Everybody Has One
Although such a notion was already scarcely imaginable from a historical or professional point of view when Adorno dusted off “the teaching of the good life” as the ancient and near-perennial “true field of philosophy” in the introduction to his Minima Moralia, this was also the time of the first and, as things would unfold, stunted, flowering of the golden age of consumer bliss, the tenacious memory of which has so sorely plagued the American political landscape from the moment it had receded sufficiently to appear in our wistful collective rear-view mirror.
“The good life” certainly sounds like something about which anyone at all might venture an opinion. Indeed, the assumption that we would underlies the very form of the Platonic corpus, in which philosophy first appears on the western stage, namely, the dialogue. And, proto-post-modernist that Plato turns out to have been, it was their slyly democratic form above all else that proved to be the content of his investigations. Since, under the strict, if, arguably, hallucinatory template of the theory of forms, knowledge is rendered dubious if not entirely impossible, and as wisdom without knowledge is highly problematic at best — as we know, Socrates rated himself wiser than others only in that, unlike them, he knew that he did not know — it falls to the practice itself, the incessant seeking after wisdom, that ever-unrequited love, to instantiate the good life: in other words, sitting around discussing what it might or might not be with other men of sufficient leisure, or privilege, to find the time to pursue such questions is what it actually is. And if the cost of the leisure in which philosophy comes to life should include warfare, slavery, extreme wealth disparity, hunger, the domestic oppression of women, or just the everyday labor of others, well, let’s hope that the odd Noble Lie will keep the thoughts of the righteous attentive to their proper sphere and the noses of the rest to their grindstones.
If it was the professional philosophers, the Sophists, who bore the brunt of Socrates’s famous irony, this was as much as to say that to lay claim to a proprietary position is precisely the wrong approach to wisdom, perhaps even to lay claim to a position at all — not that philosophers, the Platonic Socrates included, have enjoyed much success in articulating just what their most crucial positions ever were, and under one reading of its history, philosophy is more a map of the misreadings of prior mis-speakings than the elegant dialectical dance of the spirit as which Hegel has so compellingly portrayed it. No surprise, then, that among the brightest hope of the Athenian state, the idle ephebes who hung on Socrates’s every word, opinion seems more commonly to have been bought into, assigned or osmosed by birth or affiliation, or insinuated by a roving class of cynics, and neither earned nor as yet very deeply tested, whereas, for their humble master, opinion implied responsibility, a commitment deeper, more personal, and more dangerous than country, or party, or family, or class. And nowadays we realize as well, and no doubt still imperfectly, that even language itself — the stranglehold of grammar, the embeddedness in words of antiquated social values, the tendency of one to invoke another almost of its own accord, the tempo or color of a culture that it embodies, the problem of Nietzsche’s “pocket”¹ — as well as the pressures of the law and, simply, of the way things are — the system, if you will — not to mention chance associations, conspire to define a gravitational field of influence such that we cannot really be said to possess our opinions, but are rather possessed, and long before we ever come to articulate them. What we imagine is the most personal and honest thing about us is usually just another social (and commercial) marker of our conformity, of what particular sort of target, or weapon, we happen to be.
Throughout the history of western philosophy, the effort to locate the still point from which the necessity behind the messy flux of life’s uncertainties could finally be established, typically a metaphysical fulcrum on which it hoped to rest an irresistible ethics, and to which even the stoical Nietzsche with his steam-punk-thermodynamics, the Eternal Return of the Same, was not immune, has constantly troubled its dreams. Perhaps no surprise that it has often fallen to the model of the dreamier aesthetic realm, of beauty and the sublime, and the quondam (at least aspirational) certainty, or uniformity, of response and assessment within it, to prefigure the synthetic universality of opinion — er, judgment — tout court. But taste, that charming and melancholy relic of the past on which it was predicated, an inherently social if historically labile category, has degenerated as the assumption of a common store of cultural values gradually proved chimerical, or too exclusionary, quaint, or simply too time-consuming to sustain. Even Adorno’s powerful argument for a honed subjectivity as the only meaningful objectivity,² on the basis of which some at least local and specific purchase on the nature of the good life seemed impossible to dispute, disintegrates under the dead gaze of the multitude, or rebuffs any who has not subjected herself to the same excruciating austerities, remaining an ideal trapped within itself, ineffable in its very specificity, a Platonic form from the bottom up rather than the top down. And who, anymore, is equipped even to agree with him, however fervently she may desire precisely that?
When we picture a seductively eccentric if perhaps slightly fanatical cabal staking out a corner of the blistering agora day after day, worrying notions that have insensibly seeped through the fabric of language into the higher realm of the spirit, the whole enterprise might strike us as a good deal sillier and more harmless than the impressively enduring if frequently cross-purpose dialogue that constitutes the history of philosophy (but which ignominiously, per Whitehead, remains a mere series of footnotes to the former), and if the whole thing seems to many, or, honestly, to most, a kind of trickery, and perhaps not such innocent trickery after all, it thereby hearkens back to its original milieu and the state-sanctioned murder, auto-da-fé, or crypto-suicide with which it all began.
The good life, the ground on which it might have continued at least to imply the universal dialogue, is no longer even a remote possibility in the minds of the greatest practitioners of philosophy, a Heidegger, a Derrida, and certainly not an Adorno (for all that it once served his rhetorical purposes to invoke it), neither collectively nor even singly: Es gibt kein richtiges leben im falschen, as he paralyzingly, if surprisingly judiciously, announced. And if it is adumbrated only in art, the good life, that is, as he at least still tended to believe — Stendhal’s promesse de bonheur – art today is all but invisible, unintelligible, mute, and it is useless beyond the delicacy of a Kant, a Wilde, or an Adorno to us now. In that, they are finally just like the rest of us. The life we have made, even ostensibly informed by their occasional guidance — and does anyone dare suggest it is a good one? — has tarnished if not obliterated even the once glorious work of the past, all of which, in any case, is headed exactly where we are. It has no place for art except “the market,” and what surer way of destroying the remaining (dis)interest of those who otherwise might have cared, who might have encouraged others to care?
From the time I first read Plato, late in my seventeenth year, I became almost comically wary of expressing my (own, sic) opinion. Reluctant to intrude where I did not belong, perhaps fearing to betray my own ignorance, I did just that. I was as if embarrassed, suddenly aware of how blatantly naked my erstwhile ignorance had been, like Adam and Eve after the fruit, and I felt shame in it as they did in their knowledge. In attending to that phrase now, I can only think of Kant’s gentle consolation to the effect that “humiliation is the beginning of self-knowledge,” and I regret that I didn’t respect my ignorance enough not to betray it. Or at least I imagine I do.
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1 “As if every word were not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have been put!” (Nietzsche. Human, All too Human. Tr. by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Volume 2, part 2, Section 33; p. 316.)
2 See, for example, “Anyone who, drawing on the strength of his precise reaction to a work of art, has ever subjected himself in earnest to its discipline, to its immanent formal law, the compulsion of its structure, will find that objections to the merely subjective quality of his experience vanish like a pitiful illusion…” (Adorno. Minima Moralia. London: New Left Books, 1978. Section 43, pp. 69-70)
John Wronoski is a former antiquarian bookseller, art dealer, and curator. He is the author of the book-length exhibition catalogue, Boris Lurie: A Life in the Camps, and has essays in numerous art-related publications, most recently, Heide Hatry’s Icons in Ash (Station Hill Press).