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Living By Self Definition – Is Strephon A Philosopher?

Issues: … self-definition … self … self images … philosopher … philosophy …

Who defines us in life, even in outer life things?

A tennis friend from when I played at the club for years visited me yesterday and subtly questioned whether I was a philosopher or not.

This was my reply:

‘I call myself a philosopher because I philosophize sometimes in my writings. I go into the nature of life as we experience it. What is sex, for instance? What is my disease? Who am I at this point?’

‘Yes, but there is Hegel and Kant …’

‘And little me, even though I am know a bit in the world because of my writings. I don’t say I am a great philosopher. I hardly have a great body of work. But I do answer philosophic questions, like the problem of subjectivity.’

He looked at me, his eyes a-twinkle.

Whether I make a significant contribution to the world is not for me to judge, but for future generations. If my writings last past my death then something is there. It is for others to decide the value of my thought. It is for me the task to produce it.”

(conversation modified for clarity’s sake)

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION

At first as we live in the original family we learn how those close to us define us and adapt. Do my parents’ and teachers’ images of me define me? How much can I adapt and be them? Or do these images and expectations not fit me?

Then in the teen and young adult years we are expected to define ourselves: pick a profession or role to live by. ‘We will send you to college, but only for four years. What will you study?’

Some of us, like myself don’t know what we want to do in life so early in our existence. All together I was in eight undergraduate schools and four graduate schools before I graduated with my two Masters degrees, one in English Literature and one in Psychological Counseling. I loved learning and competing for good grades, except when I did not like the subject, like learning French with all its grammar rules. I got a D there from an awful professor.

• The point being that we go into a job or into a school and there we get defined by study and graduation in the subjects we choose to learn in.

Some of us choose job roles and if we do well in their goals and skills we are that successful person of that job.

We qualify in society through feedback in grades, honors and money for what we accomplish. We define ourselves by our successes.

This is all done by the age thirty. At thirty we can be well defined for some kind of career or job, even if we need more study and development.

However, we are not our jobs though we may think so.

I had a recent career as a club tennis player, a totally useless role given us by society, even with little badges and trophies for winning matches in tournaments. Who is the best among us that year? I was runner-up in one of these tournaments but I saw through them and did not stay to get my medal and ribbon.

What could I do with it? I couldn’t make money, and money I needed since not working anymore I was greatly reduced in income.

I saw then with us older men club players how we all tried to improve in tennis playing and play with ‘the best guys.’ Of course that is more fun and even at our end of life we seemed to need positive images for ourselves.

THE ART OF SELF-DEFINITION

Who is the best actress? Who is the top expert in the field? Who works the hardest and produces the biggest results?

These are measures of accomplishments, aren’t they?

Yet if others don’t know how good you are, how do you expect them to respect you and want to be around you where success, even for them, lies?

When I was thirty I was at a New York City party and there was Maggie Smith, an actress, sitting and talking with a cigarette holder in her golden hand. What was she talking about? Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! Everything was wonderful! This director and that director that she had worked with, all wonderful. She just loved her directors, and her fellow actors were marvelous also.

Never once did Maggie Smith praise herself directly. She did not have to. She had fifteen of us men and women around her on three sides listening to her marvelous stories. By implication also Maggie Smith must also be wonderful since she had worked with such wonderful people as she described who made movies and staged stage plays.

• After about fifteen minutes of this I got the point and left her ‘adoring circle of fans.’

In life you define yourself for others or they don’t know how good you are.

But you learn how to do this so people don’t react negatively against you.

Don’t be honest, be positive, appreciative, nice, everything’s wonderful kind of stuff.

I used to go to the lectures of Gerald Heard. One time Oscar Williams, the poetry anthologist, the best in America at the time with huge sales, my father, visited me and I took him to a Heard lecture.

After the exciting lecture we congregated around Heard with other followers. Heard was talking non-stop in an erudite high English accent. My father tried to enter the ‘conversation’ many times, but he never made it. He was a fascinating public speaker himself who had great wit and humor.Afterwards, my father said to me, ‘he sure likes to talk, doesn’t he?’

How could my father miss the point, I wondered. Oscar Williams likes to talk and be the center of attention as well. I had just experienced this of my father at university meetings and talks he gave. He was big time also and could command the center of attention for at least 45 minutes,

I observed as his son and a nobody. Who listened to me? Who read my work and appreciated it? Who gave me a professor job?

Nobody!

I was not qualified enough. And I did not push my own ore in the sea of life. I followed. I listened. I absorbed. I worked damn hard at things I did not want to do since I had not defined them as me.

So now late in the game of life I am friendly questioned on calling myself a philosopher.

My reply: if I don’t self-define myself how will people know. Plus I do write philosophic and psychological things at a high level of thinking and writing skill.

Some know it. Some have given me feedback. They don’t have to do this.

LESSON

Define yourself at your various stages of life. Don’t be so dependent on others defining you. Know what you do well and go with that. Tell people your successes as entertaining stories. Let them be true stories, yet embellished stories.

• If people don’t know you how can they appreciate you? How can people appreciate you if you don’t tell them what you do best?

How do you become interesting to others? How do you become so interesting and valuable to people that they even pay you for what you give them?

Define yourself as a successful person in what you do, and then make sure you develop in such a way that you are successful.

I don’t think Maggie Smith was a great actress. But she did receive notice in the news when she died as a nice old lady recently. (CORRECTION: MAGGIE SMITH STILL ALIVE AS OF JULY 8, 2009) Interesting! I can imagine that Maggie Smith realized that you can just be an actress on stage and succeed at this profession and earn a good living by it. You must be an actress off stage as well and entertain wherever you can grab an audience.

I imagine Maggie Smith went to thousands of parties and gave her wonderful, wonderful talks thousands of times.

What else was she going to do?

If people don’t know you how can you know yourself?

1. Show them you are something, show them you have valuable things to give.
2. Define yourself in this life and keep defining yourself.

It will go better for you …

Don’t lie but be imaginative with the truth.

Pick the best that you can do and keep doing it, getting better all the time.

But let others know how good you are at what you do, and prove the point.

My father was good as a public speaker, but Gerald Heard, also a writer, was better.

My father, Oscar Williams, never got a word in edgewise, with Gerald Heard dominating the conversation on that beautiful Southern California sunny Sunday in the glorious springtime of my first adulthood.

Don’t kid yourself! I was depressed a lot of the time, but learning life’s lessons fast day by day.

What are you learning for yourself today?

What? I can’t hear you!

…

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