I think his own book, The Virtues of Our Vices, is a brilliant case for applying philosophy to everyday life because, as he points out in the introduction, seemingly trivial things, like a colleague being rude to us, have a much greater impact on us on a day-to-day basis than reflections on the meaning of life.
A lot of philosophy deals with quite theoretical questions: the correct definition of concepts such as justice, the relationship between mind and body or the nature of the soul. These are problems that have been inherited over the years from Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. there is another tradition that sees philosophy as a reflection on life. this includes discussion of the ethical issues we face, but it also focuses on the way we behave, the way we live, the way we relate to each other. I see my book as a contribution to that tradition. not so much an attempt to solve complex metaphysical problems, or problems in the theory of knowledge or philosophy of mind, but rather a reflection on the way we live.
You are reading: Books on philosophy of life
Do you feel this side of philosophy has been neglected?
I do. In one of the books I have chosen, The Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, William Irvine makes this very explicit. In ancient times, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers dealt with theoretical problems, but the Greeks and Romans understood philosophy as something that people had and used in everyday life, and there were competing schools of philosophy.
yeah, i love that part of the book, where irvine describes how, as an ancient greek, you had to choose a philosophy school for your son, whether to send him to the cynical school, the stoic school, or the skeptical school. school – just like today, we could decide whether to send them to a public or private school.
yes. so that the tradition of philosophy, as a reflection on life and a guide to living, has never been extinguished. It can be traced through Plato, Epicurus, the Stoics, Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Thoreau to the present day. but in the last few hundred years, it has receded into the background, while metaphysics, theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and the heavier grand theories of morality in moral philosophy have tended to take center stage. when you look at a standard introduction to philosophy or ethics, it’s usually about these big theoretical problems. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with discussing these big theoretical problems, I just think it’s a shame that the tradition of philosophy as a reflection on life and a guide to life has been marginalized.
Let’s go over the books you’ve chosen, then, and maybe talk a bit more about Irvine’s book, The Guide to the Good Life, specifically. so she’s really applying stoicism to everyday life: I read a section where she’s at the mall and his stoic principles leave him completely blown away by consumer goods.
I don’t necessarily completely agree with this book. what I like is that he writes very well and is very clear about what he is doing: he tries to revive that notion of philosophy as a guide to life. that’s a really valuable contribution. we live in a culture where science has hegemony. everyone looks to science; everyone, in a certain way, wants to be considered as a scientist. philosophy is no exception. it has tended to dominate the kind of philosophy that sees itself as a handmaiden of science, or that uses some of the methods of science. so it’s reviving this other tradition.
He’s obviously pushing the philosophy of Stoicism, and I think he does a pretty good job of making it plausible and appealing. it has to counter the common perception of Stoicism as advocating a rather tedious, boring, self-sacrificing, and joyless existence. he shows that it really isn’t. it is about deciding on certain values, and the Stoic prioritizes the value of mental and emotional tranquility. he argues that the ancient Stoics were actually very keen psychologists, in many ways anticipated some of the findings of modern psychology, and had a great understanding of human nature. If tranquility is your goal, and Irvine argues that it is a worthwhile goal, then the Stoic way of life is quite plausible.
so he uses various stoic techniques to deal with problems. For example, as humans, we have a problem called “hedonic adaptation,” meaning if I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d be happy for a month or two, and then go back to normal levels of frustration. To deal with this, Stoics advocate “negative visualization.” So, for example, if you are not happy with your husband, imagine that he had an affair or he left you tomorrow and you will appreciate him again.
maybe! yes, negative visualization is one of the most memorable psychological techniques you talk about. he suggests that as a regular habit, simply practice imagining how things could get worse: imagine losing loved ones, losing your job, your country being at war, or losing your health. he argues that if you practice this, it pays dividends. this is consistent with contemporary psychological research on gratitude. Psychologists have found that if people continually write down the things they are grateful for, they are actually happier with life. that’s quite plausible. Ever since I read the book, I have been practicing “negative visualization” on a very small scale. I don’t do it every night, as he recommends, but I do when I’m in a less than desirable situation. for example, the other week i was stuck with the family in the car on the new jersey turnpike. it was drizzling, we were in a horrendous, endless traffic jam, and we passed a couple of guys with a flat tire on the side of the road. there we were in the car: we were warm, we were listening to a good audiobook, and I thought, well, yeah, things could be worse. It’s a small-scale thing, but it’s certainly better to think like that, instead of consuming yourself in annoyance, frustration, boredom, and anger that things aren’t the way you’d like them to be.
