Perhaps more importantly, for Socrates, living rationally constitutes a distinctively human way of life. Even before Socrates, Greek philosophers agreed that what makes humans special and different from other animals is our ability to reason. To say that humans are rational beings means, among other things, that we can weigh options and choose the path for ourselves that we judge best. A human being is not a mere thing, carried passively along the currents of life. In order to flourish and excel in a human life, we must use the brains in our heads to decide what our lives will be.
Kid, You’ll Move Mountains!
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.) (Places)
The ending of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is thoroughly positive. Dr. Seuss assures us that, if we take his advice and set off boldly along the journey of life, we’ll do great things. But how can Seuss be so confident of success? Aren’t some setbacks and slumps just too much to overcome? Don’t even the best choices sometimes fail to work out?
Once again, I think Dr. Seuss’s answer to these questions is similar to the ones Socrates and other ancient philosophers would give. Socrates and most ancient philosophers argued that, in the final reckoning, the external events of life aren’t what matter most. If you don’t actually fly ahead of other people or win games or manage to move a mountain, that’s not important. What matters is the attitude that you have about life, the choices you make in the face of what life gives you. Seuss and the ancient philosophers agree that someone who has the courage to question and find her own path and the wisdom to face problems and challenges with equanimity, who develops rational abilities to make good decisions about her life, will almost certainly succeed in life. So, as Dr. Seuss says, “be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray / or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea, / you’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . get on your way!” (Places).
CHAPTER TWO
My Troubles Are Going to Have Troubles with Me: Schopenhauer, Pessimism, and Nietzsche
Jacob M. Held
Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and we seek wisdom in order to live well. And to live well is to excel at being human; to be exemplary. Those who seek to live well want to live praiseworthy lives; they want this life to mean something, to be “worth it.” And so in dealing with the human condition and in trying to explain why this life is “worth it,” philosophy often must focus on those aspects of life that seem to detract from its meaning and fullness, that seem to make it not worth living; namely, pain and suffering. After all, as much as we’d prefer it were not so, a great deal of life is painful. Dr. Seuss was well aware of this fact, and several of his books dealt with pain and suffering and what type of response to our existence as suffering beings was appropriate. At first blush we might find it odd that a children’s author would focus on pain and suffering, but upon reflection I think there is no more suitable topic. What lesson could be more important for a child to learn than how to deal with the inevitable bang-ups and hang-ups, the lurches and slumps of which this life is invariably constituted? As anyone with children can attest, one of the most important lessons a child can learn, and one of the most difficult—for both the children learning it and the parents watching—is that life will be full of obstacles, disappointments, and basically pain. What good parents do for their children is not remove pain and obstacles from their children’s lives but provide them with the tools necessary in order to deal with the inevitable suffering that life entails.
The lessons in Dr. Seuss’s stories about suffering are varied, but each is fundamentally about the recognition that life is full of discomfort and dealing with it is one of our principal tasks in this life. For example, in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, the child is guaranteed success, at least with a 98 and ¾ percent chance. One response to life’s pain is (naïve?) optimism; we pat our children on the head and say “It’ll be okay.” But will it? Perhaps we shouldn’t promise success. Instead maybe we ought to offer only contentment. Such a response appears to be offered in Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? Here the child learns that plenty of people have it much worse off than he. The ultimate lesson being, “Some critters are much-much, oh, ever so much-much, so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!” (Lucky). So we might tell children: “It could be worse, you could be . . .” But just because it could be worse doesn’t mean that your suffering is acceptable. Things could always be worse, that doesn’t mean that how they are now is okay. And should the suffering of other people make me feel good? So what other options are we left with? Well, what about sheer resignation. We might just respond, “Deal with it!” Don’t lie about how they’ll win in the end. Just simply say, “Suck it up.” Dr. Seuss says about as much in You’re Only Old Once!, a book whose title is oddly ambiguous. It could mean, “You’re only old once, so enjoy it. Make the most of it,” or it could mean, “Thank goodness, you’re only old once. It’ll all be over soon.” Maybe we ought to just resign ourselves to the fact that life is painful, but at least it ends. But these are all unsatisfying responses to the human condition, and surely a playful, fun-loving author like Dr. Seuss can offer us more. Thankfully, the answers above don’t exhaust Dr. Seuss’s repertoire. There is one last possibility, and one story I haven’t yet mentioned, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
And that’s how it started.
