It’s a new year, so I’m thinking about new things. Next school year, I’ll be teaching the same slate of core class: “Philosophy of Human Flourishing”; “Religion in Global Context”; “Introduction to the Bible”. While I enjoy teaching all three of these, I’d like to someday, possibly teach courses on the following topics, because I’m curious about them:
1. “History and Philosophy of Games”
This may be a 1.a and a 1.b option, maybe even a 1.c depending on what would draw the most interest from students (presuming that there would be any). 1.a would be “History and Philosophy of Games” but if that’s too broad, 1.b would be “History and Philosophy of Sports”. If 1.a was doable, I’d open with Unit 1, “What Is a Game?” I’d consult the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Bernard Suits (The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World), and the philosopher who I’m currently reading: C. Thi Nguyen (Games: Agency as Art). Unit 2 would likely focus on, for lack of a better word, physical games ranging from baseball to Uno, or “sport” if the former idea is too broad. Unit 3 would likely focus on video games. Each unit would begin with a history of those types of games. I’m not sure what other lessons I’d add yet, though I imagine.
If this is too much to stuff into one class, then my 1.b option would just be, as mention, “History and Philosophy of Sports” and my 1.c option would be “History and Philosophy of Video Games”. Both of these topics would be much easier to plan for separately. Paradoxically, I don’t play video games all that much, but they were a massive part of my childhood, so I find them interesting still. I watch a ton of sports, but don’t play much. I think the history and philosophy of sports would be easier to create, as I’m more familiar, but I imagine, if somehow I could incorporate some video game play time into the class, the history and philosophy of video games would be a lot more fun to create/teach.
2. “Philosophy for Becoming an Adult”or “Philosophy for Adulthood”
I imagine this being an elective for seniors. Unit 1 would focus on meaning-generation. I could see myself teaching lessons on what major philosophical and religious traditions have presented as the meaning of human life. (For the religious traditions, I could use Stephen Prothero’s four key components of religions (problem, solution, technique, and exemplars) which might map onto schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism, Confucianism, etc.
Then, Unit 2 would focus on relationships. Maybe something related to Confucius’ ranking of relationships and teachings about filial piety combined with something on friendship (maybe consulting Robin Dunbar’s Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships) and maybe something—if I’m brave—on romantic relationships, though I’d be super cautious about this, and may want to choose some novel angle. Unit 3 would focus on work and career, maybe built around Matthew Hammerton’s “What Is Wrong with Workism?” Hammerton mentions Aristotelean “perfectionism,” which would be worth a lesson in itself. I think a discussion of AI’s relationship to work and whether we want a “post-work future” would be a great fit here.
An introduction to ethic could be a lot of fun too.
As a long time listener of the podcast Very Bad Wizards, I purchased Tamler Sommers’ book Why Honor Matterswith a positive disposition toward the author but a negative one toward the focus of the book: honor and honor cultures. My moral/ethical leanings are shaped by a “dignity framework,” whether that be because of my upbringing as a Christian and the explorations in Christian theology that have indoctrinated me, or (and?) because of my attempt to develop a rational basis for my moral and ethical beliefs that don’t appeal to divine revelation (often a secular derivative of Christian morality, if I’m honest). Right or wrong, Christian morality is presented as emerging from the example of a man, Jesus, who appealed to dignity (by way of the imago dei) in the honor/shame culture of the Roman Empire, with obvious favoritism toward the former. Jesus suffered because of an honor culture (i.e. his Passion) but the Kingdom of God that he preached imagined the world as a dignity utopia. This paradigm makes honor cultures look archaic and unevolved.
Sommers’ book doesn’t abandon the value of dignity-based morality but instead sheds light on the strengths of honor-based morality that we have lost in societies that have abandoned an honor-shame structure. He doesn’t ignore that weaknesses of honor culture—for example, honor killings, cyclical revenge, and such. He builds a steel man for the values of honor culture that I found at time convincing and at other times at least worth pondering further. And this book knocked me off my high horse by putting a spotlight on where dignity culture has failed (e.g. the American justice system and our world’s largest prison population).
I was attracted to the book for a negative reason: I’ve begun to think, contrary to some, that we’re not a society that needs less shame but one that may need more of it. I don’t mean old school, religious, Puritan-style shame. But I do think that social media has revealed a side of us in “Western” culture that’s gotten very ugly. It’s individualism taken to its most absurd extreme. We do what we want and we don’t care who it impacts, as long as we enjoy it. I think there should be some shame in that. The flip side of this is that there needs to be more people who want to live honorable lives: who care about their name, their reputation, and that of those closest to them. (For example, I want the name “LePort” to mean something that it definitely hasn’t mean in previous generations, and I want it to be a good name that my son can proudly own.) If you’re generally interested in a philosopher making a defense of the strengths of honor-based morality, or if you’ve had a concern similar to my own, then I highly recommend this book. It’s well-written and its case is argued as about as good as anyone can argue for honor-based morality in our current context.
