Become Who You Are
When I was young, the world felt more stable. Life held out possibilities for education, family, a career, money, and, yes, peace in the world.
I suppose that’s why my studies of philosophy trended towards those towering lights that sought to bring a sense of calm to their respective generations, to provide a kind path forward in the calamity of their times. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Confucius, Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and al-Farabi. After graduating from high school, I moved more towards Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William James and famed Lebanese philosopher/writer Kahlil Gibran.
As I matured, experiencing many failures and some successes, my heart and emotions began settling out, while my mind raged with possibilities and ideas.
I think my generation took a similar path, though most favoured the lyrical observations of a Simon and Garfunkel or Jim Morrison.
It’s become clearer to me that immersing ourselves in the “peaceful” philosophers and stoics perhaps settled us more than necessary. Money was everywhere, travel was getting cheaper, education was affordable, material goods were more prevalent, and we were being entertained to death by all manner of movies, videos, pop stars, gadgetry, and celebrities of all kinds. Over time we got distracted and without realizing it, our world was slowly fraying at the edges.
Webster’s defines the purpose of philosophy as, "teaching critical thinking, close reading, clear writing, and logical analysis.” Viewed in such a light, it’s almost comforting in a way, a sort of “go placidly among the universe” kind of thing. Unfortunately, our universe wasn’t unfolding as it should and we were too lost in ourselves to notice.
Until it became almost too late. COVID has exposed so many issues of life that we failed to effectively tackle, satisfied as we were with what we had. The list is long and we all know what those hurdles are: poverty, climate change, gender inequality, racism, economic divisions.
Maybe we all should consider added philosophies that serve to shock us instead of comforting our spirits. We need look no further than the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900 but whose outlook is remarkable germane to our present challenges. In his book, Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are, author John Kaag reminds us that the German philosopher’s purpose was to “terrify rather than instruct us.” What is he getting at exactly?
Just look at one of Nietzsche’s most provocative questions: “Is it perhaps possible to suffer from over-abundance?” He observed as the people of his time, inured with an endless pursuit of expanding materialism, slowly lost their awareness of just how challenging life is for most people. He felt that the traditional philosophies aided and abetted that sort of lazy luxury, instead of providing a counter-narrative, one that challenged just where it was all taking humanity. In some senses, there was nothing new in this. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, and other great leaders all attempted to establish counter-cultures, counter-thinking, that attempted to remind their followers that the purpose of life wasn’t to be comfortable, but to be better. Nietzsche followed their footsteps in a more secular fashion.
Nietzsche’s own experience helps us to see why he took a different view of life. He suffered an emotional breakdown in his thirties, was rebuffed in romance, and suffered terrible headaches. In other words, life for him was a constant challenge, and endless shifting of direction, a life left chilled in the shadows. When Kaag writes, “he developed a distaste for the ‘scripted’ routines and glib gratifications that make modern life so deplorably easy,” surely that’s easy to understand, given all that Nietzsche went through.
He developed a persistent refusal to always act on his own self-interest, choosing to see life as a challenge instead of a pillow. Everything from good health to wealth, from emotional stability and meaningful relationships, was meant to drive us forward, not to recline in the ease of it all. Humanity needed to be bettered, the plight of millions to also be bettered.
But it wasn’t happening. The world Nietzsche inhabited had become addicted to a kind of ease that stripped all other things of their meaning and substance in order to satisfy daily wants. In other words, the world was being stripped of its essence in the naked pursuit of indulgence. While traditional philosophy was employed to excuse such comfort, Nietzsche challenged it, outright and forcefully.
Nowhere was this more manifest than in Nietzsche’s thoughts regarding knowledge of one’s self. “The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, to become.” In other words, indulgence can spoil that quest, leaving it spent on the altar of greed. The purpose of existence is to grow, to shape life instead of being shaped by it.
This is a remarkable lesson for our age - a time when our pursuits have left us in a state of spiritual and human weakness. We see it everyday, in the growing distance between our words (aspirations) as opposed to reality. We say we wish to heal the physical world, restore equity, have a meaningful politics, or lift the less-fortunate, but then vote, purchase and live in ways that run counter to those pursuits. We have become a weakened humanity, bogged down by our wallets and our penchant to run away following periods of struggle.
We need a new philosophy, one that says we can’t become who we are if we have become lazy in our potentials and unmoved by our fellow human beings. Now is not the time to take comfort if what we have, but to be disturbed by what we are not - the finer souls of our aspirations. It’s time to rethink who we are and what we can be capable of.