In Solla Sollew we are introduced to our protagonist, who by his own admission has had a pretty easy life up to this point. “Nothing, not anything ever went wrong” (Trouble). So he has been fortunate enough to have a carefree life, one of ease and contentment; a life that resembles many children we may know. When we think of children who are well taken care of we think of them as problem free. They don’t have mortgages and debt, illness or debilitation, a lifetime of piled up failures, stress, anxiety. . . . Most children’s lives are not full of the pain we all experience. They have yet to suffer the spiritual death by the proverbial thousand cuts of life’s disappointments. Yet things quickly change for our protagonist. He attributes his bad fortune originally to carelessness. He wasn’t paying attention and then . . . he stubs his toe, flies through the air, and lands on his bottom, spraining the main bone in the tip of his tail. This is unfortunate, but not devastating. But things go from bad to worse. Even though he keeps his eyes open, a green-headed Quilligan Quail comes from behind to nip his tail. A Skritz goes after his neck, while a Skrink goes after his toe. No amount of vigilance can save him. He is surrounded by troubles, and so life creeps up on our poor young and naïve protagonist. He realizes that life is full of troubles and perils, and no matter how much you pay attention and how good you are at avoiding some, you are bound to be bit, poked, tripped, and nibbled. Luckily, he comes across a traveling chap who mentions to him a place, Solla Sollew, on the banks of the River Wah-Hoo, “Where they never have troubles! At least, very few” (Trouble). His prayers have been answered. If he can’t avoid the troubles here, he’ll go to a place where there are none.
Our protagonist is plagued with problems and is offered a chance to leave them behind for the promise of an idyllic life in a faraway land. He has realized that life is suffering, either degrees of pain or its momentary absence that we experience as joy or, more accurately, relief. But no matter what we do we are bound to experience setbacks and disappointments; life is a series of problems. Things look bleak. Our protagonist may even be on the verge of becoming a pessimist.
The Pendulum Swings from Skritz to Skrink
In everyday language, when we talk about a pessimist we think of someone who always thinks things are going to get worse, even though they are already quite bad; as the saying goes, someone who thinks the glass is half empty. If this is all there was to philosophical pessimism, it’d be very unin
teresting. After all, life is full of problems; we all know that. We also know life will always contain these difficulties. But the difference between even the most morose of everyday pessimists and a true, philosophical pessimist is that even those people who see life as fraught with troubles may still see it as redeemable. Most everyday pessimists do think that the value of life can be reevaluated and seen to be worthwhile when measured against some other good like momentary pleasures or a religious doctrine of salvation. But a true philosophical pessimist sees life as irredeemable, inherently and intractably painful with no possible way to make it worth living.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is arguably the first and easily the most influential philosophical pessimist. He saw the glass not only as half empty but cracked and full of poison. But his pessimism doesn’t stem from a depressive personality or bad childhood. He is a pessimist because that is the response he finds most appropriate to the nature of reality. Schopenhauer’s pessimism stems from his metaphysics; that is, how he understands the nature of reality to be fundamentally structured.
According to Schopenhauer, the one thing that marks the essence of human life, and all life in general, is the will to life. This will is the unconscious motive force that moves us constantly and unrelentingly onward. It is “a blind, irresistible urge.”1 Our will most apparently finds expression through our choices and attempts to meet goals, but it marks even the most unmotivated among us. Even those poor saps caught in the waiting place manifest the will to life. As they wait for a phone to ring or snow to snow or a pot to boil or a better break, the will to life is acting through them and they are still driven to something; there are always urges. We are always striving even when it looks like we’re standing still. And Dr. Seuss’s books always depict people this way. The characters always want something new, or different, and always better and grander than what has come before. From King Derwin’s oobleck to Morris McGurk’s Circus McGurkus, from the most outrageous zoo populated with the most fantastical animals known to Seussdom to the most perfect and ridiculous plate of scrambled eggs, all of his characters are striving, and the stories often revolve around the obstacles and problems that come from trying to do fabulous things. When one tries to do grand things, one is bound to stumble often and encounter grand obstacles. Striving necessarily brings failure, disappointment, and pain. But when the going gets tough Seuss never calls it quits; his characters never give in and become pessimists. Yet Schopenhauer draws a different lesson from the hang-ups and bang-ups that accompany life’s challenges.
We have long since recognized that striving . . . where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal . . . satisfaction . . . all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting . . .
it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving. . . . Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering.2
As we continually see in Seuss, as the characters strive, they will succeed at times, but these successes are short lived. They are often the beginning of a new crisis or problem that must be met with a fresh striving. And all of these small victories are temporary, leading time and again to new failures or perhaps further small victories, thus marking life as a perpetual striving punctuated with short-lived satisfaction. Or as Schopenhauer so poetically puts it: “Life swings like a pendulum to and from between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”3 Schopenhauer is bleak, he sees only death as the end to all of our long, painful journey. “Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care, although he knows that, even when he succeeds with all his efforts and ingenuity in struggling through, at every step he comes nearer to the greatest, and total, the inevitable and irredeemable shipwreck, indeed even steers right into it, namely death.”4 So thank goodness you’re only old once.