Your examples of the ancient Stoics are great. so Seneca makes a list of his frustrations before he goes to bed, the little insults he has had to deal with over the course of the day, and how she gets out of her fear of him. they’re pretty fun to read and irvine points out how little things have changed over two millennia…
yes, and there is marcus aurelio. he gets up every morning and says: “today the following is going to happen to me: they are going to insult me, slander me and spit on me”. he starts his day preparing for the worst.
and that helps because he’s ready for it?
yes, he doesn’t have unreasonable expectations. If I want to go all the way with Irvine, I don’t know. but I have a very open mind about the philosophy of Stoicism. I think there is a lot of wisdom in it. one thing that struck me is that although its main value seems to be calmness, the book is called the ancient art of stoic joy. he’s really trying to argue against the idea that stoicism is the same as a certain kind of buddhism, where you try to completely eliminate desire. he says that if you live the right way, you can achieve more than just the absence of pain.
I think of stoicism as a fatalistic approach: if something bad happens, you just have to shrug it off and move on.
also has that. a stoic attitude is certainly accepting things that you cannot change. that is another great point of his philosophy, that there is absolutely no point in protesting against what cannot be changed, shaking your fist at thunderstorms.
I think the negative visualization techniques might need to be refined a bit. At one point Irvine cites Epictetus’s advice that every time you kiss your son, you should imagine that he could die tomorrow. for neurotic modern parents, constantly anxious about their children’s health and safety, the thought that they will die tomorrow probably doesn’t help calm levels. also, the advice to live each day as if it were your last: that could be a burden to the hypochondriacs among us, who are already constantly worried that we might die tomorrow.
yes, it could be a recipe for increased anxiety. it could be argued that there is something neurotic about that level of negative visualization. however, he suggests doing so as a result of conscious choice, rather than as a symptom of anxiety.
One of the areas where I really sympathize with irvine is where he talks about luxurious living. mentions people who become too used to the best food, the best wine, the best theater, the best music, etc., and become unable to appreciate more mundane versions. I think he’s in a good spot there. For example, I live in a college town and we regularly go to see college theater productions and college orchestral performances. It’s obviously not the same as going to Carnegie Hall, and I’ve occasionally heard people express rather snobbish attitudes about student performances. but it’s a sad thing not to be able to appreciate art just because it’s not up to the best. it really is better to be able to enjoy things on your own terms. Irvine says, “It’s good to get used to a little rough in life, and a little less than great.” I would not advocate severe deprivation; but when people become too precious to savor the excellent, I see it as a limitation rather than a mark of their good taste.
I love cheap sound and amateurish music making, and possibly do too much negative visualizing. Reading this book, I realized that I am definitely a Stoic. and you?
I think I’m three quarters of a stoic. I teach a course here at the university called tightwaddery, the good life on a dollar a day. It’s what we call an honors class, a two-credit evening class, and it’s both serious and somewhat light-hearted. we read epicurus, we read thoreau, we read articles on consumerism and advertising. we also teach personal finance classes, and there are some joke classes, like one where students learn how to cut each other’s hair. there’s a banquet at the end of the term, where everyone has to prepare a very cheap meal, from a depression-era recipe. that aspect of stoicism, getting by with little, avoiding unnecessary luxuries, managing your resources, that’s definitely me. I am very reluctant to spend unnecessary money, even though I spend money on things I value, like traveling…
if you’re three quarters stoic, what’s the other quarter?
