17th century moral philosophy is the self-help we need today
How Descartes, Spinoza, and others showed the way to living the best life
How Descartes, Spinoza, and others showed the way to living the best life
The world today is full of self-help. In fact, it is a major industry in the United States with a market on the order of $10 billion and projected to grow to $14 billion by 2025. From diet apps to “life hacks” to spa-like meditation retreats, everyone is looking to improve their lives, either for the moment, when trying to fix a plumbing issue, or, permanently, to eat less, exercise more, or live more mindfully. Self-help has made some self-styled gurus millions, all blessed under the moral veneer of helping others.
The self-help industry is a reflection of late stage capitalism’s one-size-fits-all tendency for markets to serve those with the greatest amount of money to spend. Self-help, rather than being a pursuit of self-knowledge, is something we consume, and, like all consumed things, it is disposable. Books are bought, courses taken, lectures watched, plans started, and discarded, but you are the same as you were before. Maybe you shed a few pounds or got better sleep for a while. Maybe you got in shape. Maybe you dated or took a really nice trip with a lot of credit card points. But all that will be gone because you never really figured out who you were and why you were overweight, out of shape, single, or restless in the first place.
These days self-help is hardly equated with philosophy, and that is a shame because philosophy got there first.
For 17th century philosophers, how to improve one’s life was central to understanding right and wrong. After all, wasn’t the “good life” also the “right life” from an ethical perspective? Central to answering that question was knowing one’s self and thereby enabling the virtuous transformation of the self.
Modern moral philosophy grounds itself in the 18th century Enlightenment, Kant and Hume, whose take on ethics was far more abstract and focused on questions like how moral decision making and reason play together, how does one define right and wrong apart from religious decrees, and what duties and obligations do we owe to one another. This flowering of abstract ethical theory, matching the Enlightenment’s obsession with abstract order in science and art, completely overshadowed the prior century’s seemingly unweighty concern with how to live the good life.
While 17th century philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza are well known for their metaphysics, Hobbes, his political philosophy, and La Rochefoucauld and Shaftesbury hardly known at all, their moral philosophy bears an uncanny resemblance to self-improvement plans.
Unlike today’s self-help, however, their philosophy did not focus on making small changes to one’s life, easy life hacks that leave you more or less the same inside. Their works did not resemble “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” or “The Power of Positive Thinking”. Rather, they focused on a total transformation of one’s thinking. Their goal was no less than a radical self-understanding which ultimately would lead to finding a way to live the good life.
To play self-help guru for a moment: If you are feeling ill from the constant stream of self-help cures in the news and even here on Medium that profess to cure all that ails you, this is the antidote.
Unlike the moral philosophy of later centuries, 17th century philosophy was far more holistic — one might say more right brained as opposed to the more left brained 18th century. It asked a whole host of questions from metaphysics to politics to worthwhile intellectual pursuits because it saw all of it as contributing to the living of the good life. The central question was not “what is the good?” it was “what is the best life?”
Seventeenth century Europe was roiled by religious wars and upheaval. John Calvin’s theology in the 16th century had taken many fledgling Protestant sects by storm, offering a compelling picture of people’s corrupt nature. Nothing could be done for people, and there was nothing we could do. We were damned or saved by the power of God alone and not by anything we try to do for ourselves. Thomas Hobbes, a 17th century philosopher, indeed suggested that people’s motivations were fundamentally selfish, even when they tried to do good.
Calvin and Hobbes set up a challenge for 17th century philosophy that would set the tenor for the rest of the 100 years and into the early 18th century. Reactions such as Arminianism in theology and the philosophy of Descartes and Spinoza promoted the possibility of achieving personal virtue and salvation by one’s own free will and self-knowledge. This flowering of self-help philosophy rediscovered the ethics of antiquity from Plato to the Stoics such as 2nd century Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who laid out their roadmaps to living the very best life hundreds of years earlier.
Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish philosopher, in his Ethics, invited the reader to acquire ‘freedom of mind, or blessedness, from which we shall see how much to be preferred the life of the wise man is to the ignorant man’. Indeed, Spinoza’s ethics were radical, even for its day, in suggesting that the good life, referred to as “felicity”, could be attained “by understanding oneself as part of a non-teleological, infinite causal universe”.
In other words, one cannot live the best life, i.e., achieve felicity, unless one understands the kind of universe one lives in. For Spinoza that was “non-teleological”, meaning without purpose or direction, in which everything happens because it is caused by something else. This is remarkably similar to some Eastern religious thought, especially Buddhism which regards everything that happens to us as manifesting because of prior conditions and mediated by the blind force of karma.
Spinoza’s assertion here is not to insist you blindly follow him like some modern guru. Central to his philosophy is that the best life can only be lived if one undertakes a process of self-discovery, using reason as a guide to discover knowledge. Thus, one is invited, not coerced, to attain goodness through the power of understanding metaphysics.
