able to reflect, to think carefully and concentratedly, is dependent on your environment as well. You may well be not free to do so, even if you tried, in many of the circumstances that you're usually in, day by day. And finally, it takes such a lot of hard work to form your character and develop into a better person, doesn't it? Surely that's something that is simply not possible if you have an overwhelming load of daily concerns to take care of? Perhaps it's something you might do a bit for on vacations, or when you are retired. But as things stand, you're not at liberty to focus on that.

Compelling as this line of thought may be, it's self-deceptive. You do have choices, here as everywhere. And one of the first steps to developing a better character is to get clear on what those choices are. When you think that you'd rather reserve some later time for caring about your person, the decision that you in effect take is that your job, your career, or whatever prevents you from doing so, is more relevant — you are assigning it a higher priority. You may object that it isn't just the job itself: remember that commuter train? In order to make a living, you have to do something, and that will take time from you one or the other way. Perhaps; but even so, what keeps you from making good use of these dead times in the middle of everyday business? You can use any free moment wherever you are, and be it only for pondering something useful in your thoughts. If you don't do that, you're not only wasting time (and make no progress with your important projects), you've again silently taken a choice: you might have made an effort wringing something out of even an inconvenient situation — but you put a priority, at that moment, on the more convenient, the easier alternative, the path of less resistance.

You may not actually revert those choices; but it would be some progress to even recognize that they are your choices. It's not the world around you that has decided that you can't make more out of your life. It never is. If that choice is taken, it's always you who takes it — whether you realize it or not; whether you acknowledge it or not; whether you can justify it before yourself or not.

Choices are pervasive: you can start making use of every single moment of those waiting times; you can put a time management system in place in order to streamline the mundane and necessary tasks you have to do; you can rearrange a lot of your life to make room for what you think is important. You do not have to linger around with those who are in your company just because of an accident of the moment; you can choose who you want to be with yourself. You can also reflect at any time on what is important: what are the real goals of your life, and what kinds of character qualities would you have to develop to reach them? These questions are hard, and it takes a long time and much effort to merely get a first and tentative answer, which then must be refined over and over again — not to speak of starting to actually pursue those goals, and develop those character qualities. But difficult though it may be, it's your decision, and yours alone, whether you embark on that path.

All these are choices, and it's you who must decide: your path is not yet set and fixed for you by circumstances. With every day, with every hour you let pass and do not choose yourself, you're leaving your life to the general drift it's got from whatever influences the world exerts to it. And that may in the end not be what is best for you. Take care.

Being young again

2009-12-10T10:26:00.000+01:00

Have you ever wished to be a teenager again? That's a conventional manner of speech (and perhaps, as such, it is mostly innocent). But have you actually desired to be young again from time to time? Have you believed this would be a good thing? But why does it look so attractive? What did you have as a young person that you don't have now? A healthier, stronger, more attractive body? Unfailing enthusiasm and unlimited energy? All the options still available, all the choices still open?

Think twice. Wasn't that just an illusion, because you didn't know, at that time, what failings and limits are like? Wasn't that just the world as it looks through the eyes of someone inexperienced, someone who hadn't really figured out how to tell the important things in life from those that aren't truly relevant? Wasn't that someone mistaking shallow fun for something valuable, intensity of feeling for emotional depth, lack of control for passion, the inability to determine your own good pace for an infinity of options and a boundless playfield?

And what makes you think you won't make all your mistakes again? You made them precisely because you didn't have the experience of them. Now you have that experience, you can avoid them.

Freedom and creativity can only be exercised within a given frame of constraints, and they need a sense of direction. (Some artists have described their own process of creating exactly like that: they have to set themselves definite restrictions, even arbitrary restrictions sometimes, and they are then working towards a creative vision, within that setting; I think there is some deep insight in that description.) And the same is true for freedom and creativity in living your life. Just going off into the blue won't lead anywhere; and having no goals at all is not freedom, but arbitrariness.

Finding worthy goals, and learning what to value and what to discount, then, are essential. If you haven't put any effort into this during your life, going back to your inexperienced days wouldn't help at all (by far a better option is to get started now, at least.) If, on the other hand, you have, then you could only lose by winding back. Moreover, if you merely desire back your physical health, and the prospect of a long life still before you, what do you think would you do differently if you'd get those once more? You had all that once — do you really think you would be able to put it to different, better use this time? What makes you think so? Doesn't it rather seem, if you're not content with where you are, that you sailed with a questionable set of priorities then? Instead of longing for doing it all over again the same way, better start revising those priorities. Whatever being young again might give you: it's unlikely that on reflection it will be highest up the list. Take care.

The well-meaning

2009-12-04T19:26:00.000+01:00

It may not seem so, but receiving good wishes from others is a complicated business: they always get you into conflict.

One the one hand, they're well-intentioned, and we should appreciate that. The mere fact that someone takes the time and care to express a good wish indicates that there is some value they see in your relationship, and that's something to be honored. (Leave aside those cases where the motive is selfish; if you can't trust someone as far as whether their good wishes for you are based on a calculation that you may be of some use to them, then it's presumably not a complicated task to decide how to respond.)

On the other hand, however, the wishes of nearly everybody else around you will express what they think of as valuable, and given the sparse distribution of really hard thinking about this, of consistent reflection and willingness to decide on the basis of reasons, not received opinions — given this rareness, then, what most people see as valuable are most likely just the things commonly seen so: a long life and health, probably; happiness (in the prevalent sense that means not much more than just feeling good and easy, having fun); professional success and reputation; being well-off and proud owner of an imposing collection of status symbols (a house, a car, a private jet — just fill in what is current in the circles you are frequenting).

These things may be what we often go after; they're not always highest on the list of priorities, though, and it's precisely not a good idea to accept what's implicit in such wishes: that things like that are valuable, something that would be good to have (in a strong sense), something that makes a difference for whether you're leading a good life or not. Were that the case, then we should simply go after them always, and independently of what the situation is like and what our goals and plans may be. But that's not so. Whether you should go after things of that sort is a decision, and one that can only be taken by yourself, one that depends on both the respective circumstances and your ability to recognize what goes on in them, to figure out what's the right thing to do. And you may well decide, in a given situation, that there are more important things to take care of than your own long life and health (how many risk their lives and health for the good of others every day!), your feeling good and having fun (if you've ever spent some time with a needy person, someone too old or ill to get along on their own anymore, you'll see immediately what I mean), your career (you hopefully don't belong with those who sacrifice being together with their loved ones simply for doing longer hours at the office, risking a breakdown of relationships or leaving your children unhappy and alone), or money (not in need of elaboration, isn't it?).

The point here is not that it is wrong to care for your own health etc., of course. It's rather that these things have only a relative value, one that hasn't always primacy. (And you'll notice quickly that the examples I have given can be added to indefinitely; once you start thinking about it, there are many occasions where these things count less than it looked like at first glance.) The most important thing to have is the ability to choose, at any given time, among them and other options; it's a decision, and if there is anything to wish for, then it is for you to make the best possible decisions, to choose well and act right. And that is up to you, of course: thus in a sense it is something that you can wish for, rather in the sense of a resolve, or an intention; it's actually not clear where the point would be for others to wish for your acting well. Still, that would at least express the right values in a wish of them, and thus even show that they've successfully reflected on what would be really good for you, instead of merely propagating a common belief.

It's not by accident that we struggle for such a long time to tell the difference between what's truly of value in our lives and what's merely preferable on occasion; part of what makes that struggle so difficult is the overwhelmingly widespread false opinions on that question. Error of judgment in value questions is viral: it is transported by the good wishes, and well-meant suggestions, of those who want to do you some good. When I started by claiming that receiving good wishes is complicated, that was what I had in mind: you have to be careful to separate what's really good in a good wish (that the other person cares about you, which is invariably valuable) from the reference to what doesn't have a value of its own (which means almost any content of all those wishes you probably receive). And that's not easy, given the positive inclination to what we're receiving. It's crucial to make sure that this positive response picks out the right component: namely, the intention, and not the content of the wish. Take care.

Imperfection

2009-12-01T07:26:00.000+01:00

Falling short of ideals is common. There is a widespread sense that ideals are anyway nothing we can actually achieve, that they're for envisioning only: they give our strivings a direction, but it's not expected they'll ever be arrived at. The phrase 'an unreachable ideal' seems redundant and tautological — as if ideals were unreachable by definition already.

And yet does this not sound a little like a pretext to you? Doesn't it amount to half giving up on your ideals even at the outset? Why is it that we suppose it excusable to not attain what we agree would be a worthy goal?

There is no such thing as an imperfection without a corresponding conception of perfection: a norm failing which means to be less than perfect. To rank a meal as unsatisfactory, for example, you must be able to recognize the taste of a perfectly satisfactory one; to judge something as deficient piece of music you need an idea of what a flawless composition sounds like; observing a weakness of character requires you to know how an excellent person ought to behave, and to see where you're still short of reaching the goal of living your live well you have to reflect and find out what it would mean to reach that goal.

Once you do have a conception of the ideal, you may have to learn to live with instances of imperfection around you. You will encounter food and drink that comes not even near your idea of a perfect meal (and much more often than you'll have something you'd award that title to); you will hear music that is not in every respect as flawless as you'd like it — and that is only natural, since there are so many influences capable of spoiling perfection here that it must be very rare indeed. At least that's so for things like meals and music: they are the products of practices which in their very setup include a myriad of details that can only be controlled by the most sophisticated masters all at once. (And even they may not be always capable of getting simply everything completely right.) Yet that is only so because outside influences are in play. A single missing spice that wasn't within reach of the chef might spoil what otherwise had been a perfect dish; a sudden siren of an ambulance nearby may break into the quietest passage of a hitherto perfect chamber concert and kill the atmosphere. And as I said, there's nothing we can ever do: we simply must accept that these perfections are as rare and fragile as they are.

It's not like that with matters of character, and of living well. If you find yourself falling short of acting as you know you should, the proper attitude is not to sigh and resign yourself to the idea that you're not perfect — not at all. How you behave is fully under your control. (At least in the long run: even if you cannot change each of your reactions at once, you can always change your dispositions over time. It just requires will, and discipline, and no external circumstance short of your own end can prevent your eventual success.)

Why then, again, is it supposed to be fine not to strive for ideals, at least in that respect? Is it because we have lost sight of clear priorities, because we have unlearned that things like meals and music are no paradigms of what to value, and what to strive for? It's true enough, when we start looking closer, we may find that excellence of character is even harder to achieve than that of cookery, and that accomplishing perfection in the way we're living is an even steeper task than gaining it in making music. (And note that no-one said that most of those who try will meet that goal within the short amount of time we typically have.) But that will not invalidate it as a goal, nor should it frighten us away.

An important thing to recognize here is that our conceptions of perfection are of different kinds for meals and music on the one hand and for excellence of character and a well-lived life on the other. While the former includes at least as one component a happy coincidence, a junction of favorable circumstances, the rare coming-together of all those elements that enable a subtle composition in which even the minutest detail fits with all the others, the latter doesn't hinge on external luck in the same way: still, there are a great many details that you have to get right, and all must come together; but none of them is put beyond your reach, none of them is of a kind that you eventually can't control. If that is true, then it is not a question of possibility or impossibility whether ideals of that second sort are reachable — it's a question of your choosing. Take care.

Unreality

2009-11-24T19:25:00.000+01:00

Have you ever pondered where the borders between reality and unreality run?

There are the obvious cases of the fictional and the mythical: the worlds of a novel or a movie are not real, they are constituted by stories in a way that may bear more or less resemblance to the real world (depending on the genre), but what is narrated in those books and films did not actually happen as it is depicted there. And thought-up scenarios are on reflection much more common than it looks at first glance: think of illustrative stories that you may use in a speech or presentation; think of scenarios used for simulation of the effects different strategies may have in business, warfare or disaster prevention; or think of the thought experiments, hypotheses or assumptions used in almost any activity that requires planning and deliberation. Even more frequently, we encounter untrue descriptions or depictions of states of affairs of a more fragmented sort: quick lies and unintended deceptions, legends and rumors, illusions and hallucinations, fantasies and dreams — the varieties are endless, and in general these have little more in common than the fact that they refer to something that isn't so in reality. The realm of what we can talk about (we might say) is much larger than just the real.

We often use the language of 'real' to indicate this fact: we say things like: "I thought I saw him, but he wasn't really there, I mistook someone else for him." — "I was lying, in reality things went differently." — "This isn't the real story, it's just a movie." (That seems to be the main role played by these expressions in our language: they're mostly used when recognizing occasions where we didn't get to the truth of the matters; they appear when we want to mark something as an instance of unreality.)

Unreality is as much part of our lives as reality; we deal with forms of it every day; and while we certainly have some appreciation for select forms of it (think of the carefully crafted works of beautiful fiction), we are generally wary, or should be, of accepting the unreal as if it were real. (Note that where we do appreciate something unreal, that appreciation requires us to recognize its status as unreal in the first place, so that we can see and evaluate the art and skill that were applied to create it.) Take lies or illusions as the primary example: we have an interest to find out whether and when we are subject to those, even though it often is more painful to face the truth than it would be to remain deceived. We're not content to live in a dream world; we'd prefer reality to it, even if it turns out to be drearier.

We need to be conscious, then, of all the forms of unreality around us, and of their character. Especially in our beliefs and our emotions we tend to react to unreality in much the same way as we respond to actual fact — and this is something urgently requiring correction. Fine perceptiveness and subtle judgment are what is called for here, and it certainly helps to study unreality in all its manifestations (a field that makes for fascinating study anyway). Take care.

Darkness

2009-11-18T18:21:00.000+01:00

Darkness is special: of all the senses, vision is so dominant that its absence is felt immediately and acutely. In some people darkness causes fear (which is foolish), in others it fosters a focusing: we instinctively strain our remaining senses. (We do the same in related situations of impeded vision, such as foggy mornings or badly lit rooms.)

Still, darkness tends to leave us less in control, since it so severely limits perception and reduces the effectiveness of our actions — and paradigmatically so. Thus it has come to stand symbolically for hostile or at least unfavorable environments. With respect to people, it can sometimes signify evil or desperate streaks within their psyche, such as when we refer to the 'darkness within someone's heart', or the 'dark corners inside a person's memories'. (We might speculate that, by analogy, it is those people's lack of power over some of their bad character traits that makes the metaphor an apt one.) And though all this belongs in the poets' toolboxes of figurative speaking, there must have been something in darkness that has inspired associations of that sort.

