1. Virtue as skill or know-how

AT LEAST ONE STATEMENT from the previous chapter must have struck many of you as incredible, if not downright ridiculous: “It is as natural to seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and avoid disease.”¹ But if so, you will no doubt be thinking, how does it happen that so many of us seem so little given to following the way of virtue, preferring instead courses that are much more suggestive of “the primrose path.”

Before we can answer this question, we must first address ourselves to the prior question of just what this thing called “virtue” is anyway. What do we mean by such a notion?

In our first chapter we toyed with the idea that living well, or making the most of one’s life, was perhaps no more than a matter of art or skill, a matter of knowing how, in other words. Why not, then, simply identify virtue, moral virtue that is to say, with knowing how to live? The virtuous man would then be the man who had acquired the requisite skill in living, or in being human, just as the man who lacked virtue would be the one who hadn’t learned how to live, who didn’t know what to do or how to do it, and who consequently was well on the way toward making a mess of his life and a fool of himself.

2. Human feelings, affections, and emotions as that with
respect to which the human virtues are exercised

All well and good. Suppose, therefore, that for the time being we accept the proposal that human virtue be understood as simply the skill or know-how that is appropriate to the business of living. Nevertheless, a skill must always be exercised with respect to some typical kind of situation; likewise, any sort of know-how involves knowing how to do a particular kind of job when faced with a particular kind of problem or situation. Thus a skilled pilot must know how to get his ship through stormy seas, a skilled physician must know how to bring his patient back to health amid conditions of bodily disease and decay, and a skilled investor must know how to conserve and increase his original stake in the face of the fluctuations of the market and of changing business conditions.

What is it, then, that the virtuous man must do? With respect to what sort of situations and problems is his skill exercised? To answer this question suppose we raise a closely related question: in just what sort of situation are we inclined to say that a person has not acted or behaved very intelligently or wisely? The answer is not hard to find. Let anyone ask himself whether he has ever lost his temper, or gotten excited, or been depressed, or felt hurried and pressed for time; and whether under such circumstances he has not at least sometimes done things which he later regretted, things which, as he might say, he should have realized were foolish and unwise, had he not been so angry or so excited or so upset.

Could we say, then, that moral virtue is simply the sort of skill or know-how that enables us to act intelligently—this time not in the face of rough seas or adverse business conditions, but in the face of our own feelings and impulses and emotions? This seems plausible on the face of it. Nevertheless, we need to push the analysis further and consider rather more complicated cases than those of merely getting angry or excited or rattled.

For instance, consider Dryden’s satirical portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury:

Of these the false Achitophel was first;

A name to all succeeding ages curst:

For close designs and crooked counsels fit,

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,

Restless, unfix’d in principles and place,

In pow’r unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace;

A firey soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay:

And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay.

A daring pilot in extremity;

Pleas’d with the danger, when the waves went high,

He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;

Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,

Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?

Punish a body which he could not please,

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave what with his toil he won,

To that unfeather’d two-legg’d thing, a son:

Got, while his soul did huddled notions try;

And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.

In friendship false, implacable in hate,

Resolv’d to ruin or to rule the State. . . .²

Without concerning ourselves with the justice or historical accuracy of this characterization, do we not readily recognize the sorts of “mistakes” and “errors” that a person such as Shaftesbury might be said to have fallen into? His restlessness of spirit, his feelings of bitterness and resentment, his recklessness, his vindictiveness—all these qualities indicate not just passing impulses and momentary feelings that cause a man to do things which even he himself would acknowledge were stupid and foolish. What are involved here are settled habits and patterns of behavior that seem to have rendered the man relatively impervious to saner and more rational counsels. Thus while Shaftesbury himself might not recognize that the way he was conducting himself and what he was making of himself were unwise, we and others who might be in a position to view the situation more objectively can see that this was precisely what was happening.

But does not this only confirm our earlier suggestion that in the business of living what the requisite art or skill must deal with are such things as our own personal inclinations and tendencies, our passions and feelings? It is in the face of these that we must act intelligently, if our concern be to live skillfully and intelligently and not simply to invest money or pilot a plane or try a case skillfully and intelligently.