Spinoza deviated from Descartes and certainly Hobbes in that he saw the pursuit of truth as having priority over accepting one’s intuition or widely held beliefs. This tendency to traverse forbidden ground was one of the things that led him to fall afoul of his religious community and be excommunicated.
Spinoza equated God with Nature, for example, and believed that the path to virtue was in understanding Nature and thereby God. He regarded God to be non-personal and infinite and to manifest a finite universe from his infinite nature. His metaphysical view is that we are all emanations from God, no different than dust or gold, and that we must understand our place in the causal flow of events, a mere finite mode in an infinite universe, not truly separate, but more like a note played on an infinite harp.
Spinoza recommended a course of therapy for those seeking virtue to pursue joy and avoid sadness by managing one’s desire. The best life could be achieved by understanding what one, deep down, desires and through that seek joy. This proto-Cognitive Behavior Therapy intended the seeker of virtue to understand the internal metaphysical causes of their actions, arising from their inner essence, which he called their Virtue. This is fundamentally anti-teleological because it suggests that we ourselves are not acting with purpose but causally. In other words, our inner metaphysical nature drives virtuous actions, but actions that seem to come from us are actually actions done to us. For example, if we steal, that is not because we have a purpose or aim to steal, but something external to our essence, our Virtue, has caused us to steal. If we eat another doughnut or cookie when we know we should not, it is not because we wanted to eat it but because we were caused to eat it.
That does not absolve us from responsibility, however, because Spinoza argues that we must seek self-knowledge of our own inner Virtue and understand the metaphysical causes of our overeating or stealing. We need to seek out different causes in the world that prevent us from engaging in those actions and instead promote tranquility. Hence, even though grounded in abstract concepts of God and infinite causal structures, Spinoza gives us practical advice such as avoiding those things that cause us to act wrongly like doughnut shops.
Spinoza’s identification of the will with the intellect, action with knowing, suggests that we cannot exercise self-control, and there is no such thing as will power. Rather, we can only become free of external causes when we understand ourselves and our desires and appetites. Famously, indeed, Spinoza said, “If men were born free, they would form no concept of good and evil so long as they remained free.”
This is not a dive into moral relativism, mind you. Spinoza is not saying, as Nietzsche would later assume, that we are free to exercise our desires as long as we know what they are or that self-knowledge can lead to some kind of might makes right assertion. In fact, Spinoza took for granted that good and evil are well-defined and that one can only be free if one does “freely what is best”. He suggested a free person would naturally act, not out of envy of others, as underlies much of self-help today, but to help others and promote their advantage. In this he echoes Saint Paul in Galatians 5:1,
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Just as Spinoza’s metaphysics echoes that of Buddhism, his moral philosophy echoes Christianity’s unique focus on sin as being a form of slavery. Spinoza says that slavery is caused by a lack of self-knowledge and that a truly free person will never act deceitfully.
Like today the Seventeenth century philosophers tended to express their moral teachings as simple advice in the form of maxims or aphorisms, sayings that today might be placed on wooden plaques on our walls, posted as quotes under people’s email signatures, and expressed as 280 character tweets. Some of these are pithy quotes like “None Loves himself too little” (Whichcote 1703). These sayings lodge specific teachings in our memories, distilling central concepts into easy to recall phrases.
From Jesus to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus to Proverbs, moral teachers have made use of maxims for centuries. Descartes, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and others published numerous maxims that today we often quote (frequently out of context). These maxims were intended to remind the reader of important points, and, as with today’s out of context soundbites and tweets, they were never intended to be the whole teaching. Rather, one was expected to understand the systematic reasoning leading up to the maxim or proverb so that one could properly understand it.
La Rochefoucauld, a French moralist who attended the same Paris Salon as Pascal, that of Madame de Sablé, was the master of such maxims, publishing a book titled simply Maxims. Unlike Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld had few illusions about human nature. He did not believe that we could achieve perfect virtue by metaphysical knowledge. Rather, he appeared to believe that we simply needed frequent reminding of our corrupt natures. Unlike Calvinists, who focus on our depravity in theological terms, La Rochefoucauld’s maxims expose our everyday vices.
He said, for example, “self-interest, which is accused of all our crimes, often deserves to be praised for our good deeds.”
How many people make a habit of broadcasting their virtuous deeds today? We even have a phrase for it, “virtue signaling”. This isn’t a new problem either. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “When you give to the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). In other words, don’t give out of self-interest or a desire to show others how generous you are.
Likewise, La Rochefoucauld said, “Most men’s gratitude is merely a secret wish to receive greater favors.” How many of us make a little too much show of gratitude for a raise or some praise in the hope that we get more? How virtuous is that?
Because La Rochefoucauld lacked a systematic philosophy, his Maxims are frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted. He was far from cynical and recommended sincerity and integrity as virtues to be practiced. The point of his maxims was to view one’s own motivations skeptically, for he said, “Self-love (amour propre) … is like our eyes, which discover everything and are blind only to themselves.”
