Over roughly the last week, I've been producing a set of new core concept videos on two main works of Plutarch, and I've been doing that as resources for my academic students enrolled at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in a class that's called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life, which is exploring philosophies as ways of life.
So we look at texts that not only give you sort of frameworks, but also useful practices, or as Martha Nussbaum calls them (and I'm bringing this up because this really is the best term in this case) therapeutic arguments. And that's what Plutarch is providing in On Tranquility of Mind, and to a lesser extent in his work How A Person Can Become Consciousness of Their Progress in virtue.
So today I shot several videos on his work On Tranquility of Mind, and one particular line of reasoning that I think might be really interesting to not just talk about and explore. But think about how it applies to our own life, and mindsets and the outcome of our thinking about matters has to do with.
So here's the term that I actually used for the title of the video, desiring or trying to do everything. Nobody can do everything. There's that old saying, you can't have it all. And by have it all, they mean that you not only can't have possession of everything, but you can't apply yourself to do everything at a very high level in life.
As a matter of fact, if you think about it, there's probably far more things that you cannot do at any given point in time, or even over the course of your entire life, than the things that you can do. So you always kind of have to make some choices, decide priorities. But that doesn't mean that we can't feel like or desire to do it all, especially if we've been getting wrongheaded ideas about this from other people, which would include the people we grow up with and we're surrounded with or our friend group.
But I would say that social media has probably contributed to this problem because we have a much greater possibility of comparing ourselves to the at least superficial appearance of the lives of others. And we also get exposed to a much wider variety of possible things to think we ought to be involved with. So I think this is a really helpful discussion.
He gives you examples like he says, not only do people demand to be at the same time rich, and learned, and physically strong, and convivial spirits, and pleasant company, and friends of kings, and rulers of cities. So that's seven different things right there that you're probably never going to combine in one person.But adding to that, unless they shall also have dogs and horses and quails and roosters that can win prizes, they are disconsolate.
And he brings up an example of Dionysus, who was one of the greatest tyrants of his age in Syracuse and Sicily, but he couldn't sing verses better than a poet named Philixenus, and he couldn't get the better of Plato in dialectic, so he was very angry about this. He felt like somehow life is letting him down, and he actually sent Philoxenos into the stone quarries basically to die,and he sold Plato off into slavery. And that's the wrong way to go about things.
So how do we get into this problem? Well, he starts out by saying that it's a matter of having expectations that are too high and aiming at things that are too great. Then when we fail, we blame our destiny and our fortune instead of our own foolishness. And what's the root of this?
Well, he says that it is self-love, which is philautia in Greek. And this makes people desirous of being the first all the time. So that's philoprotos, desiring being number one, we would say, and to be victorious or to be successful in everything. And this is a term philonikos that the Greeks use quite a bit. They took philonikia, this desire for winnings, for superiority, for surpassing others, as a fairly basic human desire. And I think they're probably right about that. People really do enjoy feeling like they've won in some sort of way.
And by not managing this well and being realistic about it, we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble. And Plutarch points out, well, he's got a lot of considerations, but the one that I think is actually the best here is even among the gods, the different gods have different powers, different functions, different domains. But if we think about human beings, no human being can actually combine all these things in one person.
And he brings up, interestingly, the legendary Stoic sage who supposedly could do this. And he says, this is liable to discourage people, including people who are attracted to Stoicism, because they look at this ideal and they're like, oh man, I fall short of that. My life sucks. So this is a real recipe for making your life unhappy by having wrongheaded ideas.
Not only is it impossible to Just to have it all. But there's another deeper reason why that's the case. And it's quite simple. Some of the things that you're trying to combine in one person's life are actually incompatible with each other. They rule each other out.
So he uses a couple interesting examples. If you're going to do training in rhetoric or mathematics, or for that matter, philosophy, that requires a fairly quiet life and some free time. But if you want to be involved in political or the active life, the social life, and attain the friendship of important people, you can't do that without hard work and full occupation of your time.
Likewise, if you want to spend a lot of time on your body, making it really strong and vigorous, you're probably going to make the soul work. And so you can't do everything all at once. They interfere with each other. He also talks about making money. If you want to devote your life to making lots of money, well, that's really cool. That increases your wealth. But if you want to make progress in philosophy, you probably need to make making money a pretty low priority.
So if you're going to try to combine these ways of life with each other, you're not actually going to be successful because they're not compatible with each other. It's going to go on and give some additional advice along these lines and lots of examples. You can go to the text and read it. As a matter of fact, I highly encourage you to do that.
He's going to finish up by talking about something really interesting. So there's this line that in English translation, it's a great line by itself, but I think if you can read it in the Greek, it's got a lot of other resonances to it. So he tells us that when we're trying to actually have it all, what we end up doing is slandering ourselves. We wind up being displeased and we despise ourselves as living an incomplete and trivial life.
So slandering ourselves is a translation of the Greek term soukophantomen. And it's the word that we get sycophant from, basically a butt kisser, somebody who is kissing up to other people. But it also has a really important meaning. Second meaning in ancient Greek, a sycophant was also somebody who would report other people to the authorities to try to get in good with the authorities or maybe even make some money from them. So a narc, a snitch, as we call them in American English.
Why is this interesting to note? Well, you're snitching on yourself when you are being that kind of sycophant. So you're telling somebody, yourself, I guess, the world, other people, that your life isn't a good life.
Being displeased, that's a decent enough translation of akharistomen. And another way you could translate that, because it's coming from a Greek term that means both joy and gratitude, is being ungrateful about the life that you live.
And then this despising, that's kataphronumen. And that is also translatable as have contempt, look down upon. Literally, it combines the terms for downward and for thinking about. And so we look at our own life and we despise it as being needy, missing something, endeus. And a telos so what's being translated as trivial there a better way of translating it would be not having a proper goal to it and thereby being trivial so that's what happens to us if we let these unrealistic ideas about being able to have it all or that we should try to have it all.
And I think that we're probably at greater risk in our current society, perhaps, than they were in ancient times for cultivating these desires because we hear these messages coming from all sorts of directions and we see people being presented as if they actually do have it all when they don't. If we looked closely at their lives, we would see that they're not the perfect combinations of everything good, that their social media account or their publicists or whoever else is presenting them as.
So I think this is a really great passage. I think it would be good for us to keep this in mind when we feel down about not being good at something or not succeeding in some area of our life. We can look at what we actually are good at or successful in to whatever measure we have that and say, that's probably as good as it's going to get for me. And that is good enough, not just for me as a person, but for me as a human being who can't possibly do it all. And if we do that, we're going to have a much more content and happy and tranquil life.
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