I am not completely committed to Stoicism because there is also something Nietzschean in me. Nietzsche was very interested in the Stoics because he was something of a Stoic himself. he lived as such, in a way. but he is also something of a romantic. He is influenced by Goethe’s Faust and believes that the best life is one in which you experience the full range of human experience: life as a kind of roller coaster. that is not the stoic ideal. the Stoic ideal is tranquility. So somehow I’m torn I am for that Stoic ideal, and yet I recognize the appeal of the Faustian or Nietzschean ideal of experiencing the ups and downs.
then let’s talk about the nietzsche book you have chosen. It’s called gay science, which means…?
is just a translation of the German, die fröhliche wissenschaft, which means the blissful wisdom. It is my favorite of all the Nietzsche books. It is interesting that 50 years ago Nietzsche was not taught much in academic philosophy departments. Gradually, in the 1970s and ever since, there has been a tremendous blossoming of scholarly interest in it. If you go to the philosophy section of any bookstore, you will find that there are more books on Nietzsche than on any of the other great philosophers. one of the reasons is that he is an absolutely fabulous writer. he is also extraordinarily original and seems to have a lot of interesting thoughts about just about everything.
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But I think that another reason for Nietzsche’s popularity, which is related to what we were talking about before, is that he is not only concerned with theoretical problems such as the mind-body relationship or the definition of knowledge. he concerns himself to some extent with traditional philosophical problems, but he also offers a philosophy of life. he really does I think this is one of the great attractions of him. When you read Nietzsche, you can relate much of what he says to your own life and experiences.
give me an example.
so the book is written in aphorisms, short passages, ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages. in one place, he talks about becoming the “poets of our lives.” what I take it to mean is that if you think of your life as a poem or a work of art, you can work to make it into a cohesive and attractive whole. you can eliminate the things that seem ugly to you. let’s say you have some character trait, let’s say you’re a little greedy, you try to work on that trait. you don’t completely eliminate it, necessarily, but you try to make it a more desirable trait, perhaps a form of ambition that is productive and fruitful. in this way, you are taking your own life as raw material, and you are working on it to make it something more harmonious and, ideally, beautiful. I guess Nietzsche’s guiding idea appeals to most of us.
also seems to tie in with the modern research of psychologist jamie pennebaker [mentioned in next book, by jonathan haidt] who discovered that if something very bad happens to a person and they write about it in such a way as to create a meaningful story, they feel better. one of nietzsche’s most famous lines is about trauma, isn’t it?
yes, in another book, he famously says, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. a lot of people have criticized that, saying that it’s obviously not true, because some things are terrible. but i think that misunderstands nietzsche. what he is saying there is: “here is an attitude that you should try to take, whenever you can. when bad things happen to you, ask yourself, how can I use this?” and I think he’s right about that. it is a fruitful, positive and productive attitude.
However, gay science is quite a difficult book to read, isn’t it, if you don’t have a background in philosophy?
yes. Nietzsche presupposes a high degree of cultural literacy on the part of his readers, and in his later works he tends to presuppose that you are familiar with his own interests, his writing, and his terminology. and yet when I teach a class on existentialism, I usually include this book. yes, it is difficult, but it is unfailingly interesting. One of the things Nietzsche does is relate the philosophy of everyday life to larger historical and cultural concerns. thus, for example, one of the main themes of gay science is the death of god. in book iii, he famously announces that “god is dead”. At first glance, this means that religion, Christianity in the West, is losing its grip on people’s minds, is losing importance both socially and politically. religion is no longer the psychic center of people’s lives. In general cultural terms, the “death of god” also raises questions about belief in objective truth. but it is also related to the way people live. if religion is no longer at the center of your life, if you no longer believe in god or in the afterlife, or in a cosmic justice that keeps you on the right track and rewards you for virtue and punishes you for vice, you have to think again about your core values and how you want to live.