Let us, though, consider another example, this time one that is admittedly fictional, but one that anyone who has been connected with academic life must recognize as true. It is C. P. Snow’s description of one of the characters in The Masters:

I looked round his sitting-room. It was without feature, it was the room of a man concentrated into himself, so that he had nothing to spend outside; it showed nothing of the rich, solid comfort which Brown had given to his, or the eccentric picturesqueness of Roy Calvert’s. Nightingale was a man drawn into himself. Suspicion and envy lived in him. They always would have done, however life had treated him; they were part of his nature. But he had been unlucky, he had been frustrated in his most cherished hope and now envy never left him alone.

He was forty-three, and a bachelor. Why he had not married I did not know: there was nothing unmasculine about him. That was not, however, his abiding disappointment. He had once possessed great promise. He had known what it was to hold creative dreams; and they had not come off. That was his bitterness. As a very young man he had shown a spark of real talent. He was one of the earliest theoretical chemists. By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure. He had, so I was told, anticipated Heitler-London and the orbital theory; he was ten years ahead of his time. The college had elected him, everything seemed easy. But the spark burnt out. The years passed. Often he had new conceptions; but the power to execute them had escaped from him.

It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingale’s, it made him fester with envy. He longed in compensation for every job within reach, in reason and out of reason. It was morbid that he should have fancied his chances of the tutorship before Brown, his senior and a man made for the job; but it rankled in him after a dozen years. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suspicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him.

His reputation in his subject was already gone. He would not get into the Royal Society now. But, as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspiciousness, at moments in the knowledge of what he might have been.³

This passage requires little comment. A man’s feelings of envy, of frustration, of suspicion, can prevent him from achieving anything like an examined life in Socrates’ sense or an intelligent life in Aristotle’s. Again, the sort of situation with respect to which skill in the art of living becomes pertinent is a situation calling for the exercise of intelligence with reference to our own feelings and emotions.

Perhaps one final example may not be out of place in this connection. This time we turn to Miss C. V. Wedgwood’s characterization of Charles I:

The small, fastidious King presided fittingly over his well-ordered Court. By nature reserved, he was isolated still more by that slight impediment of the speech which made him shun all but formal contacts, except with his familiars. Even his friends he kept at their distance, but with a regular and courteous demeanour that all understood and some, who were formal themselves, grew to like. . . . The unseemly, the ludicrous, the merely human were excluded from his public life, and almost all his life was public.⁴

The King had a high sense of duty towards the people whom he regarded as a sacred trust from God, but this was compatible with an open dislike of their proximity and their opinions. It was only, perhaps, when he touched for the King’s Evil at Easter and Michaelmas that he allowed the vulgar to approach closely to his royal person. . . .

He had never had the painful experience from which his father, as a young man, had learnt so much; he had never confronted insolent opponents face to face and had the worst of the argument. No national danger had compelled him to go out among his people and share their perils. He was, at this time, not only the most formal but the most remote and sheltered of all European kings.

What he knew of men, he knew chiefly by report and study. Like many shy, meticulous men, he was fond of aphorisms, and would write in the margins of books, in a delicate, beautiful, deliberate script, such maxims as “Few great talkers are good doers” or “None but cowards are cruel.” He trusted more to such distilled and bottled essence of other men’s wisdom than to his own experience, which was, in truth, limited; his daily contact with the world was confined within the artificial circle of his Court and the hunting field.⁵

The ideal was constantly before his eyes but the intellectual and aesthetic fashion of the day, strongly bent towards allegory, obscured the practical difficulties of the task. The King lived in a world of poetic illusions and could not but be affected by them. For him and his courtiers, the most ordinary events were swiftly wreathed in pastoral or classical disguise. The Countess of Anglesey gave an evening party for the Queen and at once the poets summoned the goddess Diana and bade the stars shoot from their spheres. . . .