The naturalist account that I've alluded to, the view that darkness is simply associated with situations of powerlessness, situations which we have a built-in aversion against (presumably developed in an evolutionary way), seems unlikely to be the whole story. It explains our instinctive caution and dislike of darkness by assigning it to a long-standing reaction to what from experience is characterized by heightened danger — something to get away from, and quickly. It doesn't account, however, for the emotional intensity that darkness generates, especially in comparison with other forms of impaired perception and impeded action. As an empirical description, moreover, such a view may well state that people tend to value dark surroundings negatively, but that many people do so (even when it is a habit that has evolved) doesn't make it necessarily a good thing to do. Values, in general, should result from rational reflection, not from instinctive habits. (Not that instinctive habits are useless — they're certainly good to have in many other contexts; but again: we're talking about valuing things, and the actions, feelings and beliefs that flow from such valuations.) Mere descriptions of behavior, even behavior that expresses values, aren't sufficient where reasons are needed for seeing something as good or bad.

Where can we locate, then, the ambivalent attitude to darkness with respect to our views of what's good and bad? Fear seams inappropriate; for fear is a negative emotion that takes its object, in this case darkness and what may result from it, such as our inability to recognize dangers in time, as something bad or evil. A better reaction toward unfavorable or dangerous external circumstances is caution: realizing and weighing the imminent threat or unpleasantness, and taking suitable measures if possible. Likewise, even though darkness may have a focusing effect, that seems not a sufficient basis for counting it among the things valuable.

A border case is perhaps that of people who have to accept permanent blindness, for instance resulting from an accident or illness. For them, lasting darkness will become the shaping condition of their future lives, and they may well take it as a chance as well as a curse: the world of their experience will be reduced by one dimension, the dimension of sight, but in exchange the sensitivity of their other senses might increase, and so compensate at least for part of the loss. Might someone in that situation then take the perpetual darkness to come as a good thing, a blessing that enables such an enrichment? Certainly, if they take such a view, that's an admirable strength of character, and there must be something very valuable involved here. But it seems wrong to locate the goodness, the real value, in the external circumstances that have merely brought the opportunity for excellence; clearly, what's admirable here is how the blind person has sustained her attitude. (Someone else, in an identical setting, may have despaired and sunk into weakness and helplessness — and since the situation is by hypothesis the same, the role of blindness is invariant; it's the attitude taken, and the excellence of character or the lack of it, which made the difference, and that's where we should look for what is goodness or badness in these examples.)

As with many things that happen in the world around us, darkness is something we have to deal with sometimes, and here we have a range of attitudes to choose from. As ever, the real goodness or badness lies in which of them we take, and what that tells about us. Questions of good and bad are questions about ourselves, rather than about darkness (and light). Take care.

Silence

2009-11-12T19:24:00.000+01:00

One of the most preferable states is silence — or should be, if quiet reflection and focused attention were as highly rated as they ought to be. Our attitudes to silence, however, are ambivalent.

Continuous noise can spoil concentration, irritate and make us nervous; this makes many long for silence, thirsting for getting rid of the unordered sounds we are exposed to (which have a tendency to mercilessly grab our attention, eating away our mental energy) — and the relieving effect is in fact tremendous when all sound suddenly stops. Deep silence, on the other hand, seems to have a disturbing effect on some (and especially in social contexts it can be quite meaningful when everybody refuses to talk). As with many things related to sound and hearing, silence interacts with the weight of time: its effect seems to build up and increase with its duration. The same applies to noise, of course; the overwhelming desire to escape is probably the reason for attempts to drown it in loud music streamed in via earphones, as we can observe people doing every day in crammed train cars or in the busy streets of our cities. (Although that only seems to replace one sort of noise with another, there is some attraction to the idea: at least this makes it an ordered soundtrack that fills our ears, and one of our own choosing.)

If there is such a variety in what we feel about silence at different times, we should make a fine distinction. The external circumstance, silence, may be congruent or not with the inner condition of calmness, of harmony within your thoughts and feelings, of being focused and capable of remaining so and keep on track with the paths of action you've chosen. Calmly following through with what you have decided is best is not merely more successful (usually), it also brings a feeling of satisfaction and generally relieves from tensions and nervousness. But it doesn't stem from external conditions, such as silence; it's often rather the other way round: being able to keep focus among turmoil and noise is a sign of strength of character and a well trained, focused mind. Although complicated environments can be trying for anybody in this respect, it's not true that this ability depends on silence and more friendly conditions. And as we have seen, the converse does hold as well: silence itself can be both conducive and obstructive; whether it makes you nervous or helps to concentrate has more to do with yourself than with what goes on around you. Take care.

Absence

2009-11-09T04:24:00.000+01:00

Interaction with others, fellow human beings, is generally valuable, and the more so the deeper your relationship with them is already. We spend time with our lovers and friends, our children and parents, and the mere being together with them has some value: it's their presence, interacting with them, that makes a difference from other occupations (such as being at work, talking to relative strangers).

Absence, the inverse of presence, seems to have a corresponding negative value. But where do either valuations come from? In what sense is presence as such desirable? (It's not so difficult to see why it is their presence, rather than that of others, that we care about. But exactly how valuable is direct presence, and why?) It seems that it is not merely a matter of quantity, that the value we see in the presence of those we care about does not scale with its duration: it's not necessarily so that being together for a longer time is therefore already more valuable. And a relationship can be healthy and deep even over long periods of absence, be it punctured with small phases of being with each other, or even entirely without them. (Of course, relationships often cool down and even vanish after some time without any contact at all; it's a tricky question whether that is because the relationship wasn't so deep, then, after all, or whether its value has legitimately changed over time and thus has been reduced normally.)

From all this it seems that it's not presence or absence as such which have value: they're merely containers for what is actually important (and it doesn't even depend on the size of the container how we value their contents). And in the case of absence, it's not something bad in itself that's in the container, but a deprivation of something good: your life over these periods is lacking something that would be valuable if you just had it.

The presence of any one person in your life is an external, depends on external influences (influences, that is, which we cannot control). Certainly, it is up to us, to some degree, to nurture our relationships; not doing so is a neglect that invariably results in a reduced quality of our lives. (This comes to be felt most severely when we lose someone permanently; but it is clear enough also in the case of simple absence, which is characterized by some good chance to meet the respective person once more, get closer again to her or him.) The vagaries of life, however, tear us apart from those we care about often enough without leaving us a chance to prevent it. It may be for a few hours every day, or for a few days every once in a while, very much depending on your life's setup — usually this sort of absence results from the demands of professional life. It may be for long uninterrupted periods, such as when our children leave home for some distant place to live and work there. Periods of absence of these sorts we simply have to accept.

Absence, I have said, is a deprivation: you're not able to enjoy something that you might have enjoyed (if circumstances had been different, presumably). And although it is something dispreferred, it's not bad in a strict sense: it's something that depends on external fortune, on events and circumstances you can't control; in all situations which you can control, it would be less than excellent, to say the least, for you to act in a way that causes a deprivation of that sort to both you and your loved ones. What is bad in these cases, of course, is not the deprivation as such, but that you've produced it by our actions, or at least that you've let it happen and be. (Acting so as to deprive yourself of some good thing means to act in a way that harms you, reduces your fortunes; it's unwise, and acting unwise is something bad — especially if it becomes a habit.) On the other hand, a deprivation caused by external events you can't control, or often even influence, wouldn't actually be bad in that sense. Certainly, you disprefer it; and that precisely means that if you could control and influence, you would, or at least should, do as much as possible, as much as you can, to prevent such deprivation. But if, as per hypothesis, you can't, then in your actions there is nothing bad. Mere external happenings don't count as bad (or good) — for good and bad are that which makes your life more or less a good one, one worth living, and one worth having lived. (And what else could count as a criterion here?)

(Note that this does not merely include what you think is good, what feels good, at a given moment — the criterion is whether what you do actually is good: and that is not exhausted by your subjective perspective on things; for instance, it will certainly include the good of other people as well as your own, and in particular that of your loved ones.)

Absence of those we care about is not in itself bad; it's what you haven't done about it that makes it so — if there was anything you could have done. If not, then there's no point in whining (or complaining). In any case, and fortunately, there are always plenty of occasions where you can do something to enrich and deepen your relationships. Take care.

Inexistence

2009-10-31T18:23:00.000+01:00

Why do we have this fear of our own death? Why are we scared by the thought of being annihilated as a person, of no longer existing at all? If it really is our own non-existence that scares us, it is a fear of not being there. But what exactly would that be like — not being there? Would it be like anything at all, experientally? Or isn't that rather a confused notion? After all, if you aren't there, what could it mean to experience anything?

According to a popular view, it is the sheer unimaginability of one's own inexistence that induces this seemingly unbearable fear. But this can't be quite right: we haven't existed before we were born either, and that's not something we have any bad feelings about; it's also not a quantitative matter: we wouldn't think, on reflection, that those who've been dead for decades now are in some sense worse off than those who died only recently.

And, more curiously, shouldn't there be a similar emotion directed at the sense of not being yourself, not deciding on your own actions and views? Isn't it something to avoid, to actively prevent: not being in charge of what you do, being driven (by whatever else, like cultural determinants, education, childhood experiences and so on)? So while there seems a natural fear of death, why isn't there an equally strong tendency to get in charge of our own lives and personalities, a caution not to waste that precious resource, your life time?

Some philosophers have thought that the supposed badness in death is one of deprivation: you'll not be able to enjoy the goods of life, or you'll not be able to reach those goals you still have set before you. (The latter point seems to be progressively weaker for people in high age who have already achieved much of what they set out to achieve. It's graver if someone dies prematurely, as we say: as a relatively young person, with many goals and projects interrupted that might have been completed otherwise.)

And again, if that theory is correct, and it is primarily our not receiving what we might have received from life had it been longer, why isn't there a similar emotion toward our weaknesses and faults? After all, these are responsible for many missed opportunities; quite a few spend their lives wasting days, weeks and years, and never seem to have any deep feelings regarding that (until perhaps very late, when they look back and regret).

We know we all have to die. With that fact in the background, it is reasonable to care about the actual physical process of dying, taking precautions to make it as acceptable as possible (by arranging health insurance, for instance), and obviously, avoiding mortal dangers. Moreover, it would be unwise to exclude the thought of one's own end (at some future time, of which it is unpredictable when exactly it will be) from all consideration about one's life. It's a basic element in all such reflection, and ignoring or suppressing it would be a distortion. (Of course, that's not a plea for overdoing it and falling into morbid melancholy. It would be a deficient sort of reflection that allowed you to let thinking about the bounds of your life hamper your activities and the pursuit of your goals.)

Yet from all this doesn't follow that inexistence, annihilation as a person, is something to fear, or even to be concerned about. Fear of inexistence, then, is perhaps rather about that confrontation with yourself: never having reflected and so made the best out of what in your situation was attainable, it's tempting to try to delay the final moment of truth until later rather than sooner. Had you faced it earlier, it would not just have been easier, but also better for you (there would still have been some room for change, some chance to really do something with your life). Conversely, if you make the most of your possibilities, and live a good life, there won't be any need to fear that final transition to inexistence. Take care.

Unawareness

2009-10-29T11:59:00.000+01:00

Self-knowledge is hard to achieve; it is also double-edged: beneficial and dangerous at the same time. Once gained, it can't be lost, which is good if you want to improve and make progress, build on what you've managed so far. But it will also persistently display your own faults to you until you've straightened them out. It will show you, that is, where you are; and that sort of insight is rarely pleasant (most often, we will just realize how little progress we've really made).

Perversely, that makes it look attractive to avoid looking too closely at yourself, blunt your perception of your own personality traits and keep away from scrutinizing your motives all too directly. Attractive it may seem, but obviously such a recoil isn't good for you. Thus many people, rather than simply avoiding self-knowledge, fall into a self-deceptive pattern: instead of self-knowledge, they go for something less disturbing, but superficially similar-looking. To immunize against that mistake, let's look closer at what self-knowledge is not.

We should distinguish between self-knowledge and mere awareness, observation and interpretation of our own psychological states. We're in certain moods, have emotions, and we accept or refuse beliefs — and though we do all this consciously frequently enough, we also do it sometimes without realizing it. You can be in a given mood for quite a while without being aware that you are; people often experience emotions (in particular, those of the nasty variety, such as jealousy, anger or fear) and only recognize at an already far developed stage where they have led them; and many of our opinions (or blind spots that prevent us from considering alternative ones) are so deeply entrenched that we're not always aware that we hold them, although they may express themselves in our behavior and others do observe the attitudes which reveal them. So becoming aware of your own mental states is an ability that needs training. In that respect it is like self-knowledge: it isn't something that comes for free. And like self-knowledge it has both a helpful and an unhelpful side: being aware of your psyche's contents will increase your ability to actively shape them, but it will also show you how much of your time you're enduring rather unpleasant states (for instance, that of boredom). It also will demonstrate to you how even pleasant feelings get stale and weak after just a short while.

Self-awareness in this sense is not the same as self-knowledge: mere perception of how it feels to be in a situation is no substitute to evaluating your being there. Real self-knowledge is reflexive character assessment: having reflected on what you want to do with your life, what sort of a person you want to be, and knowing where you stand with respect to these goals. That's not something that comes easily; it's a hard-won achievement. It requires sharpening your perceptiveness; but it's not nearly enough to just observe how you feel, to merely accompany your thoughts and actions with some situational awareness. That's a start, of course; it then must be supplemented by sound judgment (including, and especially, of the self-critical sort) and the ability to mature your emotional responses and build up your decidedness in taking action. Self-knowledge is not of the easy, empirical sort: it takes some attitude, and will. Take care.

Live by your philosophy

2009-10-17T09:38:00.000+02:00

If you act, think, feel in a way that is incongruent with your deepest convictions, then something is wrong. Your philosophy is the result of your reflections on what your life should be about and what sort of a person you ought to be — it's your considered opinion on these questions, and if you find yourself acting contrary to that, this means you're doing things against your own best interest; if you observe you're holding opinions that are in contradiction to it, this manifests an inconsistency in your views; and if your feelings take you on a ride far away from what they should be if your affections and attitudes were sound, this shows a rift between what you were aiming for and what you've achieved so far in educating them.