Schopenhauer would’ve made a lousy children’s author. We wouldn’t want to read such assessments of life to our children, unless we wanted to drive them to heroin or suicide. So Seuss, without denying that life is speckled with failures, finds answers to these problems; that is, a way to value life positively in the face of the inevitable and unavoidable pain that marks so much of it. How can Seuss do this? How can he look at and acknowledge all the pain and suffering that accompanies so much of life and smile through it, offering sunshine and roses at the end of the day?
What Would You Do, If Your Kids Asked You?
There are several responses we tend to give to deal with the problem of suffering. Three frequently offered responses find expression in Seuss’s work. In Oh, the Places You’ll Go! we’re told that despite all the bumps and slumps we will succeed. All the pain and suffering of our lives is redeemed because it leads eventually to success. In the end we’ll come out on top. Really? In the end aren’t we all dead, just as Schopenhauer iterated above? Won’t avoiding all the whirlpools and Hakken-Kraks merely delay the inevitable? And even if success is possible, ought we to offer such a promising future to all children? When our children lament their suffering, should we promise success as if their lives will turn out all right in the end? Don’t we know better? Haven’t we lived long enough to know most lives don’t end well; they merely dissolve into obscurity after years of disappointments? Maybe such a naïve optimism and hollow promise is delusional, a lie we tell our kids so they can cope until they realize what we already know. It seems that for a true pessimist Oh, the Places You’ll Go! offers a less than adequate response, and perhaps an intellectually dishonest one.5 But there are other alternatives.
“It could be worse.” This is a common response we’ve all heard from our parents and we all still often rely on. It could be worse. And surely this is true. It could always be worse than it presently is, until you’re dead. And then you’re dead, so why bother. So, yes, it can always be worse. But how is this supposed to help us deal with the pain we’re constantly feeling? In Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? Seuss offers this very answer to a complaining child. The boy, lovingly referred to as Duckie, has apparently been heard complaining about how rough his life is. A wise man sitting atop a cactus decides to set him straight.6 The wise man’s answer to the child’s incessant whining is simple: “I’m telling you, Duckie, some people are muchly, oh, ever so muchly, muchly more-more-more unlucky than you!” In fact, “You ought to be shouting, ‘How Lucky am I!’” (Lucky). And surely this is true. Duckie is much better off than those caught in traffic on Zayt Highway Eight and poor Herbie Hart, Ali Sard, or Mr. Bix, who all have considerable troubles to face. Duckie is far better off than Mr. Potter, the Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher, Professor de Breeze, and all of the Brothers Ba-zoo. He has none of their problems, all of which would seem to make any Duckie might encounter pale in comparison. And so it is for all of us. For any trouble you might have, and it doesn’t matter how serious or grave it might be, we can come up with how either it could be worse or find an example of someone who is muchly more unlucky than you. But what does this do for you? Do you feel better because you’re not as bad off as someone else, or do you just recognize that everyone has it tough? This doesn’t seem too helpful. What kind of life is one built off of schadenfreude? Should our lives become meaningful because we either realize they’re not as bad as they could be, or, worse still, we take pleasure or comfort in knowing that others have it considerably worse? So what other response might we, or Dr. Seuss, offer?
In You’re Only Old Once! we’re offered another response: deal with it. In this book, we follow a poor sap who is supposed to represent the reader’s inevitable old age through the Golden Years Clinic. What we witness is the infliction of numerous tests and procedures that check everything from eyes to
allergies. And what does our sap get for his troubles? “When at last we are sure you’ve been properly pilled, then a few paper forms must be properly filled so that you and your heirs may be properly billed” (Old). But it’s over now so you may leave, and be content, “you’re in pretty good shape for the shape you are in!” (Old).
In this tale, the proffered response to our trials and tribulations is a mix of the previous two: pain is temporary, you’ll get through it, and really it’s not that bad anyway. The doctor’s office is a perfect setting to teach this lesson. Doctors make us better, but we’re never done being made better. They can always find something wrong, something that needs poking, prodding, pilling, and billing. And each solution leads to further problems or just postpones the inevitable, insoluble problem of total body failure, death. So is the message that it’s all temporary and not really that bad supposed to make us feel better? Is life worth living, or is it like a trip to the doctor, something that for the most part can be tolerated until it’s over? Our poor sap has incurred enormous debts, been given a rigorous pill regimen, and sent on his way. But we know he’ll return to suffer it all again. Or maybe he won’t. His next trip might be to the morgue. Ultimately, the only cure to life is its end. As Socrates mentions in the Phaedo, on our deathbed perhaps our most fitting action would be to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius.7 But this attitude doesn’t redeem our lives, instead it tells us to bear with it, it’ll be over soon. Life is to be endured.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy Page 4