Is joy also important in this book?
yes, joy is an important concept in nietzsche. he was a classical philologist. he is steeped in the classics of greece and rome, in particular greek tragedies, and his first book was on greek tragedy. he begins by accepting the tragic view of life. As Sophocles said, “To live long is to suffer long.” life is going to involve a lot of suffering; the human condition is fundamentally tragic. we are mortal; we are bound to fail to achieve the things we want to achieve. he spends his whole life, in a way, trying to argue that the greatest affirmation of life is to affirm it against that tragic intuition: to say that life is good, even if it suffers. that is the best way to say “yes” to life that one can imagine. he thinks the Greeks, in a way, did that, and he’s trying to do it himself. Do you know Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return?
I know it’s a big topic in Nietzsche, but you’d better explain it.
at the end of gay science book iv introduces the idea for the first time. it is a very beautiful passage, called the heaviest load. he says, imagine that one night a demon whispers in your ear that this life you have lived, with all its joys and all its sorrows, you are going to have to live it over and over again, an infinity of times. Nietzsche assumes that the natural thing would be to fall, gnash your teeth, tear your hair and say: “this is horrible!”. – because life is suffering. but maybe, he says, there was a time when you wouldn’t have done that, when you would have said, “this is great; I welcome this news. It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.” that would be the pinnacle of life affirmation, where you could embrace the eternal return of all things, the eternal return of your own life, despite the fact that your own life may include a great deal of misery. his life certainly did. her great happiness was her writing and his work. his great misery was his loneliness, and the failure of most of his relationships.
and his terrible health.
and his terrible health.
Which book will we talk about next?
I think jonathan haidt is the happiness hypothesis. there is a pretty clear connection. Haidt is a very interesting thinker. there’s a wonderful ted talk from him. Do you know his work at all?
I’m a big fan, yes. he’s even done an interview for five books.
When I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I remember that moral philosophy consisted of a dry analysis of moral concepts, the state of moral judgments, and a lot of oxbridge-style linguistic analysis. haidt, who started out as a philosopher and is now a psychologist, shows how interesting moral philosophy can be, if you broaden its scope a bit. he has done some really interesting work looking at different elements of the moral thinking of people in different parts of the world. for example, he shows how liberals tend to emphasize rights and justice and conservatives tend to emphasize loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity. He uses that analysis to explain why, in the culture wars in the United States, liberals and conservatives often talk to each other. for liberals, same-sex marriage is simply a matter of rights. it’s a no-brainer. of course people should have the right to marry whoever they want. For conservatives, who think on a different moral axis, homosexuality is sinful, it is impure, it goes against tradition. One of Haidt’s great contributions is to show how much more there is to say about morality than we have been thinking. he shows a lot of creativity there.
So, how does your book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, relate to the philosophy of everyday life?
haidt starts with the traditional philosophy that we have been talking about. uses a lot of Eastern and Western philosophy. he discusses some of the main insights and bits of wisdom within these traditions, but then relates them to contemporary psychological research and assesses them relative to that. he’s willing to criticize them and say, “well, the buddha and the stoics and socrates, they showed a lot of insight here, but we can build on that, and using contemporary psychology we can offer better informed guidance on how to live a meaningful life, how to be happy and how to feel fulfilled.”
do you want to give an example?
one of his best chapters is chapter six, where he talks about love. Contrast passionate love with companionate love. passionate love is romeo and juliet, what we all think of as romantic love. he says that many people want and expect to fall in love in the paradigmatic romantic way, and that this romantic and passionate high will last a lifetime. sometimes people even make affirmations like that for their marriage: “I love you as much and in the same way as when we met.” he says that’s nonsense. what happens in the case of passionate love is that your brain is flooded with certain types of chemicals and you can’t sustain that for very long. it is not even biologically possible. it’s like a drug that you get used to, so expecting it to stick around is a big mistake because it will let you down. what takes over, however, is companionship, which takes a long time to grow. It has a lovely little graph, where passionate love falls off a cliff after a short time, but companionate love grows steadily. It seems to me that this is clearly true for people’s experiences. it makes good use of contemporary psychology and relates somewhat to Stoicism. it’s about being realistic in your expectations about things and not feeling dissatisfied because things don’t live up to some impossible ideal.
