The Shrink and the Sage E-Book

Antonia Macaro

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 293

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Based on their Financial Times Weekend column, philosopher Julian Baggini and his psychotherapist partner Antonia Macaro offer intriguing answers to life's questions. Can infidelity be good for you? What does it mean to stay true to yourself? Must we fulfil our potential? Self-help with a distinctly cerebral edge, the shrink and the sage - aka Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro - have been dispensing advice through their FT column since October 2010. Combining practical advice on personal dilemmas with meditations on the meaning of concepts like free will, spirituality and independence, this book - their first together - expands on these columns and adds much more. Through questions of existential unease, metaphysical trauma and - for instance - how much we should care about our appearance, intellectual agony uncle and aunt team Baggini and Macaro begin to piece together the answer that we'd all like to hear: what is the good life, and how we can live it?

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Text copyright © 2012 Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

‘The Shrink and the Sage’ is the name of a regular column written by the authors which appears in the FT Weekend section of the Financial Times newspaper. This book includes some material based on columns which originally appeared in FT Weekend. Those passages appear with the permission of the copyright owner, The Financial Times Limited.

Cartoon on p. 47 © Chris Madden

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Minion by Marie Doherty

CONTENTS

Title page

Copyright

About the authors

Introduction

The way of Aristotle

PART ONE

Being the best you can

The Shrink

The Sage

The problem with happiness

The Sage

The Shrink

On goals

The Shrink

The Sage

Being true to yourself

The Shrink

The Sage

What should you do before you die?

The Shrink

The Sage

Being torn

The Sage

The Shrink

Dealing with emotions

The Sage

The Shrink

What should you be proud of?

The Sage

The Shrink

Gut feelings and intuitions

The Shrink

The Sage

Contrary to appearances?

The Shrink

The Sage

Will and resolution

The Sage

The Shrink

The varieties of self-love worth having

The Shrink

The Sage

On self-deception

The Shrink

The Sage

The status of status

The Sage

The Shrink

Are you responsible?

The Sage

The Shrink

The happy pessimist

The Shrink

The Sage

No regrets?

The Sage

The Shrink

Meaning and spirituality

The Shrink

The Sage

Thought and action

The Sage

The Shrink

On paying attention

The Sage

The Shrink

PART TWO

Psychology for philosophers

Julian Baggini

Philosophy for psychotherapy

Antonia Macaro

Conclusion: the serenity mantra

Notes

Julian Baggini is founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and the author of numerous books including The Pig That Wants to be Eaten and The Ego Trick.

Antonia Macaro has many years’ experience as an existential therapist and philosophical counsellor, and is the author of Reason, Virtue and Psychotherapy.

INTRODUCTION

Everyone with the slightest jot of wisdom, from the Buddha to the jaded old soak behind the bar, would ruefully nod in acquiescence with writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor’s line: ‘Life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.’ No wonder that the marketplace in life guidance is so crowded with both buyers and sellers. Canny shoppers might reasonably conclude: nothing works.

But while it’s true that no thing works, some things work. There is no secret, magic formula, no algorithm for living a good, satisfying life. But in the accumulated wisdom of the generations there are ideas and practices that can help us to deal with the problems of living that come as the non-negotiable fee for the privilege of being born. If we can use them well, we can develop practical wisdom: the ability to think for ourselves and make better choices about how to live.

There is a huge risk of hubris in daring to write about such matters. But by doing so we do not make any claims about our own wisdom. One of the features of practical wisdom is that you can’t tell how much of it people have by finding out what they know. Just as a clever mechanic can accomplish more with a single screwdriver than an incompetent one with a fully-equipped garage, so a little knowledge can go a long way for a wise person, while a lot can be wasted on a fool. All we claim is that we have access to a well-stocked garage, which we invite you to visit and use as you see fit.

Our toolkit is equipped with the resources of both psychotherapy and philosophy. It might not quite look as you’d expect. In particular, there is a widespread per­ception that both psychotherapy and philosophy are centrally concerned with exposing hidden depths. Philosophy pulls back the veil of appearances and reveals the real world for what it is, while psychotherapy is mainly an exploration of the unconscious. But while it is the case that some truths lie buried and things are often not as they seem, there is no reason to systematically concentrate on the invisible rather than the visible. In therapy, for instance, the reasons people give for their behaviour are often more illuminating than speculation about motives they might not be aware of.

