Self-Help

…what he most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge….It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

I read a good deal of a book last semester (in graduate school you seldom finish everything, if anything) which impressed me arguably more than it should have. Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is just what it sounds like. It is perhaps the first of what is now a lamentable genre, a genre avoided by all persons with a decent appreciation for the redemptive power of irony, and who generally avoid taking themselves seriously enough to warrant a course in self-improvement.

The appreciation of irony is a virtue in itself.

Self-Help is thoroughly unironic. Naturally, I went and bought another of his books, the moral heft of which isn't difficult to appreciate in the one-word title: Duty. 

But moral heft is what we're going for. Samuel Smiles wrote for "the every man"--men who wouldn't turn their nose up at a moral precept or a zinging cliche (of course, turning one's nose up at a cliche requires an ear for irony. One gets the feeling, though, that Smiles's patrons weren't reading Lawrence Sterne deep into the night). Well, Smiles was full of zingers, old and new. His book begins with an old one: Heaven helps those who help themselves. 

Oh I hear you groan, but those old chestnuts can be damn useful, can move men to action. Written at times in rather rosy ink, Smiles's books are full of anecdotes and hyperbolic portraits of all sorts of men (I do forgive him his exclusion of the fairer sex). Smiles wrote the book for those eager enough, yet unlucky enough, to be born socially below their intellectual station: poor in pocket, but not in spirit. Self-Help in particular was written for--and because of--such willful workers. Smiles introduces his 1859 publication "briefly": "The origin of this book may be briefly told..."

Some fifteen years since, the author was requested to deliver an address before the members of some evening classes, which had been formed in a northern town for mutual improvement, under the following circumstances:--

 Two or three young men of the humblest rank resolved to meet in the winter evenings, for the purpose of improving themselves by exchanging knowledge with each other. Their first meetings were held in the room of a cottage in which one of the members lived; and, as others shortly joined them, the place soon became inconveniently filled....

 Though they were for the most part young men earning comparatively small weekly wages, they resolved to incur the risk of hiring a room; and, on making inquiry, they found a large dingy apartment to let, which had been used as a temporary Cholera Hospital....But the mutual improvement youths, nothing daunted, hired the cholera room at so much a week, lit it up, placed a few benches and a deal table in it, and began their winter classes....The teaching may have been, as no doubt it was, of a very rude and imperfect sort; but it was done with a will. Those who knew a little taught those who knew less--improving themselves while they improved the others....Thus these youths--and there were grown men amongst them--proceeded to teach themselves and each other, reading and writing, arithmetic and geography; and even mathematics, chemistry, and some of the modern languages.

About a hundred young men had thus come together, when, growing ambitious, they desired to have lectures delivered to them... (Self-Help, Oxford pp 6-7)

"[A]nd then it was that the author became acquainted with their proceedings," the author, of course, being Smiles himself.  Like Duty, Self-Help fails often by falling into romances of toil; it positively revels in the nobility of hardship. And yet I keep finding myself moved--minding the pitfalls, Smiles can be damn good reading! It's a kind of philosophy, and much more fun (and...edifying...) than sludging though Heidegger or some other treatise of philosophical hand-wringing.

Duty is perhaps even more heavy-handed than its predecessor (the fourth of five in what eventually became Smiles's Self-Help series). But allow the words (or will them) to be fresh, and they will be:

He who has well considered his duty will at once carry his convictions into action. Our acts are the only things that are in our power. They not only form the sum of our habits, but of our character.

 At the same time, the course of duty is not always the easy course. It has many oppositions and difficulties to surmount. We may have the sagacity to see, but not the strength of purpose to do. To the irresolute there is many a lion in the way. He thinks and moralizes and dreams, but does nothing. "There is little to see," said a hard worker, "and little to do; it is only to do it." (Duty, p.31)

This really hits you if you're young, more intellectually inclined than the world has use for, and have a nagging moral urge to do good, useful things with your life. Emerson said that "the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Emerson has more credibility today than Smiles, but they're saying something similar.

Reading a book like Duty is hard if you really haven't done anything yet, and feel painfully aware of the fact. Really, I think you could hardly find a more fitting target of Smiles's ire than a neurotically self-reflective intellectual person who thinks without really doing.

While I don't think I'm as paralyzingly self-reflective as I could be, Smiles pushes us to think about weakness of character. I cringed at those parts of myself I like least: hesitancy, ambivalence, uncertainty, contentedness, irresoluteness, impotent (or empty) self-reflection (and we might add a tendency toward redundancy to the list...). Smiles articulates his vision of the feeble-willed, those with "weak wills":

...or no wills at all. They are characterless. They have no strong will for vice, yet they have none for virtue. They are the passive recipients of impressions, which, however, take no hold of them. They seem neither to go forward nor backward. As the wind blows, so their vane turns round; and when the wind blows from another quarter, ti turns round again. Any instrument can write on such spirits; any will can govern theirs. They cherish no truth strongly, and do not know what earnestness is. Such persons constitute the mass of society everywhere--the careless, the passive, the submissive, the feeble, and the indifferent." (33-34)

"Philosophers discuss," says Smiles, "decisive men act." I'm "discussing" resolve and action. My whole journey in philosophy now seems to me to have looped in on itself to begin eating its own tail--from idealization of the "examined life" through the great Western thinkers; through the narrows of questions of power, identity, free will, ontology, epistemology, skyhook universals of God or Nature; to language games, and slippage, and deconstructing binaries and assumptions and norms and the Human and the Nonhuman, and anything that could have once snuggily belonged under the only seemingly solid rock of Common Sense. The play of language, and puzzles, and more puzzles. It's something we need to do: to never take for granted that the world is what it seems simply because it feels right, or it's comfortable, or doing otherwise is a bit painful. I know this, I really do.

