The well-meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.