We offer no grand unified theory. Our perspectives, tools and insights were gleaned from centuries-old philosophy and recent research in psychology. They also reflect the experience, over many years, of talking to people who were trying to work out how to live, and reflecting on those conversations. But although we draw from many sources, it’s very important to us that what we say fits into a coherent framework. We have striven to avoid the kind of promiscuous pick-and-mix approach that ends up with a hodgepodge of incompatible, contradictory advice from different thinkers and systems.

We would describe our overall ethos as a minimalist one: while we believe that we can do things to make life better, solve some problems and make others less debilitating, we do not believe that lasting, uninterrupted contentment is a reasonable goal, even if some people do manage to achieve it. We hope and believe our resources can be of help, but they will not solve all your problems because life’s problems are just not like that.

In Part One we scrutinise twenty potentially tricky spheres of life. In Part Two we each explain a little about our approach. But before getting going we thought it would be useful to outline the central ideas of the philosopher and psychologist who has most influenced our thinking about problems of living: Aristotle. His work is a rare find when it comes to questions of how to live. Although he wrote over two thousand years ago, lacking all kinds of knowledge we now take for granted (and of course getting some things completely wrong as a result), his understanding of being human is more insightful and relevant than many modern theories. We have both taken much inspiration from his framework for the good life, and his influence can be seen behind every page of this book. We hope that filling in some of the background to our perspective will help to illuminate both the connections between the topics we discuss and any questions we don’t cover within these pages.

If you want to know more, give Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics a go. It’s essentially a set of lecture notes and so you may need to join a few dots, but we believe it’s well worth the effort, as this is one book that really merits the over-used tag of ‘essential reading for everyone’.

Although this book has two voices, they are intended to be in harmony, complementing more than contrasting with each other. Whether or not they’re singing the right tune is for you to decide.

THE WAY OF ARISTOTLE

Practical wisdom

To say Aristotle was a philosopher is an understatement. He was arguably the greatest polymath who has ever lived. As well as writing some of philosophy’s foundational texts on abstract matters of logic and metaphysics, he also turned his mind to biology, drama and the ordering of human affairs. His ability to seamlessly move from the abstract to the concrete is nowhere more evident than in his writings on ethics, and is encapsulated in an idea he put at the centre of a good human life: practical wisdom, phronēsis. If we have this we’ll reliably come up with the right judgements about how to act in different situations.

The question is, how do we go about developing it? First of all we need to think through our values and reach a good awareness of the sorts of things that contribute to a good life. Then it’s a question of gaining the skills to put this understanding into practice. These include thinking clearly about ourselves, our situation, other people, what is and is not possible; sharpening the ability to select and assess potential goals, work out the best way to achieve them, monitor their consequences, and use what we learn to adapt and change.

But good decision-making is only the first step. It’s just as important that the appropriate actions flow from it without too much struggle. Pushing ourselves to stick to our deliberations while gritting our teeth is better than not implementing them at all, but the ideal is to be able to follow them gracefully and easily. Reason will still have to guide this process, however, by instigating the actions and habits that can help us to develop the relevant qualities and character traits. This is how we become more likely to do the right thing automatically, without having to cogitate at every turn.

There is nothing mystical or mysterious about this ability. Aristotle’s ideas have a striking parallel in contemporary psychology’s concept of expert intuition. Once you’ve become an expert in any field, the best course of action is liable to pop up without the need to articulate the exact reasons behind it. Of course your judgement is always fallible, and it’s good practice to try to work out the rationale for it. Nonetheless, explicit justification often comes after the event, which is just as well, since we often have to rely on experts to make good decisions quickly. In this sense practical wisdom is simply expertise in the art of living.

Developing practical wisdom is not easy, but Aristotle has a useful device to think about it. It’s the doctrine of the mean. The idea is that we are not faced with a binary choice to be, say, assertive or unassertive, courageous or timid, hedonistic or puritanical. Instead, we have to find a place on a scale that is appropriate for us and the situation we’re in. That place is called the mean. This is how Aristotle puts it:

For example, fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain can be experienced too much or too little, and in both ways not well. But to have them at the right time, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the mean and best; and this is the business of virtue. Similarly, there is an excess, a deficiency and a mean in actions.1

But the mean is not bland moderation for all. We shouldn’t always aim at a modest amount of anger: some situations might call for great anger (although how it’s expressed is another matter) and others for none at all. The mean should be finely calibrated to our particular circumstances. Aristotle is very clear about this, explicitly stating that the mean for human action is not like a mathematical average. Take weight, for example. 50kg is too light for a six-foot man and 100kg too heavy. But the mathematical average – 75kg – is not necessarily the right one for any given individual. A slight-framed dancer may need to be lighter, a body-builder closer to the excess. As with much else in the good life, there is no algorithm for calculating the mean.

