An alternative way to live
As certain children’s films of the last few decades have taught us, we must always be “true to ourselves”. This is a fundamental rule of human life, disregard of which ends in unhappiness. To live according to the wish of another or to assume a “false self” is to invite disaster. In The Little Mermaid, the protagonist is beset by the forces of tradition and parental pressure, which attempt to stifle her idiosyncratic identity. Eventually, she overcomes this oppression; and she finds happiness by changing her physical appearance to suit a true self within. The titular character of Shrek rebels against the world, which refuses to accept him as he is. In the end, he attains happiness by remaining true to himself. On the other hand, Shrek’s female lead exemplifies the dangers of assuming a false self: her life is nearly ruined by her attempts to deny her true nature, and she achieves contentment only when she accepts that nature.
Taken alone, there is nothing interesting about these observations. Stories are stories; and they should be taken as they are, rather than deconstructed for our amusement. However, when one sees a Dr. Pepper commercial speaking of “being you” by buying Dr. Pepper, or witnesses the obsessive focus on authentic self-expression in the arts, one begins to notice a trend. Questions begin to arise. What is the difference between a true self and a false self–and why does one and not the other lead to happiness? Few answers are to be found in a society that presupposes at its every level the importance of authenticity. We have forgotten that this value system is an invention of the modern West. Worse still, the more sinister conclusions of our ideology have been papered over; and ancient ideas about happiness and the self, which authenticity replaced, have been erased from our cultural memory.
In the West, we take for granted that all people have true selves. We assume that each person is absolutely individual–a self-contained identity that, left alone, would flourish into an authentic, happy and content free agent. All would be well if not for the intrusion of outside influences, whether cultural, societal or familial. These forces instill us with the values or inhibitions of people totally unlike us. Our true, authentic selves are choked out by layers upon layers of imposed baggage. It is only at the times when this baggage disappears that we are truly ourselves: a mid-life crisis; a life-threatening situation; a bout of existential dread. Here, the true self emerges from its cocoon for a brief moment, before once again succumbing to the monotony of oppression. Outside of these times, we do our best to fight against the influences that hold us captive. Although we know that escape is never permanent, it is obviously better to try to be oneself than to be a slave to the whims of others.
The seeds of these ideas have been with us, in one form or another, for nearly 800 years. They can be traced from Duns Scotus to Petrarch; from Descartes and Locke to Kant. They connect Nietzsche to Sartre. Thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida, despite their attempts to forge a new path, in many ways continued this same tradition. In other words, the notion that each person is somehow self-defined, self-contained and wholly individual is the bedrock of modernism. This article, however, is not an exercise in genealogy. Instead, this writer would like to contrast the above understanding of the self–let us call it the “modern self”–with an equally fully-formed view that was held by many in the ancient world, beginning at latest with Aristotle. For brevity’s sake, we will call this the “ancient self”.
Petrarch offers us one of the modern self’s most straight-forward summaries: “Every one has not only in his countenance and gestures, but also in his voice and language, something peculiarly his own, which it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and correct than it is to alter.” Each person, that is, stakes a claim to an individual identity that is prior to outside influence. One is born a painter, for instance. This individual identity must be grown with care, to avoid its being suffocated by others. The most concise summary of the ancient self comes to us from Will Durant, in his discussion of Aristotle’s ethics: “[W]e are what we repeatedly do.” That is, the self is a collection of actions–its own personal history–, and it is defined by those repeated actions which take up the largest portions of its personal history. One is a painter because of repeated acts of painting.
The core conceit of the ancient self, then, is that identities are shaped entirely “in time”. If one is simply one’s own personal history, then identity is determined by repeated decision-making; and so identity is malleable. Further, the decisions that shape us are shaped in turn by cultural, societal and familial influences. While the modern self shrinks from these forces, the ancient self is inseparable from them. It is impossible to take action without the impetus provided by outside influences. As a result, we in a very real sense become our influences. Even if we later attempt to escape them, the values and viewpoints that have shaped our personal histories of decision-making remain part of us. To follow tradition or to deny one’s desires is not to kill one’s “authentic self”, because there is no authentic self: there is only a history of action.
Obviously, the ancient and modern views of the self entail radically different understandings of human happiness. The modern self achieves happiness by being itself. The self is its own completion: when one is authentic, one has reached the highest state of being. While the exact definition of being oneself developed over time–it found its final form only in 19th and 20th century existentialism–, it is grounded in the Petrarchan idea of cultivating individuality. By contrast, happiness for the ancient self is a matter of repeatedly choosing the good. As with being oneself, the definition of choosing the good differed between ancient thinkers. A detailed history of the idea is beyond the scope of this article, and so this writer will work with generalizations.
Most ancient thinkers believed that there was an “essence” or “nature” common to all humans: an unchanging, universal identity that grounds individual identity. Each individual human is joined to all others by the essence of humanity, which means that there are certain concrete facts that are true of all humans. Happiness is the event of thriving as a human–of pursuing ends that bring about thriving and of avoiding ends that do not bring it about. The statement that “murder is evil” is true because murder impedes a human from thriving; and the statement that “health is good” is true because health is a condition for human thriving. The ancient self would, for example, achieve happiness by repeatedly seeking after the good (such as health) and repeatedly avoiding evil (such as murder). This repetition of action alters one’s personal history, which in turn alters identity. One comes to embody the good.
If the ideal ancient self is a paragon of virtue, then what is the ideal modern self? No one answered this question better than Nietzsche. Total authenticity is the removal of all things that impose upon one’s individuality; a complete lack of outside influence. On final analysis, this includes identity itself. The only self prior to outside determination is a non-self–an absolutely undetermined, undirected will, moved by itself for its own sake. The ideal man is the Übermensch, a self-determining agent that is at once creator and destroyer, that invents rules to break them, that lives life as though it were a game. Only in this utterly spontaneous, aimless willing is there authenticity and happiness.
But, as a result, the Übermensch is not bound by ethics: it is a primal force that could murder at one moment and give a fortune to charity at the next–a being that is not even directed by desire or ambition. It creates its own values and goals from moment to moment. The worst atrocities and the greatest achievements in human history could be performed by this entity, and both would be reduced to the same ethically neutral plane. Although fiction has never portrayed the Übermensch with perfect accuracy, we have caught glimpses of it in certain manifestations of the Joker. The sheer randomness of Mark Hamill’s rendition in Batman: The Animated Series, in particular, occasionally provides an idea of how a truly aimless will would look.
On the other hand, the ancient self is grounded in ethics and in its connection to the Other. The Übermensch could never exist under such a system, because the ancient self’s actions are brought about by its relationships with outside influences, which define it and are defined by it. The ancient self accepts personal history; the Übermensch flees from it. As a result, the ancient self allows itself to change: not to retreat to a more original identity prior to pain, but to advance toward a new self that bears scars but has overcome them. Does a society built on the ancient self escape violence and war? History tells us otherwise. Are those who believe in the ancient self guaranteed perpetual happiness? No. But, for those disenchanted with the conclusions of modernism, the ancient self offers an alternative way to live.
Still Eating Oranges
