Living in Another’s Mind

A word of praise, and the day brightens; a flicker of disdain, and it darkens—though nothing in what we are has changed. Schopenhauer describes this mechanism with the irony of a naturalist: just as surely as a cat begins to purr when stroked, a blissful rapture spreads across the face of a man who is praised. What is thus caressed or wounded is neither the body nor possessions, but a third thing, harder to pin down: what we represent.

What we represent—or, in other words, our existence in the opinion of others—is, owing to a particular weakness in our nature, generally prized far too highly, though the slightest reflection might teach us that in itself it is of no importance whatsoever to our happiness.

The force of the observation lies in a question of place. Where does this “existence” that grips us so tightly reside? Not within us. “The place of all that we are for others,” Schopenhauer notes, “is the conscience of others”; and these images of us, these notions attached to them, are things that “directly, do not exist at all for us.” Prestige is a being lodged in a foreign mind. We pursue it as a good, yet it is a shadow we nurture elsewhere, in a place we shall never set foot. Hence his starkest formula: each of us “lives first and foremost in his own skin, not in the opinion of others.” To measure what one is “in oneself and by oneself” against what one is “only in the eyes of others” is, he suggests, already to step out of the illusion.

Schopenhauer does not stop at exposing the illusion; he weighs it. To ascribe such value to opinion, he says, is a “universally dominant superstition,” all the more tenacious because the mind in which our image dwells is rarely worthy of what we deposit there: less deference would be due, given “the superficiality and futility of the thoughts” that fill most heads. The remedy here is a matter of proper assessment: to reduce the apparent good to its meagre real weight, and to redirect esteem toward what, at least, belongs to us—health, wit, the contents of our own consciousness.

Should we despise what others think of us?

Neither Schopenhauer nor Epictetus advises contempt. Both merely observe that the seat of our peace cannot be a place we do not inhabit. For the one, what we represent has scarcely any being for us; for the other, reputation does not depend on us. In both cases, it is foreign to us.

Epictetus does not argue from the nothingness of the thing, but from its ownership. The Manual opens with a single division, and all else follows.

What depends on us is opinion, choice, desire, aversion—in a word, whatever is our own doing. What does not depend on us is the body, possessions, reputation, office—in a word, whatever is not our own doing.

Reputation falls on the wrong side of the divide. Not that it is base: it is merely classed among things “powerless, enslaved, subject to hindrance, foreign to us.” To fasten one’s desire to it is to entrust one’s peace to what another will do or think. Hence the counsel that scandalises: “If you wish to make progress in wisdom, be willing, in matters external, to be thought foolish and witless.” To consent to forfeit all esteem, if need be, rather than yield anything that is truly one’s own—this faculty of judgment and will which Epictetus calls proairesis, and which he holds to be the only place no one may enter without our consent.

Before drawing the two gestures together, we must see that they do not proceed from the same movement. Schopenhauer passes judgment on the value of opinion: it weighs little, because it lives only in superficial minds. Epictetus, for his part, does not judge whether reputation is worth anything—it may be precious; he merely observes that it is not ours. And the inner space to which each withdraws differs accordingly. What Schopenhauer still counts among our own possessions—body, health, intelligence—Epictetus resolutely places outside, on the side of what does not depend on us. At the end of the retreat, one recovers all that he is: his nature, his temperament, what fills his consciousness. The other keeps only a bare faculty, what he wills and judges, stripped even of the body. Two very unequal inner spaces behind the same door.

Yet it is the same door. Schopenhauer fears seeing us “enslaved to the opinion and sentiment of others”; Epictetus advises desiring nothing that depends on another, “lest we become the slaves of others.” The same word, under two pens that could not be more different: slave. And the peace each seeks—for Schopenhauer “the repose of the soul” and independence, for Epictetus “the calm of my soul”—is regained at the same threshold: not to lodge one’s peace in a conscience one does not inhabit. They push the same door; behind it, they do not enter the same room. This is to hold together the two and the one—a single threshold, two dwellings.

Praise and disdain, Schopenhauer writes, “hang by the same thread.” To cut that thread is not to scorn the gaze of others; it is to cease renting out the room in which one lives.

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