Later, an early 18th century philosopher, the Earl of Shaftesbury, would turn against the 17th century tendency to express maxims and aphorisms in favor of the inner “soliloquy”, a self-dissection modeled on, for example, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. This form splits the practitioner into “two distinct persons. He is Pupil and Preceptor. He teaches and he learns” (Shaftesbury 1744). This is not easy, he suggests,
One would think there’s nothing easier for us than to know our own minds — to understand what we are up to — what we are plainly driving at, what we are setting before ourselves as our end, in every occurrence of our lives. But the unspoken language of our thoughts is so obscure that it’s the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out clearly. The right method is to give them voice and accent
Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of William and Mary on the throne, philosophers had grown tired of public self-righteousness coming from of selfish motives, which just goes to prove there is nothing new under the Sun. They argued that all moral performances should have an inner moral center to back them up. The key to that was, as with Spinoza and others, self-knowledge. For Shaftesbury, self-knowledge came from literally questioning oneself.
While Hobbes, Calvinists, and others such as John Locke, argued that all virtue was motivated selfishly, either by Earthly reward or a reward after death in Heaven, Shaftesbury argued that self-interest was inherently immoral as a motivation. He argued rather that human beings are not naturally depraved but virtuous, seeking the well-being of family and friends. He pointed to the “Natural Affections of Parents to their Children, and of Children to their Parents; of Men to their Native Country; and, indeed, of all Men in their several Relations to one another.” In other words, “to love, and to be kind” is inherently pleasurable and brings tranquility to the soul.
The reason we do not indulge in this continuously, argues Shaftesbury, is because we fail to know ourselves well.
One might think that knowing oneself is a product of modern psychology, psychoanalysis for example, but in fact Shaftesbury suggests that we can be our own therapist and find out what our motivations, desires, opinions, and inclinations are.
His method, in his own words, bears a striking resemblance to modern psychological methods of visualization,
when by a certain powerful figure of inward rhetoric the mind apostrophises [speaks to them when they aren’t there] its own fancies, raises them in their proper shapes and personages, and addresses them conversationally, without the least ceremony or politeness. This will soon bring it about that two organised parties will establish themselves within. When the imaginations or fancies are treated in this unceremonious way, they’re forced to declare themselves and
to take sides.
These two sides are those of appetite and reason, which he likens to two brothers who play with a person’s will like a football. Only when we understand what is on the side of appetite and what on the side of reason do our quirks and whims come out as charlatans.
A Platonist, Shaftesbury illustrates this inner conversation as a Socratic dialogue in which one questions one’s motivations for one’s actions and arrives at a reasonable conclusion. Hence, the goal was not to “talk to oneself” in the modern sense of having an inner conversation, e.g., venting angry or anxious and negative self-talk, but to apply critical thinking to one’s own thoughts as if one were two people. Again, like Spinoza’s seeking after metaphysical self-knowledge, this is a form of CBT. It seeks to bypass the dramatic show that people put on for themselves and others and find the true causes of one’s actions.
Later 18th century philosophers began to move away from the questions that Hobbes, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, Shaftesbury and others in the 17th asked. They were unconcerned with what the best life was or how it could be lived, nor did they concern themselves with the possibility or impossibility of virtue in human beings. They saw these questions as literally baroque.
As Newtonian mechanics supplanted Cartesian theories of natural philosophy, a sort of moral mechanics supplanted the personal virtue seeking of Descartes, Spinoza, and others. Instead of asking how to live the best life, philosophers concerned themselves with universal ethical theories, in analogy to the theory of universal gravitation. At first, these were couched in theological terms, in trying to understand how a perfectly free, rational God might have structured the moral universe.
Philosophers like Samuel Clarke condemned the moral virtue seeking of Spinoza and Descartes as borderline atheistic. Surely a perfect God created a perfect moral law, and our job is not to help ourselves become better but discover what our moral duties are. How to become better people is not important. These religiously based answers led to counter reactions from the later 18th century philosophers such has Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and others. Rousseau’s famous social contract for example took God out of the picture and replaced it with a collective agreement.
That is not to say that philosophy isn’t at all concerned with how to live your best life, but for academic purposes 18th century moral frameworks are far more fruitful just as 18th century mathematics is far more useful to physics than 17th century, albeit those older methods never went away. Yet there are fundamental differences in approach that are often ignored. While the 17th century is sometimes seen as proto-18th century thought, it is all its own, and much of its holism and introspection was lost in the Enlightenment. In terms of practical usefulness the 17th century also pays dividends.
Rather than embracing a consumer-based, disposable approach to self-help, 17th century philosophy promoted inner transformation through self-knowledge, a transformation designed to last. Only by learning why you are fat, lazy, single, or unhappy can you stop, and that won’t come from any plan, YouTube or Tiktok video, book, or workshop. It can only come from you.
Garrett, Aaron. “Seventeenth-century moral philosophy: self-help, self-knowledge, and the devil’s mountain.” (2013).
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. “Soliloquy, or advice to an author.” (1744).