To live by your philosophy means a lot of things: for one, you have to really follow through on what you think is best for you. It's not enough to have the right insights — they're worthless if they are not manifest in what you do. And likewise, if you stop doing all those things you know you should do, just because you realize that you can get away with not doing them, that should give you pause. It's not just the visible actions, but also your inner stance that counts. If those thoughts and feelings that no-one can see are not in tune with what you do, then you are giving merely a show, a surface performance that may fool some others, but in the end you'll only deceive yourself (and how foolish it is to even invest effort into that!). Contradictions of that sort are the very thing that philosophy wants to correct.

Another thing that is meant is that you live by your philosophy, not by somebody else's. They may coincide, but then it's still your philosophy that you live by; not that other one — or put differently, what makes a philosophy the one you should live by is that it is your philosophy, nothing else. This is not a call for a high-flying, speculative mindset that results in 'your philosophy', as if you'd have to write a book with ideas in it that were never heard of before: but when you think about it, what can count as a philosophy that guides your life, all your actions, thoughts and feelings, must be something that has its roots in your own reflections; it must be arrived at by your own reasoning; and no engagement in changing your life will be sound if it is not founded on attitudes which aren't in a deep sense your own. Needless to say, your reflections will be informed by a long tradition in ethical philosophy, your reasoning will have to seek its touchstone in the arguments of others who also reflect and take a stance on those important questions, and your attitudes must be formed in an active engagement with the world around you. There is no such thing as cooking up 'your philosophy' just by stewing in your own intellectual juice. But unless you have reflected, thought through, and accepted something yourself, it won't do as a basis for living your life according to it.

Once you have started investing thought and effort into this, you will notice that the consistency of your actions with your views improves, that your judgments become more sound and you feel in an appropriate way more often than not. Constancy and personal integrity are a mark of a developed philosophy by which you can live. So is a continuously taken reflective stance of self-examination. Take care.

Avoid a vicious environment

2009-10-11T11:58:00.000+02:00

Indulgence, weakness, failure — those are bad enough themselves, but even worse are occasions, and locations, when and where they are celebrated, praised and practiced as if they were something good. If circumstances are favorable for seeing excessive eating and drinking, careless hunts for pleasures, thoughtless speech and senseless intoxication as desirable, all this naturally becomes much harder to resist — especially when everyone around you chimes in with the incitation.

But obviously bad example, blandishment and other forms of leading you into doing something you'd resist from a more considered perspective are not exclusively found at orgiastic sessions that cater to the senses. If, for instance, many of the people whom you deal with on a daily basis haven't any courage, if most of them from time to time act timidly, and everybody seems to just accept it as admissible way of doing things, it will be difficult, to say the least, to train and cultivate your sense of what's courageous; your courage will itself be weakened by that constant deficiency around you. And it's the same with all the qualities of character.

There's nothing wrong with pleasant surroundings — unless they make you soft. At many times, we simply choose to be where it seems most agreeable to be; but then again, that shouldn't keep us from the more important things we want to gain in our lives: when pleasantness of surroundings, and niceness of the landscape or the people reaches a status with us that makes it the most desirable thing, and even more important than who we care about, and what we want to do with our lives, then we have reached a point where feeling good has virtually replaced any other goal. And how degrading would that be!

Just think: if it is that important for you to feel well, to taste the pleasures of good food, to sense the softness of a mild climate, if you have come to see such mere conveniences as really valuable, then anyone and everything that's capable of causing pain to you, of even merely subtracting from your pleasures, finds a widely open door to blackmail you. Just about anything that's nasty could be used to cause you trouble. (And this is not as far-fetched as you now may think; I bet there is among the people who you know a number of that sort who are the slaves of one or the other of such tastes. Indulgence has a strong grip on those who've given in to it.)

Another bad effect of softness is a growing lack of energy. If everything that counts is feeling well, then why start working, or pursuing goals? In fact, not having any goals would be just fine, provided that a maximum of pleasantness is still ascertained to be had.

So, living for the pleasures makes you weak and lazy, and a plaything of all circumstances that have any power to reduce them. Just as you should care to resist this as a bad idea of what to do with your life, it's similarly wise to learn to recognize when many voices are about to coax you into a relapse. If you should find yourself in that sort of environment, be mindful not to be seduced. Take care.

Educate your feelings

2009-10-06T06:57:00.000+02:00

In our time, there seems to be a widespread tendency to blame: others, circumstances, or simply things in general. In many cases, that's just a technique to deflect attention from what actually should be one's own responsibility. And while this is easily recognized when what is under scrutiny is people's actions, the same applies to feelings. Let's look at an example.

Nobody likes being bored, isn't that so? Boredom is unpleasant, it makes us uncomfortably feel the weight of time, lets us experience ourselves as inactive, incapable even of doing anything useful with ourselves.

But many assume that feeling bored is merely the proper reaction to an environment that fails to entertain us — or fails to fascinate us, engage us, occupy our thoughts, in a word: fails to grab our attention. So it is really the world around us that is to blame for the nasty feelings we must endure. Or so it seems. For let us ask: why should it be that feelings of boredom are the proper reaction to things that go on around us? Does it seem the best way to behave, in circumstances that you take to be boring, to just remain inactive and, well, feel, that is, concentrate on what your senses tell you (i.e. nothing of interest, since by definition we are talking about a situation that you find boring)? Wouldn't it be equally possible to try and make some use of the situation? Whether you are in a waiting room or listening to a lecture you were forced to attend, whether you have to remain in company that you wouldn't have chosen if it was up to you or whether you are alone when you'd rather have someone around you: why not take the initiative and get something useful done? At the very least, there's always the option to do some thinking: reflect. Review the last few hours, this whole day, the past weeks; think about your goals in life and where you are with respect to them; even think about what's brought you into that situation you are in now. Perhaps you can identify some mistake you've made that brought you into it? Should you have taken more care of yourself so you wouldn't end up in a doctor's waiting room? Should you have dropped studying a subject that gets you into lectures you really don't want to listen to? Should you do more for the relationships to other people in your life — so you won't need to spend time with people you don't like, and you'd have the chance to be with those you care for?

Am I recommending, then, to take that feeling of being bored as a signal, an indicator to get active (or contemplative)? Not quite. That feeling is improper: it's bad for you; feeling that way is already to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. What I suggest goes deeper: you shouldn't have to feel bored at all. In all those situations, instead of having an impulse to become bored ("Oh, now I'll have to wait for the train for another ten minutes, and there is nothing of the slightest interest here!"), you'd better have an impulse to do something, or start reflecting ("Well, that gives me another ten minutes; fine, so I can continue reading that novel I've just started."). Instead of letting your surroundings determine what you might do, or even worse, of leaving it to the situation what you'd feel, start making that decision yourself — and train your feelings to tune in with more sensible options (and habits).

More generally, why should any feelings be merely a function of the goings-on in our world? True, once you have developed certain habits, you can't immediately control how you feel. There is an automatic pilot in place that drives much of them, and it's not easy to even notice, much less change them once that pilot has decided on a course. In the long run, however, you can educate your feelings; you can to a certain degree re-program the autopilot to steer more sensible courses in a given type of situation. Granted, that takes a lot of work, and even when successful there is no guarantee that your feelings will always be what you'd like them to be: in the complicated emotional interactions that we have every day with the people around us, so many things can still trigger unexpected behavior. And it is very hard to know yourself so well that you'd be able to foresee all that. The variety of situations we might encounter is infinite. All that, of course, is no excuse for not working on yourself and correct your affective responses, the ways you feel in given circumstances. Your feelings are your responsibility, much the same as your actions and beliefs are. There is no need, at any time, to feel bad (or bored). The fault, as always, is not in our surroundings, but in ourselves. Take care.

Memories

2009-09-29T12:57:00.000+02:00

When we use the phrase 'the time of my life', most often retrospectively, we refer to a period that we remember as one of deep happiness, intense feeling, an acute awareness of ourselves — a period we recognize, at the time we're remembering it, that was unique and will never come back. The middle (and late) stages of our lives are full of such insights to the effect that something was there in our youth that is now irretrievably lost.

(The phrase is also often used more loosely to express one's had some fun, but of course that's not the interesting usage; we're not talking here about simply the equivalent of saying that one's had a good time, but of saying it was the one time in one's life. That's what these reflections are about, even though it may not always be what people mean when they use those words.)

A good portion of our sense of self depends on our attitude to such memories: some get melancholy, others get dreamy; and there are those who quietly treasure them, and love to recall them from time to time at a peaceful hour when they are by themselves. Me, I often feel a wave of sadness sweep over me: it's a fresh shock every time to look back and face the facts of missed opportunities, failures from half-hearted pursuits, neglect of others that I subsequently came to regret bitterly; and although there are those episodes of a deeply satisfying happiness, too, they strangely trigger the same poignant sense of loss: they're a recollection only, of something that's gone forever. (That latter impression needs analysis: if the loss is one that actually came about as a consequence of my own actions, if it was up to me and I just messed it up, I'd rightly feel regret; though still it should rather be directed at my actions instead at a felt loss. In other words, if regret is appropriate, it can only be about what I'm responsible for. Else it isn't regret, but pointless whining.)

How should we deal with these feelings about our memories? They are taking us back to something unique, I have said: they're about parts of our lives — and not just in the trivial sense in which every portion of our past, every episode we've lived through could be called a part of our life. These episodes we're talking about are singular. Each of them has the character of something that you know will never happen again in that same way, and with that same intensity. Uniqueness implies loss — if it wasn't unique, it might be repeated; so when you remember it as unique, then it is already a thing of the past, of the kind that you can't have back.

There is something special about every stage in our lives, in fact, about every single stretch of time in them, especially our youth (with all the spirit, passion, and the recklessness typical of it). It's not the only time that is engraved in our memory. However, it's the first in the sequence, and so naturally it's what we will recall during all the later parts of our life. There is a certain asymmetry here: you can't get rid of all the memories of your past when you're old, though you can ignore your future to a certain extent when you're young. And memory, of course, does not just keep the happy, but equally the sad experiences; it makes no difference where the goodness (or the badness) came from: whether it was from within yourself or from an external source; and it generally seems the vividness and strength of our recollections has to do with how important and how deeply felt those experiences originally were.

Unless you are forgetful, the events of your past won't change (though your attitude to them may vary somewhat from time to time), and they will never disappear from what you remember to have been. And wouldn't it be shameful to forget? If what you did in those past times was the right thing to do (then), if you did well, if your stance was appropriate, then forgetting about it would be a foolish regress, a step in the direction of losing hold of your very self; if those past things are rather regrettable, distancing yourself from them seems like trying to avoid taking responsibility and wasting a chance to improve. So we'd better never forget. Take care.

Take responsibility

2009-09-24T00:56:00.000+02:00

This is not a game (not an intellectual one, nor of any other kind). It's about serious matters, the most serious there are for any one of us.

Philosophy is good advice, a suggestion to reflect, a recommendation how to live. And it's not easy to give advice, much less good advice, don't you think? It's no big deal to talk a lot, of course; but do you also heed yourself what you say? Do you act the way you recommend, are your affective responses right in tune with what you tell others they should feel? You and I, we're both still far from being perfectly wise (or so I presume, I am, at any rate); so we fail to act as we think we should often enough. But could you with a clear conscience advise someone to do something you haven't tried yourself (and successfully)?

You, as a lover of philosophy, have a responsibility: you've taken a reflective stance on your life, you know what it means to examine and improve. You've been through the first few cycles of reflection; you've learned it's not a trivial thing to look at your life as a whole and figure out what it would mean to make it a good one, and happy; you know that taking the reflective stance can be disturbing, and yet it pays off: it lets you have a satisfaction deeper than what anything from outside yourself could ever give you. That's because it's your life, and everything you are and ever will be is expressed in that life — nothing else can have that sort of meaning for you. Now remember that everybody else is in the respective situation: for them, it's their lives which are at stake, and for them, the stakes are as high as they are for you.

You know that there is only as much to your life as you make out of it yourself. And while all those decisions (what to think, and do, and how you should be feeling at whatever happens to you) are yours, and yours alone, there is a plethora of help, suggestions and advice in the works of all the masters of the field. Being able to access them is an immense treasure, matched by only a few other things that depend on external circumstances: think of the few people you really love, and really are loved by; think of the luck of living in a society that gives you freedom enough to pursue your goals and provides the basic resources to be able to do so — not everybody is so lucky to have that, and while it would still be possible to be upright and make whatever is possible out of a situation where these conditions aren't fulfilled, even the best that could come out of it wouldn't amount to much, compared with other possible scenarios. So do not hesitate to make that treasure available to others as well. Study the works of philosophers thoroughly, and make sure you pass on whatever you were able to learn. Be careful, however, not to be carried away when you start passing it on to others. The receivers of our advice are worth that we give them all our attention: make sure that what you have to say is something that has value for them, helps them see what you can see — and never forget to respect their capacity to think and decide for themselves. In a word: deal responsibly with that treasure you've won. Take care.

Authority and aggressiveness

2009-09-21T08:55:00.000+02:00

In many hierarchical organizations, such as businesses, bureaucracies, or academic institutions, there is power that comes from authority (that's exactly what the hierarchy is built from; though it's not the only kind of power, even in hierarchical organizations).

When you are in a situation of power, when you have the authority to tell people what to do (and perhaps also how to do it), you have to be careful: power over people has strong catalytic effects on bringing character traits out in the open. A great temptation is to use people's emotions to manipulate them into doing what you want (using fears is particularly effective, but it works with other emotions too). It's clear (to most people) that one shouldn't do this. As usual, however, the first necessary step is to recognize situations of that sort — it's not always obvious when it is happening. It needs some sensibility, and of course you have to be clear yourself what's appropriate and right, and what isn't.