And then I'd go home, and something in the blood recognizes that there will always be binaries to live by. Family and not family; city and country; human and not human. And really, who needs shelves and shelves of philosophy discussing the fuzzy borders of the Human when we already have Darwin? The Origin is surprisingly tedious, but there's no doubting the profundity of the details of that book: he says over and over and over Look, look at this. Don't you see what this means? Isn't this wonderful? 

And so I began reading my way away from philosophy: the pragmatists like William James and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism, φρόνησις, phronēsis. Practical wisdom, experience. All of which I am relatively without, and all of which isn't merely to be found on a college campus. Wisdom is found in books, but rhetorical banalities aside, the plumber really does know something the Emerson scholar doesn't; the man who built the chair he sits in knows something I don't. I know nothing, but that's the jewel of Socratic wisdom I cling to. I don't want to abandon the "life of the mind"; I just want to begin walking in a different direction.

I remember a conversation with my parents. I was an undergraduate and just beginning to really get my head around Nietzsche, and Mill, and Shakespeare. I told my parents that people don't really take the time to think, and to look beyond the surface of their own assumptions. That if more people spent more energy examining the way they operate in the world, the world would be a much better place. I asserted that this was the most important pursuit an individual can take: the examined life of the intellectual. If you don't have that foundation, you simply cannot be a truly fulfilled person.

Or something like that. My father looked over his hamburger at me with brown eyes I inherited: "So the intellectual stuff, that's the most important thing?"

I affirmed this, and I don't think he argued the point; but in my faulty memory he keeps eating, maybe glancing at my mother, and says something about family being his most important thing. I probably pinked up and muttered something about not being able to have a fulfilling family life if you haven't yet pursued your own intellectual pursuits. But he paid for our meal with money from the job he doesn't really like, and we drove back to the house he built himself, the house I grew up in.

I'm aware I may fall into the Smiles fault: to romanticize the practical, and generalize; and certainly I risk being anti-intellectual to make an argument too irrational to stand. But I don't think Smiles is anti-intellectual. He wasn't criticizing scholars and intellectuals; he was criticizing those who never dug into anything, those who ever skimmed the surface, those who never pushed by the feckless pursuits to fruitful results.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to say. I'm not criticizing the intellectual life. Such a life gives the opportunity to throw oneself into a life of books and ideas; to enjoy and contribute to The Great Conversation about things that matter. I do think the pressures of professionalization and publication have pushed many scholars to intellectual dead-ends of trivialities and useless minutiae--the publishing of book that are never read, and of articles no one really cares about. Ever since the Humanities began having fits about needing to justify its own existence (give us results!) was when the Humanities began to wilt around the edges.

Ironically (for myself and for my argument here), that pressure was probably deployed though the rhetoric of pragmatics, the very rhetoric I find myself drawn to these days. The humanities don't really have cash value, and that's okay--that's actually a good thing.

George Eliot talked about "the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in--good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle" (Daniel Deronda, Penguin ed, p157). It's Dorothea Brooke's yearning for a vocation rather than avocation (mere enjoyment, or hobby).

I'm finding I need to get my hands dirty, at least for awhile. I've been in school since I was 5. The idea of staying in school until I die is basically a real soul killer at this point.

And I don't know whether I've come to the point of leaving academia academically, or if this is just a rite of passage for a person in their 20s who hasn't yet found their niche: the place to dig down deep, and find the pains and the joys of doing so. It's not so much finding what you think you're looking for as cultivating some patch of earth to fruition. Maybe life isn't a journey so much as a garden.

You'll pardon that aphorism. But Voltaire had said something to that effect, or Candide did at any rate. Back from the long journey, Candide settled down to a quiet life with Cunegonde. This settlement leaves a bit to be desired since we are told that "At the bottom of his heart Candide had not the lease wish to marry Cunegonde." This generation has been told over and over to achieve, and to shoot for the moon, and reach for excellence; we have been told that we can achieve whatever we can dream. We are told never to settle.

So poor Candide, we first think. Or maybe poor Cunegone who undergoes the narrative inconvenience of a Princess past her rescue plot--she too will grow old, will live beyond the romantic to the ordinary and banal. Pangloss keeps asking his questions; he asks "the best philosopher in Turkey...why so strange an animal as man was ever created." Pangloss gets no real answer, and a door slammed in his face.

They meet an old farmer who knows nothing of the world but is "content...with sending there for sale the produce of the garden [he] cultivate[s]": ""I have only twenty acres," replied the Turk. "I cultivate them with my children; and work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."" The wandering adventurers think about it, and return to the farm on which they had hesitated to settle. Pangloss even beings to philosophically justify such a course. But "Let us work without theorizing," says the cynic Martin; "'tis the only way to make life endurable":

The whole small fraternity entered into this praiseworthy plan, and each started to make use of his talents. The little farm yielded well. Cunegonde was indeed very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry-cook....and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here." 

"'Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens."

[work in progress warning]