Maybe we don’t think about it in these terms, but many life issues we find difficult are struggles to find the mean. We may want to take more risks, be more confident, more patient, more tenacious, more able to resist immediate gratification. We may wonder whether we are pushing ourselves too hard or not hard enough, at what point tolerance gives way to being a doormat or courage to recklessness, what the right balance is between achievement and enjoyment. This dynamic is evident in many of the problems of living discussed in this book.

At times the mean is hard to locate, and Aristotle gives us two rules of thumb to deal with those situations. One is to steer away from the more harmful extreme. When you see the sign warning of bears, is it cowardly to turn back or appropriately brave to carry on? If you’re really not sure, turn back: better to have missed out on a lovely walk than to be mauled to death by an angry grizzly. The other is to steer away from the extreme towards which we are naturally inclined. In any sphere of human behaviour most of us tend more towards one pole. If you are inclined to be excessively cautious, say, you can gently nudge yourself towards the mean by taking tiny steps to be slightly more daring.

Moving towards the mean is possible because, unlike other objects in the universe, human beings have the capacity to change. As Aristotle put it, ‘a stone that naturally falls downwards could not be made by habituation to rise upwards, not even if one tried to habituate it by throwing it up ten thousand times … nor anything else that naturally behaves in one way be habituated to behave differently’. In contrast, good settled dispositions, which Aristotle calls virtues, ‘arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation’.2

We are responsible for building our character despite the deep roots of our behaviour in our childhood experience (and, we would now add, genetic inheritance). But how can we effect these changes? Primarily through habituation. ‘We become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre’, wrote Aristotle. ‘So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by temperate actions, and courageous by courageous actions.’3 Again, Aristotle’s ancient insight finds itself vindicated by contemporary psychological research. Various forms of behaviour therapy work precisely because changing what you do can influence how you think and feel.

The aim of all this self-training is not unthinking automaticity, but the intertwining development of our rational deliberation and our immediate responses. Aristotle’s account of the interplay between instinct and reflection has similarities with ‘dual-process’ models of the brain, such as the one described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. This describes two systems: System 1 is concerned with fast, automatic, unconscious thinking, System 2 with slow, conscious deliberation.4 Although Kahneman points out that the latter has little direct control over the former, it seems evident that reason can exert indirect influence on some instinctive reactions, for example by initiating habit change.

This does not happen without friction. If we have a habitual inclination to be impatient, say, and decide to cultivate patience, initially our only option may be to go against the grain and control our behaviour, suppressing the impulse to butt in, move on or give up. But if we persevere, eventually we should come to feel as well as act appropriately. We have achieved virtue or excellence (aretē) when inclination and deliberation feed harmoniously into each other.

The good life

Practical wisdom includes a good understanding of what is valuable in life. You cannot judge where the mean lies between cowardice and bravery, for instance, unless you are clear whether and how much something is worth taking a risk for. The right degree of loyalty will vary depending on how important you think it is to maintain social and family ties when other considerations suggest they should be severed. Any verdict about what it is best to do implies a judgement about what kind of life is better or worse.

We tend to be suspicious of general pronouncements about how best to live, often preferring to see these choices as purely subjective. But it wouldn’t be surprising if some elements of the good life were more or less universal, given the many experiences that all humans share. At the very least we should all be able to agree that a good human life is bound to look different from a good life for a cat or a pig. Rolling in mud may be fun sometimes, but doing it as much as a pig is no way for a human to live.

Trying to identify one or a set of key ingredients for the good life has been a kind of philosophical parlour game for millennia, over which time the key contenders have remained pretty constant. Richard Layard, for instance, believes there are strong evidential grounds for identifying five factors as being the most important for happiness: family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and health. Although Aristotle is interested in flourishing rather than happiness (see ‘The problem with happiness’ in Part One), he starts his discussion with some of the same usual suspects.