This is not just a pragmatic consideration, because the authority built on fear is ineffective and ephemeral — which it is: it is also harmful for your character. Using threats (however veiled or indirect) and feeling successful with it tends to build irascibility, a character weakness. People who are angered lightly can develop a despotic streak; they often take on the attitude of someone who has suffered injustice (in their anger, as an implied feeling) — and that doesn't fit reality. Playing the aggrieved party, they are in truth looking for an opportunity to inflict harm. Despotism is vicious because it lives the drive to hurt people, but under the disguise of being hurt oneself (as implied by the anger). Of course all this applies equally to similar behavior in other contexts than work: people can become despotic with their friends, or at home. Constellations of authority, however, have a tendency to bring these character attributes out more clearly into the open, or give occasion to develop them. Be cautious to avoid their traps!

A particularly dangerous type of situation is when playing on the emotions of others seems the only, or the most, effective means to reach some important goal. They're dangerous because they can make it seem that there really is a good reason, this time, to make an exception and do it. After all, it's the effectiveness of what you do that in the end will count. Or is it?

Acting badly cannot be justified by whatever end you may want to achieve. True, when we deliberate, when we decide to act, there are from time to time situations of conflict; in some of them, the effects of what you do would be the only criterion that can be sensibly used. And so, in these cases, you choose the course of action that promises the greatest certainty of success. But this can't be the right thing to do when acting badly is among the options. In cases like that, merely pointing to the greater effectiveness of some action for a desired outcome doesn't make it acceptable. In fact, there are many ethical limits to action that have the consequence of constraining effectiveness. That's a wide and debated field, of course; but there's a first couple of steps for everything. Make sure that you examine your choices, and consider whether they include a concern for treating everyone around you as a person, and not a mere means to some end; consider whether your first priority is integrity and acting well; test, especially, your awareness of the ambushes that authority can lead you into, and your vigilance and caution in keeping clear of them. Take care.

Build a coherent world view

2009-09-13T08:55:00.000+02:00

Whether you form the correct opinion in a given situation, whether you do the right thing, and whether you experience adequate feelings (whether you are, that is, neither too cold nor work yourself up more than the occasion warrants) depends on many factors. For one, you must be able to take in your surroundings correctly: recognize all the relevant details, and discount what's irrelevant or misleading. But to look only at the situational elements is not enough. Since you are likewise part of the situation yourself, since you bring your entire personality with you, the overall soundness of your views plays a part as well.

Your views should fit together: what you think and say should be consistent, shouldn't be contradictory. And there is a connection between your beliefs, actions and feelings. What you do, and how you do it; when you feel strong emotions, and how you express them; what you think and say, and how you decide when to speak out loud your opinions and when to keep them for yourself: all these should fit together, and make sense in the light of each other. Your thinking can explain your actions, and feelings can express your thoughts — but only if they actually cohere. More generally, whenever you exercise your rational capacities, that is, whenever you form an opinion, decide how to act, or reflect on an emotional state you experienced, those who want to understand and make sense of you (and that includes yourself) only have a chance to be successful at it when they can assume that you do it in a way that is sound, proportionate and internally coherent.

(Put the other way round: if you are just inconsistent, what is anyone supposed to think? To the extent that you exhibit contradictions, you make it hard, if not impossible to understand; and obviously, not being able to rely on understandability, how could one come to trust you? And ask yourself: how could you trust yourself? For this is, as you certainly have guessed, not just about making you intelligible to others, but also, and perhaps primarily, to yourself.)

Obviously, this doesn't mean you should attempt to never ever contradict yourself: frequently enough, you'll learn something new that invalidates or at least relativizes some ideas you hold. In these cases, there is nothing wrong with changing your mind. It would be foolish to stick to an opinion merely because you have once claimed something that's at variance with it, or because you've once acted in a way that was not in line with it.

But be honest about that change of mind: don't try to give the impression that you've never thought differently. 'I used to think so-and-so ... I now think this-and-that.' is more honest than claiming 'Well, I've always said this-and-that!' (Even if you never actually said so-and-so, but merely thought it. Remember: giving a wrong impression is not in the least better just because nobody knows about it; and what does it matter, as long as you are aware of it yourself?)

To sum it up: the goal must be a harmony of opinions and beliefs (expressed or not) with actions and affections. How can that be achieved? Being cautious and vigilant, avoiding rashness and error is part of it. But it's not merely a passive affair: there is a lot that you must actively do in order to reach that goal. Of course, there is no such thing as explicitly taking stock of every bit that you know or believe. But that doesn't mean that you can't work on the consistency of your views. And again, don't remain too narrowly fixated on situational elements. Your opinions range from political, historical and religious views over aesthetic preferences, career choices, personal likes and dislikes, tastes and whims down to those hopes and desires, aversions and fears that we barely ever admit to ourselves. There may be some about people in general, but many opinions that we hold are about rather specific persons: your friends and family, your neighbors and colleagues, customers and business partners, long-standing companions and recent acquaintances, your allies and your enemies. And most important of them all, your philosophical views: what's good and bad, what's valuable and why, how reality is made up and where its borders with unreality run, how to tell knowledge from mere belief, truth from falsity, correctness in thought from the mere appearance of it. Look into all that, and especially examine these views when you come across them while reflecting on something that you have experienced or done. Can you identify some of the roots of your feelings and actions in those more or less deeply held opinions? Take care.

Develop a fine perceptiveness

2009-09-07T08:54:00.000+02:00

In everyday life, we encounter many facets of people's characters (including our own). It's not always easy to discern which of the many possibilities we have before us: are you just witnessing a case of cautious behavior? Or is it timidity? Restraint? Or rather cowardice? The outward signs of what people do may be compatible with all of these interpretations. But depending on what you take to be the case, you're dealing either with an excellent or with a faulty character; depending on how you interpret the situation, you are looking at weakness or strength, something good or something bad. That's not to say that it is all just a function of what you think of it, that in itself actions are neither coward nor courageous and so on. They surely are. But since human interaction is so complex, and we cannot look into people's minds, there is a lot of uncertainty in judgments of this sort. And that uncertainty may easily be large enough to leave room for all those interpretations, different as they may be. (Again, this applies not only to what other people say and do; our own behavior isn't always transparent to us either, and we sometimes ask ourselves only later on precisely why we've reacted the way we did.) So there is no fool-proof method, or exact science, to distinguish between what looks like excellences of character and goods on the one hand and faults of character and bad (or indifferent) things on the other. Of course that doesn't mean at all that we shouldn't try; and since it is primarily a matter of a trained perception and a consistent view on what shows a good or bad character, on what's valuable and what isn't, on what is good and bad and what's indifferent — since it is primarily a matter of something that's up to us to develop and improve, we're responsible for doing so. It's not optional, merely a matter of taste or fancy. It is also in our own best interest: not being able to recognize bad behavior for what it is has obvious dangers.

It's not just that telling the good from the bad (or indifferent) is so difficult — it's also that most people, having the same difficulty themselves, misjudge, and then promote that error in judgment to others. You may realize, for example, that great wealth is nothing that makes one happy, or a good person; still in people's opinion, and that great magnifier, all those magazines, movies and websites that multiply people's opinion, the opposite will be claimed over and over again.

So one of the first steps must be to develop a critical sense and a scepticism about any opinions that aren't your own. Withhold judgment, don't rush into thinking of something as good or bad, especially not if the only reason to view it so would be that someone just has called it so. Rather, learn to take nothing as good or bad by default, and only accept those conclusions you've reached by your own powers of reasoning. Play the old 'Five Whys' game: 'He's a happy man.' — 'Why?' — 'He swims in money, he just won the lottery.' — 'Why's that good? Why does it make him happy?' — 'Well, having a lot of money is a condition for being happy.' — 'Why?' — 'Because you can buy whatever you like, you don't have to work that hard and endanger your health, you can have many more pleasures, and people will recognize and respect your higher status.' — 'Why is that sort of status recognition good for you?' — 'Because ... perhaps because it helps you to get even wealthier; or rather, because people take you as a successful person, having achieved such wealth; or maybe it's simply that it feels good to be adored a little.' — 'And why's that?' — Well, do you have an answer to this? At the very latest with the last 'Why?' question, it seems clear that at the bottom of such an ascription of happiness to someone with lots of money are questionable values. If everything comes down to being able to amass more of it, or to looking good in the eyes of the many (mostly on the basis that they know nothing about you save the fact that you are rich), then would you still think of this as an important good, something that makes your life happy? Drilling deeply into the reasoning behind common opinions helps to expose much of what we take for granted too easily often enough.

Children are notoriously good at the game of 'Whys'; many adults have dropped it somewhere along the way, perhaps because it can be so daunting. But half of it is not difficult at all: you just have to be obstinate and never stop before you've asked 'Why?' five times at least. What's difficult is the other half: finding the answers. (I've given only example answers of course, you'll have to find those which you take to be plausible yourself.) You'll notice that this is tough to get started with, since from our everyday experience, we're not used to ask that deeply for reasons.

But those reasons underlie our thinking, and our opinions, especially our views of what's good and what's bad (and what's neither, being either neutral or preferable at some times and not preferable at others, depending on circumstances). The answers to these questions are operative in what we do and feel, and thus we should be able to make them explicit in what we think as well. Don't be frustrated when it doesn't come easily at the beginning. It'll develop. The answers are there; what needs exercise is just your capacity to formulate them, to bring them out in the open.

One of the astonishing effects will be that your perceptiveness will greatly improve. You'll be able to tell cowardice from caution in the way people behave; you'll be less likely to mistake rashness or recklessness for courageous and decisive action; and you won't be fooled into taking flattery for friendship in the praise you receive from people. Take care.

Room for development

2009-08-31T06:54:00.000+02:00

What we do, think and feel has been said to be preprogrammed by our genes, determined by blind fate or a watching divinity, imprinted by culture and society, moulded by our childhood experiences. I don't feel particularly compelled by such theories that tell me, in effect, that my choices, my ideas and convictions, are really driven by something (or someone) else. Are you convinced?

We have to make a fine distinction here. What those theories I've mentioned above have in common is the claim that we don't choose ourselves what to do, think or feel. But there are different ways to understand that claim. It could be meant that we are fully controlled by something else, that none of our actions actually comes from our own decision, that we always think and feel in a way that is determined externally (that is, outside of ourselves). On this extreme interpretation, there is nothing that we really could do to change ourselves, in order to act differently. In fact, according to this extreme view, even our wish to change is something that's preprogrammed, and so is whatever we try to do in order to fulfill it. (And of course, whether we succeed in changing thus is also already predetermined.) Our notion that we have choices and some freedom turns out to be an illusion.

There is a more nuanced interpretation, however: it might be claimed that we are only partly controlled externally, that some of our actions result from influences beyond our control, but others are really what we chose freely, that sometimes we are driven, but at other times we are the drivers. On this view, there are still strong influences on us; but it also acknowledges some room for exercising choice. In fact, nobody would really think that everything is under our own full control: we experience ourselves often enough to be somewhat influenced by factors outside ourselves. Our genes, childhood experiences and so on seem indeed to have some role in shaping our lives, and unless we start to counter that influence, obviously there won't be any change. But what the nuanced interpretation allows, and what the extreme interpretation does not allow, is that there is some room for development. We may be shaped by childhood experiences, but we can to some extent conquer that influence in our lives. The same applies to cultural patterns, and biological conditions. There may be limits, but there are possibilities as well, and it is within these possibilities that we can operate.

And how else could success in life be defined, if not precisely by how well you do within the area marked out so? For living successfully, it's relevant how much you make out of the possibilities. Where exactly the lines of constraint run does make some difference for what will happen in your life, but that's not the relevant one. What makes the relevant difference is whether you do act, within the area where you can change things, and whether you actually bring about that change. That's what is decisive for whether a life is successful or not. And of course, the extreme version of the claim that other things than our own choices drive our lives leaves no room at all for that sort of success.

There is another consideration that makes the extreme view unacceptable: What would it mean for you if it were actually true? What discernible difference in your life would it make whether your behavior is preprogrammed by your genes or not? I'd rather say that if there were any difference at all, it could result only from a difference in your actions, thoughts and feelings. If you started believing in being driven by mechanisms generated by the events of your early childhood, that would possibly change your behavior in some ways, and also your attitudes: would you be able to take other people as seriously as you do now when you come to think of them of automata controlled by their genes, their childhood experiences, or social role conventions, or some such thing? Start accepting the extreme view, and you'll probably begin to behave indifferently towards others, and indeed, towards reality. However convincing the rhetoric may sound (and some proponents of the extreme view use the pathos of science, or religion, to astonishing effects), accepting the claim under the extreme interpretation is not good for you — it's harmful: it will damage your relationships with the rest of the world.

And finally, subscribing to such a view, one that takes your responses to the world as something that you don't actually control yourself, would be a perfect excuse not to put any efforts into forming your character, improving yourself, wouldn't it? What point would there be in enhancing your ability to deliberate, to figure out what's the right thing to do, when the outcome will be what providence has prescribed anyway? Why should you try to build up better, more consistent beliefs when the truth is hidden behind veils of cultural constructs? And why should you educate your feelings when they're at any rate merely a cruelly blind repetition of the events in your early childhood? Thus accepting the extreme view is damaging not only in your behavior towards others, but even in your attitude towards yourself. Again, it's harmful: it leaves no room for development.

So when you think about influences on your decisions, be careful to be nuanced. Make sure that the view you accept includes room for development: of your own character, your relationships with others, and your success in leading your life. Take care.

Having nothing to hide

2009-08-29T08:53:00.000+02:00

Some of our actions, many of our thoughts, and most of our feelings remain unknown to anybody but ourselves. In some cases, this may be simple economy: unimportant as they are, nobody would be interested in them. Sometimes, perhaps, it's rather tactics: can you get something you want easier or more quickly if certain people don't have a clue about your intentions? Or it may be that you want to spare the feelings of others by keeping to yourself what you think or what you are about to do. And finally, sometimes your personal life needs protection from political or commercial exploitation, or just foul-minded individuals setting out to harm you. But even subtracting all that, a nagging suspicion remains that there is still more within that horizon which only you can cross, things you do only in private, thoughts you won't speak out loud, emotions you daren't express.

Just to avoid misunderstandings: we're not necessarily talking about severe matters here — there may be so many small things, things others wouldn't probably even notice (or invest much thought into to judge them). And yet you're hiding them, just in case — and perhaps because, if someone would look at them critically, you feel they'd be right. We hide things often not because there could be tangible consequences, but rather because we are ashamed of them ourselves.