The allegorical trick in poetry and compliment insensibly spreads to other things and becomes almost a habit of mind. The King seemed sometimes to treat administration and politics as though the peace and contentment of the realm were indeed assured because, at his Christmas revels, a golden chariot upon a white cloud had descended against the heavenly backcloth bearing Peace, “in a flowery vesture like the Spring,” with buskins of green taffeta, a garland of olives on her head and a branch of palm in her hand.⁶

Alas, poor Charles, if this account is to be credited. The King’s fastidiousness, his timidity, his lethargy in regard to matters of business and public affairs, his aesthetic sensitivity led him to mistake a grandoise baroque dream-world for the harsher world of reality. Little wonder that he should have missed so completely the Socratic objective of knowing himself and, correlatively, knowing the actual human situation in which he found himself. Once again, it becomes clear that living intelligently involves seeing things as they are and seeing oneself as one is, amid all the confusions and misrepresentations due to one’s own passions and predilections and prejudices.

3. But what are “feelings,” “affections,” “emotions,” “inclinations”?

What is the nature of these disturbing and seemingly irrational factors in men’s behavior which we have rather loosely and indiscriminately labeled “passions,” “impulses,” “feelings,” “emotions,” etc? Apparently, human virtue amounts to no more than a certain skill or competence in dealing with these irrational human affections. But have we any very clear idea of what these things are?

In meeting this challenge we propose not to have recourse to the theories and findings of modern psychology—“When ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”—but rather to follow as closely as possible our common human experience in such matters. At the very outset our enterprise would appear to be rendered almost hopeless by virtue of the seemingly limitless diversity and heterogeneity of such things as feelings, desires, emotions, moods, attitudes, and passions. How will it ever be possible to bring these all under a single genus, so that they can all be equally understood as just so many sources of confusion and interference, with respect to the rational conduct of life?

For example, must it not be acknowledged that your feeling of drowsiness and ennui as you read a dull book is a very different thing from Othello’s blind and all-consuming passion of jealousy? Do perennial laziness and habits of procrastination have anything in common with that irascible overconfidence and hard self-assurance which belonged to Sophocles’ Oedipus? Yet we seem to be suggesting that all of these things—boredom and laziness, Othello’s jealousy and Oedipus’ self-assurance and even hubris—all of these are to be accounted as strictly comparable factors, in that all alike tend to militate against a really intelligent conduct of life: they blind us to the truth about ourselves and keep us from acting in ways that even our own better judgment would prescribe.

And even if the manifold diversity of human impulses and affections can all be subsumed under one heading, is it not a patent mistake to suppose that all such passions and motives, all such likes and dislikes, are necessarily bad, that they are all recalcitrant and even contrary to the dictates of reason and intelligence? Boredom with a dull book may be a sign of good judgment, and indignation can often be righteous.

In the light of considerations and warnings such as these, our task is now to give such an account of human affections and emotions that not only their generic unity can be made apparent, but also their characteristic ambivalence and ambiguity: whether they are beneficial or harmful, contributory or inhibitory, with respect to our human concern with living intelligently and leading an examined life. Perhaps, though, the task may not be so difficult as it sounds. For one has only to consider the condition, at once so obvious and so universal, in which every human being inevitably finds himself, of being thrown into an environing world of people and things and forced constantly to reckon with what may be advantageous or harmful, pleasant or painful, fortunate or unfortunate, beneficial or disastrous. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that human beings should have developed various devices of warning and control, thermostats, if you will, which register the approach both of dangers and of benefits, and which then set off the appropriate reactions and dispositions on the part of the organism—say, fear in the case of threatened harm, or desire in the case of a promised benefit, or despair in the case of seemingly certain disaster.

4. A possible classification of desires and emotions according to
their respective thermostatic functions

In this connection, some of the more old-fashioned schemes for classifying the passions and emotions are by no means uninstructive. For instance, one mode of classification⁷ was to consider the feelings of so-called love and hate as basic. By “love” and “hate” were meant no more than approval or liking for what appears to be good or beneficial, and disapproval or dislike for what is taken to be evil or harmful. The English words “love” and “hate” are really too strong and too heavily charged to convey properly the relatively neutral and general idea of an opposition between what some recent thinkers have called “pro-attitudes” on the one hand, and “con-attitudes” on the other.⁸

In any case one can readily understand how, taking as basic such a pro-attitude toward that which appears to be of worth or value, this attitude becomes desire, when the object of value is absent, and joy or pleasure when it is present. Correspondingly, an attitude of dislike or disapproval, a “con-attitude,” becomes a positive aversion when what is disliked is absent and a feeling of pain or distress when it is present. In similar fashion, a feeling or emotion such as fear is to be understood as the sort of response that is appropriate to that which one dislikes, but which instead of being actually present is imminent and threatening. In like manner, various other feelings such as hope, despair, envy, resentment, and anger can be understood in terms of the difficult or easy accessibility or evitability of objects toward which we evince either pro- or con-attitudes.