Unlike many other philosophers of his time, Aristotle thought that some material comfort was a suitable part of the good life, since ‘human nature is not self-sufficient for contemplation, but the body must be healthy and provided with food and other care’.5 But money, like health, is only a means to an end, and so he quickly dismisses it as a life-guiding goal. We shouldn’t waste our life amassing material possessions, which we could lose at any point anyway, at the expense of more worthwhile goals. We can make the best of even unfortunate circumstances, just like ‘a shoemaker makes the noblest shoe out of the leather he is given’.6

As for achieving fame or reputation, a common goal of our times, it can’t be the main life pursuit either, according to Aristotle. Not only is it too dependent on other people and the workings of chance, it’s also too indiscriminate. We’d be wrong to want recognition for its own sake, since it’s not the honour that really matters, but receiving it from good people for our true good qualities.7

Good relationships have been widely identified by psychologists as important for well-being. Unfortunately when such studies are reported they tend to focus on quantity rather than quality, suggesting that there is an ideal number of friends we should have. One study suggested that the number of friends a person has at school is a good predictor of future wealth, with every extra friend adding 2 per cent to adult earnings.8 Aristotle is very sensible about this, saying we’d be hard pushed to describe someone who is totally solitary as having a good life: ‘no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods’.9 A good life should include other people, and especially solid relationships based on genuine mutual admiration, rather than merely pleasant or useful ones. However, a good person also ‘wishes to spend time with himself’,10 partly because ‘the wise man can contemplate even when he is by himself’ and so is ‘the most self-sufficient’.11 Important though they are, good relationships with others facilitate rather than constitute the good life.

Aristotle also considers pleasure. He starts with the austere statement that people whose main interest lies in bodily pleasures live lives that are ‘fit only for cattle’.12 Nonetheless, he ends up defending an appropriate degree of pleasure along various lines. First of all, even purely bodily pleasures are good in moderation. We are embodied creatures, and too little appreciation of bodily pleasures can hinder our quest for the good life. It’s only excessive indulgence that is damaging and distracts us from more interesting pursuits.

He also points out that there are different kinds of pleasures, and the best kind derives from being involved in a worthwhile activity. This can sound like high-minded prejudice. Just like when in the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill distinguished the higher pleasures of art and intellect from the lower pleasures of the body,13 there is a suspicion that philosophers try too hard to justify their preferred pleasures over those of hoi polloi. But this is less a matter of mind versus body than intellectual engagement versus passivity. Think, for instance, of listening to music. You could just let it wash over you, or you could attend to it consciously, appreciating its qualities. In the first case, your pleasures are more animal or child-like; in the second, they are distinctively human.

While the example is not particularly Aristotelian, the distinction is, and it’s a key one. Each type of living thing has its own nature or function, and the good life for anything means living in accordance with that. So the good life for human beings involves living in accordance with our nature as rational animals. There are two reasons why this may sound implausible. The first is that we have become more sceptical about the idea of human nature, let alone that of a natural ‘function’. The second is that to place rationality at the centre of human life seems a bit elitist and naive. Aren’t we much more affected by irrational impulses than rational ones?

Aristotle may have overstated the extent to which humans are rational. He did nevertheless give due weight to our embodied nature, while insisting that it should be governed by rationality. The parts of us that are in common with other animals are not denied or suppressed, simply not left to run the whole show.

As for human nature, it need not be understood as something strictly fixed and tied to a notion of our proper function. To say that a good life is one lived in accordance with our nature simply means that it is lived in ways that most fully bring out our potential to live as more than just animals. This involves using reason, but not necessarily in some high-minded, scholarly way. Practical wisdom, as we have seen, lies at the heart of Aristotle’s vision for the good life, and that is something we can all develop, no matter what our academic aptitude. We can talk of human reason in a broad sense, in contrast to simply following instincts unthinkingly.

While Aristotle had some specific views that might seem too prescriptive – he is widely considered to have believed the best kind of life to be contemplative at its core, for instance – his framework is fundamentally pluralistic. This means it can be filled out in different ways, since there are many routes to a distinctively human life. Whether a life is centred on science, art, sport, craft, comedy, or altruism to strangers, it’s a life no other animal can live, not even a chimpanzee or a dolphin.