Let's make a thought experiment: What would it mean to get them out into the open? What would happen? How would you have to change in order to be able to do so without fear (or shame)? Why is that so hard? (It is, no doubt. The reflex to hide is deeply entrenched in many of the ways our societies work. Not least because of this we admire honesty and openness so much in those who are capable of them.)

Part of the question is whether your actions, thoughts and feelings are in accordance with your values all the time. Is it sometimes that you'd rather hide them because they are not in harmony with the values you subscribe to? If, for example, you see consistency and integrity as important, and then find yourself acting (or even thinking or feeling) contrary to them, you may well feel an impulse not to admit even to yourself how weak your ability to stick to your values is. Another aspect is related to the views of others: is the higher or lower opinion that people might have of you a good enough reason to act in a given way? So do you hide actions sometimes not because they are inconsistent with your values, but because they're not compatible with what people think you should do, even if you don't agree to them, just to keep general opinion in your favor? And finally, is it sometimes so that you keep your thoughts to yourself merely because they might hinder your career if they became known to someone, or might cause you some material disadvantage?

On reflection, as you have certainly found, these motives I've just listed are questionable, especially the latter ones. Are money, reputation and career progress important enough to make you operate with two faces? Are integrity and justness, courage and perseverance, kindness and generosity, honesty and modesty — are these values that you have to hide whenever you encounter someone who thinks that wealth and pleasure, reputation and power rather are the things worth having? But even the first motive, not owning up to things you've done because they contradict your own goals, seems not sound when thought through to the bottom: if you're not willing to admit even to yourself such a divergence between what you've done and what you think you should have done, then how could you ever make progress in becoming more congruent there? And if you're willing to admit it to yourself, then what point would there be in hiding it from others? (Given that you've just agreed that catering to the opinions of others in itself is no good reason either.)

So shouldn't be the goal one along these lines: to develop a character such that none of your feelings, thoughts and actions are such that you would not want to admit them, be it to yourself or anyone; to be able to recognize, and own up to, situations where you still fall short of that goal — be it toward yourself or others; to live in a way that any of your doings might come out into the open, and be comfortable with it? Of course, that doesn't mean that you have to run around confessing whenever you think you haven't been at your best; and neither does it imply you should impose the details of everything you think and feel on anybody who wants to listen. But there shouldn't be anything among those details that you'd be ashamed of. Not getting everything out in the open may be all right, but the reason shouldn't be a desire to hide. The goal should be having nothing left that needs hiding. Take care.

Arrogance

2009-08-23T13:33:00.000+02:00

A disdainful behavior is not a sign of excellence — although those who exhibit it usually think (or hope) that this is what it is taken for. But there is no reason why anyone who speaks dismissively about others should be in the least better, just for the reason that he's able to criticize. (It's always easier to talk negatively than to be appreciative, anyway.) And badmouthing others (co-workers, neighbors, competitors) is a cheap and disgraceful tactics. As so often is the case with what we think, say and feel, it reveals more about those who do it than about those who it is about.

There are several things you might want to do with the stance I've suggested in the previous paragraph. (Apart from thinking it through, and questioning it, of course, which is something worth doing with any opinion you take in, always.)

One is to try it out in everyday life, be perceptive and observe closely how it actually plays out. There are plenty of occasions. When you enter into a conversation with your co-workers, notice what their first response is to what people tell them. Is it encouraging? Constructive? Does it show an interest in what the other has to say? Or is it dismissive, contemptuous, a knee-jerk throwing of objections and misgivings at everything that is proposed? (And scrutinize your own contributions for the same patterns; it's easy to forget in a conversation that you're a participant too, and that the tone is influenced by your words as well.) After you've identified some of the latter sort, watch who's got the upper hand. You'll be surprised how often it is the negative person who seems to have made a point, and the other who's on the defensive. That's why throwing criticism around is such a cheap, but often successful tactics. One doesn't really have to say something substantial, just be sufficiently aggressive, and then let the other one defend. One can easily appear to have only the best interests of everybody at heart, of course, since one is merely bringing objections to the table that should have been considered by anyone anyway. Yet certainly it's neither fair nor helpful when people behave that way, so that's the point at which you may ask what their real motives might be. And that's precisely to take the perspective I've suggested in the first paragraph. (On a side note: you'll possible also notice hat a negative style has a way of rubbing off on all involved — once somebody starts, others tend to follow, and the constructive substance of a discussion goes down in a spiral.)

A further possible response to the suggested attitude is to examine the reasons behind it: why is it that talking down the achievements of others, discrediting them, should be taken as signs of a lack of excellence rather than of excellence? In part, that's because an unfair and unhelpful behavior towards others indicates some faulty character qualities, and that doesn't speak for a person's overall excellence. There is, however, a deeper reason.

Arrogance can have many roots, but in almost all instances it expresses an attitude that hints at some incongruity between what someone perceives to be the case and what actually is the case. It displays a rift between what is behind our actions, thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and reality, the world with which we interact, about which we think and to which we respond affectively, on the other. Drifting away from reality is bad for you, and as far as arrogance discloses such a drift, in its diminished awareness of others, absence of appreciativeness, and above all, deficient self-awareness, it's a clear mark of a lack of excellence. Or, to put it the other way round: if you are striving for excellence, beware of arrogance in all its forms. Take care.

Admiration

2009-08-16T08:52:00.000+02:00

On some occasions, our feelings towards something suggest a depth, a profoundness that is hard to describe, and possibly even harder to explain. (Perhaps explanations have to come to an end at points like this.) Such occasions can be of various sorts. Sometimes we are touched by the beauty of a piece of music, a work of art, or a bed of flowers; or the sublime spectacle of natural phenomena moves us: a grand landscape at sunrise, a violently raging thunderstorm, the boundless calm surface of a sleeping ocean.

Yet perhaps the deepest feelings in us are inspired by people and their qualities of character: their consistently fair and just behavior, their strength in enduring adverse conditions, their calmness in the midst of turmoil, courage in the face of risk and danger, and generosity even in uncertain times. And while feelings originating thus seem to have a certain quality in common with the more aesthetic experiences coming from encounters with physical beauty or natural spectacle, there is an extra dimension that can only spring from the specifically human excellence we find exemplified in them, and our response to it. In a word, what we feel towards the excellence of character in people we encounter is constituted in part by admiration.

Admiration itself is not a feeling — it's an attitude. It's not something that merely happens to you, it's something that you choose to exhibit. And in order to really be admiration, it must be expressed towards others; it's not enough that you privately experience it. Admiration is an activity, a chosen course of action. And, not surprisingly, I strongly recommend that you very carefully consider by which criteria you single out someone as worthy of your admiration. Whom you admire, and for what reasons, tells as much about yourself and your own values as it signals something to the admired person.

You can only admire what you value. (You may not be able yourself to do what you admire in others; but you must be aware of it, and you have to be convinced that it is of value. Otherwise whatever you feel isn't based on admiration.) So if you admire someone's courage, that presupposes that you think of courage as something worth having. If you feel great respect for someone who can remain composed and be fair even under pressure, that shows that you see value in that ability. But people consider a diversity of things as worth having, don't they? What about money? Would you think of someone as admirable because of their wealth? Be it that it came from lucky accident, heritage, or that person's own ability to amass it: we'd not take this as something admirable. For one thing, this should perhaps have us thinking about what the worth of wealth really is; and there is another aspect: we can admire only what a person has achieved herself — not something that happened to them by lucky accident, or was gained by gift or heritage. Really praiseworthy is only what is of stable value, what cannot be given or taken away by circumstances, doesn't depend on fortunate events: an excellence of character, consistent decent behavior, clear and honest thinking and appropriate feeling towards others and yourself.

On a side note: this means also that there is no point in hoping (or praying, if you are with some religious faith) for a good character (something that can be admired) — you have to achieve it yourself, and whether you do that doesn't depend on anything else but you. (If it did, again it wouldn't be something we could admire.) If there is anything that can produce this, make us admirable ourselves, then it is human spirit and the rational capacity in us — nothing else. Nothing from the outside will make one admirable; nothing should be admired that didn't come from within. Take care.

Sort out your thoughts

2009-08-11T08:52:00.000+02:00

Be structured and clear when you speak, and keep a well-measured pace, both for the benefit of your listeners and your own: you might run into the danger of talking faster than you can think.

Whoever listens to you wants to be able to follow and to understand. It's your responsibility to take care that they can. And they deserve it that you put some effort into it, if they are taking time and give their attention to what you have to tell. (That is especially so since good listeners have become rare and people are increasingly unable to concentrate and focus; if you are so lucky to have someone who is listening to you, you should well appreciate it.)

Sorting out your ideas is not just a matter of what you believe, or what you would say to yourself. It's not a matter of merely internally structuring your reasoning. It also depends on who it is you talk to. (So the same thing may have to be put differently to different audiences, and differently at different occasions.) Considering your audience nearly always improves your speaking: think about what they may know, what they may think, how they might respond. And it doesn't have to stop with the order of your thoughts, and the vocabulary. Sometimes you will have to be inventive conceptually, coin notions, devise images and metaphors. This way, the audience's listening reflects back on, and so enriches, your thought — this means that the more acute your awareness, and the more intense your responses to your listeners, the broader and deeper will be what you can gain for yourself.

Apart from the benefit that both you and your audience have when you sort out your thoughts, there is a deeper effect. Structured, meaningful conversation is valuable to us, and becomes more so with every instance in which we take part. There is something like a level of quality that a conversation can have, even though it is difficult to measure. The more excellent interactions you engage in (and the more excellent you make them by taking care to express yourself well and in an adequate way that connects with your partner in the interchange), the higher becomes the overall quality of discourse. Especially when philosophy comes into play, this should be a concern close to your heart. The way you discuss philosophical questions, and particularly ethical ones that relate to how one should live, should display a dedication to excellence, a striving for investing our lives with actions and feelings that have been solidified and refined by constant and honest reflection. Take care.

Build on past insight (but make up your own mind)

2009-07-30T08:50:00.000+02:00

Over the centuries, there have been entire traditions of philosophy, dedicated to excellence in thinking through things, searching for genuine insight in complicated matters, striving to accommodate results from empirical observation and to eliminate logical and conceptual mistakes. (Also, most of the natural and social sciences which are distinct subjects today have started historically as branches of philosophy.) To study their approaches and compare them with each other is rewarding in itself, even though it takes some time and discipline. It also gives you an idea of where to locate yourself and your views in the space of possible philosophical positions.

In philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, thinkers have built on each other's work and advanced a coherent system of ideas, suggesting and scrutinizing solutions for problems and inconsistencies on the way. Sometimes elegant and comprehensive theories have evolved from this; sometimes internal tensions between fundamental assumptions have driven permanent re-combination and re-arrangement of elements into new wholes. You'll notice similar patterns in your own reflections. You may also find that you develop an affinity for a particular tradition or school of thought. (Be wary of affinities that were already there before you even started studying them, however. It's doubtful that these have originated from your own considered thought; more probably, they were suggested to you by others' opinion.) Or perhaps you're rather eclectic, picking up ideas from various sources; you can increase the richness of your background that way, of course, but there is also a higher risk of inconsistencies and gaps in it.

In any case, you should decide yourself what to think, however much it will be based on insight learned from others (or books). And it matters for what reasons you accept a view. Beware, for instance, of taking them on mere authority. Even the masters of the field have erred; more frequently, their view may be based on premises you wouldn't agree with; and generally, only an insight which you have reached yourself by thinking through a matter (guided by someone else or not) is a genuine and potentially stable insight: you don't really know what you merely believe because it is someone else's doctrine. A fruitful relationship to a philosophical view won't take the shape of blindly following the lead of a guru — it's rather one of critical examination. It's also a two-sided one: a philosophical position, even one out of a book by a long dead author, benefits from your efforts in trying to understand it, from your interpreting and discussing it with others. Just taking over views on faith does nothing for making them better understood. It merely adds a disciple; but excellence is not measured by counting devotees — it's a much clearer sign if critical minds have systematically reflected on a view and found good reasons to agree. Take care.

Philosophy as good advice

2009-07-27T08:49:00.000+02:00

Philosophy has always been an art of conversation. Much of what we know about the thoughts of philosophers in the past we can only read in their books, but rarely have they lived purely reclusive lives, without any contact to others. At the very least they were engaged in a silent discourse with their predecessors; most had teachers, students and like-minded friends whose works they followed, and with whom they have discussed their own ideas; many had lively exchanges with the broader public. Philosophy in general, and reflection on ethical questions in particular, benefits greatly from honest and intense dialogue with those who share our estimation for it.

Especially in important matters, like how one should live, your ways of sharing your insights should reflect the insights themselves. If you think that you have gained by reflecting, then do respect the capacity for reflection in others: accept that they can, and will, think and decide for themselves. You may suggest and advise, but the choices are theirs.

There is more value in advising someone than in missionizing them — it simply shows more respect for the reason and intelligence of who you talk to. It still leaves it their decision what to think, and how to feel. (If, on the other hand, you try to decide for someone else, you attempt to take choices away from them. In a sense, you act to restrain, not to empower them.) And respecting their decision is not just more honest and helpful towards them: if you think about it, it is also more valuable for you. Partly that is because a considerate and respectful attitude towards others is in itself an honorable quality; partly it is because an inability to respect diverging views in others, even if you have good reason to believe them false, might indicate a questionable element in your own personality.

What does it mean if you find yourself hesitant to accept that someone thinks and feels differently than you do? Do you find a delight in getting others converted over to your own position? Do you see this as a game, or contest? Or is there a fear behind it, are you perhaps afraid that their differing views may influence you? An uncertainty may be at work here that you have about your own views, and possibly you should scrutinize them. You may have to correct them; perhaps add some qualifications, make them more nuanced; or you might confirm them, providing them with a firmer basis — in any case, you'll gain from the exercise, and you are better off having done it than you would have been if you'd just ignored your doubts.

If you find yourself compelled to press someone on a subject where you've given advice that hasn't stuck with them: ask yourself why it should be so important to you to change their mind. Take care.

Being surprised at yourself

2009-07-20T07:15:00.000+02:00

Sometimes I find myself being surprised at my own actions. It's not a good sign: after all, shouldn't I know myself well enough to be clear about what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it? And yet I frequently realize, immediately after saying something, or making a gesture towards somebody, that I've been acting from impulse, and certainly not an impulse that is in tune with my considered opinion. I look back and have to ask myself what's come over me just a second ago; it's revealing that more often than not, I even hesitate to honestly identify precisely what affect was behind my behavior (they're foolish enough to be ashamed of).