This week, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. I was struck by one line in particular. It reminded me of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But Sartre’s version is framed existentially. He says (quoting from Macomber’s translation, p. 24), “…in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”
If I understand existentialism, it doesn’t offer forth a strict, structured ethical system by which all must abide. But there is an ethic based in our freedom as humans and our responsibility for our actions. Sartre says that once we’re “cast into this world” against our choice—because we have no choice when it comes to our being born—we are “responsible for everything” we do (p. 29). We can’t blame our actions on others. We do them. Presumably, we do them with a sense of justification. We do them thinking they’re right to do. Sartre is convinced that no one acts thinking that their action is evil. “We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” This isn’t quite Kantian. We’re not making a choice with the Categorical Imperative in mind, explicitly. But we may be abiding by it implicitly. Because we think that if we can do it, humans should be able to do it. And if humans should be able to do it, then in essence, our actions tell everyone around us, whether or not we place them within a concrete ethical framework, that this is what we think is good and right. And whether we would want others to do what we’ve done is secondary to the fact that once we’ve done it, we suggest that humans can and should be able to do it, and if humans can and should be able to do as we’ve done, then this is what we deem acceptable for humans, as a whole. Even if we’re narcissistic enough to say that we alone should be able to act in a certain way, the reality is that we’re a human among humans, so the louder claim of our actions is “this is how humans should act”. We wouldn’t act as we do if we didn’t believe this.
I mentioned the philosopher Simone Weil a few posts ago (see “Simone Weil’s rootedness”), and her book, The Need for Roots. In that post, I mentioned my desire to meditate on her “vital needs of the human soul”. This post will be the first in a series where I’ll summarize what she says about each one and then share my own meditation on it. For Weil, these vital needs can be understood this way: (1) they are an attempt to answer this question: “what needs related to the life of the soul corresponds to the body’s need for food, sleep, and warmth”; (2) and they “must never be confused with desires, whims, fantasies or vices” (p. 8, Schwartz translation). While this may sound theological in nature, and for Weil it seems like there’s no line between theological and philosophical thinking, let me say that if the word “soul” is distracting, try to think of psychological well-being. Also, I don’t think one needs to assume the a soul/body or mind/body dualism to find value in this list. It’s common to speak of physical and psychological needs as distinct even if we believe that the mind/soul/psyche is material.
The list of vital needs First, let me share the list that Weil created. It’s fifteen items long, so this series may take some time:
Order
Freedom
Obedience
Initiative & Responsibility
Equality
Hierarchy
Honor
Punishment
Freedom of Opinion/Association
Security
Risk
Private Property
Shared Property (“participation in collective goods”)
Rootedness
The Need for Truth
The reason that I want to (1) summarize and then (2) reflect/meditate upon each is that I’m not sure if I agree with this list as a whole. As I re-read each one, it’ll give me a chance to critically evaluate what Weil wrote. If there’s space, I want to end my class “Philosophy for Human Flourishing” with a lesson on this list, so this gives me a chance to really evaluate it. Let’s begin with “Order”.
Summarizing Weil’s comments on “Order” Weil calls the need for “Order” “the main need of the soul” that is “the one closest to its eternal destiny” (p. 8). What does she mean by “Order”? Her definition is as follows: “a web of social relations such that no one is forced to violate strict obligations in order to fulfill other obligations” (pp. 8-9). For context, Weil begins the book (p. 1), “The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it. A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” In other words, I can demand people recognize my rights all day, but if they feel no obligation to me then there’s nothing to the language of rights; and if I don’t feel obligated to others, then I won’t recognize their rights. As she said, “…a right that is not recognized by anyone amounts to very little.” Also (p. 1), “He in turn has rights when he is considered from the point of view of others who recognize obligations towards him”.
With a shift in our attention from rights to obligations, “Obligations are only binding on human beings” and “Identical obligations bind all human beings” (p. 2). Our identical obligations to other human beings means, “There is an obligation towards every human being through the mere fact that they are a human being” (p. 2). Her foundation for these claims is definitely theological in nature. She says that the obligations are not based on “de facto situations, or on legal precedent, or on customs, social structure or relations of force, or on the legacy of the past, or the supposed direction of history…This obligation is not based on any convention” (pp. 4-5). Instead, “This obligation is eternal.” Why? “It echoes the eternal destiny of all human beings.” Since, theologically speaking, the human is eternal, so our obligation to these other eternal being with which we surround ourselves. “This obligation is unconditional.”
When Weil describes our obligations to every other human, they include “not to let them suffer from hunger”; “shelter, clothing, warmth, hygiene and care for the sick”; and those things that are “not physical” but part of the “moral life” (p. 6). With this in mind, we see that “Order” means that making sure that people can fulfill their varying obligations to others. Weil mourns, writing “Nowadays, there is a very high degree or disorder and incompatibility between obligations.” But she’s not confident that this order is possible. She writes (p. 9), “Unfortunately, there is no method for reducing the incompatibility. It is not even certain that the idea of an order in which all obligations are compatibility is not a fantasy.”
She takes hope is the widely diverse universe working in a synchronized way, and “truly beautiful works of art” doing the same. But it seems to me that this is the best she can offer: a hope. She writes (p. 9):
Lastly, our awareness of our various obligations always stems from a desire for good that is unique, fixed and identical to itself for each man, from the cradle to the grave. This desire perpetually stirring inside us prevents us from ever resigning ourselves to situations where the obligations are incompatible. Either we resort to lying in order to forget they exist, or we struggle blindly to extricate ourselves from them.
