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Following up on my post about a Soul Workout, I've hit the spiritual gym and done some reflective reps on my personal practices. So far I've focused on three of the six questions I gleaned from Eric Hoffer's book The Passionate State of Mind:
Hoffer connects these questions with susceptibility to both flattery and calumny. On reflection, I'd say that I don't seem to be overly governed by what other people think of me, which implies that I don't tend to be swayed by other people's opinions about me, whether positive or negative. In fact this has been my way for a long time, perhaps out of personal stubbornness (a family trait on my mother's side!) or perhaps out of agreement with the Epicurean maxim to live unknown.
As to that last point, self-deception appears to be an occupational hazard for anyone who pursues fame, power, status, influence, or importance. Yet if you can accept that your actions will have no impact on present-day society or the course of history, and even accept that at the end of your life you will quickly pass out of human memory, then most people's opinions of you won't matter. Personally I honor the opinions only of the dear people (φίλοι) who truly care about me. In general this doesn't necessarily solve the problem - after all, one could be surrounded by flatterers or fault-finders - but it does limit the scope. Moreover, although I strive to be gracious about receiving praise and open-minded about receiving criticism, I also tend to keep my own counsel about my own worth.
With my recent turn toward an ever-deeper personalism in mind, it strikes me that the foregoing practices are essentially a private application of the principles of intellectual honesty that Walter Kaufmann enunciated in his book The Faith of a Heretic. However, I find that they're not always easy to follow, even for someone like me who seems to be constitutionally quite immune to outside influence.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While reading Eric Hoffer's book The Passionate State of Mind, I came across some thought-provoking aphorisms about self-knowledge, self-deception, and personal identity. Here are the key sentences, which I've extracted and strung together for my own purposes:
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. (§58)
To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. (§59)
The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it. (§61)
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. (§128)
When we are not governed too much by what other people think of us, we are likely to be tolerant toward the behavior and the opinions of others. So, too, when we do not crave to seem important we are not awed by the importance of others. (§134)
As noted recently, although Hoffer had a powerful nose for generalizations about the foibles and failings of humanity, I prefer to translate such pronouncements into the personal, the particular, and (I might add) the positive.
Thus I ask myself:
The attempt to answer these questions will require so much self-discipline that it'll be like a workout regimen for the soul! If I make any progress (perhaps with a little help from my friends, or even from Shakespeare), I'll report back...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Sometime in the next few weeks my friend Adrian Lory and I will hold a Substack Live video conversation about philosophy and psychology as complementary paths to wisdom and fulfillment. In preparation, I've been thinking up some questions about the relationship between philosophy and psychology, as well as their respective contributions to the good life. Here's what I have so far:
Stay tuned for details about the Substack Live session and be sure to subscribe to Adrian's Substack so that you can see what fascinating questions he's been thinking up. :-)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In his book First Things, Last Things, Eric Hoffer makes some observations about change and revolution:
We used to think that revolution is the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: revolution is a by-product of change. Change comes first, and it is the difficulties and irritations inherent in change which set the stage for revolution. To say that revolution is the cause of change is like saying that juvenile delinquency is the cause of the change from boyhood to manhood.
[P]eople who undergo drastic change recapitulate to some degree the passage from childhood to manhood, and mass movements are in a sense the juvenile delinquency of societies going through the ordeal of change. The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition. There is a family likeness between juveniles and people who migrate from one country to another, or are converted from one faith to another, or pass from one way of life to another....
Although Hoffer's primary interest here is change and revolution in society (see also his most famous book, The True Believer), I wonder if something similar applies to individuals. Consider two quotes from Tolstoy:
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Could it be that the inner revolution of personal regeneration is often made possible by a move to another country, joining a different faith, pursuing a new career, getting married, getting divorced, becoming a parent, or some other change in one's way of life?
To me it seems more likely that in these matters causation is bidirectional. After all, personal regeneration simply is changing oneself - or, more accurately, a change in oneself. Yevgeny Zamyatin once wrote that "there is no final revolution", which at the personal level implies that one needs to keep changing throughout life based on one's ever-widening range of insight and experience; indeed, living an examined life requires nothing less.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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The other day in my post about Making It Personal, I wrote as follows:
I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Today I'd like to focus on that last part, because over time I've found that my To-Don't List can be even more beneficial than my To-Do List.
It strikes me that most of the books, news articles, blog posts, advice columns, and Internet memes floating around out there are implicitly or explicitly universalist: they talk about how society needs to change, about how "we" (always undefined) need to take certain actions, about how everyone should do what the writer or influencer says, etc. Yet changing society, modifying government policy, or convincing everyone to act in a certain way is completely outside my span of influence and control.
Yes, I freely grant that it's awfully tempting to make such universal claims; for much of my life I did the same thing myself! However, I've learned that when I give in to this temptation I immediately start weaving a tangled web of unrealistic hopes and self-righteous expectations, which inexorably pulls me into a cycle of anger and frustration ("why don't other people do what I think they should do?!").
This temptation to universalism is itself nearly universal: it seems to lie at the root of politics, activism, punditry, and far too much of philosophy, psychology, religion, literary criticism, sociology, and similar disciplines.
For myself, I've discovered that attempting to translate universal prescriptions into personal practices provides an effective filter on the endless stream of news, advice, and propaganda; and if a source of such information is too insistent, I simply start ignoring it. And in my own writing I try to scrupulously avoid the universalist temptation.
Naturally, I'm not saying that you should start doing things my way or that society needs to become less universalistic, because if I did then I'd be caught in the same old web...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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My increasingly strong commitment to personalism and particularism has prompted me to make some changes in how I read, think, and act. Specifically, I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Consider, for example, the following opinion expressed by Eric Hoffer in his book First Things, Last Things: "My hunch is that to keep stable and healthy a free, affluent society must become a creative society." Universally speaking, that claim may or may not be true (it's not clear to me how we would prove it). However, if I agree with its underlying aim then there are two paths I can take.
The public path would be to advocate for a more creative society, write books and articles about the importance of beauty and the arts in human experience, donate time and money to museums and other cultural organizations, lobby the government for increased public funding of the arts, and so on.
The private path, by contrast, is simple and direct: I could be more creative. For instance, I could study classical guitar, compose music, write poems, pursue nature photography, observe the movements of birds and animals, read great literature, watch the sun rise and set, gaze up at the moon and stars, contemplate paintings and sculptures in my own house or at museums and galleries, learn more about the history of the arts, apply my mind to answering novel questions in philosophical aesthetics, and so on.
Oh wait, I already do all those things! It seems that at a deeply personal level I agree with Hoffer's claim, because I'm working to make it real in my own life - taking, however, the quiet, private path rather than the noisy, public path. Since nowadays our society seems to honor public things far above private things, we could even call this taking the road less traveled by. So far in my pursuit of human fulfillment, doing so has made all the difference.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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