One and All

Here is a personal note. At a literary festival in Australia a couple of years ago – at Byron Bay – I was asked by a young man, who was volunteering in the festival bookshop, which of my rather-too-numerous books displayed there he should begin with. I said that they were all windows into a single room, all roads leading to a Rome, which one sees if one accepts E. M. Forster’s injunction ‘Only Connect’ – Forster’s motto, his standing advice. So I told the young man that he could begin with any that explore the question of an individual philosophy of life, and why having one matters; or any that address the problem of the polis, the organisation of state and society; because the relation of each to the other is constitutive of both relata, though in an asymmetrical way, and the asymmetry matters.

I was prompted by the young man’s question to write a brief account of the room that the windows look into, of the Rome to which all those roads lead. It is as follows.

Consider a number of familiar, if far from uncontested, points. Individual experience is ultimately subjective though its forms are shaped and coloured by the conditions (cultural, historical, ideological) of its setting. A more dramatic way of stating the point is that individuals are ultimately existentially solitary, the ultimacy in question consisting in experience’s occupancy of the impenetrable interior space of head and heart. What others can see or know – by observation of the individual’s behaviour, by hearing the individual’s avowals, both filtered through lenses themselves conditioned – is at best partial only.

To claim that an individual human being is ultimately an existential solitary can be, and is, challenged. One argument is derived from the empirical datum of human plasticity: place any infant in any society and it will grow up as identifiably shaped by its culture. Selves are social selves, this says; humans are essentially social animals, and it is culture that determines selfhood. That pungent Wilde quote, ‘Most people are other people’, illustrates a truth.

But this kind of argument misses the point. It is not selfhood but subjectivity which is the issue. Each individual stands at his or her own unique point in space and time, at the centre of a world, and however socially-conditioned the inputs to that locus are, there is a phenomenology of their landing place in that unique location which emerges into awareness as the social conditioning of the input begins to fray – which it does as a result of subjectivity’s awareness of that input’s multiplicity, of competitors to it, of possible alternative receptions of it, chiefly through the experience of relationships.

The need that individuals have for relationships is their problem and their advantage, their burden and their opportunity. Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ speaks to a point different from Wilde’s; the latter adverts to the reach into individuality of the social setting, the latter of the reach outward to that setting, as exigently as a thirsty person reaches for a glass of water.

The centripetal force of the need for relationship (indeed its absolute necessity in infancy and childhood, which in transformed ways never goes away for the great majority) brings people into various kinds of contact and cooperation, but also opposition and conflict. Because of the centrifugal forces that arise from human diversities, collectives of most kinds above small self-organising (self-attempting-to-organise) groups soon come to take the form of top-down structures, these either imposed by a strong individual or group, or by agreement of most of the participants, even if grudgingly by some of these most. But top-down-imposed structures do not neatly fit all the individuals thus brought into combination; under the socio-political blanket there is perennially a degree of unrest, dissatisfaction, disagreement, nudging with its elbows and sometimes disrupting the general agreement to co-operate and observe norms. The deep spring of the unconformability at issue is subjectivity. This is why societies – at least: ‘liberal’ societies, liberal democracies – are sites of continual negotiation. Managed continual negotiation is the practical ideal. For this, good institutions are necessary. A fully ideal situation – not very likely given how things are with people and life – is one where each individual is a co-creator of the arrangements and is therefore fully signed up to their structures and rules, and is so because s/he sees their point and wills their effectiveness. This is a bottom-up arrangement. One question this immediately prompts is: how can this ideal be most closely approximated in practice? The effort to achieve this – consisting in a society’s continuous, continual negotiations with itself – has this sweet spot as its horizon.