An essential part of what it means to be human is to have the capacity to deliberate and make choices for ourselves, and no one can provide us with easy answers about what we should do. What we need, and what Aristotle provides, is not a set of prescriptions that diminishes our responsibility to make our own choices, but a philosophy of life that provides a framework for making better ones.

Part One

BEING THE BEST YOU CAN

The Shrink

Imagine being the best possible version of yourself. What would you do? Would you be more confident, tolerant, sociable, go-with-the-flow? Would you sport an impressive knowledge of opera, or nineteenth-century Russian literature? Become a nonchalant polyglot? Climb the highest rungs of your career ladder?

The idea that we should perfect ourselves in some way is deeply engrained in the fabric of our times. Many books are dedicated to self-improvement. Not that it’s always clear how to go about it. It used to be more straightforward. For Samuel Smiles, who published Self-Help in 1859, people should develop the high-minded qualities of application, perseverance and thrift. Now it’s a bit all over the place, and self-improvement can legitimately include wine appreciation. And the advice is often contradictory: do we improve ourselves by learning to express our emotions, for instance, or to control them?

Similarly, fulfilling our potential is such an imperative that a feeling of not living up to it can come to haunt even the most accomplished. Then we are liable to blame ourselves for the gap we perceive between what we think we would be capable of and what is in fact happening in our lives. We imagine that with a little more foresight or application we really could have perfected all our potentialities.

While the impulse to be a better person is nothing but admirable, our thinking about it can go wrong in many ways. Perhaps the worst error is becoming too obsessed with the pursuit of perfection. It’s not uncommon to fear that if we let go of this ideal we’ll sink into a sloppy carelessness, just doing the least we can get away with. At the same time we might wonder whether it’s worth sacrificing our sanity on the altar of high standards. But does it really have to be one or the other? Perhaps it’s our dichotomous thinking that is the problem: perfection or mediocrity; either we always achieve the highest standards or we’re a failure.

Albert Ellis, founder of Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), wrote persuasively about the dogmatic and absolute musts with which we torment ourselves. The belief that in order to be a worthwhile person we must have 100 per cent success, for instance, is neither rational nor helpful. Perfection is not something a human being can achieve. And the more we cling to the demand that we must succeed the less likely we are to do so. It can be paralysing to think too much about end results.

As often, the Stoics have bequeathed us some useful advice: if we take archery as a metaphor, the idea is that we should do our best to shoot as skilfully as we can, but we can never guarantee we’ll hit the bull’s-eye. The aim of shooting well is in our power; but once the arrow has left the bow it’s outside our control. We wrongly imagine we should be able to control outcomes when all we can control is our effort.

Paradoxically, self-improvement cannot survive without acceptance of imperfection and tolerance of failure. Without this softening influence, a concern for betterment can easily turn into a narcissistic focus on oneself, or a self-critical perfectionism.

Another potential mistake is to take too much responsibility for what we make of ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: taking responsibility is good. It allows us to take steps to change things. But it would be unfair to ourselves not to take the situation into account. We don’t exist in a vacuum, and our circumstances can be more or less conducive to flourishing. In a different context we might have been able to develop certain talents and qualities a lot more, but perhaps the conditions were not right for them to grow in the life we actually had.

Finally, we can focus too much on the failures, on what is left unfulfilled. We have to accept that self-improvement can never encompass all aspects of our lives, and that tending some potentialities inevitably means letting others wilt. We have limited resources, and it’s not always possible to devote our energies to all tasks equally. Many high achievers, for instance, will readily admit they haven’t become the best human beings, friends, or partners they could have been. We can never be the best we can in every aspect of our life. That is just part of the human condition.

But loss in one direction may well mean gain in another, and we could choose to pay attention to the potential we did develop instead. You may have left your athletic or business potential unfulfilled but gained a rewarding domestic life, or vice versa. Given our limitations, we should think carefully about what we’re going to invest energy in. It’s good to try to boost our memory, say, but if we allocate too much of our resources to it there will be a cost in lost opportunities or deterioration somewhere else.

Of course none of this means we should enthusiastically embrace imperfection as an excuse not to make an effort. But only if we accept imperfection will we be able to treat ourselves and others kindly when success is elusive.