If I’m reading her correctly, Weil is saying that we desire a world in which our obligations are not in conflict. This is a need of ours, even the central one. But it’s also one that may be “a fantasy”. We want a morally structured society. I presume that this implies that a morally dysfunctional society leaves us unable to experience this order that we crave
Reflecting on Weil’s comments on “Order” Every philosophical thought experiment from the trolly-problem on is a reminder that we live in a morally tense universe. As I wrote in my last post, “Effective Altruism and moral intuition”, there are moral systems that make a lot of sense but then when pressed, feel immoral at points. This is true of a lying deontologist and a hard-line utilitarian. But the desire that we have for such a framework is real, and if I’m understanding Weil, then maybe the constant striving for such “Order” is the best we can achieve.
Our pursuit of “Order” and our desire to create it for others is why every moral treatise and moral system has come into existence. We argue for our preferred morality in hopes of finding the morality that will work for all of us. This hasn’t happened yet but again, I think the goal is noble and what’s the alternative. Even if we concede some form of moral relativism, that’s a system, that’s a structure that we land upon in order to find “Order”.
Let me be brief (-ish) with this blog post. I’m preparing lessons for my new class, “Philosophy for Human Flourishing”. One of them will ask students to imagine themselves as a CEO of a pharmaceutical company that has the opportunity to make their company more efficient by implementing AI technology that promises to create more life-saving medicine quicker for cheaper. But this means laying off many of their employees. What should they do? I’ll break the class down into four groups, all responsible for making an argument from one of these four ethical paradigms: Aristotelean Virtue Ethics; Deontology; Utilitarianism; and Effective Altruism.
In preparation, I’ve been entertaining the arguments of the Effective Altruists and I find myself conflicted. (If Effective Altruism is new to you, here’s an introduction: Effective Altruism.org.) In short, Effective Altruism seems to universalize morality. It aims to be objective and rational, making moral decisions based on data. For example, many Effective Altruists, argue that while you could spend $1,000 on say a charity for researching glaucoma or for providing underprivileged students with sports equipment, you’re better off using that money for malaria nets, or vitamins, or vaccines, because charities that focus on these things save more lives. So, your charity is more effective. And following Peter Singer’s classical “Drowning Child Thought Experiment”, they argue that distance—geographic, in the original version, but even through time in some more recent versions—shouldn’t prevent you from saving a life. In other words, shared nationality doesn’t make someone more deserving. If you can save one American life with $1,000, but thirty in some country across the world, then you save the thirty. (This feels a little like the trolly problem.) There’s no denying that this is more “effective”. And it’s difficult to make the argument that something like shared nationality makes a life worth saving. This may be because I’m influenced by teachings like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or because I fear the slippery slope of where such ideologies can lead, as various nationalist ideologies have shown us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries!
On the other hand, something feels off about Effective Altruism. Morality that lacks relationally feels…immoral. It seems weird to say no to the homeless person standing right in front of you, looking them in the eye while denying them help, because that money will go further if sent to someone on the other side of the world. Ethnocentrism, nationalism, and such ideologies are dangerous, but does that mean that there’s no place for preferring “closeness”, for lack of a better word. I won’t lie: I’d save my son before saving hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of kids on the other side of the world. In fact, in some sense, by raising a young American, and knowing the cost it’ll take to do so, I’ve already chosen to spend money and resources on his one life that theoretically could’ve saved many, many lives elsewhere. And I feel like this is the right thing to do; I feel like my obligation to my son is greater, by far, than my obligation to people elsewhere. Am I hypocritical for this? It’s something that I’m pondering.
Epictetus has a way of assessing what is valuable about our lives as humans that I find refreshing. In our society (I speak as an American), most people determine your greatness based on wealth and power. (Interestingly, many Americans also think of our society as a “Christian” one…but that’s another discussion altogether.) Rarely do we admire people for their virtues. Maybe we admire wealthy and powerful people who seem to have retain some virtue but our admiration of their virtue is secondary. We’re surprised that they have money, power, and character. But for Epictetus, as I wrote in the last post, there’s nothing about being wealthy that makes someone inherently great. If someone is wealthy, that’s just it: they have a lot of wealth. It tells us little about them as a human. The same is true of power.
Epictetus and Wealth Now Epictetus doesn’t seem to be one who would say that we should “eat the rich”. He wasn’t anti-wealth. Nor is he anti-power. It’s just that he didn’t see these things as the be-all, end-all of human value like we are taught in capitalist societies. Epictetus saw wealth and power as things that someone might have, mostly by means that are beyond their control (e.g. born into a certain family; right place, right time opportunities). He didn’t deny that people who want wealth must pursue it, so there’s definitely some minimal contribution of human agency. But it is very minimal. Every wealthy and powerful person arrives where they do not because of the power of their will but because many things beyond their control went their way.
Here is what Epictetus appears to think of the decision to pursue wealth and power with our limited agency: it’s just an exchange. We’re making the decision to trade certain things for others. The trades aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad” but merely preferential. Let me share some excerpts that will explain what I mean (and remember, I’m using Long’s translation).
Judgments, Motivations, Desires, and Aversions First, Epictetus warns us “if you desire any of the things that are not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate” (Section 2; Long, p. 9). Epictetus has stated already that the things that are up to us are judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions. In other words, our perspective on the world is our own; how we exist in the world is mostly outside of our control. Wealth and power aren’t judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions but we can judge that we want wealth and power, be motivated to attain it, desire it, and be averse to experiences like poverty and powerlessness. But the only real choice that we’re making that’s in our control is the choice to value what we value. We could choose to value other things, like peace, tranquility, happiness, etc., which are more easily accessible as states of mind.
