You Must Change Your Life. But How And Why?
On Success Philosophies: Sloterdijk, Nietzsche, Bourdieu, Gladwell + the Stoics, Christianity, Buddhism
Hello,
It may be an obvious question, but why do we seek to improve ourselves? Why do we want to be “successful”?
The obvious reasons are:
1) To achieve a goal
2) To express ourselves or realize our potential
The less obvious reason, according to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, is to gain immunity from suffering.
We wish to be stronger, smarter, or richer so as to protect ourselves against life’s slings and arrows. We seek to avoid the shadow of death and chaos through skills, rituals, training, education, habits, customs, and institutions - including religion.
The self-improvement project began as a religious one involving small spiritual communities (the monastery, the sangha, the ashram, etc). Only much later did it become secular and scientific.
Religions are very good at self-improving practices, such as the Benedictine Rule or the Ngöndro of Tibetan Buddhism. Quasi-religious philosophies such as Stoicism have the memento mori (reminders of death).
The Benedictine Rule aims to bring monks closer to God through work and prayer. The Ngöndro practices aim to purify the mind of disturbing emotions so we become stable and happy. The Stoic death focus makes practitioners imperturbable in the face of any event, including the final one.
Such practices have proven their worth over the centuries.
Religions may be the most skilled in them, but in modern life most people follow self-development practices that are not religious.
Sloterdijk believes it is a mistake to observe a “return to religion” in the last two or three decades. What we are really seeing is a ramping up of the desire of eight billion people to find ideas and practices that will make them better off - emotionally, spiritually, and materially. For every person who submits to God, there are more who seek answers from a motivational trainer or YouTube philosopher.
Sloterdijk describes humans as Homo repetitivus or Homo artista (“the human in training”). He identifies five kinds of life trainer:
The guru of Hindu tradition
The Buddhist master of the doctrine of liberation
The apostle who shows the way to the imitation of Christ
The philosopher who is witness to the search for truth
The sophist who is an expert on the ways of life
“The sophist who is an expert on the ways of life” sounds a lot like Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, Anthony Robbins, or Brené Brown - to use some contemporary examples.
In a self-improving society such figures are popular because they hold the keys to our “acrobatic” success. Sloterdijk ventures that the most shocking “barbarian” of modern times is one who mocks achievement and denies status or hierarchy.
The philosopher-anthropologist Dieter Heinrich pointed out that the modern person cannot simply live their life, they have to “lead” it. That often involves a vertical quest for something improbable.
The conditioning stars early. Think of the motivational quotes with which teachers and principals plaster the walls of their schools. Some are about being a good person and citizen, but others challenge pupils to “be amazing” and “reach for the stars”.
Every civilization has its heroes, but Sloterdijk uses the word mirabile (amazing or wonderful to behold) to describe contemporary culture, in which “success” falls heavily onto the individual. This normalization of the mirabile creates a “vertical tension”. If all we are presented with is cases of the exceptional, a merely normal or unremarkable life can become a pathology.
The “trainer” has a crucial role in such a culture, in that he or she exists to make the impossible seem like a rational endeavor. It is in the interests of the trainer to say that no-one has anything that you cannot obtain. It’s only a matter of technique or repetition or attitude.
In earlier epochs in which all authority was seen as coming from God, it seemed wrong for people to make much of themselves - to stand out. The heroic move was losing the self to get closer to the divine. Today, humility and solemnity seem old-fashioned.
Whether it’s a quest to gain a greater self, in a Nietzschean “superman” sense, or lose the self in a Christian/Buddhist way, it’s fair to say that every religious, philosophical, or self-improvement teaching can be summed up by Rilke’s command from his sonnet ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’:
“You must change your life”
(New Poems: The Other Part, 1908).
The Ascetic Planet
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche described earth as the “ascetic planet”. An alien looking down would see humans as a species disgusted with themselves and with life. We do anything to improve or avoid reality.
Nietzsche saw a crucial difference between the religious ascetics, who tried to outdo each other in suffering and self-denial – and athletes, warriors, artists, and philosophers, who work on themselves only to optimize their performance and achieve their goals.
Nietzsche wondered how humans would manage after the ‘twilight of the gods’, but he shouldn’t have been worried, Sloterdijk says. The main thing is that there is always a vertical dynamic in humans, with or without God. We are always seeking the higher or better. It’s only the form (religion, sport, business) that changes.
This upward movement not only aims to immunize us against fate or inertia, but actively encourages the pursuit of perfection.
Pursuit of perfection
In response to a question from an acquaintance, Wittgenstein reputedly said, “Of course I want to be perfect!”
He was one of the few modern philosophers who wanted to bring his discipline back from being an academic subject about language to an ars vivendi (art or discipline for life). For Wittgenstein, language was about an attempt to live consciously according to a chosen set of rules. Without such practices there was only unconscious absorption and acceptance of culture, or what he called “swinishness”.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called this cultural inheritance “habitus”. In his Marxist theory of power we are all the product of social conditioning, and “success” is simply the result of class benefits. It’s enough that humans create a base camp where all can be equal; going for the summit, or ambition, is an elitist, unnecessary effort.