5. The limitations of these thermostatic controls of our actions
and reactions, and the role of the virtues in making up for
these limitations

Granting the limitations and inadequacies of such a classificatory scheme for human feelings and emotions, we can nevertheless begin to see, in terms of such a scheme, just what the peculiar nature of man’s ethical or moral problem tends to be. It is well and good that our human thermostatic controls should tend to make us fearful in the presence of danger, or eager and desirous in anticipation of what promises to be beneficial, or contented and satisfied on the achievement of something valuable and worth while. But if what we are afraid of should prove to be not a real danger at all, or if what we are so eager to get should in fact not be really valuable, or if what we take to be a cause of self-congratulation and self-satisfaction should actually be something trifling and insignificant, we shall be made to appear foolish and ridiculous.

In other words, there is nothing wrong about a man’s being angry or pleased or bored or afraid or discouraged or satisfied, provided that the object of his feeling or emotion be truly provoking or pleasing or dull or dangerous or discouraging or satisfying. For without emotions and passions, a human being would not be human, but a mere clod, lacking the dynamic quality that is requisite for the attainment of human perfection. In this sense, then, the common feature that may be said to characterize all of our amazingly diverse and heterogeneous human emotions is not that they tend to be a refractory element, likely to disturb the sane and intelligent conduct of life. On the contrary, our emotions are the very motive, or emotive, forces of our being, moving us toward what we need and what would be of benefit to us, and away from what would be harmful and dangerous and evil.

In this light, then, it becomes clear that all of our human affections and inclinations can be brought under a single heading, as regards their relevance and significance for a truly human life. And it becomes clear also that such appetites and emotions, so far from being all bad, are indispensable aids to, and even promoters of, the good life. Just as the sea is not a hindrance to the skilled pilot, or the national economy an obstruction to the skilled stockbroker, so a man’s feelings and emotions are in no wise to be regarded as evil, provided only that the man have the requisite skill in utilizing and handling them. Indeed, in any art or skill, the objective is not to eliminate the material upon which the artist works, but to use and control and become the master of these materials. And so it is in the art of living: the virtuous man is the man who knows how to utilize and control his own emotions and desires.

More specifically, then, on this view morals and ethics are to be regarded as involving no more than learning and knowing how to bring our intelligence and understanding to bear upon our passions and desires. For, as is only too obvious, these latter, in their role of thermostatic controls governing the release of our appetitive and repulsive energies, are none too reliable. Indeed, as should by now be apparent, there is no human pro-attitude or con-attitude, no human emotion or passion or feeling, that does not involve at least an implicit value judgment about something’s being good or bad for the individual concerned. But such sub- or pre-rational judgments are frequently misleading. Accordingly, the function of our human reason and intelligence, in a moral context, is to provide a needed corrective to the oft-mistaken judgments implicit in so many of our emotions, as, for example, when we become angry when there is nothing really to be angry about, or when we set our hearts on getting something which is scarcely worth getting excited about, or when we become depressed and feel sorry for ourselves, even though our situation be nothing like as bad as we may have led ourselves to believe.

6. A possible illustration of how these virtues sometimes work:
Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean

By way of illustration of how such skill or know-how in the business of living tends to operate with respect to our impulses and feelings, it may be instructive to consider briefly Aristotle’s celebrated doctrine of the mean. To be sure, this principle may not have the universal applicability in regard to moral questions that Aristotle seemed to think it had. For it seems hardly plausible to assume that in regard to any and every pro- or con-attitude that we may have, the role of intelligent judgment will always and necessarily be one of mediating between excess and defect, as if every such attitude, whether pro- or con-, were bound to be either too much so or too little so. On the other hand, if we accept the assumption, it turns out to be a mere truism which doesn’t tell us very much. For how is one helped in the living of one’s life merely to be told that one must be careful not to feel too strongly and yet equally careful to feel strongly enough, not to desire a thing too much and yet to desire it enough?