I think this book is also important because it argues that it’s okay to take antidepressants. talks about how he put them on himself, and while they were great for his anxiety, they made him extremely distracted, so he put them back down.
yes, very soon he says that antidepressants like prozac are a solution for some forms of depression, and criticizes people who suggest that there is something morally suspect or inferior in them. he says, “no, these drugs can really make a very positive difference for some people.” I thought he was refreshingly frank and direct about it.
He also says that some people are just more cheerful and others are more prone to depression – that’s just who you are and it doesn’t have much to do with your life experiences. I think it’s a very useful idea.
In fact, you have a formula for happiness that is something like genetics + conditions + choices. this is his formula for a realistic approach to trying to achieve the good life. there is something out of your control, which is your genetic heritage. it would be foolish to deny that this has anything to do with who we are. psychological research on identical twins shows that there is much in us that is fixed by genetics. but conditions and choices are things that are more under our control. talk about how the conditions you live in affect your happiness, very small things, sometimes. for example, he says that noise, the incessant noise of living in a city, irritates people and has an adverse effect on their general sense of well-being. It also recommends not making long and stressful trips.
In general, do these books you recommend offer an alternative solution to the one offered by freud and psychoanalysis? let’s say, the example of pain. my mother died when I was nine years old, so whenever I have a problem in my current life, the analysts want to talk about it non-stop. but the Stoic approach would presumably be, “Okay, it’s sad, but there’s no use dwelling on something that happened 30 years ago: you have to move on.”
haidt says things are worth talking about. he sees a value in talking about adversity. but I do think the books suggest that he may not always need to call on experts to provide him with the key to dealing with life’s problems. to some extent we come equipped with the resources to fend for ourselves, to figure things out. and other resources are readily available. Some of these resources may be philosophical: the philosophies offered by the Stoics, offered by Nietzsche and insights offered by Haidt. I’m not saying, “oh, no one needs to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist.” I wouldn’t say that at all. but you’re right that these books are about having to think about our lives, our core values, our priorities, and the direction we’re headed. also, the ways in which the minutiae of life can affect things. maybe that’s something we tend to overlook. For example, Haidt points out, I think in this book, that it’s a very good thing in a relationship if you say positive things to each other a few times a day. cups of tea could be made or favors rendered to each other. Little things like that really make a difference.
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I think one of the reasons we don’t look to philosophy for solutions is that it needs a pretty major PR revamp. it’s just not very conventional. look at haidt: he left the field of philosophy to focus on psychology…
I’m all for what you’re doing, as long as you don’t renounce the philosophy or disparage it, or say you don’t have anything else to offer. because philosophy, which is general reflection and clarification of thought, can open up ideas precisely for people like haidt to study on a more scientific basis. Philosophy has a reputation for being difficult and abstruse, but one development that is healthy is that there are many people trying to write philosophy in a way that is more accessible without simplifying it: Alain de Botton, for example, and Julian Baggini, as well as some of the people who contributed to the stone columns in the new york times.
Well, your book has already made a difference in my life, in the two weeks since I read it. I’m thinking in particular of the chapter where you try to clarify by thinking about gossip. it is something we engage in constantly, in one way or another, and yet we tend to view it as morally suspect. it’s quite refreshing to know that it can be positive and helpful.
yes, it can be an informal communication channel that can avoid misunderstandings.
Let’s talk about middlemarch, which I haven’t read in a long time but which is simply fabulous. Before this interview, you told me that George Eliot was some kind of philosopher (she translated Feuerbach and Spinoza) and that this book presents everyday moral problems and dilemmas in all their messy complexity.
