A philosopher’s path

What do you tell yourself?

This past academic year, I faced a personal challenge, and in view of this challenge, a friend and colleague asked me a very interesting question: What do you tell yourself about all this? Walking the centuries-old Philosophenweg up the Heiligenberg in Heidelberg, I found myself thinking about this question again.

Despite my public persona, I’m generally a fairly private person, but I found this question and the reflections it prompted so engaging, and so relevant to my calling as a professor of philosophy, that I decided to write about it.

My daughter became ill just before October, and as her symptoms set in, she went in for a consultation. It looked like a gall bladder problem — and she has a strong family history. But an ultrasound revealed not the gall bladder disease we were expecting, but ominous dark spots in her pancreas, which of course led to more testing, an MRI, endoscopy, biopsies — all of which were inconclusive, except that her pancreas showed a lot of inflammation. After many weeks of waiting and watching her grapple with this unknown, the specialists in Austin came up short. I later confirmed what I had suspected at the time: it looked like pancreatic cancer, but the tests did not confirm the diagnosis. Luiza was referred to MDA for further review and testing. Better equipment, better cytology, better diagnostics, the specialist told us.

MDA is an amazing place, from the way people greet you (“I know you’re feeling bad, but today is going to be a good day!”) to the way they organize parking, relieving us — the weak, the anxious, the sorrowful, the victorious — relieving us of at least this mundane chore. The pancreas team at MDA ruled out adenocarcinoma, the most dreaded disease of the pancreas. Nevertheless, they could not determine the cause of the inflammation. We passed most of the winter with a waiting game of trying to keep Luiza’s strength up, while specialists ruled out increasingly exotic possibilities. Eventually, there was an answer: autoimmune disease. After so many months of watching her condition deteriorate, with the right treatment (NSAIDs mostly), Luiza returned fairly quickly to to the vivacious, sarcastic young woman she was, before.

Intellectually, I understood this game. I even embraced it, endorsed it. I didn’t want to treat the symptoms; I wanted to follow the path, however steep and meandering it might be, to the underlying cause. In fact, rationally, I sided with Luiza’s GI specialist against alleviating symptoms that could serve as clues. But it’s a rare person who can watch, unmoved by the suffering of a fellow human being — and of course, that’s a trait that tends to elicit and reinforce the best in our species. So, as understandable as this waiting game may be, I wanted to see her whole and active again.

Enter my friend and her question: What do you tell yourself about this? (Thanks! You know who you are.) I suppose the impetus to ask was a series of conversations about past medical challenges. I had recounted a remark someone had made: “Do you ever just ask yourself, ‘Why me?’?” In fact, I hadn’t asked myself that question. On the contrary, at some point in facing Nathalie’s four neurosurgeries, I’d had the sudden realization, Why not me?!

If you stop for a moment and think about all the things that have to go right just to enable you to be awake and reading this post, you’ll be amazed that any of us is upright and functional — let alone following some Schlangenweg up the mountain.

Many of you know that I am not religious in the least. I subscribe to a view of a universe that is neither for nor against us: it just is. The beauty of science, love, friendship, art, music, even morality itself — those human accomplishments are real, but I am convinced that they are generated in and through our transactions with the world and the others we find in it.

Early in my intellectual development, I fell very much under the spell of Heraklitus: the cosmos does not see itself the way we must see it, yet we are constantly tempted — to project our needs and our perspective onto it. Nevertheless, the fact that the cosmos allows for this projection at all inspires a certain awe — awe at what the cosmos allows us to believe about it, but also awe at the power of those beliefs to shape our experience.

To this day, I still find Heraklitus’s dictum, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, sustaining in good times and not so good. The customary translation is “Human character is human fate,” playing on the grammatical ambiguity of anthropoi, but I prefer a more accessible, if challenging, translation:

People make the lives they deserve.

Over the years, and especially in my work in philosophical counseling (yes, that is a thing), people have often responded rather negatively to my translation. It may provoke a reaction, but it’s easy to misunderstand. None of us chooses the circumstances of our existence. Heidegger was right about this: We were thrown into this world, a world already in progress, and we have to find a way to “get along.” There’s nothing about what we were thrown into that we deserve, so the referent of “deserve” in my translation is none of those unchosen features. To put it simply, it’s what we make of our lives that we deserve. By our choices, we inflict their consequences on ourselves — and on others.

“That’s all fine,” someone might object, “but my choices are made under conditions that are also beyond my control — how can I deserve that?” An excellent complaint, but it’s not so much a complaint about my translation or Heraklitus’s message, as about the human condition itself. We always — all of us — choose under less than ideal conditions, because, as Heraklitus reminds us, nature hides from us. We feel compelled to walk forward on this path, but it’s mostly dark, so we grope our way along as best we can. Occasionally, there’s the lightening flash — and for a moment, it’s as if we can see things as they are.

But here’s the thing: In the moment just after the lightening flash, there’s a sense of seeing, but strangely mixed with the realization that you didn’t have time during the flash to look at anything. Simply registering the world isn’t looking.

I think that’s exactly why Heraklitus chose this metaphor: The way the cosmos would see itself is like the moment of the flash: it’s just there, not disoriented, as judged by our own goals and motives, but simply unoriented. Its kosmoi, the cosmic order, is not for us; we are responsible for our own orientation in that cosmos. We don’t just see; we look — and look for.

The moment just after the lightening flash is where the power of narrative becomes inescapably obvious. We “get oriented” by choosing and arranging bits and pieces of this cosmos into a story, complete with a familiar arc and denouement. The way up and the way down are one and the same, but the stories are different. Very different, judging by der Schlangenweg.

But the power of our stories is not limitless. I could not, by just retelling, make Luiza whole and strong again. When we run into obstinate reality, when we see the suffering of others, it must in some way remind us of our frailty, too. In the long run, Hume says, Nature will maintain her rights, whatever they may be. We can create and we can destroy, but we cannot force the cosmos to see things our way.

So, what should any of us tell ourselves about the suffering of a fellow being? And more importantly, what should we tell ourselves when we seem to be powerless in the face of that suffering? Here’s what I told myself. Often.

This universe just is, and confronted with my own thrownness into this cosmic order that was not, is not for me, I’m left with the stories I can tell, stories that, on good days, are grounded and give me a sense of direction. The path was dark — at times, very dark — and along the way, I waited, gathered information, made the best judgments I could — and took one step at a time. Sometimes, it seemed, I found a clearing, a place from which I thought I could see. Sometimes not. I comforted, laughed, cried, nourished, played games, cherished. And above all, I tried to tell good stories.