Nevertheless, for all the shortcomings and even dangers of this doctrine of the mean, it may, perhaps, be used as a device for illustrating how something on the order of skill and know-how can be brought to bear on our human likes and dislikes.

To begin with, consider the ordinary run of human responses and feelings with respect to typical situations in which men find themselves—confidence and discouragement, enthusiasm and indifference, cautiousness and carelessness, appreciativeness and scornfulness, friendliness and hostility, worry and unconcern, dissatisfaction and complacency. Now there is no doubt that some of us all of the time, and perhaps most of us some of the time, allow ourselves to worry overmuch about our affairs, or else not to worry enough; to be excessively dissatisfied with our lot, or else lazy and complacent; to be friendly and a hail-fellow-well-met toward everybody, or else churlish and disagreeable; to be ridiculously cautious and careful, or else reckless and by no means careful enough; to be blinded to everything of worth and value except what is dictated by an all-consuming ambition, or else shiftless and lethargic with no get-up-and-get at all; to be the eternal optimist, indiscriminately sanguine about everything, or else the gloomy pessimist with no sure judgment about even those chances and opportunities that are genuine. Nor is there any doubt that the more sensible behavior would be one which managed to observe the just mean between such extremes.

It is true that in such judgments there is a great deal that is relative to the particular situation or that derives from mere social convention. An English gentleman of the nineteenth century was expected to observe a haughtiness and reserve which would have been scarcely appropriate, and even ridiculous, in an Italian fruit peddler of the same period; a trust officer in a bank is expected to display a caution that would hardly be fitting in a wildcat oil operator. And yet, the whole point of the doctrine of the mean is that in the very nature of the case it will be related to the particular situation, the principle being that how we feel and react to a situation should not be a mere uncritical and undisciplined response, but rather the sensible and intelligent reaction which the particular situation calls for. Even though social convention and the traditions in which we have been brought up may color our judgments as to which reactions are excessive and which deficient, the very purpose of the doctrine of the mean is that, by having regard for it, we shall eventually learn to let our judgment as to what is really the mean between two extremes be determined by our intelligence and understanding rather than by mere social convention.

7. A still more specific illustration; the virtue of self-respect and
a just sense of dignity and personal responsibility

In order more fully to bring out the import of this doctrine of the mean, considered as a device for determining what our proper feelings and emotions should be on different occasions, we might consider that sort of attitude or feeling toward ourselves which we today would call self-respect or a sense of personal dignity. Indeed, if we are not mistaken, it was somewhat the same sort of attitude that Aristotle sought to designate and describe—not very felicitously perhaps—under the title of magnanimity (megalopsychia) or greatness of soul.⁹ One might say that a proper respect for and estimate of oneself is not just one virtue among others, but is almost the key to the entire ethical problem. For if Socratic self-knowledge be the essence of the good life, then the man who manages to live well will be the man who has a just estimate of himself, being neither overly complacent about his capacities and achievements, nor, at the other extreme, overly lacking in a sense of his own dignity and responsibilities. Or, to paraphrase one of Aristotle’s blunter formulations of the principle: a proper self-respect is nothing but a mean between the two extremes of thinking too much of yourself and thinking too little of yourself.

That most of us are inclined to err on the side of thinking too much of ourselves goes almost without saying. For complacency and smugness, to say nothing of downright vanity, are traits from which we human beings seem to be singularly unsuccessful in freeing ourselves. To take but one example, this time from Jane Austen:

Sir Walter Elliott of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one. . . .

Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliott’s character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and at fifty-four was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did, nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessings of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliott who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.¹⁰

Substitute for a baronetcy a Harvard professorship, or a record as a star athlete, or the presidency of the local Lions Club, or a widespread reputation as a lady-killer, or perhaps even first place in a beauty contest, and one will find Sir Walter’s vanity paralleled by thousands of American businessmen, professors, athletes, and beauty queens. While few Americans are likely to find “occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one” in the “Baronetage” they can find ample substitutes in such things as golf trophies, Who’s Who In America, citations by the local Junior Chamber of Commerce, or maybe even in boxes of colored slides that chronicle in depressing detail their honors, their triumphs, and their travels.

