INTRODUCTION
It’s Not All Fun and Games
TO HEAR SOME people tell it, the secret of happiness is to live your life, feel alive, and exist in the here and now. As if life were a gift, as if the present moment were nothing but magic and poetry. That may be true for those who live on love and fresh water, vacations and leisure, luxury, serenity, and self-indulgence. For most of us, however, life is not a gift but a series of imposed constraints, calculations, and schedules. Not because of the daily grind of commuting, working, and sleeping but, above all, because life is made up of a whole series of things that we have not, or have only partially, chosen for ourselves: our body, our personality, the era we live in, our address, our neighbors, our routine, the conditions in which we perform our work. Living almost never involves beginning; more often than not, it is merely a matter of accepting and persisting. In most matters, we make do rather than choose. Our freedom is not absolute, without compulsion or limits. It adapts, finding its own place in an environment that existed long before we came along and that we did not design.
Living means suffering. In “A Litany,” the sixteenth-century English poet John Donne asked God to ensure that “our affections kill us not, nor dye.”1 This poetic prayer encapsulates the plight in which we, the living, find ourselves: we are incapable of not seeking our own happiness, love, and success; but anything we desire can also undo us, because everything is at once both essential and ephemeral, because nothing is predictable, because everything is irreversible and suffering is not a weed that we can simply uproot. Life isn’t all fun and games. So how can philosophy be of use to us in the hard work of existing? Can it help us to survive the very thing that kills us even as it expires?
Philosophy is useful; it is neither a luxury nor an occupation for dilettantes. It does not exalt the utility of anything that is useless or the felicity of anything that serves no purpose; on the contrary, philosophy thinks no thought that is not useful. And that utility is of a dual nature: it can either provide those of us who suffer various ills with diagnoses and expertise, or it can teach those of us who believe ourselves to be in good health that we are, in fact, ill. In the latter case, without philosophy the illness may go undetected and the infection may spread. As a particular form of biopsy, the philosophical examination reveals what neither the doctor nor the psychologist nor we ourselves are capable of detecting. As a balm for our wounds—romantic breakups, trouble with the neighbors, professional failures, weariness of life—philosophy can be seen as a branch of medicine like any other, with its own repository of unguents and sedatives. But it is unparalleled as a means of unmasking a problem that we do not understand even as we endure its secondary effects. Who but the philosopher can tell us how to prevent our affections both from killing us and from dying? We have two options: either we are sick and ask philosophy to propose a treatment, or else we believe that we are healthy and philosophy must convince us of the contrary, thereby offering us true health and true healing.
All philosophy lays claim to the status of medicine, although some philosophers do so more loudly and emphatically than others, such as the ancient Greeks, Epicureans, or Stoics, for whom “Vain is the word of that philosopher who can ease no mortal trouble,”2 or Nietzsche, who claims for himself the status of doctor of culture. The diagnoses vary, as do the suggested cures, but the goal remains the same: to identify what’s wrong, be it grief or gangrene, whatever prevents a person from being herself or obtaining her due, be it happiness or the truth. There is something orthopedic about philosophy, as if we all have the ability to walk but suffer from some sprain, vertigo, or motor defect. We can neither abjure our desire for truth and happiness nor satisfy it. Lame and clumsy, we are at one and the same time capable and incapable, desirous and unsatisfied—in a word, we are sick. We do not measure up to our own ambitions; we do not enjoy the health to which we aspire. So it’s not merely the ideas that are to be found at the intersection of medicine and morality, matters of bioethics, that inform philosophy as a branch of medicine; nor is it because some philosophers have been doctors or anatomists. It is because life itself is a disease of which we must be cured.
USE AS DIRECTED
Healing Your Life
PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT kill; it makes us stronger. It even has the power to cure. But the question is knowing what it is that we are being cured of. The desired goal seems easy enough to define: we want to be healthy. But is it our bodies or our minds that we want to be healthy, or both? What do we call the kind of health that the philosophy cure supposedly offers us: Happiness? Wisdom? Consolation? Normalcy? Do we seek relief from temporary discomfort or do we hope to be delivered from some deeper-rooted evil?