It’s a fantastic book. I think Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel written for adults. it has it all: it’s beautifully plotted, the characters are wonderfully drawn. When I get to the end of a semester, I always treat myself to a big, long classic novel, and only go back to reading middlemarch. what struck me is how wonderful psychologist george eliot is. one very nice thing about her is that, for example, casaubon, the dry, self-centered scholar that dorothea marries, and the banker, bulstrode, who is a pious hypocrite… she calls on the reader to have mercy on them, because she sees that you are trapped in his way of being. no one in the book likes casaubon except dorothea, and i don’t think any reader ever will. but several times she says, pity him, because he’s stuck. I love the sympathy with which she plays characters that, from a moral point of view, we have to be very critical. Casaubon has no reason to ask Dorothea to marry him; it is a very self-centered and self-serving request.
What ideas does the book offer about the philosophy of everyday life?
Eliot is very good at showing how people act against their best interests because of subtle social pressures that drive them a certain way. one of the central characters is lydgate, the doctor, who marries a rather superficial woman. he is trapped in this marriage and they fall into debt. he is a noble character, ambitious in his profession, who wants to do a good job in the world, and gets dragged down. With the best will in the world and very noble intentions, he can’t help but be dragged down by the subtle social pressures of people’s expectations of him.
Another thing I noticed in the novel is that, time and time again, social expectations prevent people from talking directly to each other about difficult issues, like whether they love each other or criticize each other. but when they do, when they exceed those social expectations, then something good happens. lydgate, for example, is suspected of having received a bribe from the banker bulstrode. Dorothea crosses the threshold of social convention and says, “Just tell me straight. What happened?” Her friends warn her not to do this, saying, “You can’t do that.” But she does, and the fact that she’s so open, honest, and candid makes a huge difference in Lydgate’s life. that happens several times in the book. the most admirable characters are people like caleb garth, who always speaks very directly and openly. for him there is no bluster, no hesitation, no masking of intentions or euphemisms.
However, aren’t social conventions much more relaxed these days? does it still apply?
it is true that they are much more relaxed and it is probably easier for us today than in the 19th century to be direct and open due to the increasing informality of social life, something I talk about in my book. however, there is still a lot to learn about middlemarch. the moral I am drawing is not that everyone, in all cases, should always be direct, open and direct. there are times when you have to make hard judgment calls about what will be useful and what won’t be. What Eliot is referring to, the need to cultivate the practical and difficult wisdom of knowing when to be frank and honest and when to hold back, still applies today.
This is definitely a topic I wanted to ask you about in the context of white lies. Let’s say a friend is wearing a horrible outfit and asks what you think of him. you automatically say, “you look beautiful!” or are you telling the truth? Obviously, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but if you don’t, first of all, you’re lying, and second of all, the next thing you know, your friend will be wearing that horrible outfit again. what are you doing?
I’m pretty cowardly about that sort of thing. it all depends on the relationship. In the case of my wife, if she asks me, I just tell her the truth as I see it. she got used to it. She does not like it; she’ll be mad when she asks me about a sweater and I’m like, “nah. she makes you look fat.” she might protest a bit, but she’ll take note. but that kind of honesty is only possible in certain relationships. if she were someone she knew less, she wouldn’t necessarily say that. If it was someone I thought was sensitive, someone I thought would hurt, maybe I’d be less honest. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone.
so you would just say “the sweater is beautiful”?
It’s hard for me to lie, but yeah, I’d probably say, “oh yeah, that’s nice…”
another thing i noticed about middlemarch when i reread it is how sharp george eliot is on the subject of self-delusion. almost everyone is guilty of self-deception, and there are about a dozen different forms of self-deception in the book. Dorothea’s self-delusion stems from a kind of idealism, Rosamond’s from inexperienced self-centeredness, and Bulstrode’s is a kind of religious hypocrisy. I find this interesting, because there is a lot of philosophical literature on self-deception. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a lot about it. there is something of a mystery as to how we are able to lie to ourselves since we actually know the truth in some sense. Eliot offers not so much an analysis of self-deception as a very clever and insightful description of the different forms it takes, and how it is often linked to people’s self-interest.