Vanity or smugness, we would all agree, is an extreme variation on the feeling of self-satisfaction, and hence foolish and ridiculous; but is it equally clear that at the other extreme there is such a thing as thinking too little of oneself, which in its own way is just as foolish? At first glance, this does not seem plausible; we naturally assume that if vanity is a fault, then its opposite, modesty or humility, must be a virtue.

We must proceed cautiously here, for while modesty is certainly not a fault—provided it is not mere mock modesty, but a genuine attitude based on accurate self-knowledge and self-appraisal—still it may be questioned whether modesty is, after all, the proper opposite of vanity and complacency. Remember, the basic feeling or attitude that we are here concerned with is one of self-respect, a feeling of one’s own worth and dignity. Accordingly, if one extreme consists in overestimating one’s own worth, the other extreme is not modesty or humility, but rather what might be called a lack of proper self-respect or an insufficient sense of personal dignity. It is hard to express in one word the quality I am trying to describe—perhaps “self-depreciation” is close enough to suggest the meaning. That this can be a serious and even a frightening thing is brought out in the following quotation from Erich Fromm:

The modern market is no longer a meeting place but a mechanism characterized by abstract and impersonal demand. One produces for this market, not for a known circle of customers; its verdict is based on laws of supply and demand; and it determines whether the commodity can be sold and at what price. No matter what the use value of a pair of shoes may be, for instance, if the supply is greater than the demand, some shoes will be sentenced to economic death. . . .

. . . the regulatory function of the market has been, and still is, predominant enough to have a profound influence on the character formation of the urban middle class and, through the latter’s social and cultural influence, on the whole population. The market concept of value, the emphasis on exchange value rather than on use value, had led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself. . . .

In our time the market orientation has been growing rapidly, together with the development of a new market that is a phenomenon of the last decades—the “personality market.” Clerks and salesmen, business executives and doctors, lawyers and artists . . . all are dependent for their material success on a personal acceptance by those who need their services or who employ them.

The principle of evaluation is the same on both the personality and the commodity market: on the one, personalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities. . . . only in exceptional cases is success predominantly the result of skill and of certain other human qualities like honesty, decency, and integrity. . . . Success depends largely on how well a person sells himself on the market, how well he gets his personality across, how nice a “package” he is. . . .

The fact that in order to have success it is not sufficient to have the skill and equipment for performing a given task but that one must be able to “put across” one’s personality in competition with others shapes the attitude toward oneself . . . since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or rather simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. . . . [one’s] self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is “successful,” he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. . . . Hence one is driven to strive relentlessly for success, and any setback is a severe threat to one’s self-esteem; helplessness, insecurity, and inferiority feelings are the result. If the vicissitudes of the market are the judges of one’s value, the sense of dignity and pride is destroyed. . . .¹¹

From such a description we can discern more clearly the sort of thing involved in this feeling or attitude that we have called self-depreciation, or lack of self-respect. It is the sort of feeling that makes a man willing to sell his soul to the devil, and sometimes very cheaply too—whether the devil is a Hitler who promises such things as national glory and honor, to say nothing of food and employment, at the price of giving up one’s critical intelligence and one’s responsibility to think for oneself; or whether it is the American “personality market,” as Fromm calls it, where one is promised such things as glamour and success if only one will conform, forgoing anything like the examined life and devoting all one’s efforts to making oneself a merely saleable or marketable article.

Nor is this the only manifestation of the sort of feeling that we have called lack of self-respect. There are other examples as well, perhaps some that are to be found even closer to home. Suppose you ask yourself: Do you actually believe in such things as personal dignity and personal integrity? Is not all this talk about perfecting oneself as a human being, or recognizing one’s capacities and responsibilities, or how only the examined life is worth living—does not all this sound like stuff and nonsense? Can you imagine a character such as Jake, say, in The Sun Also Rises talking this way? Or if this be too high-brow, what about Steve Canyon in the comic strips, or Peter Gunn on television? Here are steel-eyed, steel-nerved men, sophisticated, thoroughly disenchanted, taking their pleasures where they find them, and living from day to day, never bothering their heads about the Socratic ideal or any other ideal for that matter, and on the whole simply fancying that the business of living amounts to little more than making the most of life’s emptiness and purposelessness.