Kierkegaard entitled his most definitive book The Sickness Unto Death. In other words, he claims to be addressing a disease that ends only in death, and which he identifies as despair. From cradle to grave, we are dying of despair. It is therefore philosophy’s job to cure us of “the greatest spiritual sickness,”1 which is the death in life embodied by despair. To live is either to despair or to dare to be oneself. There is no in-between, because no one who carries the disease is free of its symptoms. We must decide between despair and the courage to be ourselves.
Does this mean that all the diseases that we might treat with philosophy are fatal, critically serious, and exclusively psychic? If that were the case, wouldn’t we have a better chance of being cured by psychology, psychiatry, or neurobiology than by philosophy? Who do we turn to—the doctor, the psychologist, or the philosopher? The most prudent answer would certainly seem to be that the one does not exclude the other, that the remedies proposed by one discipline do not prevent us from trying out those of the others. A bolder response would be to confront the objection head-on and ask whether the therapeutic function of philosophy is not a purely metaphorical one, with no real power to cure. But isn’t it a kind of scientism to believe that only those diseases that we treat with science are real? Isn’t it scientism, too, to reduce all existential questions to the realm of psychology, to view our anxieties as mere expressions of temperament and our confusions as a sign of dysfunction that can be fixed with solid clinical and psychical reeducation?
The diagnoses offered by philosophy may be seen as flawed because they are weighed down by the Great Questions—What is Man? What is Life? What is Freedom?—and too abstract to be real. If we reject them, however, we run the risk of reducing the individual to the sum of her behaviors and of seeing her only from the outside, based on her actions. But we are more than merely what we do; our behavior does not reveal all that we are. We also need to account for what can’t be seen—our motives, our intentions, our desires—all of which we can just as easily betray as fulfill through our actions.
We cannot set aside our inner life, the ebb and flow of our feelings, our thoughts, our reflections, the perpetual restlessness that plagues us and whose influence is just as powerful as that of our behavior. None of this can be reduced to the psychological or the psychosomatic; rather, it’s the signature of every individual’s singular manner of living and what makes our own experience unique to each of us. It all adds up to the fact that only I can be me, that I alone have what it takes to be me.
Know Thyself
It was philosophy that gave a name to that part of every individual that can be ascribed to her physiology or psyche without being reduced to it—the unique place that belongs to each person. Philosophy was born out of this process of geolocalization. Indeed, one sunny day in Delphi, Socrates, one of the inventors of the discipline, was suddenly struck by the aphorism “Know thyself.” Although it is neither scientific nor medical, knowing yourself is the prescription of choice in the philosopher’s own scientific and medical practice. “Who am I?” is a question for philosophy. And an answer. It launched a reign that continues to this day—the reign of the soul. For it is to the soul that the injunction to know yourself is addressed. Only the soul can secure such knowledge, and it is only because each of us has a soul that this recommendation can be made. Asking myself who I am makes sense only because I am a soul.2 It’s not about going off in search of your capacities; of knowing your own character, biases, and preferences, but about concerning yourself with what is essential. Philosophy is not religion just because it speaks of the soul and the care it requires. On the contrary, it is through the knowledge of yourself as a soul that its specific powers are best expressed; philosophy speaks of the soul because it alone is capable of knowing the soul and of understanding the demands of having one.
And the soul is demanding. We can lose it; neglect it; or, contrarily, know it and watch over it. That is how it endows our being with momentum, history, and prospective experience. For human beings, existence isn’t in the order of a given; quite the opposite, it’s something that can be subject to modification and made into theater. Having a soul makes the business of living not only a question (“Who am I?”) but also a prescription—we never merely are; we have to be. We have to be the person that our soul requires us to be. So “Know thyself” also means “Be the person you have to be,” “Be the soul you know yourself to be.” In other words, until proven otherwise, we are the only creatures that do not take their own existence for granted, whose existence is a whole complicated saga. Not only because we act, make choices, and take decisions but also because, for us, being is never just a fact but a calling, a duty, a goal. Because being is not a self-evident, hassle-free state but the source of innate anxiety: Who must I be? Who can I hope to be?
We are more than just the condition of becoming, changing at the whim of events and encounters with the passage of time. We are not merely a story that ravels and unfolds; our existence is not an inventory of everything our relationships and environment have made of us. There is in us a primordial solitude that makes each of us alone in being ourselves and ensures that, whatever we may do or want, each of us is only our self. Nobody exists in my stead and I cannot exist in anyone else’s stead. Existence is the only thing we cannot exchange or delegate, and the soul is nothing but the necessity of owning our own existence.