The ideal to be the best we can be should be seen as just that: an ideal. So we should concentrate on doing the best job we can while fully appreciating the inevitability of imperfection. Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita, founder of Morita Therapy, came up with a catchy version of this thought with his advice to ‘be the best imperfect person you can be’.

Any nagging feelings of dissatisfaction about unfulfilled potential can be constructively interpreted as implicit statements of value. Expressing a need or desire to develop certain areas of our life in ways we have so far neglected, they can help us to steer our actions towards a different, more fulfilling course. But in this as in many other cases, the direction of travel matters more than the finishing line.

The Sage

In the 1920s, French psychologist Émile Coué argued that by reciting the mantra ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better’ we could, by the power of suggestion, make it come true.14 Whether or not such techniques have the desired effect, surely it would be wonderful if they did. How could it ever be worse to be better?

The thought of, say, someone practising air guitar 24/7 should be enough to challenge any assumption that too much improvement is a contradiction in terms. When it comes to being better people, some progressions matter more than others.

Consider, for instance, the difference between what we might call the moral life and the flourishing life. To improve morally is to treat others better and have a more positive impact on the world. To flourish is for your life to go better for you: healthier, full of richer experiences and deeper relationships. In pursuit of this second kind of improvement we tend to focus on what provides the most gain for us: losing weight, learning a new language, controlling our tempers and so on.

What I find interesting, however, is that people often justify these projects by pointing to their altruistic dimensions. When we become better we become more interesting, genial people to be with, they say. Even with that most narcissistic of goals, personal happiness, people will cite evidence that happier people tend to be more generous, sympathetic and caring towards others.

There is some truth to this: morality is usually food for flourishing. But to believe the two always go together is surely too optimistic. There are happy, fulfilled egotists and there are saints who sacrifice their own health, wealth or family lives for a higher good.

To focus too much on self-improvement is to risk directing our attention more towards the merely self-serving sense of betterment and to relegate the moral dimension to second place. To regain a proper focus, we could start by dropping the word ‘self’ and simply strive for improvement, in all its varieties. Coué’s mantra should be changed to: ‘Every day, in a significant way, I’ll try to do better and better.’

This leads to the questions of what exactly it is we’re trying to make better, and how far we should go. What people commonly believe they are trying to make the best of is their potential. Almost everyone thinks they know what their potential is, and many think they can spot it in others, even though by definition whether or not it really exists depends on the development of something that is not yet there. To say someone has the potential to be a great tennis player, for example, is to assume that they are not yet a great tennis player. So when we are thinking about as yet undeveloped abilities, turning potentiality into actuality usually involves a much higher degree of uncertainty than common talk of potential assumes.

For one thing, there are any number of reasons why we might simply fail to make real what is only possible. Resolve, emotional resources, or circumstances might fail us. Also, we might just be wrong. Many aspiring artists, for example, have at some stage to deal with the harsh truth that they are merely quite good and do not have what it takes to be truly exceptional. Potential that appears unlimited to youth may look more finite when seen through more experienced eyes.

Jean-Paul Sartre denounced potential for the false comfort it gives us through thoughts of what we could have been if things had been different. For him, a person is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is’. It’s a false comfort to tell ourselves we could have done more, if circumstances had favoured us. Sartre insists that ‘reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled’.15 To dwell on potential is to define ourselves negatively, in terms of what we are not, rather than positively, for what we are. Potential left undeveloped is nothing more than a hypothetical ability that belongs in our dreams, not as a ghostly presence in our actual lives.

Gallic philosophers are not prone to understatement, and perhaps Sartre makes too much of this. But surely he is right to make us question the extent to which we too readily assume we know what we could be, or could have been. No one can see the future or alternative pasts. Potential that we are not actively trying to develop is nothing more than a hypothetical ability that we can never know we have.

So, it’s good to strive for improvement, as long as we do so free from narcissism and illusions about what our potential might be. But then how far should we go? Despite the pitfalls of perfectionism, I think there is a sense in which it can sometimes be appropriate to strive towards impossible ideals. The thought behind this actually springs from its opposite, a principle attributed to Kant, that ‘ought implies can’.16 In other words, it makes no sense to say that you should do something unless you are able to do so. You can’t tell a pauper that he ought to give a million pounds to charity.

It sounds obvious, which is why I was struck when the philosopher Simon Critchley once told me that he thought that in ethics, ought implies cannot.17