In other words, this time what we have chosen to call a deficient sense of one’s dignity and responsibility as a human being leads not to selling one’s soul to the devil, or even to selling one’s human birthright for any of the currently popular messes of pottage, but rather in just not selling or buying anything. For nothing seems to be worth anything. You don’t amount to anything yourself, and even if you tried to sell yourself, what could you buy with the proceeds that would be any more than a snare and a delusion? Oh, you keep on living, of course, but mainly by diverting yourself—with bullfights, with love affairs, with sports, perhaps even with your job, if you are good at it and it happens to be sufficiently varied and diverting. But basically, living is pretty much a matter of forgetting and being distracted, almost as if you were moving in a dream, performing inane and pointless and often even frustrating activities—but what does it matter, since all of your comings and goings, your doings and undoings, are so wholly without significance as to be almost without reality?

One has but to bring to mind attitudes and feelings of this sort, feelings which reflect not despair so much as just not giving a damn, and one readily recognizes that as compared with feeling overly complacent and satisfied, there is an opposite extreme in which one’s life comes to be blighted and distorted from boredom with one’s very existence, or perhaps from a kind of sneering and superior indifference to the possibilities and responsibilities of life, or from a cynical conviction of the inanity and pointlessness of human existence.

It is not without irony that in the present day in our own country such attitudes of indifference or even of disgust for the purposes and responsibilities of life have tended to become a source of no little pride and self-satisfaction to many of our contemporaries. An attitude that was originally supposed to be one of stark realism has lately come to deck itself out as an eminently fashionable and hence alluring ideal. How many of us consciously or unconsciously would not like to imagine ourselves as exemplifying in our lives the type of the sophisticated newspaper reporter, or the cool “private eye,” or the clear-eyed, no-nonsense “realist”? Certainly, among so-called intellectuals and people in academic life, you have often but to scratch the surface of professional respectability to discover that your man of learning secretly delights in picturing himself as a sort of composite Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Pablo Picasso.

The result is likely to be not a Hemingway or a Sartre or a Picasso, but only a Sir Walter Elliott. But however amusing or even ridiculous its results may be, there is no denying the fact that what is here being enacted is a curious transvaluation of values, one extreme having been literally transvalued into its opposite. What in its inception was an outlook of little more than hopelessness, desperation, and cynicism in the face of one’s human existence tends to take on the character of an ideal worthy of emulation. It has joined the ranks of all those other human poses and postures which are sources of satisfaction and self-congratulation to those who strike them, for they seem to provide us with a sort of reassurance that we are, after all, thank God, not as other men are.

This capacity that men seem to have of managing to pass, almost phoenix-like, from thinking too little of themselves to thinking too much of themselves is likewise exemplified, and perhaps even with greater frequency, among that other group of those whom we have characterized as being deficient in self-respect and a sense of their own worth, those who are all too ready to sell themselves—whether cheaply or for a high price, and whether on the personality market, or to a dictator, or to ordinary purveyors of conformity who flourish in every community. For it is the very person who thinks so little of himself as to be ready to forgo such things as freedom and independence of judgment, to accept the standards of the community uncritically, to do only the done thing—it is he, who having been a success in his conformity, is most likely to become the stuffed shirt, the pompous ass, the unshakable pharisee. Ironically enough, it is such a person’s very self-importance which betokens his underlying inclination toward micropsychia, thinking too little of himself: he has become satisfied with himself when there is still not much to be satisfied about and when he should be demanding so much more of himself.

But enough by way of examples and illustrations. They may suffice to show how, in many cases, the voice of intelligence in human conduct calls for striking a mean between certain extremes of excess or defect into which we human beings may easily be led, if we uncritically follow the lead of our various feelings, inclinations, and passions. Even more fundamentally, may not such examples serve to show the pertinence of knowledge and understanding to the conduct of life, with the result that living well, or being a success, or making the most of one’s life are to be regarded as being pretty much a matter of acquiring and exercising the requisite skill and know-how in what we have chosen to call the art of living?