That doesn’t mean that we are transparent to ourselves or that there is no mystery in being ourselves. On the contrary, the soul is more of an enigma than an ID. It’s an arena of conflict and a source of guesswork, and being ourselves has more in common with bullfighting than with classical ballet. The landscapes of our soul, its “plains and caves, and caverns of my memory,”3 are largely unknown to us, its truths unsuspected or unstable—making sincerity a highly perilous undertaking. We can’t even be certain that we are made to have just one soul, just one “me.” We are nothing but one “great riddle”4 to ourselves. That’s because we’re looking at it the wrong way; we’re looking at ourselves much too up close to see ourselves as we are. That’s why, more often than not, our actions seem ambiguous or outright strange (“Why did I do that?”), as do the contradictions that we struggle to overcome (“I didn’t want to do it, but the urge was stronger than I am.”). One of the key functions of the philosophy cure is, precisely, to end the wars raging within us, to establish peace on the battlefield that is us. Traditionally, the armed struggle is waged between the soul and the passions that besiege and enslave it; both ancient and classical philosophy—from Seneca to Spinoza and even Kant in the eighteenth century—view the passions of anger, love, and vanity as the prime diseases of the soul.
The great riddle that I am to myself, and which philosophy seeks to solve, is not an intellectual game or a mere problem of logic; it sets out a life choice. What kind of life must I lead to be who I am? It’s not only a question of knowing ourselves; it’s also a question of living. What is the best life, the one best suited to who I am? “Our debate is upon a question which has the highest conceivable claims to the serious interest even of a person who has but little intelligence—namely, what course of life is best.”5
The Courage to Exist
So it would seem that Kierkegaard was right. It’s not enough to merely live—we need to heal life. That is the very particular condition that philosophy is designed to treat. That is where its utility and profound originality lie: it does not deliver instructions; it does not prescribe behaviors; and it does not cure dysfunctions. It cures life, the very fact of having to live. Philosophy must not be treated like a leisure activity, to be squeezed in between gardening and the book club; as I said earlier, it’s more like bullfighting, in that it requires the courage to face up to all that is brutal and dangerous in the very act of living. It’s not about abandoning ourselves to life’s sweet pleasures but about climbing down into the ring and sidling up as close as possible to the very thing that would crush us. While there may be no beauty to be found in a bullfight—that brightly colored butcher’s dance of twirling arms, legs, and garish costumes—life itself is not much better, hard as we may try to veil its stark and glaring realities in a cloak of dreams and make-believe.
It’s not the philosopher’s job to live well or to live badly; it’s her job to reveal all that is obscure about life. Philosophy, therefore, is no abstract activity cut off from real life. At the same time, it has the troubling and confounding power of turning things we take for granted into problems—like how to live, for instance. The truth is, how to live is a question that we usually don’t ask ourselves, because our daily routine is governed by the need for haste and a lack of time. At any given moment, I find myself having to make decisions both trivial and consequential; I have to make the best of situations that are not of my own making, with no time to pull myself together or even to pause for a reset. There’s no way to seize the high ground over existence, to set ourselves aside or above the field so as to ensure the soundness of our judgment. We are required to reflect, to decide, and to act all at the same time. The paradox of daily life is that it is both humdrum and hair-trigger, never fully alien but changing from moment to moment. Life rushes along … to live. Is there anything philosophy can do to help with this problem?
Boldness. That is the Cartesian way—to live well, we must live to the full. With a generosity directed first and foremost at ourselves. We have to see the big picture, reach wide, not measure our lives out by the thimbleful but be determined and resolute in all things. It is not so much about being proactive as about being bold, a combination of courage and risk-taking, a broad scope of vision and action, a sense of having conquered indecision, which, if Descartes is to be believed, is the worst of all evils. The generosity with which we act and live must have some excess to it. It takes more passion than moderation to nurture the ability to never sell yourself short. To persist and to own, to place the stamp of your will on everything you do. To see yourself in the choices you make, even when you fail, even when you go astray. The important thing is to measure up to all the decisions you make.
Copyright © 2020 by Laurence Devillairs. Translation © 2020 by Jesse Browner