What We Value Second, we must take responsibility for what we decide to value, knowing it could let us down if we fail to earn the wealth and power of which we dream. Epictetus says (Section 5; pp. 11, 13), “It is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinion about things.” And “whenever we are frustrated, or troubled, or pained, let us never hold anyone responsible except for ourselves, meaning our own opinions.” With regard to what I’m saying here, if we pursue wealth and power and we fail, we have no one to blame for the fact that we invested so much of our emotion into those externals.
Entitled to Nothing Third, we should see nothing of this sort as owed to us. We are not entitled to wealth or power, no matter who we are. Epictetus reminds us (Section 11, p. 19), “Never say about anything, “I have lost it’; but say, ‘I have returned it’.” If we have wealth and power at one moment, and then we lose it at the next, it was never “ours”. We had it on loan. (More intensely, Epictetus says this about the death of a loved one like a spouse or a child, for even with regard to people that precious to us, he stands by his assertion that we must remember that we can’t control whether they are with us or not. This has been a harder teaching for me to accept but I’m still processing why I’m open to Epictetus’ posture toward wealth and power while much more resistant to his posture toward lost loved ones. That being said, in his era, life-spans were shorter and one was more accustom to experiencing the death of a spouse or a child than we are, so it was something with which a first century CE Roman had to learn to cope.)
Distrust Yourself Fourth, as I’ve discussed in another post (see “‘If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself'”), even if we pursue wealth and power, we should never allow ourselves to buy into our own hype. Epictetus writes in Section 13 (p. 21), “Even if some people think you are somebody, distrust yourself.” Oh that many of the world’s most wealthy, influential, and powerful people had an ounce of this self-awareness. Maybe to be a major player on the world stage like a Putin, or a Jinping, or a Trump, you have to have a level of narcissism that drives you to bulldoze forward no matter what but I don’t know that our world is better with such men in power. What if such men paused to have a moment of doubt as to whether they should be where they are, acting toward others as they do. Imagine.
Appearances Can Be Deceptive Fifth, Epictetus reminds us that people who have wealth and power may not be as satisfied as they appear. He writes in Section 19 (p. 29):
“When you see someone honored ahead of you or holding great power or being highly esteemed in another way, be careful never to be carried away by the impression and judge the person to be happy. For if the essence of goodness consists in things that are up to us, there is room for neither envy nor jealousy, and you yourself will not want to be a praetor or a senator of a consul, but to be free. The only way to achieve this is by despising the things that are not up to us.”
A modern example that stands out to me is Elon Musk. The man spends hours on “X/Twitter”. There are days he tweets over a hundred times.He’s reported to have a burner account to fight online with his enemies. His cult of personality leads some to worship him thinking that “he’s playing chess while everyone else is player checkers” but what’s his goal. He’s the wealthiest man in the world and clearly, that doesn’t satisfy. He has to ear of powerful politicians, but that doesn’t satisfy. I’m skeptical that he’s a man who can be satisfied and by this I mean that he’s a man who could embrace happiness, peace, and tranquility. He needs drama. He needs a fight. Clearly, he needs to be constantly distracted. The billions aren’t enough. Epictetus would remind us that we should be very careful when we become jealous of such people. Do we want their lives, really? If your happy, at all, then you may want a piece of his financial security but I guarantee that if a genie offered you the chance to swap places with him, you’d turn down the offer.
Satisfaction Starts Inside Sixth, this is because Epictetus believes that if you aren’t satisfied with yourself, there’s nothing wealth and power can provide you. In Section 23 (p. 33), he writes, “If you ever find yourself looking for outside approval in order to curry favor, you can be sure that you have lost your way.” And in Section 24, he says that we should not worry about living a life “without honor” in fear that we’ll be “a nobody everywhere”. Instead, we should embrace the reality that we “need to be somebody only in the things that are up to you, and in them you can be a top person” (p. 35). Personally, this means trying to be a good husband, father, and teacher. I don’t need to be somebody to many; I need to be much to a few.
Pursue Wealth, If You Can Preserve Honor, Integrity, and Moral Principles Seventh, Epictetus addressed whether we should seek wealth (and we can add power) so that we can support others, like our friends. His response (in Section 24; pp. 35, 37)?
“If I can get it and preserve my honor and integrity and moral principles, show me the way, and I will get it. But if you are asking me to lose the good things that are mine just for your to acquire things that are not good, you can see how unfair you are and how ungenerous. Would you rather have money or a trustworthy and honorable friend?”
Similarly, Epictetus sees this commitment to honor, integrity, and moral principles as a patriotic act that benefits one’s nation: “And if you were to supply your country with another trustworthy and honorable citizen, would you not being doing it a benefit?” If we sacrifice our values, Epictetus warns (p. 39), “…if you lose this character in wanting to benefit your country, and you end up dishonorable and untrustworthy, what benefit would you be?”
Weigh the Costs Finally, back to the most important point: all pursuits are exchanges. Epictetus advises (Section 29; p. 45):
“In every undertaking, examine its antecedents and their consequences, and only then proceed to the act itself. If you don’t do that, you will start enthusiastically, because you have not thought about any of the next stages; then, when difficulties appear, you will give up and be put to shame.”