What is the point of thinking about these things? What is the end, the desideratum sought, in efforts to understand, propose and implement ideas about the relation between the individual and society, the One and the All? It must be some good, something worth the endeavour. What is it? For human beings it cannot simply be the super-efficient functioning of a collective order, as with ants and bees. These require the negation of individuality. But for humans, individuality in the ultimate metaphysical sense at issue is an irremovable fact, at the very centre of the picture. The question of the good has therefore to be something that relates to the individuality of individuals, something that speaks to their existential solitude; that addresses the quality of their experience of subjectivity, arising from the place of their ultimate state of being one unit in the vectoring pressure of the crowd they of necessity live among, and the alliances they form in it which reduces or in the ideal eliminates the isolation of subjectivity if – far more likely: when – it is felt as such, especially if associated with the likely adjuncts of powerlessness and purposelessness that isolation prompts, what in other framings has been described as angst or absurdity, the abyss or the void.

Are alliances of the relevant kinds a necessary condition of the good thus sought? No: they are sufficient, but not necessary, for it is possible for an eremite to find the inner quality sought, albeit by an extreme version of what is anyway necessary, viz. the cultivation of the way subjectivity is experienced. This is a function of the individual’s philosophy of life, the degree of richness of his or her mental equipment, how far s/he has developed the mental muscles to think, evaluate, manage emotions, make choices, focus energies, deal with vicissitudes. The fully achieved Stoic, Epicurean, Buddhist, Confucian individual has self-cultivated to the degree which, if everyone did the same, would bring the ‘ideal society’ into existence: a society that is good, genuinely and fully good, for all the individuals comprising it, in their individuality and in their relationships. That is the idealistic aim of the enterprises involved.

But pragmatism supervenes, so adherents of these philosophies accept that (‘at least for now’) there is not going to be an ideal society, and therefore they tighten the circumference of the circle to enclose a far smaller area – an Epicurean garden, a Buddhist monastery, the Stoic individual. Only the last has the maximum assurance of success, because the garden of Epicurus and a monastic community are vulnerable to the probability that in any gathering of two or more, differences arise. (And perhaps…even for the Stoic? There can be conflicts within, a self divided against itself. It is the implication of Pierre Hadot’s study of Marcus Aurelius that what we witness in the Meditations is a doubtful subjectivity urging itself to be a chosen self). But at the same time, the Epicurean garden and a voluntarily-created community offer advantages and enlargements for their inhabitants that full existential isolation denies. These advantages arise from the effect on the self of attending to other selves: in the experiences of loving, giving, helping and sharing. These too, though, require the agency of the individual who acts – the ultimate oneness is undischargeable even in ecstatic togetherness, as the reference of one of the at least two poles in which any relation (other than that of numerical identity) has to consist. Thus it is that ‘self-cultivation’ is self-cultivation; in fact it is more: it is the cultivation of the individual’s subjectivity – thus ultimately referencing the fact of existential unitariness and its solitude again. What is cultivated is in part the overcoming, in part the optimisation, of that condition. This locates the place to begin. As with any journey, it starts from home.

But what is there at home to take on the journey? What equipment is there to optimise the journeying? That is where the ‘philosophy of life’ point arises. Everyone has a philosophy of life; most people do not know they do; and even when they realise it, they tend not to explore it, to examine its assumptions and where these came from, to challenge the assumptions and what is built on them, and to ask themselves: what do they really value, what do they really want? The process can be uncomfortable; it can be liberating. It can discover purpose, or prompt a choice of purpose. One does not get far along in the process before one sees that the question of choosing one’s own life – Socrates’ ‘considered life’ – invites another choice: either to turn one’s back on the world (on society), or at least its conventions and expectations, for which there are plenty of guides to help one do it: Cynics, Epicureans, Pyrrhonists, Jains, Theravada Buddhists, Daoists; or to strive to make society such that, for oneself and others, there can be a greater chance to live good, meaningful, chosen lives within it. Aristotle regarded this juncture – between ethics and politics – as a seamless one, and for this reason. For this endeavour there are plenty of guides among Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Mohists, Confucians, Mahayana Buddhists, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, to help one do it.

