Live Life on Your Own Terms
Solitude at sunrise on an Atlantic jetty.
Working for the Author of Succeed on Your Own Terms
When I was 22, I worked for a family who owned a company in Princeton, New Jersey, Personality Dynamics. The company produced various psychological tests that other companies—as well as itself—used for such purposes as selecting hires. After I knew him, the CEO, Herb Greenberg, wrote a book with coauthor Patrick Sweeney that celebrates individualism and success. Succeed on Your Own Terms includes dozens of interviews with exceptional achievers.
While to live life on your own terms isn’t necessarily to succeed, what is success without doing it essentially on your own? More gets written about the necessity of community, but while having others in your life is needed, it’s easier to submit to group norms than it is to choose your own norms and succeed by them. It shouldn’t be a conflict, nor should it be between your individual values and the internet.
Some will say that no one “chooses” norms. They’re a given fact of reality. But choice in the matter when it comes to values is essential. How much you’re willing to work, for what. All the planning that goes into the issues, which alone involves coming to terms with how to manage your time. If the essence of individualism is concern for your own interests, it’s important to evaluate every one of them on your own terms. Critics will say our interests are really generated by the unconscious, beyond the range of consciousness and the terms we imagine ourselves settling. But while interests carry emotional weight, we must conceptualize them to make them manageable. That’s not something we merely imagine ourselves doing.
Every corporate entity values interpersonal skills, just as every nation is a community and not only a collection of isolated selves. But just as every good manager knows the best employee takes a personal value in his work, every nation of moral worth recognizes outstanding individual achievement.
Personality Dynamics became the company Caliper, finally acquired by Talogy. But during the winter and spring of 1983, one of my job functions included being a personal assistant to the CEO. I not only drove him to distant functions in his Mercedes; I took him by the arm and led him to them, because he had been blind from age six.
I initiated at least a couple of conversations on those long drives, and I remember having brought up for discussion some of the work of Ayn Rand during one of them. Had he heard of her work? Yes, he’d listened to some audios.
On the Subject of Rand, Macmurray, and Buber
Ayn Rand is on my mind of recent, because I’ve made the point to soon go back and reread correspondence with a fellow member of the Macmurray Fellowship. The issue of individualism arose. I joined the fellowship, because I felt very surprised I’d never heard of Macmurray. Introduced to him when read an article in Philosophy Now, I found a link to join the fellowship. All the years from age 20, I’ve kept my inner relationship to another personalist, Martin Buber, lively. So, I felt very surprised to come across another.
Macmurray and Buber both described their work as personalism. I’ve recently read that commentators have said that Macmurray is a metaphysician of personhood, while Buber is a poet of the same. At any rate, part of the reason it took me so long to come upon Macmurray is due to all of his works being out of print for years.
Regardless, I’ve been reading Macmurray, and about his work, which makes me think more about issues of individualism and community. I have much more reading, and even more thinking, to do yet. It’s possible this particular URL, under which I write the current post, will be updated in the future.
Regarding the man from the Macmurray Fellowship I corresponded with, I wasn’t satisfied with the critique of individualism he offered. He had written and published, at least for the Fellowship, a Macmurrayian rejection of individualism, which I read carefully. I’ll need to read it at least once more. He and Macmurray affirm individuality while rejecting individualism, but as I wrote in one of my email responses, who doesn’t mind his own finances? That’s just one example of “concern for one’s interests” definitive, not of individuality, but of individualism.
I basically think of individualism in the way Rand refers to “concern for one’s interests,” It’s clear that as much as we concern ourselves with the interests of the other when corresponding, we concern ourselves with our own interests as well. But Rand’s idea isn’t enough, as I’ll make clear in a moment. For now, the man from the Fellowship I corresponded with must have an interest in his persuasion against individualism, for an example of concern for his own interests, but that isn’t to say he doesn’t care for and respect me, just as I care for and respect him.
Rand and Buber
I don’t remember reading, recently, what would amount to the crux of the issue, besides that Macmurray’s personalism affirms community and individuality, rejecting collectivism and individualism, which sounds like Buber’s affirmation of the same and rejection of the same.
Buber rejected individualism because he believed it led the individual into alienation, depersonalization, and a focus wholly on self. I believe Rand’s definition of individualism as “concern for one’s own interests” needs to be understood as inclusive of care for others. One’s cares for others in his life, including people new to him, are among his interests. Even though another individual exists wholly in his own right, I’m fully at liberty to be concerned for him. If he asks me not to be, I will cease communicating, but I may remember him on occasion.
After all, most people appreciate it when others extend care. Trading value for value, as Rand suggests is essential to morality, whether of knowledge (of which correspondence consists) or material products, isn’t the full extent of human relations. Concern for the other’s well-being is needed, yet I would argue that individualism doesn’t need to refuse such relations.
I’ve never agreed with Buber on individualism, because I’ve never understood individualism the way he seemed to think he understood it. “Concern for your own interests” is anyone’s taking responsibility for his or her life. Rand made that very point about anyone’s doing so where, in one of her books, she remarks, “America is a nation of individualists.”
But America isn’t the only nation where the fundamental personal concern is one’s own.
On the Terms that Make It Real
I’ve always agreed with many of Buber’s ideas, chiefly that humanity comes about through interaction with others, the I-Thou or I-You relation. But Buber made it clear that I-It is part of what being human is, also. It would be impossible to function without I-It.
But concern for your own interests isn’t exclusively that of things and ideas. Our most passionate interests, at least for most of us, are social. Likewise, in choosing the terms by which you live, the struggle of choosing the right ideas is a great passion. Choose wisely, and you increase your life’s value, so long as you follow through with action. A matter of making life more real than it would be without your intellectual effort.
Rand believed her philosophy is a system. I’ve never systematized my thinking, but I believe in organic systems, which include all the hundreds of handwritten notebooks I’ve produced. So when it comes to succeeding on my own terms, it’s chiefly because I’m always asking “why”, when it comes to decisions, and trusting those decisions I conclude upon. They naturally fit into the whole of my life.
Most intimately, it’s not society or some particular community or other I try to belong to, not primarily. My own life subsumes everything—though it relates to other lives within the whole of existence—and often I need concern only myself. I recognize that existence is much larger than I am. So is the God that makes existence personal.
Openness to Others
I allow myself openness towards other people, always aware of encountering someone uniquely not me, and fully trusting my ability to change within that encounter. Even if it’s upsetting—encounters with other people often are for me—rather than reacting by judgement and rejection, I work it out in the privacy of my mind.
I used to be extremely judgmental. It’s taken decades of work on myself, largely through journaling but thinking on my feet is as important, to learn to think further than that. Aldous Huxley made a famous remark during his elder years, attributed to a television interview with Mike Wallace in 1958, but the words could be from a lecture, “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give is to be a little kinder.”