Chapter One
Know Yourself
Know yourself. This is the key to all philosophy, the center of all
wisdom, the one thing that decides if you are the actor in a tragedy or a
comedy. This chapter points out three major interpretations of this
singular injunction. The first is the Socratic, and it has to do with
knowing what you believe. The second is Freudian and has to do with
knowing who you are. The third is lonely and has to do with training
yourself to take your intellect as your own companion.
In the Apology, Plato has Socrates explain that the only happiness is
figuring out what real virtue is, and enacting it. People who behave badly
may seem happy, but they are not, no matter how rich they get, and people
who act with virtue are certain to come into happiness and, very likely,
come into money as well. As he put it: “I do nothing but go about
persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your
persons or properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest
improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but
that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well
as private.” Coming to know yourself and re-creating how you experience
the world is a more efficient way to get comfortable than directly
altering the world.
An angry person on the subway scowls and pushes, other people scowl and
push in response, and quarrels ensue; a smiling person offers seats, takes
inconveniences with patience, offers to share cabs, and has merry
encounters. The angry person has no idea how much his or her anger colors
the way other people act. A sunny disposition is no guarantee they won’t
steal your wallet, but some of what we don’t really know about ourselves
gets bounced back from the world and radically conditions how we see
things. The Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living is
so commonplace that we forget how harsh it is. Vicious even. Think of all
the good, sweet fools you know! Isn’t it possible to be a decent, gentle,
productive person without a jot of philosophy or self-examination? The
Socratic answer is resolutely no; the examination of oneself and one’s
manner of living is the only good life and only cause of happiness. The
happiness thus achieved cannot be stolen away by any means. Given the
pitiless vagaries of life, the internal nature of philosophical happiness
is one of its big selling points.
Socrates insisted that we ask ourselves how we know what we believe. You
like democracy, monogamy, American food, sleeping at night, children
raised in families, longevity as a life-defining goal. You like a woman of
five foot ten to weigh about a hundred forty pounds. Set a goal of
convincing yourself of something you oppose. Pick a hot-button subject,
and a reward for yourself if you can shake your own faith in your
convictions. I have strong political convictions, but I’m not rallying for
them right now. I’m suggesting you pull a Socratic trick on yourself and
ask yourself all the questions you usually avoid thinking about. If the
thought is unbearable, it tells us something about the way we believe, and
think, and live. We live in little cognitive comas. Or rather, we cavort
in cognitive fields surrounded by electric fences: we all think we are
free to go where we wish, but we are struck by a lot of pain when we try
to think past our boundaries. Politics are real, but the odds are that if
you had been raised in a different U.S. state (let alone China!), you
would be not the Democrat or Republican that you are now, but instead a
Republican or Democrat. Even though those people make your blood boil.
Odds are odds. If you want to know yourself, you are going to have to
rough yourself up a little. Socrates and Plato both held that this kind of
ruthless thinking makes you happy in the process. When Plato does imagine
an arrival, a coming to the most profound knowledge, it is blissful. But
most of the time this is all about happiness as a process, as an effort.
Note that philosophy is unlikely to be effective if you just read it.
Socrates so believed that philosophy required conversation with others
that he did not write any books, and when Plato recorded Socratic thought,
he did so in the form of dialog. Many of the great Socratic dialogs took
place at social events; the title of Plato’s Symposium means “the drinking
party,” and that is where it is set. In a sense that book is one of the
most idealistic visions ever crafted, and it took place amid food, copious
wine, and modest revelry. How do you do philosophy? Discuss it with
others, write about it, get locked away with it. The last is the least
effective, but it cannot be entirely rejected, because it does work for
some people, some of the time. The essence of the philosophical
experience, the active verb of doing philosophy, is unlearning what you
think you know. And it is much easier to find out what your deep
assumptions are if there is someone else there to help you discover them.
Alone, your best bet is to try to write what you think, and proceed with
scrupulous honesty, imagining your own most skeptical self as the reader.
Think of the biblical story where Jacob wrestles all night with an angel
and the angel wounds him, and changes his name from Jacob (“who grasps”)
to Israel (“who prevails”). Renamed, he can finally ask for his brother’s
pardon for stealing his birthright, and thus be reunited with him. When
you come to something you can’t explain, do not gloss over it; stay with
it, wrestle it. Confusion is your quarry. Rejoice when you find it, bear
with the pain it inflicts, and don’t let it go until it gives you a new
name. By the way, later, the sun, that symbol of true wisdom, heals
Jacob’s injury.
Ancient ideas of knowing yourself were about coming to be a better person.
The process was psychological, but more in the realm of conditioning one’s
mind than in finding out why the mind does what it does. Marcus Aurelius
said, “Cast away opinion and you are saved. Who then hinders you from
casting it away?” Can we really control our emotions by decision? The best
of the ancient writers, including Aurelius, acknowledged that we could not
do it, and with a smile and a shrug provided exercises for teaching
ourselves to improve what self-control we have. That’s what religion and
graceful-life philosophies are doing with their rituals and their
meditations: teaching us to wake up to ourselves, for the sake of
happiness. Not all philosophy overtly calls for ritual meditation. For
instance, epistemology, the study of how we know things, and eschatology,
the study of how things end, involve conceptual investigation. But some
philosophies, throughout history, have been about how we should live. Much
life advice comes as part of a particular religion or politics. To
indicate a philosophy primarily concerned with advice for living, I use
the term “graceful-life philosophy.” The important ancient ones were
Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism, and the term is also
useful for referring to the work of the Renaissance thinker Montaigne, and
of any modern thinker who offers secular, philosophical arguments for how
individuals should best live their lives.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Happiness Myth
by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperSanFrancisco
Copyright © 2007
Jennifer Michael Hecht
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-081397-0