‘To help one do it’: in the end, though, one must do it oneself. The test of truth (recall C. S. Lewis’s analogy for the test of truth: like striking a bell, which is shown to be sound if it gives off a sonorous dong but unsound if it gives off a clank) is whether what one chooses, and how one therefore lives, sounds sonorously deep in the ultimate subjectivity of one’s existence.

The asymmetry in the relation between the One (oneself) and the All (society, its politics) is that whereas history has always attempted to make the direction of formative pressure travel from the All relatum to the One relatum, the good (or more modestly the achievable best) is to be found when matters are the other way round. That is why hoping that someone else somewhere else will do something that will somehow make your life better or good, is a mistake. The responsibility is yours, mine, our own. If that is a statement of the obvious, it has at least the merit of being true, supported by its very obviousness .

To connect – ‘Only Connect’ – questions about the personal and the public, the self and society, taking both into account, examining each properly, understanding the asymmetry in the relation between them, making sense of it, accepting the ultimate responsibility to choose and create on one’s own behalf, thereby answering the question of whether to resile or engage: that is the room seen from different angles through different windows, the Rome to which all the roads eventually lead.

At the heart of good lives, for the great majority of people, are good relationships. Between the One and the All there is the Other, or others. For good relationships, at least one of the parties does well to have a cultivated selfhood. In the best relationships, both or all the parties do. As Aristotle said, one cannot love others well unless one loves oneself in the right way – not egoistically, but such that one has that sufficiency of being which provides the wherewithal to give generously and to receive generously. The person who does not take care of himself or herself is a burden on others, a drain, instead of being a partner and a friend. Relationship, in the philosophy of the good, consists in existential equality of selfhoods. The best achieved such relationships promise to be the leaven that could raise the social loaf towards its most reciprocally nourishing best.

All this is utopian, of course; meanwhile there are the obstructive difficulties, small and great, the mistakes and accidents, the fallibilities and flaws, both within people and in the society around them, that seem to make a joke of fine philosophical generalisations. Or do they? Consider accepting that there are all these obstructions to the realisation of the philosophical aim, but seeking to do so anyway, practically and consciously. As Aristotle said, the resolve to live the best kind of life and trying to do so is itself already what it is to live the best kind of life.

Since these remarks gather and generalise my answer to the young man in Byron Bay, it behoves me, though with diffidence, to cite what relates to the ethics side, and what to the politics side, in the pile of books he gestured at. On the ethics side they are What Is Good, The Choice of Hercules, The Good Book, Philosophy and Life, and various collections of essays with titles like The Reason of Things, The Form of Things, The Challenge of Things and others. On the politics and society side they are The Good State, For the Good of the World, Discriminations, For the People, The Challenge of the Future. There are many years’ work in all that, and though it sometimes feels like trying to bring down the walls of a castle by throwing tennis balls at them, it is a profound satisfaction to try – and the endeavour continues.

These books are contributions to the conversation that humanity has with itself about what matters. It is not necessary, but in my view it is both preferable and an advantage, if a person who offers a contribution of this kind has anchorage in the weeds beneath the water, because matters of metaphysics and epistemology underlie all thinking about the world, and an effort to work out some views about the technical aspects of these matters is beyond salutary. As an indication of acquaintance with the great traditions of thought that speak to what is at issue in the foregoing, I cite The History of Philosophy, The Frontiers of Knowledge and the forthcoming (2027) Time of the Sages, and as an example of grappling with technical questions in metaphysics and epistemology, I cite The Metaphysics of Experience – not a bedside book, I’m afraid, because it was written for professional colleagues and advanced students in the patois of the discipline, indecipherable without the relevant apprenticeship. As it represents a cumulation of reflection it displaces several earlier technical books that were waystations to it.

I don’t know how my young friend at Byron Bay has fared since we met, but if his eye happens to fall on this: My warmest good wishes to you, my friend, and thank you for your question. Go well on the pathways of the world! and may you find along them both yourself and the others who will be yours and you theirs; and with them, the good that is our best destiny.