What's so bad about this is not only that it is irritating, experiencing yourself as acting differently than you think you'd act. It's also somewhat shameful: after all, these are still your actions, with all the responsibility that comes from them — you're not excused from the consequences of what you're doing just by saying: "Oh, I didn't mean to do that, it was just an impulse!" An impulse it may have been, but it was your impulse; you have to own up to what flows from it just the same.

And even more importantly: each time you are commanded by an affect you're not making the best out of your possibilities: you're letting weaknesses, bad habits, and external circumstances dictate where it should rather be yourself who is in charge. So you'd better train your reflexes to be in accord with your values and goals; your impulses should be shaped by what is the right thing to do in the situation; you should be motivated from what reflection tells you is the way to go. Take care.

Character and fortune

2009-07-15T19:48:00.000+02:00

Things happen. Some of them are initiated and controlled by ourselves, but others just happen. There may be pure chance involved, or the will and influence of someone else; we may be able to see it coming, or it may take us by surprise entirely; possibly we tried to counteract — and failed. The complexity of the world around us (in particular the many other people we deal with all the time) makes our lives unpredictable to some degree. No matter whether we believe that everything is chaotic, a random mess, subject to blind forces constantly colliding and bursting away from each other, or whether we think that there is a strict, deterministic formula by which all of this is unfolding, a would-be spectacle for those in possession of the means to understand the formula, but inscrutable and overwhelmingly perplexing for us: we have no way to be in control of the many things that just happen.

There is one thing, however, which is within the range our powers, and always so: your character doesn't have to be a plaything of the accidents in your life. True, much of it has been molded by events in previous years, key experiences may have formed it much without asking your permission. And what's happened can't be made undone. But at no point you'll be obliged to accept a character thus shaped by influences outside your informed decisions. You can change your character; and there are ways to improve it even against deeply ingrained faults and weaknesses. The future doesn't have to be the same as the past. Fortune has no jurisdiction where your reasoned, conscious will takes charge. Take care.

Welcome reality checks

2009-07-11T08:47:00.000+02:00

Do you remember those situations when you were in a dark room and had to grope your way through it, only vaguely sensing where you are, perhaps not even really knowing the right way? And have you noticed how weird it feels when you suddenly realize that you are much closer to the wall than you have assumed for some time? The sudden reality check has an irritating quality, and perhaps that's why we have a slight dislike for it, although it actually is helpful in getting us closer to our goal.

Perhaps you were surprised (I certainly was), when you started reflecting systematically, how quickly and how frequently we can get out of touch with the actual facts in the world. It can happen in many ways: we can fall for foolish hopes and opinions; what we take in about our situation can be colored by false emotions (such as anger and fear); and the ever going autopilot drives us along a path that may have been right once, but isn't so anymore (hasn't been for a while). And here, too, there are reality checks. You can avoid some of them, but not many, and not for a long time.

Why should it be so important to keep connected to reality in what we do, think or feel? Couldn't it be, quite to the contrary, that a few little deceptions would rather help and encourage us, leave us feeling happier, making it easier in general to decide how to act and what to believe? True, we'd go wrong from time to time, but that may be little price to pay for a generally more pervasive (albeit misguided) positive feeling.

Possibly; but it's not principally the balance of pleasure over pain that makes a life good. A life should have a coherent structure, a goal and direction, one or more threads that run through it and hold it all together. There are always more important things to consider than just how you feel at some given moment. And running out of sync with reality puts that life story at a severe risk, not least because it damages your character. Also, accepting delusion in yourself (because it makes it easier for you) would imply that it may be right, under some circumstances, to delude others as well, in order to make it easier for them, to spare them the little nasty tickle of confrontation with reality. And both when you're doing that to yourself and when you're doing it to others, the distancing from reality has a self-reinforcing effect — one lie breeds other lies, one foolish hope leads to another, and giving false emotions free reign only makes them stronger and increases our proclivities to get entangled in them. So we should welcome, even seek out reality checks in what we are doing: a life out of touch with reality is not worth living. Take care.

Attitude

2009-06-29T19:46:00.000+02:00

What we're striving for is not something that can be given (or taken away). It's something that you can only take — it's a form of attitude. It is up to you, and you alone, to adopt and keep it. And while there may be no easy way to form your character into one that can do it, while you should expect that only constant work and effort will hold it up even once you've achieved it, something heartening is in that insight, too: just put your mind to it, become determined to get there, and you have made the first step already. It's a substantial step. If you got there, you've taken that attitude for the first time. And you can make it all the way. Take care.

Reflect systematically

2009-06-27T08:45:00.000+02:00

Systematic reflection and study of philosophy, the views of the masters of the field, will help you to improve the way you're leading your life. But it's not primarily rules and recipes you are looking looking for. Good philosophy, and reflection, won't give you a prescription directly for how to act or feel in a given situation, although they certainly shape your ability to figure out such things. More importantly, and more fundamentally, they'll give you a background of insights — an extensive, coherent, reliable web of views and attitudes, attuning you to appropriate feelings, guiding you towards effective actions and coherent beliefs.

How does one get there? Skimming philosophical (and other insightful) writings for outstanding quotes that stir some feeling of depth is not a good strategy. Even if insights sometimes are crystallized in a slogan, be wary of those. Good thought can't rest in aphorisms alone (however well-known the name of the author next to it may be). It gets its strength out of careful, systematic coverage of the whole subject, a set of methodically connected elements, put together consistently and elegantly.

Sometimes philosophers sum up insights in pointed and memorable formulations. These can of course only really be understood after working through the arguments and explanations that precede them — they are summaries helpful mainly for keeping the main points in mind when the discussion moves on. So they are just a kind of shortcut, a summary that needs unpacking. Those who have worked through the topic that is summarized so know how to unpack them; but without investing that effort, your understanding remains incomplete and shallow. (That doesn't apply only to this particular sort of knowledge: being able to recite a physicist's formula and actually using it to predict the movements of a physical body are two very different sorts of thing.) What's worse: you're also deceived about your own progress. Being able to quote some catchy one-liners is not yet the same as having the insights expressed in them, even if the one-liners seem plausible to you.

If you're serious about reflection, and philosophy, they way to go is via systematic study. The rewards are plenty, but it takes effort and determination. It also takes courage: you will quickly find that even a long tradition of clever people hasn't so far exhausted all the paths of thinking through things. What those aphorisms mentioned earlier, in their overt well-roundedness and terseness, hide from view is that there still are many questions, more than there are answers, and that your own reflective insight is at least as helpful and important as that which has already been found and written down centuries ago. Take care.

Living longer

2009-06-19T13:08:00.000+02:00

Desires are always desires for something — normally something you currently don't have (or don't have enough of, in your view). What you desire is also something that you value, that you think is good for you, that is worth having. You can desire something even when you know you can't get it; but you never desire something you do not really want. A case in point is the desire for a longer life. It is very common, but that doesn't make it sensible, of course. And that, in turn, throws a dubious light on the supposed value of living longer.

The trouble is: when you are in a situation where you desire a longer life, it is typically very late already. You're looking back on a stretch of your life time that you now think should have been different; you'd now like to rewind to its beginning, and relive it. If you were satisfied with your life so far, you wouldn't want to have any time from it back for living through it again, and differently.

You might want to object to this: it does seem conceivable for someone to look back fully satisfied onto their past life, not wanting to change a single day of it, feeling that it was the best life they could possibly have had — and simply want it to go on, fulfilling as it has been so far. What could be even better than being able to look back on a fulfilled life, if not looking at a future that will be equally fulfilling for quite some further time (instead of being over sometime soon)?

Imagine someone who has dedicated his life to experiencing as many pleasures as possible, an adventurer in life style, a lover of good meals, pleasant places, exciting company, a hunter of the most exquisite tastes, a collector of beauty, a connoisseur of the joys of life. Would not someone who has arranged his entire life around this goal, and successfully, wouldn't someone like that plausibly just wish to be able to experience it for some more time? Wouldn't the most plausible desire in that situation be to be able to continue with it?

I don't think so. In part, that is because pleasures aren't infinite — they can't be prolonged indefinitely without loss of intensity and attraction. (This applies both to single episodes of pleasant experience and series' of tasting the same kind of pleasure again and again.) Part of what makes pleasures appealing, especially those of the sensual type, that is, the pleasures of food, drink or sex, is the charm of the new, the allure of the unknown, the surprise factor. But once you've had them, and had them twice, thrice, and often, they quickly lose much of their attractiveness and become stale, gray and heavily in need of replacement, or some supplement of new stimulants.

Increasing the intensity may help for a while, but the potential of this move is equally constrained. At the latest, when biological limits come into play even the most pleasant feeling can tip over and transform into pain or disgust at what has been sweet and agreeable just before. (It's not by accident that the heroes of the aesthetic life are inevitably pictured as ending in ennui and disgust with their surroundings after pursuing it too long, and too exclusively. And that is not to mention the physical exhaustion and damaged health that tend to come with it as well.)

Partly, then, the life of pleasure is not of the sort that one will likely wish to go on with — quite the contrary. Since it arises out of neediness and the longing for ever more and higher intensity, it is virtually guaranteed to end in deep dissatisfaction. The painful craving for the new and the stronger will increase up to the point where it can't be stilled any more. (And neither, at that time, can there be any viable path back to a modest level.) More generally, something very similar goes for lives that center around the striving for money, fame or power.

Partly, also, someone who has aimed all his life for things which depend as heavily on good fortune and a favorable environment as pleasure, wealth or celebrity would have to admit to himself that he must have been lucky to the extreme if he can say that he was even mostly successful with it. We all know only too well how unreliable the circumstances of our lives normally are, and it's really unlikely that, in the real world, anybody can enjoy the best of luck for most of his time. If someone actually did look back on a long, lucky life with not even a distraction by the accidents that usually happen, the least thing on his mind would be the expectation that this extraordinary exemption could be prolonged for another extended period, tempting fate just further.

If it isn't for the prolongation of a misdirected life built on the pursuit of external things, what motives could one have for desiring to live longer, to get some more time? Except for the short phases in our lives when we actually know how long we still have (such as in cases of terminal illness, or more generally when we get to the point where we feel that our last moment has arrived), it seems not even a coherent idea. Consider: "I don't know how long I still have; maybe decades, maybe just a couple of years, or I might even die tomorrow in a car crash — but however long it is, I wish I had six months more." That doesn't make any sense.

People may have such a desire at the end of an unsuccessful life. Looking back, it may seem to them that they still have unfinished business, that they haven't reached their goals, that there are mistakes to be corrected, bad deeds to be rectified. But how realistic is that? If what has gone wrong was due to external circumstances, then once more: Why do you suppose a few additional months or years wouldn't just give you more of the same? Chances are mostly against you. You behave like a compulsive gambler, standing at the roulette table, after having lost everything, and just trying to extract some loan from a friend. "I just need a few more tries, I'm so close..." (evidently, you aren't). On the other hand, if the failures in your past were of your own making, if you have made the wrong choices, taken bad decisions, indulged your weaknesses too much and too often, then again: you had so many chances already to become better in leading a life. Why didn't you? You knew from the beginning there wouldn't be a second take, you knew there was only one life, you knew it had to end some day. If you hadn't ignored all that studiously as long as you could, your standing would be much better now. Your chance was then; but now it is gone.

From all this it seems that the desire for a longer life, widespread though it may be, invariably emerges from a misguided approach to leading one's life. The question remains, then, if and how those who do it right, and do it well, will be free of that desire. I think it must be so. Living a good life is not something that scales with its length: it won't become better just by taking longer; nor is there anything to fear about its end, whenever it comes. Take care.

What's in a wish

2009-06-12T22:08:00.000+02:00

The world is full of well-meant wishes. We receive them from our parents and children, our lovers and friends, from our colleagues and from distant relatives. What they wish is normally something they deem good for us (although they may sometimes not expect us to also see the goodness in question — sometimes people know better, or think they know better, than ourselves what is good for us). And there are wishes of the opposite kind: those for something bad to happen to us. You can tell your enemies from what ills they hope your future will have in store for you. (Strictly speaking, there is a third sort of wishes: the kind that isn't really advantageous for you, but rather for the person who does the wishing. But even though they have the formal structure of wishing something, these are really a form of manipulation rather than genuine wishes. Let's not consider them here.)

If the content of a wish, that which is wished to someone, is either a good or a bad thing in the view of the wisher, then those wishes show us much about what people think is good for us, or bad. They do not tell us, however, what really is good or bad for us. How could they? They're just a mirror of people's opinions. (And the most common cause for those are yet other opinions; even in cases where at the end of such a transmission through many heads there was a genuine insight once, that's most likely been watered down, distorted, and connected with many wrong ideas on the path on which it was passed on.)

So what should we make of those commonly wished things: a long life, a successful career, beauty and fame, influence and power, status and wealth? If they are what people's wish implies, then they must be good for us. And likewise: death and disease, failure and poverty — are they then as bad for us as our enemies's ill wishes would mean?

All these wishes are for something uncertain and unstable, their fulfillment depending on accident, on people's whims and prejudices — but rarely on yourself. What's worse, they turn out to lead onto the wrong track often enough. Have you never met one of those unfortunate enough to have sacrificed everything for their career, only to realize how much their loved ones mattered to them when it was too late? Have you never seen the bitter remorse of someone who destroyed his integrity for the all-overriding goal of being at the pinnacle — of getting the top job, making the front page, beating them all and be champion? Whatever it was, it's highly probable that it was once the content of some benevolent wishes; repeated often enough, it came to look like a real good, something worth achieving, something precious, more valuable than anything else. That was what it seemed to be. (And it's not just the sirens of friendly wishes; we're just as prone to take the furies of enemy wishes to mean too much to us. The path away from fearful things can become as treacherous as the path towards questionable goods.)

Curiously enough, it's rarely that people include such things as a good character, successful relationships, and insight in the nature of things with their good wishes. If nothing else makes us suspicious, this should. (Suspicious of the goodness of what's in their wishes, of course; not suspicious of your friends. They certainly do not intend to harm you; but we can honor their intention to wish something that is good even when we understand that, contrary to what they think, it isn't.)

