Philosophy introduced a new, mediating element into the relationship between internal and external opinion. This might be visualised as a box in which all public perceptions of a person, whether positive or negative, would first be deposited in order to be assessed, thence to be either sent on to the self with renewed force (if they were true) or else (if they were false) ejected harmlessly into the atmosphere, dispersed with a laugh or a shrug of the shoulders. The philosophers termed the box “reason.”
According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion should be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises. Taking mathematics as the model of good thinking, philosophers began to search for an approximation of that discipline’s objective certainties within the context of ethical life. Thanks to reason, one’s status could—these thinkers proposed—be fixed through the agency of an intellectual conscience, instead of being abandoned to the whims and emotions of the market square. If rational examination revealed that one had been unfairly treated by the community, one should be no more perturbed by the judgement than by the ranting, say, of a deluded stranger bent on proving that two and two amounted to five.
Throughout his Meditations (A.D. 167), the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, moving in the unstable world of Roman politics, continually reminded himself that any comment made about his character or achievements had to be subjected to the test of reason before he allowed it to affect his self-conception. “[One’s decency] does not depend on the testimony of someone else,” he insisted, thereby challenging his society’s faith in an honour-based assessment of people. “Does what is praised become better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what of gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?” Rather than be seduced by others’ flattery or stung by their insults, Marcus aimed to take his bearings from the person he knew himself to be: “Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.”
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We should not deduce from the foregoing that the condemnation or censure of others is invariably undeserved. Leaving the assessment of our worth to an intellectual conscience is not to be confused with expecting unconditional love. Unlike parents or lovers, who may value us whatever we do and however great our faults, philosophers do seek to apply criteria to their love—just not the shaky, unreasonable ones that the wider world is in danger of resorting to. There may indeed be times when an intellectual conscience will demand that we be harsher on ourselves than others are on us. Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success and failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to the idea that the mainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability. In the case of an injustice, it also helps us to hold on to the thought that we may be lovable even outside the halo of others’ praise.
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Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.
Ye t if we concede the worth of some feelings of anxiousness in helping us to find safety and develop our talents, we may be entitled to challenge the usefulness of other emotions in relation to precisely the same goals. We may feel envy, for instance, over a condition or possession that would in fact make us unhappy if we secured it. Likewise, we may experience ambitions unconnected to our real needs. Left to their own devices, our emotions are just as apt to push us towards indulgence, uncontrolled anger and self-destruction as they are towards health and virtue. Because it seems characteristic of these emotions to either undershoot or overshoot their targets, philosophers have counselled us to use our reasoning faculties to guide them to appropriate ends, asking ourselves whether what we want is really what we need and whether what we fear is truly what there is to fear.
In his Eudemian Ethics (circa 350 B.C.), Aristotle offered examples of the extremes towards which human behaviour will, when left unexamined, typically run. He also outlined an ideal, or golden mean, as stolid as it is wise, towards which we should aspire to direct that behaviour with the help of reason:
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PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAL
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Cowardice
Courage
Rashness
Stinginess
Liberality
Profligacy
Spinelessness
Gentleness
Rage
Boorishness
Wittiness
Buffoonery
Surliness
Friendliness
Obsequiousness
To these we might add:
Status lethargy
Ambition
Status hysteria
Intelligent Misanthropy
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If we have accepted well-founded criticism of our behaviour, paid heed to targeted anxieties about our ambitions and assumed proper responsibility for our failures, and yet if we continue to be accorded low status by our community, we may be tempted to adopt the approach taken by some of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition: We may, through an unparanoid understanding of the warps of the value system around us, settle into a stance of intelligent misanthropy, free of both defensiveness and pride.
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When we begin to scrutinise the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error. Chamfort, voicing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers both before and after him, put the matter simply: “Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.”
The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigours of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common non sense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That’s the tradition, they explain.”
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Painful though it may be to acknowledge the poverty of public opinion, the very act of doing so may somewhat ease our anxieties about status, mitigate our exhausting desire to ensure that others think well of us, and calm our panicked longing for signs of love.
The approval of others may be said to matter to us in two very different ways: materially, because the neglect of the community can bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us signs of respect.
It is in relation to this second consequence of inattention that the benefits of the philosophical approach best reveal themselves, for rather than allow every instance of opposition or neglect to wound us, we are invited by the philosophers first to examine the justice of others’ behaviour. Only that which is both damning and true should be permitted to shatter our esteem. We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another’s approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person’s views deserve to be listened to—the process, that is, whereby we seek the love of those for whom, as we discover upon studying their minds, we have scant respect.