There are shades of this theory in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. I could not put my finger on what I didn’t like about the book, but it comes into focus once you understand Bourdieu’s thinking. Gladwell tends to gloss over the power of vaulting ambition and instead emphasizes the “luck” and “fortune” of being born into a favorable family circumstance or in the right era.
Of course none of us are 100% self-made. On the other hand, people with similar background circumstances frequently end up in wildly different places. That’s due to personal agency.
In Bourdieu’s thinking “Identity” replaces ambition as the basic element in society. Inertia (or failure) is not something to be corrected, but represents a kind of value, because my identity is the result of my unchangeable cultural position. Having ambition, and gaining “success”, might invalidate the inert truth of who I am. Sloterdijk calls this “Identity as a right to laziness”.
Bourdieu’s philosophy, which we see expressed in many policies and beliefs today, is the virtual opposite of the self-shaping and self-minimization drives of the Stoics, of Christianity, of Buddhism.
Moreover, it’s a philosophy that can look anti-civilization. Traditional cultural criticism that marks things out as gauche or common, or as not “fine” or of quality - is seen a form of dominance or exertion of class power.
The Bourdieu base camp of identity and equality is set up so that the imperative “You must change your life” is not heard. Or, the imperative is discounted as the call of a class-based system that does not take account of cultural identity and traumas.
Teachers such as Katherine Birbalsingh offer an antidote to Bourdiesque mediocrity, saying to her pupils, in effect: “I don’t care about your background. I will hold you to account to be ambitious and achieve excellence.” This is also the outlook of many American charter schools, which parents fight to get their kids into.
Would you rather your children hang on to the trauma and victimhood of their habitus, or try to transcend it?
Bourdieu ignores the power of the word which forms his concept: habits. Through habits, a person can break free of their background and cultural conditioning. Aristotle’s idea of hexis is to change our disposition or condition via habits in order to have more appropriate feelings, which can form virtues.
Nietzsche believed we were moving from a society involving class and power, and gradations of dominance, repression, and privilege, to a “discipline society” in which the main differentiators between people involve asceticism, virtuosity, and achievement. In this he was incisive as ever.
***
To sum up, a full modern life seems to require aims and goals, with relentless work and practices to achieve them.
Everyone wants “success”.
But if you drill deeper, what is success?
I would argue that it is more than achievement of material goals (conventional motivation/self-help), and more than the desire to avoid suffering (Sloterdijk).
What we really want is to experience a virtue behind the concrete achievement. It’s truth, quality, beauty, or love, that we are really after.
And these are all worth changing our lives for.
Stoic Classics
In other matters, I’d like to announce two new editions of Stoic philosophy for the Capstone Classics series (Wiley), each with Introductions written by yours truly.
The first is a selection of the Discourses of Epictetus, including:
How to be true to yourself in every situation
What to make of the fact that we are products of a Supreme Being
On providence
On contentment
How to behave around powerful people
How to deal with difficulties
On peace of mind
Epictetus, as you know, was born enslaved and ended up starting his own academy and being the philosopher-friend of Emperor Hadrian. His Discourses are a foundational text in Stoic philosophy, and I enjoyed putting together this new hardback edition. It includes the Enchiridion, a sort of executive summary of the Discourses which was widely read by educated Christians in the Middle Ages.
The second is On The Shortness of Life by Seneca, which along with that famous essay includes two other essays:
On The Happy Life
On Peace of Mind
Seneca was born far from the centre of Rome (in Cordoba, Spain), but by the age of 50 was Emperor Nero’s key adviser. While Epictetus had no problem squaring his philosophy with his life, Seneca was a man of power. The reality of being an extremely rich, busy, and powerful politician was at odds with his self-image as a philosopher with time to work on himself and think. The truth is that “peace of mind” and “the happy life” were a challenge for much of his adult existence. Seneca was complicated, yet the facts of his life make his writing more, not less, interesting.
You can find both books on Amazon.com and all the usual places. Here is the Epictetus on Amazon UK, and here’s the Seneca.
The two other Stoic titles in the Capstone series are Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (which now has 3,700 ratings) and Seneca’s Letters From A Stoic.
Both have excellent Introductions written by leading Stoicism expert Donald Robertson.
Holiday reading
In June, I enjoyed a three-and-a-half week driving and camping trip around Scotland. It was an amazing journey, and I only managed a bit of reading.
I loved Vicki Mackenzie’s Cave in The Snow, a biography of Tenzin Palmo. Born Diane Perry in London in 1943, as a child Perry was always drawn towards the East. She moved to India at age 20 and never really went back. She became one of the first Buddhist nuns with a Western background.
Palmo is famous for spending 12 years meditating in a cave in the lower Himalayas. Her self-confessed pursuit of “perfection” inspired countless female Buddhists, and she ended up founding the Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery in Lahoul. Certainly an acrobatic life.
Also read Richard Bach’s Illusions, lent to me by a traveling companion. Written a few years after Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it’s about a Messiah who masquerades as a small plane pilot, written from the point of view of his student. Bach’s skill as a writer, with every sentence honed and polished, somehow prevents the book being cheesy.
The student discovers in the Messiah’s “manual” a number of statements and quotes. Here’s one that stayed with me:
Wishing you all the best, and do leave your thoughts below.
Kind regards,
Tom
Author of the 50 Classics series
Editor of the Capstone Classics
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Loved this. Thanks, Tom.