As so often, you better trust in your own judgment, your considered thought, when trying to figure out what in fact is good and what is bad. Don't take received opinion for granted, even when it flows from the good intentions of your loved ones. Take care.

Dying

2009-06-06T01:04:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, when we want to help someone to find into a reflective mode, we ask questions such as: "If you knew you had only three weeks more to live, what would you do?". Of course, this is not about what people actually plan for their last days in life (who would have that sort of a plan?) — it's rather intended to encourage them to reflect on what is really important to them. The assumption is that, with only a few weeks more to go, they will get clear about their real priorities, and no longer spend any of that precious time on anything but that which matters most to them. (And thinking a step further, having found an answer to that question, they might realize that the same applies to the last year, or the last decade of their life, and in the end, they should treat the entire rest of their time that they still have left in the same way: figure out their real priorities and pursue them, and nothing else.)

Thinking about our own death has this power to forcefully remind us that we only have a limited stretch of time, and so it can help us concentrating our minds on finding the best possible way of living. There are many stories of people for whom a close encounter with death has changed, and focused, their lives: an accident they barely survived, a dangerous illness that left them hovering in uncertainty whether they would die from it for a time, the untimely death of a close friend or relative. These episodes make a deep fact about us more vivid than theoretical considerations could. They blast away the illusion that we often build (supported by many social habits that ensure that we don't reflect much on these things): that we are safe, at least for now; that we still have time, much time; that we may ignore the awful fact about ourselves — that our turn will come, and possibly sooner rather than later. Even the events in these stories, however, leave different paths open to people. Some of them revert soon to the old illusion; some, the more admirable of them, don't, and apply the lesson they have learned to the remainder of their life.

But then, there comes a moment when all the additional paths are shut down, one by one — there is a final stretch of time in all our lives when death is imminent, and inevitable. For some, it arrives quickly and as a surprise, in the middle of some activity; for others, it approaches quite predictably with old age, and usually with many frailties of the body. In any case, for everyone, there is a phase of dying in our lives.

Although people sometimes reflect on the possibility of their death, few seem to think about dying. (If they do, that's usually dominated by fears; and even those fears are probably less concerned with dying itself but rather with the pain that may be involved.) A bad sign is it when people even at that time suppress all thought of death. Trying to continue life as usual, anxiously avoiding all occasions for thinking about one's last moments, displaying studied outward lack of concern — in fact they surrender to an illusion. And how could living under an illusion be a good thing, in fact, how could choosing to live under an illusion be a wise choice? If in all the other phases of your life the best attitude is one of constant reflection, of actively shaping the developments in your world, then must this not also apply to this particular stage? Deceiving yourself about what remains in store for you would be the opposite of everything you might have achieved in your efforts to live a good life; now of all times you abandon your will to be in charge, and leave yourself over to cheap self-deception?

Being able to think and talk about death in this last period of one's life is a sign of strength of character, and courage. It's certainly not easy; living well is particularly hard during that phase. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this needs life-long preparation: part of this preparation is the continuous effort to reflect, and navigate your life as optimally as possible (under whichever circumstances you encounter); another part is getting clear about the nature of death, and its meaning for us as beings whose time is limited. Only so you can build the ability to endure those final moments calmly and serenely. The way you're dying will tell a lot about the way you have lived your life. Take care.

Don't waste your good advice

2009-05-30T18:07:00.000+02:00

Giving advice can be a good thing. I say that it can be, but not that it always is, because it actually isn't in all instances a good thing. There must be a genuine interest in the other person, a clear intention of helping them to achieve their goals; for your advice to be good it is required that you have taken some time to listen to them, have made an effort to understand them, have ascertained that you really have something to say, that indeed you have the competence to help. Otherwise, how could you be sure that what looks like well-meant mentoring isn't rather an attempt to use the other person for promoting your own purposes, or that you aren't just talking because you like to hear your own words?

Even from this brief reflection on what makes giving advice to others a good thing it is plain that this is an activity, something we engage in: we exercise our own personality in doing so. (As compared to handing out something, some 'wisdom stuff', as if it had been lying around in the attic until somebody came and collected it; advice is no ready-made stuff at all, it's constituted only by your active involvement.) Consider this parallel: when I give a book as a present, I do so only when I have read the book myself (and found it worthwhile), and more importantly, when I have satisfied myself that this particular book would be of interest and value to the person whom I'm giving it — after all, trusting my choice, they will spend a considerable amount of time reading it, and perhaps invest some thought or emotion in it. So I'd better not be thoughtless about what I choose: just giving them something that I've glanced at quickly at the bookstore and liked the cover is out of the question. And my choices tell something about me as well: they express my views about the receiver, and what I think may be valuable and interesting for them. (We inevitably expose a little bit of our own self at these occasions, which requires some trust, don't you think? Think about what that tells you about people whose presents show no thoughtfulness at all, presents they might have given to anyone, and quite possibly have done so, time and again.)

Even when it doesn't cost you a lot, you should carefully consider whom, and how often, you do give advice. By this I don't mean one should engage in horsetrading: it's not that you should give your advice only if you get something in return. And in general I don't think we should be selective: whether you help others should not depend on who they are; advice should not be misused as an instrument to promote some and disadvantage others. If you use your help selectively like that, then you do merely treat it as an instrument. (And as I have explained, the way you dispense advice reflects on your own character: not too well, in this case.) So I'm not saying you should give good advice only to your friends and family, but not to strangers, on account of it being a scarce resource. (Because it isn't.)

But there is a point at which you may suspend, even abandon your giving advice — and that's when you realize that you are talking to deaf ears. Advising someone is an interaction, it degenerates when there is no response; and so degenerates your ability to engage in it; that ability needs the constant feedback from the recipients. If there is no response, and you still continue over and over again to try to help, this will in the end blunt your skill in giving good advice.

The response I mean is not necessarily that they follow your recommendations. They may think it over and decide not to — and that's fine. It is not necessary that the person you counsel always does what you advise them to do, always thinks what you suggest they should think. So whether they follow your advice is up to them; it's their responsibility, and it's their decision. There's a difference between advising and missionizing. And there are good reasons to put some trust in their reason as well as in your own. Another matter, though, is whether they listen to, and appreciate your recommendations. If that's not happening, you better stop giving them. Take care.

Losing control

2009-05-24T18:07:00.000+02:00

What about those people who claim that they "like to lose control" (or, in a variant, "enjoy being at the edge of losing control")? Sometimes one can be carried away by an emotion (like anger), an activity (e.g. involving sex, or dangerous situations), or a physiological stimulant (such as drink or drugs). How can something like this be valued, or even seem to be of value? What could be attractive in these episodes where one is being swept out of control?

What feels pleasant about this experience, I think, is a certain sense of relief, or escape — from the task of deciding what to think and how to act, from the responsibility of bringing your activities in harmony with your goals, in short: from your own self. What makes it even more attractive is that you are nonetheless acutely aware of what happens; as compared to sleeping, for example, you are still consciously experiencing what is going on, how it feels, even how it may affect others near you. But you are not strictly yourself anymore: although in a sense you are still responsible for what you do, the whole point of not being in control is that things take care of themselves (for better or worse), that it is no longer you who is in charge even of your own behavior, let alone developments in general.

But what sort of a participant makes that you? Not one who can be trusted, being pushed around by something else as you are; not one who is in touch with reality, since you have temporarily subscribed to the illusion of exemption from responsibility for your beliefs, feelings and actions; not one who can claim credit for anything beneficial that might emerge from the events. The only thing you get out of the whole affair is a transitory psychological state of questionable significance.

Of course, whole world views have been formulated that assign a rather deep importance to it: the experience of losing control to stronger forces puts your own being in perspective, it demonstrates to you how small and powerless you actually are, how meaningless all your striving really is within that vast, cold and inhospitable universe into which we all are thrown. And of course, if you are one of those rare people who can endure that glimpse of insight in the real proportions of your own significance, that is a distinction rather than a sign of weakness. Or so the theory goes.

But what is this if not an attempt to invoke high-flown language to exculpate an indulgence: it's always easier to lose yourself than change yourself; it's easier to escape for a while to where you don't have to face the fact that it's your actions that have made you what you are; it's easier to believe that the sensations you are fed make your life well-lived than to define and achieve your goals yourself. A fondness for the experience of losing control is a weakness of character.

Losing control is not the same as taking risks. Risks can be known and calculated in advance, and there doesn't have to be anything uncontrolled in a high-risk activity. Of course, to the extent an activity is risky, it is not in one's control — that is the very meaning of a risk. But when properly managed, the possible losses and dangers resulting from the risk are taken into account and accepted, normally because they are offset by the benefits that might be gained from the situation. Deliberately taking risks is precisely not a case of losing control — if anything, it is a more controlled way of dealing with things than simply not factoring in any risk in one's expectations. Some people may tend to take higher risks than others, but if they choose to do so because of greater opportunities, that's a specific way of exercising choice, and on that level, they are actually very much in control.

True enough, it is not always possible to be fully in control — we all know it isn't; in some cases it can be unreasonable, even downright self-destructive, to obsessively cling to the desire to keep in charge — sometimes we simply can't. We all have to learn to cope with these situations (and with our retrospective realizing what has happened, our experiencing us as acting in away against, or despite, ourselves). But there is a difference between accepting them and embracing them, between being able to endure them and actively seeking and enjoying them.

Enjoying to lose control, then, is a character fault. On the other side of the spectrum, being afraid of losing control seems to be faulty as well. This is not, of course, because losing control is after all not such a bad thing. Rather, it is because fearing something that should be up to you anyway is unwise. If it is up to you to keep in control, then you should do so — what would be the point of being afraid then? If you have reason to expect you won't be in control in some future situation, then you should think about how to avoid this, if at all possible, or else you must accept it. There seems to be no point at which fearing the future situation looks as if it may contribute anything useful. Take care.

Stability and value

2009-05-18T18:06:00.000+02:00

The really valuable things in our lives, such as friendship, love, and integrity of character, cannot be bought. And while that may be a platitude, it's worth reflecting on why it should be so. That they cannot be bought means that you can't get them in exchange for something else, like money, favorable behavior to someone, or pleasure; there cannot be such a deal, because the latter things are not equivalent, they're not nearly as valuable. And why are they? Perhaps because they can expire, or be taken away from you; they will get stale, and at any time, they are at some risk. (They can also expose you to risk, by awakening envy and hatred in others who lust after them.) And look at it the other way round: you wouldn't sell anything that has true value for something like money or fame. (Would you give away the lives or the happiness of your children for wealth or celebrity?)

Some things you can only achieve yourself. That's why they are so valuable: once you have achieved them, you know exactly what you have in them, they don't depend on anything, or anyone, but yourself. And again, these cannot be compared to (or exchanged with) other, external goods, precisely because they don't have that kind of value: they're transient, unreliable, and at risk.

You can delegate tasks that are expected of you; you can hire people who can do things you can't (sing at your parties, sort out your tax paperwork, find you a nice apartment, ...); you can buy many pleasures. But you can't delegate forming your character; you can't hire someone to make sense of your life for you (or perhaps you can, but then how would you know it is really for your own good, and not his?); you can't buy the joy that comes only from acting well — and knowing, feeling that you do so. Take care.

Be straightforward with yourself (and in good time)

2009-05-12T16:42:00.000+02:00

Yes, I have suggested more than once that you carefully reflect — take your whole life into view, from the beginning to the end, think about what sort of person you want to be, and how this would have to show in the way you are living. Is it all how it should be? Are you doing what you can to improve it? It doesn't matter what you tell me, of course. You have to satisfy yourself that you are doing well. Are you doing well?

Remember, it won't do to try and fool yourself — all that will just lose you time, precious time. When your final moment comes, you won't believe it anymore, even if you do now. You will simply see through your own devices of deception (nobody else knows how to do that as well as you do). And it'll be too late then to change. Take care.

Gaining control

2009-05-08T18:04:00.000+02:00

On one of my bookshelves, I have a bust of Socrates. From time to time I walk by that shelf and my eyes fall on the sculpture. Whenever this happens, I take a moment and reflect on what I'm doing right then. What would Socrates have to say about it? Would I do the same thing, and do
it in the same way, if he were standing beside me, watching me?

Sometimes this brief meditation makes me rethink my plans. At other times, I simply go on without any alteration. But on the whole, I've changed: the habit helps me to step out of the flow of daily life, reflect more often on what I'm doing, thinking, feeling — and if necessary, adjust. It ascertains that the contents of my reflections are applied frequently and consistently.

In this function, it is not unlike a control technique as used in many areas of engineering. But there is more to it than that: it also shapes my relationship with myself, the way I interact with the tendencies and dispositions that shape my character (for the better and worse).

For example, I have experienced my 'inner voice' becoming more clearly audible: I'm better aware of my thoughts in a given situation. And much to my own surprise, what this inner voice has to say isn't always good, that is, it's really not well thought-out many, many times. It's
simply bad advice. But, astonishingly, more often than not, the better options are clearly recognizable. (Or to put it differently, I know better than my inner voice by far — but how can that be the case, seeing that it is my inner voice?) And sadly enough, I've still found myself following it's corrupt counsel again and again.

Since I'm more alert to this nearly inaudible whispering, since I've started forcing it out into the open, I have gained control, bringing my own considered thinking back to guide my feelings and actions. That's easier now: I can actually consider what it says, challenge it — and correct it, with all the determination and firmness that is required. You should know your inner voice, and shape it, if at all possible. Take care.

Death, pain and nausea

2009-04-29T18:04:00.000+02:00

It can't be denied: when we think about life as a whole, we have to look some nasty truths in the face. (And despite the ugly grin we encounter, we shouldn't shrink from doing so.) Pain and suffering can befall us at any moment, and even without them, constraints and restrictions are placed on us wherever we go, whatever we do; the never-ending grind of everyday work and the numbing routine of our many duties can create a feeling of nausea; finally, there is the certainty that death will come (we don't even know when and how) and rob us of all the things we have vainly sought, all the fame and money, our reputation and good looks. (Death, in another instance, can also take away those who we love.)

