주말에 자고 일어나 보니 어느덧 12월이 되었다. 나를 낳아주고 항상 관대하기만 했던 12월인데 올해는 어떨지 모르겠구나.
문뜩 근래 들어 필요에 의한 독서만 있었다는 마음 아픈 사실에 구입 해놓고 읽지 못했던 알랭 드 보통의 책을 한권 들었다. 영국 Vintage가 출판한 책인데(미국은 아마도 Grove Press), 원제는 'The Consolations of Philosophy'로 우리 말로 풀이하면 철학의 위안 정도가 되겠으나 이상하게 한국어 번역본은 '젊은 베르테르의 기쁨'이다. (순식간에 B급 소설로 전락하는 기분이 드는 요상한 제목이다)
드 보통의 성공의 바탕이자 그의 능력은 깊이가 있고 다소 어려울 수 있는 철학적 사유를 유머러스하고 명쾌하게 풀어낸다는 것이다. 개인적으로 철학의 대중화에 기여하는 그의 노고를 높이 평가하고 싶고, 동시에 이러한 상업적 성공을 시기하는 배타적인 철학자들이 순수성과 학자로서의 위엄 등을 내세우며 비판하는 모습이 그려진다. 그는 자신의 머리가 벗겨지고 있어서 이런 책을 집필한 걸까 문뜩 궁금하네...
According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion should be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises. Taking mathetmatics as the model of good thinking, philosophers began to search for an appproximation of that discipline's objective certainties within the context of ethical life. Thanks to reason, one's status could - these thinkers proposed - be fixed through the agency of an intellectual conscience, instead of being abandoned to the whims and emotions of the market square. If rational examination revealed that one had been unfairly treated by the judgement than by the ranting, say, of a deluded stranger bent on proving that two and two amounted to five.
Throughout his Meditations(A.D. 167), the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, moving in the unstable world of Roman politics, continually reminded himself that any comment made about his character or achievements had to be subjected to the test of reason before he allowed it to affect his self-conception. "[One's decency] does not depend on the testimony of someone else." he insisted, thereby challenging his society's faith in an honor-based assessment of people. "Does what is praised become better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what of gold, ivory, a little plant?" Rather than be seduced by others' falltery or strung by their insults, Marcus aimed to take his bearings from the person he knew himself to be: "Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised."
Intelligent Misanthropy
1. If we have accepted well-founded criticism of our behavior, paid heed to targeted anxieties about our ambitions and assumed proper responsibility for our failures, and yet if we continue to be accorded low status by our community, we may be tempted to adopt the approach taken by some of the greatest philosophersof the Western tradition: We may, through an unparanoid understanding of the warps of the value system around us, settle into a stance of intelligent misanthropy, free of both defensiveness and pride.
2. When we begin to scruntinize the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error. Chamfort, voicing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers both before and after him, put the matter simply: "Public opinion is the worst of all opinions."
The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public's reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. "One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority," the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: "The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice.That's the tradition, they explain."
3. Painful though it may be to acknowledge the poverty of public opinion, the very act of doing so may somewhat ease our anxieties about status, mitigate our exhausting desire to ensure that others think well of us, and calm our panicked longing for signs of love.
The approval of others may be said to matter to us in two very different ways: materially, because the neglect of the community an bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us signs of respect.
It is in relation to this second consequence of inattention that the benefits of the philosophical approach best reveal themselves, for rather than allow every instance of opposition or neglect to wound us, we are invited by the philosophers first to examine the justice of others' behavior. Only that which is both damning and true should be permitted to shatter our esteem. We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another's approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person's views deserve to be listened to - the process, that is, whereby we seek the love of those for whom, as we discover upon studying their minds, we have scant respect.
We might then start rancorously to disdain certain others as much as they disdain us, planting our feet in a misanthropic stance for which the history of philosophy is replete with the most fortifying models.
4. "We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors... We shall then see that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor," argued Arthur Shopenhauer, a leading model of philosophical misanthropy.
In Parerga and Paralipomena(1851), the philosopher proposed that nothing could more quickly correct the desire to be liked by others than a brief investigation into those others' true characters, which were, he asserted, for the most part excessively brutish and stupid. "The term coquin meprisable[contemptible rogue] is alas applicable to an unholy number of people in this world." And even worse, when people were not evil, they tended to be plain dull. Schopenhauer summed up the state of affairs by quoting Voltaire: "La terre est couverte de gens qui ne meritent pas qu'on leur parle" ("the earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to").
Ought we really to take the opinions of such people so seriously? asked Schopenhauer. Must we continue to let their verdicts govern what we make of ourselves? "Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of his audience if it were known to him that, with the exception of one or two, it consisted entirely of deaf people?"
- from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety(2004), edited by Tom