He uses the example of somehow who wants to glory of being an Olympian. He doesn’t tell them that they can’t pursue this goal, but that they must count the cost of the exchange (p. 45):
“You must train, keep a strict diet, stay off pastries, submit to a regular regimen each day, summer or winter, drink no cold water and no wine except at appropriate times; in other words, you have to surrender yourself to the trainer just as you would the doctor. Then in the actual contest you have to dig in alongside the other contestants, and perhaps dislocate your hand or twist your ankle, swallow a lot sand, get flogged, and with all of this lose the fight”
Even if one is to commit to be a philosopher in the Stoic way, they must be prepared to lose some things in order to gain others; they must be prepared for certain hardships the lead to certain rewards. Life is about making decisions; it’s about exchanging this for that. “Think about all this then see whether you want to exchange it for calm, freedom, and tranquility” (p. 49).
In my next post, I’ll share some of Epictetus’ words about reputation and worrying about how others view us.
Last week I read A.A. Long’s translation of Epictetus’ Encheiridion and excerpts from his Discourses, titled How to be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life. I know Stoicism is en vogue right now but there’s much of the philosophy that I find attractive, whether trendy or not. A while ago, I read a bunch of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. The principles were agreeable to me. Likewise with Epictetus’ philosophy.
Epictetus (55-135 CE) was a Roman philosopher who had been a slave. His context is important because it’s different from those of us who have some way to participate in a democracy (though maybe not so different from people living in more authoritarian countries around the world, which could include the United States some day). As Long notes about Epictetus (p. xv), “The Roman world of his lifetime was an absolute autocracy, headed by the emperor or Caesar.” Epictetus didn’t have much hope for changing his world through campaigning, voting, or activism. As hard as it is to bring change about in our world, it was even harder in his. For this reason, the next best move was to turn inward to find freedom. According to Long (p. x), Stoics like Epictetus understood freedom to be “neither legal status nor opportunity to move around at liberty. It is a mental orientation of persons who are impervious to frustration or disappointment because their wants and decisions depend on themselves and involve nothing that they cannot deliver to themselves.” While many of us may have a more expansive experience of freedom (we can campaign, vote, participate in activism, start a business, etc.), the truth of the matter is that as individuals most of us are quite limited in our impact and our influence on the world, so the “inward turn” remains valuable because this is where our “locus of control” lies.
For Epictetus, there are aspects of our world that are “up to us” like our motivations, desires, and aversions: “in short, everything that is our own doing” (p. 3). Most things are “not up to us” like our “body and property, our reputation, and our official positions—in short, everything that is not our doing.” This can be a liberating insight, even now. We can’t control the body that we were born into, or the wealth with which we started, or how people think of us, or whether we get the job we want. Biology, and societies, and economies, and other systems control much of who we are and what we have. Even those who become billionaires need things to break a certain way and they need to do business in a certain system that is rewarding certain innovations at the right time. Jeff Bezos, for example, doesn’t happen in just any context, so the idea that he’s self-made ignores pretty much everything about reality. This is a freeing insight. Those of us raised with the myth of “the American Dream” were told that anybody can become anything if they work hard enough for long enough. It’s a cute myth but merely a myth. Like all myths, it inspires certain people who “make it” but they’re the exception that proves the rule: the American Dream is a lottery. There are plenty of people who worked hard enough for long enough for very little reward.
I’m going to write a handful of posts sharing nuggets of wisdom from the Encheiridion. For this post, let me end with this one, since I’ve been talking about being a “have” or a “have not”. In Section 44 (p. 79 in Long), Epictetus shares two “inferences” that are “invalid”:
“I am richer than you, therefore I am better than you.”
“I am more eloquent that you, therefore I am better than you.”
Epictetus reminds us that as humans, we are “neither property nor diction”. We have property/wealth. We have rhetorical skill. But those things aren’t what we are. Instead, if someone is richer than others, rather than seeing themselves as better because of this accident (I used this in both the philosophical and colloquial sense of the word), they should accept what it means: to be wealthier than someone else doesn’t mean that I am better than them; it means that my wealth is greater. That’s it. I have more wealth than they do and for most of us, someone has more wealth than we do.
We judge ourselves by accidents of reality. We determine our worth by things that we don’t determine, no matter how much we’d like to believe that our hard work and ingenuity is the sole cause of our wealth, success, health, etc. This isn’t to say that we don’t contribute anything. I mean, Bezos did have a great idea at the perfect time…but he easily could’ve made a mistake here or a mistake there and there’s no Amazon as we know it. Nothing about the lives of people that we deem “successful” is inherit and inevitable; the same is true of those who are deemed failures or even just middle of the road.
A while back I was listening to The Herd featuring “American sports media personality” Colin Cowherd. Usually, he sticks to sports, providing his hot takes. But there was one day when he said something about American culture that struck me. I can’t remember the precise wording, or the context, but he praised the United States for being a place where if one “makes it” (in a capitalist sense), then one really makes it. We’re a high-risk, high-reward society. That means for the many who don’t make it, it’s natural to feel like a loser because our society exists as a competition that we welcome. America is held together in the same way that many professional sports organizations are: not so that all will succeed but so that the game itself can exist. Many poorer Americans perceive themselves as losers but rightfully so, admiring those who “succeed” (think of the adoration of Trump and Musk that we’ve seen from some circles), and sometimes hoping that they’ll get another shot to redeem themselves like we see in so many “rags-to-riches” Hollywood flicks. As many have said about Americans: we tend to think of ourselves as one big break from being millionaires when in reality most of us are one bad break from bankruptcy, especially if your health fails you. Most of us are far closer to being the person begging on the street corner than we are to being the next Jeff Bezos but our myths sustain us, so we ignore reality.
