The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [11]
Socrates insisted that we ask ourselves how we know what we believe. You like democracy, monogamy, American food, sleeping at night, children raised in families, longevity as a life-defining goal. You like a woman of five foot ten to weigh about a hundred forty pounds. Set a goal of convincing yourself of something you oppose. Pick a hot-button subject, and a reward for yourself if you can shake your own faith in your convictions. I have strong political convictions, but I’m not rallying for them right now. I’m suggesting you pull a Socratic trick on yourself and ask yourself all the questions you usually avoid thinking about. If the thought is unbearable, it tells us something about the way we believe, and think, and live. We live in little cognitive comas. Or rather, we cavort in cognitive fields surrounded by electric fences: we all think we are free to go where we wish, but we are struck by a lot of pain when we try to think past our boundaries. Politics are real, but the odds are that if you had been raised in a different U.S. state (let alone China!), you would be not the Democrat or Republican that you are now, but instead a Republican or Democrat. Even though those people make your blood boil. Odds are odds. If you want to know yourself, you are going to have to rough yourself up a little. Socrates and Plato both held that this kind of ruthless thinking makes you happy in the process. When Plato does imagine an arrival, a coming to the most profound knowledge, it is blissful. But most of the time this is all about happiness as a process, as an effort.
Note that philosophy is unlikely to be effective if you just read it. Socrates so believed that philosophy required conversation with others that he did not write any books, and when Plato recorded Socratic thought, he did so in the form of dialog. Many of the great Socratic dialogs took place at social events; the title of Plato’s Symposium means “the drinking party,” and that is where it is set. In a sense that book is one of the most idealistic visions ever crafted, and it took place amid food, copious wine, and modest revelry. How do you do philosophy? Discuss it with others, write about it, get locked away with it. The last is the least effective, but it cannot be entirely rejected, because it does work for some people, some of the time. The essence of the philosophical experience, the active verb of doing philosophy, is unlearning what you think you know. And it is much easier to find out what your deep assumptions are if there is someone else there to help you discover them. Alone, your best bet is to try to write what you think, and proceed with scrupulous honesty, imagining your own most skeptical self as the reader. Think of the biblical story where Jacob wrestles all night with an angel and the angel wounds him, and changes his name from Jacob (“who grasps”) to Israel (“who prevails”). Renamed, he can finally ask for his brother’s pardon for stealing his birthright, and thus be reunited with him. When you come to something you can’t explain, do not gloss over it; stay with it, wrestle it. Confusion is your quarry. Rejoice when you find it, bear with the pain it inflicts, and don’t let it go until it gives you a new name. By the way, later, the sun, that symbol of true wisdom, heals Jacob’s injury.
Ancient ideas of knowing yourself were about coming to be a better person. The process was psychological, but more in the realm of conditioning one’s mind than in finding out why the mind does what it does. Marcus Aurelius said, “Cast away opinion and you are saved. Who then hinders you from casting it away?”1 Can we really control our emotions by decision? The best of the ancient writers, including Aurelius, acknowledged that we could not do it, and with a smile and a shrug provided exercises for teaching ourselves to improve what self-control we have. That’s what religion and graceful-life philosophies are doing with their