When confronting the unfavorable elements of our lives, there is always a risk of doing too much, and a danger of doing too little. When future trouble looms, for instance: will you simply acknowledge the possibility, but then go on unimpressed? Or will you spend endless moments in fearful anticipation? There is no point, of course, in worrying about something that hasn't happened yet (provided that you do not have an effective means for preventing it from happening). But one thing is not to worry, another is having the strength not to repress all thought of it, not to try and convince yourself that this particular thing won't happen to you after all.

And again, does it seem a good idea to you simply to ignore the fact that you'll have to die, at some time? Do you believe it wise to keep up the illusion that you still have an infinite, or at least a very long time before you? Such an attitude will only provide you with excuses for postponing what you'd better start doing at once: getting your life on the best track that you can think of, with as much reflection as you can put into it, right now. Of course, don't paralyze yourself either; don't let the fact that your days are running out prevent you from making good use of them. (It's overdoing it by far to make it your every third thought.) However late in your life you've started the serious business of reflection, it's never too late to change yourself.

It's an equally important quality of character to endure life as it is. To accept reality takes courage, especially at times when reality is gray and monotonous. (There will be other times, when the seas of life are full of excitement and surprise — but how could it possibly be always like that?) It's also a responsibility. The world is not a show, and there is no program-maker, charged with entertaining you. It's not a mere spectacle for you to be consumed. It's a place where you have a part to play, a job to do, a helping hand to offer. If you don't make it worthwhile, nobody will do it for you; but once you've started, you will be surprised how much help you suddenly receive, and how often your efforts are appreciated.

Even at parties, if that analogy helps, the worst guests are of that bad-tempered variety who think they are entitled to being entertained, and see it as the host's fault if they don't enjoy themselves. They're not funny, they're not interesting, and they're no good party citizens. Consider carefully whether you really want to play the equivalent role for all the people in your life. If you are bored with reality, you ought to check your attitude; there's nothing wrong with the world, but quite possibly with your expectations. Take care.

Serious joy

2009-04-23T18:03:00.000+02:00

Some pleasures leave a bad aftertaste. Or rather: almost every sort of pleasure can leave a bad aftertaste, often because you've had too much of it, or because you had it at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances. So they are not unqualifiedly desirable all the time, are they? Strangely enough, although there seems to be some natural drive towards pleasant activities, there seems no equivalent tendency to stop at the right time, before the pleasure gets stale and flips into some sort of dégoût.

It feels good, however, in a deeper and more satisfactory way, when you're at ease with yourself, comfortable with what you're doing, when what you are doing is the right thing in the circumstances. It's not only that you are more successful in your undertakings. It means experiencing the world differently. And while this perhaps lacks the intensity and the thrill of the slightly uncontrollable that some pleasures could give you, it never becomes stale, and it doesn't have the unhealthy drive towards more and more.

Such steadiness and reliability is the mark of true value. A clear conscience, good intentions, well chosen actions, and a healthy disrespect for the fruits of chance and accident: you'll need these to actually plan and lead your own life, in contrast to those who are just letting themselves drift away in search of what is pleasant and nice. Reflect, and make it clear to yourself what you want to do with your live; and then go for it, and make sure you stay on course. You'll be rewarded with being at ease with yourself, your life and all the world, at any time ... and just feeling good with it.

This is a condition that goes deep (deeper than all the pleasures that there are). But even though it is a form of joy, you won't get it by throwing yourself where the fun is; you'll have to work for it. Take care.

Presence and vigilance

2009-04-18T12:08:00.000+02:00

Are you actually present in your life? Or are you merely there, drifting, as it were, through it? Where are you, and what is your part, when important decisions that affect you are made? How often are you driving them, and how often are you being driven by someone or something else? And is it in your hands, and of your making, when things are taking place? Can you ascertain a timing that benefits you?

Living your own life, being in charge of it, requires your presence, and vigilance; take action only when you can do it appropriately and with optimal effect — but when the time has come, put your mind to it, and be decisive, quick and forceful.

What the right times and best courses of action are depends on many factors: you won't find a recipe for leading your life. There are no general rules prescribing for arbitrary circumstances what to think and do, there is no standard behavior that always fits, no attitude that's right no matter what happens. And just in case you were wondering: I'm not saying that there won't be a right thing to do, a correct view of what's going on, or an adequate way of feeling about it; there usually is — it's just that we have no simple and unfailing means to find out which it would be at a given time, in a given situation. Finding out requires judgment, good sense and a willingness to decide.

But just as the art of reflection is well worth studying and perfecting, so is the craft of putting the results of your reflections into effect. And possibly even more important than that: your actual responses must be consistent with what you've come to think from your reflections. Presence and vigilance must extend over your own actions, they're not just for what happens around you. Take care.

Quell ambition

2009-04-11T20:39:00.000+02:00

There are worthier things to pursue than your career. Once you have started reflecting on the real priorities in your life, you will probably find that putting time and energy into your job excessively will hinder and harm your doing the things that really matter.

Ambition — the desire for higher career levels, for greater reputation and ever more power and influence — is insidious. It will never be satisfied; it is self-perpetuating; whenever you reach one of your career goals, that very success will breed more ambition. It's especially menacing because you're already deep into that spiral. You may have started reflecting on what's really important in your life, but your ambitions make it hard to follow through on the results of these thoughts. The voice of ambition within yourself constantly reminds you of existing demands, commitments you've made, goals you have already chosen (before you started reflecting on the bigger picture).

Ambition will never be satisfied. You must put a conscious stop on it. It's just as with all the other forms of desire: desires for sensual pleasures, material wealth, and celebrity. They're all insatiable, and become more and more so whenever you yield to them. Don't try to satisfy desires — correct them. If you suffer from unfulfilled ambitions — then better stop those ambitions; rein in expectations, your own and those of others. Replace them with a striving for something more worthwhile: turn all your efforts on reflection and philosophy; and bring any insights that you gain to bear on living well. You've only got that single life. Take care.

Sense of direction

2009-04-04T11:38:00.000+02:00

There is something called an irritable mood: everything, even the smallest thing, irks you. It could be the grumpy behavior of your neighbor, a bill that turns out larger than you had hoped, unexpected rain, or simply something that somebody says. Whatever it is, when you're in that mood, it annoys you. But you know that there are other times when you greet all these things with a smile, and deal with them cheerfully. These are the times when you are happy, when everything is all right, when you are in harmony with yourself, the people around you, and the world on the whole. (If you don't like the 'harmony' metaphor, insert your own favorite one here.)

These conditions that we call moods have an equivalent when we look at our lives as a whole. What we're doing, day by day, belongs to a thousand different projects. Some of them are small (such as getting the car washed at the weekend), and some are bigger (finding a new job, for instance). And though we may succeed in many of them, we can't always win — so there are setbacks, and sometimes there's defeat. It doesn't really matter how often you win and how often you lose, however. In fact, have you noticed that some people seem to have everything, seem to be successful all the time, seem to win any fight they pick — and yet they're never really contented, sometimes get even angry when they can't get their way in some minor affair? What they don't have is this: a sense of direction in their life, something that gives their projects significance. Those who have managed to bring that sense of direction into their lives are in the equivalent of the happy mood I've talked about. It doesn't really matter to them if they cannot always win — but every time they do win they know and feel they have made a step forward in their life. As long as they can taste that, they're immune to the occasional knock back — they'll just stand up again.

You may have noticed that I didn't say that people 'find' a sense of direction. That's not by accident. A sense of direction in your life can't be found — it's not yet there, prepared for you by someone else. You have to build it for yourself. Take care.

Spotlight and circumstances

2009-03-28T19:38:00.000+01:00

Don't invest effort in trying to manipulate other people's perception, or judgment, of your way of living. You had to do that when you went for a career, where others could influence how successful you would become. But this is exactly what you're getting away from now; make yourself independent of that. If your goal is to improve yourself and your decisions, beliefs, actions and feelings, then success depends on you alone, not on others, and therefore it's immaterial what they think about you.

What goes for the assessing eye of would-be superiors applies to more respectful recognition equally. If you've done something noticeable in your life, as most of us have in one way or another, then expectations may already weigh on you. Shed them. Don't invest energy in keeping up a prominence that would have been short-lived anyway (if history is any guide to such things).

We often get reflections about the whole of our lives going only when we are already in the middle of the action. We always start somewhere, and we're not responsible for where that is; but once started, we are in charge, and from there on it is our responsibility to get things right and steer the best course available, away from the more or less random starting point, towards the goals we have found, or are in the process of finding, when we reflect. Take care.

The winds of carnival

2009-03-22T16:43:00.000+01:00

At certain times of the year, it's difficult not to be washed away by the exuberant festivities. Everybody is held captive by the flurry of activities; some rituals are so integral to people that you would be regarded as a social outsider in not recognizing them. Everybody does it, everybody enjoys it. What defective upbringing did you have that you don't?

These things ruthlessly demand our attention, time and energy; so if you have started reflecting philosophically on your life, meanwhile (and why else would you still be reading this?), then you're probably asking yourself what attitude to take towards them. Are these necessary elements of social life in which we have to engage? Or a nexus of pointless rituals and blatant excuses for yielding to bad habits, to drinking, bawling, wasting time? Should one try to be fully abstinent and thus exercise the greatest possible self-control; or should one take part demonstratively, but with good measure? Which ability is more valuable: to keep your ways even in the face of the strongest blasts, or to exercise balanced judgment and find the right degree of participation? Take care.

When to start doing philosophy

2009-03-16T21:41:00.000+01:00

So you're going to start doing philosophy once you've secured your standard of living? You'll just make sure you have a sufficiently secure basis before you dedicate your life to reflecting, and improving yourself (as opposed to pursuing your career, and improving your bank account)? All in good time, I hear you saying: there is a time for action, and another for reflection (which is sometime later).

Let's trace our reasoning carefully here. If you think you should first secure a certain standard of living before even starting reflection on the goals of your life, then you have made one decision already: whatever else, whichever other goals might turn out to be important, that level of living well ranks higher. (You've also already taken for granted that the way you are building your career right now is the optimal way to do that.) Is that really how you see your priorities?

Consider also that all the time, energy and resources you've put into reaching your desired standard of living are lost for whatever those other goals might have been. Suppose your life happens to end just at the moment when you finally get there. Would you, in this case, say that you have spent your time wisely, that you've invested it in the most important cause that there was (namely, your standard of living)?

And are you sure that you can, and should, only then begin reflecting when these matters are settled? Imagine how things will look to you when you actually have reached that level, the one of which you now think that there you will stop, that there you won't want more, that there you will no longer postpone reflection on your real goals. What, in this situation, will compel you to actually stop, what will enable you to resist the desire for getting to an even higher standard before you get down to those other things, what will guarantee that you don't use the exactly same argument again which you're using now for not getting down to the real business of your life? (And what happens when, after you've started to reflect and go after your real goals, you fall back to some lower standard? Will you have to return to working on your career in that case?)

How was it some years ago: when you were on a lower standard of living? Since then, you've made progress in that area: you are now on a higher level than you were then. Why isn't that improvement enough, then? You might have said, at that earlier time, the same thing you're saying now. You might have argued that you wanted to get to some higher standard first, before starting something like philosophizing. Well — now you're there. So why not get down to it right away? Take care.

Don't substitute words for actions

2009-03-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

Do you know that sort of person who is constantly pouring out advice, telling you all the time what should or shouldn't be done, and why? (You may suspect I'm of that sort, too - and presumably you're not that far off the mark. But at least I can say in my defense that I work quite hard on actually living by my views and put them to the test first, before I start recommending.)

It's far more easy to reflect and have some insights about how one should live than actually putting them into action. However easy or difficult it may be, though: it's what we're doing the reflection for. Remember why you started it: to live a good life means doing the right thing, as often as possible. And knowing what's the right thing (and knowing how often it is really possible to do it) is something to be supported and trained by philosophical reflection.

But just having those insights is not enough. They must be verified, and cemented by constant efforts, daily thought and action (which is actually more and harder work than just getting to the insights and agreeing to them). How can you be sure, each and every day, that you are still in tune with what you saw when you were reflecting? How can you satisfy yourself that you are actually following the guidance and principles of reason - unless you practice constant, close examination of all your views and actions?

And note that what you examine shouldn't be the things you're telling other people. That will only make you one of those talkers I mentioned. You have to monitor your actions, question your views, examine your feelings. Find out how you are, in fact, leading your life, and whether it matches what you'd tell others. Take care.

How to look into the future

2009-03-04T20:02:00.000+01:00

It happens that I let an entire afternoon pass without getting anything useful done: because of something that is about to happen the next day, and that somehow looks very important to me, seizes my mind. It may be an important day at work, or a meeting with someone whom I'd really like to get to know more closely - generally something that will likely have some substantial influence on my life for at least some time. In such situations, it's terribly difficult for me to think of anything else but what will happen tomorrow. Even if I force myself to try and do something sensible, I quickly find myself back thinking about that other thing. (It's not something I'm proud of; sometimes I even get angry at myself later, but that's of course not helpful in the least.)

If you know that state of mind, you have perhaps wondered what is happening there. How can one actually know what one should do, have the time, be not blocked or hindered by anything - and still not do it? And it's not as if it would make any difference either. Tomorrow's events won't be changed by one's brooding for hours about them in advance. Of course, if the expected event is something that needs preparation, then one is well advised to prepare; but even if everything is prepared as much as it needs to be, there is no change in how it feels in those situations I'm referring to.

What holds us prisoners in such situations are emotions: we're hoping for something, or fearing something. They get their power from the importance that we assign those future events. (Remember, it happens only if it's going to have a considerable impact on how my life will go for a while.) And it's no accident either that they arise normally when we expect the outcome as something that isn't completely up to ourselves. A lot of painful emotion arises from our seeing ourselves as depending on events that we cannot control: those that come about by blind chance, or the actions of others, even things we might have been able to influence if we had only known about them earlier. Our fears and hopes are directed towards these.

This isn't good tactics: we should concentrate on the things that we can achieve: caution, and acting well when the moment comes. If you look back to similar situations in your past, you will notice that things happened which you couldn't influence, but those you don't take into account when you ask yourself how well you did, at the time. What counts is only what you actually did, given things were as they were. It will be the same in the future - what really is important is what you make of the situation, what you will feel, think and do.

So if you want to know how to best look towards a significant future event: instead of focusing on uncontrollable future things (hoping for or fearing them), you should rather focus on yourself, and what you're focusing on. Take care.