I think when many Americans despair the word “socialism” it’s because they agree with Cowherd: America’s greatness is—in the words of the Alicia Keys and Jay-Z song “Empire State of Mind”—the place where “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere“. Americans see themselves as playing on the biggest stage. Sure, the “World Happiness Report” ranked us 15th overall with nations like Finland, Denmark, and Iceland ranking at the top but I imagine it’s a small portion of Americans who would trade for the secure happiness provided by those countries’ social safety nets and the other perks that come with being a more collectivist society.
No Pleasure without Pain In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Joyous Science, Book 1, Section 12 (Hill translation), the philosopher provides a perspective that aligns with Cowherd’s and that of many Americans who see our country as “the greatest in the world” in spite of where we rank in measures like happiness, health, safety, etc. Nietzsche writes, “…suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other (p. 45). In other words, to experience the highest highs, one must risk experiencing the lowest lows. When we think of celebrities in our country, they have fame like no humans before them but often their lives are very complicated: addictions, failed marriages, or in the case of our athletes, the physical toll.
Nietzsche understood Stoicism, which is having a revival in our time, as a philosophy that encouraged seeking “little pleasure” because this would lead to less pain. Likewise, he understood “socialists and party politicians” as opting for a life where risks are minimized in exchange for offering a lower ceiling of pleasure. He writes, “…should you want to mitigate and assuage human suffering…you must also moderate and diminish the human capacity for joy.”
Nietzsche v. Epictetus This stands contrary to some of the Buddhist, Christian, and Stoic ideas that I’ve come to value, which emphasize human joy being found in minimizing suffering and being content with what one has. For example, this week I read Epictetus’ Encheiridion, and the emphasis from that ancient Roman philosopher (55-135 CE), who has once been a slave, is that true freedom is found in accepting what we might now call your “locus of control”. In Section 29, Epictetus tells his students that if they want to pursue the type of greatness that comes with say being an Olympian, then they should be aware of the cost. He doesn’t say that one shouldn’t pursue such goals; neither does he lionize doing so. Instead, one must be prepared to “exchange it for calm, freedom, and tranquility” (the “it” being the potential glories of achieving lofty goals). There’s something perplexing about human nature, especially as filtered through “the American Dream”: we know the path to peace but it bores us. Meaningfulness matters more than happiness. The philosophy of many Americans seems to be that they’d rather live somewhere where they can dream of greatness than somewhere they can be secure and at peace.
Are Ashramas the Answer? I find that as I’ve aged, I’m attracted to Buddhist and Stoic ideas but I recognize that when I was younger, I would’ve aligned more with Nietzsche’s perspective. (I’ve found Christianity to be easily molded to fit both perspectives, depending on the emphasis place on different parts of that tradition.) There was a stage in my life where I was obsessed with completing a Ph.D. Once that stage was over, I lost my taste for living in a state of constant ambition. I think I was burned out. I wanted to take life much slower, catch my breath. It seemed like one stage of life required certain things to be satisfied while the next stage has required other things.
In Indian philosophy, there’s the concept of “ashramas” or life-stages. One begins with a preparatory stage where they develop discipline and become educated (“Brahmacharya”); then move to the family and wealth building stage (“Grihastha”); then they transition more toward voluntary service and spirituality (“Vanaprashta”); finally one ends with a preparation for death and hopefully deliverance from the cycle of rebirth (moksha from samsara) during the last stage of life (“Sannyasa”). Maybe this is a middle way? Maybe we need our days seeking glory and our days seeking respite and calm?
Now Cowherd, Trump, Musk, Keys, and Jay-Z aren’t examples of this path. They seem to be pursuing Grihastha to the day they die. But ashramas might serve as a way to reconcile some of the truths that seem to resonate in the contradictory words of Nietzsche and Epictetus, acknowledging, of course, that this presentation is structured upon a metaphysics that many outside of India don’t embrace. Maybe Nietzsche is right for young people: take those risks; pursue great pleasure. Maybe Epictetus, the Buddha, Jesus, and others are better voices for when one comes to realize that all that glitters is not gold, and that once one achieves, the satisfaction fades quickly. In the later, wiser years—for those who find it—peace, calm, freedom, tranquility, etc., should be the goal. It could be argued that one can’t really value the reward of a peaceful, calm, free, tranquil life without having first tried to find satisfaction in the pursuit of greatness. Personally, I needed to see if I had the ability to earn a doctorate. Others have an itch to start a business, earn a million dollars, travel around the world, etc. Sometimes we achieve what we want and it’s a Pyrrhic victory. We’re left wondering if all the effort was worth it. But the fact of the matter is that for many people, they’d be left with the same cloud hanging over them if they never tried to “reach their full potential”. I don’t know what this says about people in the late stages of life who need more money, more property, more power, more, more, more. My suggestion here doesn’t reflect well on them but hey, maybe Nietzsche’s right and our one short life is best lived with our foot on the pedal and the pedal to the metal until the day we close our eyes for the last time.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, American dads spent about “triple the time” taking care of their children than they did fifty years ago (see “8 facts about American dads”): “Dads are much more involved in child care than they were 50 years ago. In 2016, fathers reported spending an average of eight hours a week on child care – about triple the time they provided in 1965.” In my view, this is moral progress. Fatherhood should be taken seriously. Fathers should invest heavily in their children. And I’m going to say something that sounds like a politically conservative talking-point but give me a chance to explain this assertion: once you become a father, it’s the most important vocation you can undertake. I think this is true of becoming a parent, in general. So yes, motherhood is the most important vocation you can undertake, once you become a mother.