does she offer a solution? If I, as a person, want to know how self-deluded I am, how do I go about finding out?
in the book, often the solution comes from someone else. self-deception tends to be shattered by other people or by circumstances. Bulstrode’s is broken by circumstances; he is exposed as a thief. But Rosamond’s self-delusion is never shattered.
dorothea would have been much better off if she realized she was cheating on herself before she married casaubon, and not after.
yes, but luckily he dies. a very interesting moment in the book is when he asks her to make a promise about how he will behave towards her after he dies. she agonizes over whether she should make the promise. she thinks the promise is that she will carry on her work, which she thinks is pointless, though in reality the promise is probably that she will never marry will ladislaw. she goes out into the garden, determined to make the promise, and finds casaubon dead. If she hadn’t found him dead, Dorothea would have made the promise, and then, being Dorothea, she would have felt compelled to keep that promise. and she would have spent years and years engaged in an activity that she thought was meaningless, just because she made a promise to a dead man. george eliot really invites us there to say what we think: “don’t do it, dorothea, don’t make the promise! and if you do, don’t keep it!”
What does your last option, the people of the forest, bring to the discussion?
Colin Turnbull is a well-known anthropologist who wrote popular books. this book, the forest people, is about the pygmies of the congo and paints a portrait of their lives. some people would probably say it’s an idealized portrait, and maybe it is. the book had a great influence on me, because it portrayed a way of life very different from ours, and very different from the one advocated by haidt or nietzsche. what amazes me about the way of life that pygmies live is that they are not trying to achieve anything beyond what they already have. we almost take for granted that we should fight for things. in the forest people hunt, gather, set up their houses (they are nomads), and then sit around the fire and eat and sing songs at night. and do the same thing the next day. children play, splash in rivers and climb trees. they don’t think there is a need to do anything else. I find that fascinating. I think it’s a very interesting and important counterpoint to what we take for granted: the preference for a purposeful life. I don’t live like the people of the forest, but I think it’s worth seeing how they live. When I read this book it raised a question mark about some of the values we take for granted.
So, a way of life in which some of our core driving forces (ambition, desire to progress) are absent?
Yes, if you think about the way we educate children (I’m an educator too), it’s a given that children need to be ambitious. They should strive, they should be all they can be, and they should try to leave the world a better place. I’m not saying that’s wrong. it’s just that the forest people offer a very interesting challenge to our assumptions. For example, what about living in the present? one of the characteristics of the way we live is that we lean into the future at a very sharp angle. kids at school are trying to get into college; people in college are trying to start their careers; people in their careers are trying to get promoted. We lean too far into the future, and in extreme cases, in China, Korea, Japan, and parts of the United States and Britain as well, people nearly lost their childhoods because they’re so dedicated to getting ahead.
I think that living in the present and being more able to enjoy it, to savor the moment, is something that we easily forget how to do. I am also guilty of this. I think I don’t enjoy the moment as much as I should because I have this nagging feeling all the time that there are things that need to be done and accomplished. Of course, it’s also true that as a result we have an incredibly dynamic society that’s churning out iPads and everything else, and we’re happy about that. we now speak on skype, thanks to the dynamic nature of our society and the people who make an effort. but for all that, pleasure in the moment, in the present, has to be part of the good life. what the forest people, as turnbull describes them, have that seems admirable and enviable is an intense enjoyment of the simple things available to them in the present.
It’s a very attractive and readable book, isn’t it? it is not a boring anthropological treatise.
turnbull was an anthropologist, but he doesn’t write in anthropological jargon. one of the things he has been criticized for is that he tends to include value judgments, which makes him scientifically suspect. I don’t worry about that, since I engage in normative ethics anyway. for me, he brings a living way of life, and makes me reflect on what we have lost and what we can learn, although obviously we cannot live like this. we can’t go back to that in any way, and we don’t necessarily want to. but you can still think to yourself, “what is enviable about the way these people live? what are the chances of retrieving any of that in our own lives?”
See Also: Books About Cycling Across America – Ball Are Life