This essay is a comparative examination of thinkers who advocate a careful self-scrutiny of ingrained tendencies that have become so familiar a part of our landscape as to be tacitly taken for granted, but which appear as bad habits when viewed in terms of their unrecognized consequences which are portrayed as being unnecessarily self-constraining.
Theravada Buddhism and Stoicism are two extremely sophisticated systems of practices, endeavoring to control habits, attitudes and postures. In answering the Socratic question of what it means to live a life, they suggest that if we discern universal causal processes we can attune ourselves to such patterns through religiously prescribed techniques and thereby heal ourselves of the discontents caused by the otherwise disordered idiosyncratic perspectives that rule us.
In contrast, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty are suspicious of appeals to “human nature” or the “facts of the matter” as far as the world is concerned. Their quintessentially modern attitude holds that any “solution” is not going to come from reading it off of or into the cosmos, their turning instead to aesthetically inspired innovation, though the yearning for novelty or transvaluation may belie a profound dissatisfaction with the contemporary. Nietzsche and Foucault offer explanations that aim to unmask social life, in asking how certain beliefs and practices came to seem natural or inescapable and how they may subtly govern our lives in unsatisfying ways, while Rorty renounces any need for philosophy to play doctor to the modern soul.
Examining these figures leads into general questions, such as to what degree are our self-explanatory stories real or not? Do they need to accurately capture how things are to be efficacious and what does the discovery of such truths enable us to do that we couldn't without them? Conversely, what are the pragmatic consequences of mainly regarding them as being useful coping inventions, and what constraints are there on the stories we might tell?