Notice, unlike the Elon Musk’s of the world, I’m not advocating for having as many children as possible. Nor am I suggesting that becoming a parent is more important than, for example, choosing to pursue a demanding career or a religious vocation. Nor do I think there are absolutely concrete and universal ways to take parenting seriously. A single parent has particular demands that must be understood within that context. The same can be said of a parent struggling financially (which is why we should have strong safety nets for parents, if we’re the advanced and/or moral society we claim to be) or parents with particular health concerns (which is why we should have a robust health care system that doesn’t threaten people with unbearable financial burdens if they get sick—this includes “brain” or “mental” health). We might find it difficult to spend a lot of time with our children if these challenges face us.
But “all things being equal”, if you choose to become a parent, and you have the ability to spend time investing in your child’s health and well-being, then you must do this. It must be a priority. Here’s why I say this, and why my point isn’t the same as the one commonly heard on say Fox News. It comes down to consent. A child can’t consent to their coming into existence. As philosophers like David Benatar warn, when you have a child you put them as risk of the almost endless forms of suffering that could await them, from cancer to severe depression, to chronic pain or disabilities that aren’t accommodated by our society. Benatar takes this point so seriously, he argues that it’s immoral to have children, period. I disagree. When you have a child, you offer them all that is potentially good about existence. The moral thing to do is to try to build a world where all children have a better chance at experiencing all that is beautiful about being, from falling in love to eating tasty food to enjoying all forms of art to feeling a sense of accomplishment when we do something difficult. That said, I take Benatar’s argument seriously: you make the decisionfor them to exist. The gift of existence can become a curse, easily.
While I believe that all people are responsible for and obligated to other humans, I think the parent-child responsibility/obligation is the most demanding for this reason. I’m responsible for my students in a particular context but it’s not the same responsibility as that held by their parents. The responsibility of parenthood is the responsibility of direct causation. The responsibility of being an educator is the responsibility of interconnection or as some Buddhists call it, interbeing. As a parent, I impart existence itself where there might not have been existence. As an educator, I exist within a web of being wherein I have a particular connection to my students which comes with certain responsibilities and obligations, some which are immutable because I’m a sentient being living in a world with other sentient beings and my actions toward them impact all of us as a whole whereas other responsibilities are role-specific, like imparting knowledge and mentoring. If I quit teaching, or if they move on from being my student, then that latter responsibilities change. But if I see them in a store, or communicate with them via social media after they graduate, I remain responsible toward them as human to human, noting that I’m a human who was once their teacher. But I didn’t cause them.
My son that was born a couple of weeks ago, I caused his existence (in part) and therefore carry the burden of what kind of existence he might experience. This is immutable in the aforementioned sense of being a sentient being living in relation to him as a sentient being. If I cause him joy, then I have infused joy into our collective existence; if I cause him suffering, then I have infused suffering into our collective existence. More importantly, it’s immutable in the sense of my responsibility of consenting to his existence for him. This is analogous to being someone’s primary medical contact that makes decisions for them if they’re incapacitated without an advanced directive, except that it’s multitudes more demanding because as a parent you’re one of the primary agents in consenting on behalf of someone to the one thing that determines everything—their actual being in reality.
Now, as I said, I don’t know that we can lay down concrete, objective, universal examples of what it means to be a parent. There will be difficult decisions. Do I honor my decision to bring a child into the world by taking on that more demanding career that will drain my time and attention but provides me with the financial means to guarantee their health and well-being? Or do I honor my decision by doing my best to not live to work but to work to live, choosing a career that may pay less but provides me with more time for the emotional nourishing of my child? These are difficult decisions. The moral demand is for those decisions to be made with seriousness, recognizing the weightiness, and being willing to own those choices by saying, in honesty toward ourself, that we are doing what seems best for the person whose existence you determined for them.
I live with a form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I find Jesus of Nazareth to be the greatest moral exemplar, likely due to my upbringing, culture, and religion. On the other hand, I’m aware that his morality was shaped in a context very different from my own, most importantly as a first-century CE Jewish person living in Galilee and Judea, which was under Roman occupation, who held to an apocalyptic understanding of the world which from our perspective seems to have been somewhat misplaced. For this reason, mere parroting of Jesus’ ethics may not be wise for most of us, if such a thing is even possible. So, as a Christian, I try to ask myself what it means to live in some form of alignment with Jesus’ vision of the good, though a version of the vision that is applicable to the twenty-first century.
The tricky business here is that this kind of mindset often leads to Christianities that may as well abandon any affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I would say that most American Christianities function in complete independence from anything related to Jesus. His “Sermon on the Mount” is critiqued as “woke”. His ideas are rejected by Christians as impractical (should we really treat people who are poor that way?!). Therefore, the label “Christian” retains a cultural significance as one that secures some form of status but it has little to do with the person that “Christians” have called “Christ”.
There is a part of me that thinks that only certain radical groups, like Anabaptists/Mennonites (with their emphasis on non-violence and simplicity), or the Christianities practiced by the oppressed and marginalized, are worthy of being affiliated with Jesus. This would leave me on the outside looking in, sort of like Nicodemus in the first part of the Gospel of John. But this might not be a bad thing. It reminds me of the American author and poet, Maya Angelou. When she was asked if she was a Christian, she responded:
“I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.”
The long history of Christianity has shown that the word can mean anything. Therefore, the label “Christian” can mean anything. Christians can support unjust imperial power. Christians can be violent. Christians can demonize people because of their ethnic identities (think of the centuries of persecution of the Jews). Christians can be as addicted to wealth (think of the Prosperity Gospel). Christians can be harmfully superstitious (think of the “Word of Faith” movement or popular forms of “spiritual warfare”). Many brush this off by saying something like “Christians aren’t perfect, only Christ is” but that’s an excuse for maintaining the cultural value of the label Christian without taking seriously the demand that this word should have upon our lives (think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship*).
I live in South Texas where being “Christian” is an important label. To respond as Maya Angelou did would earn you suspicion from many. But when I say I’m a Christian, I mean something like what she did: “I’m working at it”. And honestly, many of the people who quickly and definitively name themselves “Christian” are the type of people who make the word mostly meaningless. I think, “if you’re a Christian, then clearly being a Christian means nothing for the world”. But I also think this of myself: if I’m a Christian, then Christianity needs help. I guess the important difference is self-awareness.
This being said, I find that Jesus can remain a moral exemplar even if his apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of God coming to earth seems to have missed the mark. (Whether there’s some eschatological truth to his vision is impossible to address because we can’t know that truth until the end of our lives or the end of human history, so I find that debate unhelpful except to give people a reason to maintain a certain form of Christianity, which is fine if that works for others.) Jesus remains the type of person who stood not only for the marginalized and oppressed but with them. He wanted to see people restored, healed, and whole. He wanted to see oppressors regain their humanity. And he refused to contribute to our cycle of violence when he was cornered. (Whether Jesus was ideologically pacifistic seems beside the point; that he refused to engage his enemies violently when it really mattered says what needs to be said.)
“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
In Book II of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates is discussing the meaning of “justice” and what it means to be a “just person”. Is “justice” just a construct that the powerful use to justify themselves? Or is justice something objective that can be measured over against whether someone has power? Socrates says to his interlocutor Glaucon, that the truly just man will be just for justice’s sake, not for the appearance of justice since being just for the appearance of justice is being “just” in order to gain a reputation that can be used for selfish gain. Socrates proposes that the most just a person can be is “to be and not seem good” (p. 45 of Lee’s translation). He states:
“We must, indeed, not allow him to seem good, for if he does he will have all the reward and honours paid to the man who has a reputation for justice; and we shall not be able to tell whether his motive is love of justice or love of the rewards and honours.”
For Socrates, the only person who can be clearly just, is the one “we must strip…of everything except justice”. He continues:
“Our just man must have the worst of reputations for wrongdoing even though he has done no wrong, so that we can test his justice and see if it weakens in the face of unpopularity and all that goes with it; we shall give him an undeserved and life-long reputation for wickedness, and make him stick to his chosen course until death.”
It has been noted that Plato likely has Socrates in view. Socrates was charged by the Athenians for being “impious” and for “corrupting the youth”. In a sense, these charges were accurate but the question is whether or not Socrates’ “impiety” and “corruption” were clearly evils or just evils perceived by the misguided worldview of the Athenians. Plato’s views seem clear here.
Jesus was perceived by his followers in much the same way. In short, Jesus is presented as a just man who was unjustly condemned by an unjust society. In fact, Plato writes something that is hard for Christians to read without thinking about Jesus, even though it was written centuries before Jesus** (again, from Lee, p. 45):
“…the just man, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified (or “impaled” depending on the translation), and learn at last that one should want not to be, but to seem just”
With those words, Plato’s Socrates draws a line between true justice and seeming justice. Justice exists, though rare, in the form of people who are so just that they will die for justice rather than take the easy path. Now, in a sense, this helps me with the question of whether or not Jesus’ ethics are completely relativized by his apocalypticism. If we read Jesus’ actions through Plato, what matters is that this just man Jesus was not rescued by divine intervention but went to his grave refusing to muscle the “Kingdom of God” into existence, which would only contribute to the cycles of violence that consume us. He used what life he had to try to bring the “Kingdom of God” by means of healing, care, forgiveness, empowerment, etc.
From this perspective, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are Christians. On the other hand, I’m in a category with Maya Angelou: “I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being”. I fail but I try. And I think Jesus’ vision, as read through Plato, remains worth our effort even if, as Jesus’ crucifixion, Socrates’ trial, and Dr. King’s assassination (not to mention all the other innocents) teach us, most of us must settle with wanting to be just rather than achieving it. More precisely, we must settle with wanting to want to be just, since is Jesus, Socrates, King, etc., are the measure of a just person, I think many of us would prefer to never be truly tested.
*Sadly, the copy of this book that’s available on Amazon has a forward by Eric Metaxes, who embodies how worthless the label “Christian” can be.
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