Some 50 years ago, I came across a question that I have been mulling over ever since. It appears in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, which traces its source to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, his 1819 series of poems influenced by the Persian writer Hafiz, whose collected works are known as the Divan. The question Goethe poses is this: Lebt man denn wenn andre leben? “Does a man live when others also live?” A hell of a question, isn’t it? What could he possibly have meant by it?
According to Bloom, it was Goethe’s way of addressing poetic anxiety. At 75, Goethe was apparently so confident of his own talent, he assumed that the works of his predecessors and contemporaries rightfully belonged to him. “Why should he shrink,” he asked rhetorically, “from picking flowers where he finds them? Only by making the riches of the others our own do we bring anything great into being.” In truth, Goethe seems only a handy conduit to get to Thomas Mann’s much greater anxiety, since, as Bloom points out, the question springs up in Doctor Faustus, in Mann’s memoir about its genesis, and in his diary.
The perturbing question originally appears at the end of two quatrains in which Goethe alleges that every “rhymer” and “fiddler” thinks himself the best, and urges us not to reproach them for feeling this way. But then he asserts, in a translation by Tess Lewis: “And I really couldn’t fault them; / When we honor others, / We must deprecate ourselves. / Do we then live if others do?” But where Mann and Bloom saw a writer’s anxiety, I sensed something with a darker, more existential meaning. Goethe wasn’t asking how an artist lives when other artists also live. He’s wondering how a person, any person, can be authentic when other people walk the Earth. He isn’t worried so much about other poets as about others in general.
If only life and literature were that simple. From Rüdiger Safranski’s biography of Goethe, we learn that he actually felt slighted in 1808 by a critic’s assessment that Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel were now the better poets. So perhaps Mann and Bloom were correct in thinking that Goethe felt a bit threatened. Which left me no better off than before. Does the question reflect Bloomian agon, or did Goethe, in need of a rhyme for geben (to give), simply settle on leben (to live)? Goethe was perhaps the least tortured of 19th-century writers, and his declaration that there was no crime he could not commit makes me think that his instincts were those of a man of letters, not those of a criminal. He was too great a man to believe that he could not live authentically simply because other people wrote or lived.
I, however, am not a great man and find myself wondering if the existence of other people does not somehow infringe on and devalue my own existence. For me, Goethe’s question rests firmly on the rather stupendous fact that other people exist, not because they restrict or narrow my life but simply because each of them is, well, an “other.” As it happens, there are approximately eight billion others at present (though numbers are not the point). Who are these men and women on the street, in homes and huts and apartment buildings, in restaurants and sports stadiums, in all the cars along the 70 interstate highways in the United States, who get on airplanes and wake up in Louisville, Sheboygan, Kuala Lumpur, Rome, Accra, and Jerusalem? Are they real?
Well, of course, they’re real—but are their lives as real as my own? How is that possible? In every hamlet, village, and town, in every house in every countryside, in all the cities by the sea and cities deep inland subsist the memories of every mind but my own; all the thoughts and dreams, all the foolish hopes and shallow regrets, all the bursts of happiness and inevitable griefs, each a minuscule voice in the planetary chorus of voices that sing briefly, never to sing again. It’s almost impossible to conceive, which is why we put the thought and the numbers out of our mind.
Right now, everyone, including people we know “intimately,” is thinking thoughts different from our own, experiencing emotions we’re not privy to, attending to tasks we know nothing about. Countless others are attending a brilliant party in a museum or sitting alone in a diner somewhere in Oklahoma. A man I will never meet is unpacking a suitcase in a Four Seasons hotel, and a middle-aged woman is sitting on a sad bed in a Motel 6. Somewhere there is a funeral with 1,000 mourners, and another funeral with only 10. And somewhere, postal workers (unlike doctors) are going from house to house.
So many people, so many lives, each a product of thousands of generations. How do we comprehend such humanity? Could this be another reason for God, a Mind that encompasses all the minds in all the world, a place where every consciousness has a home? One sometimes forgets that for true believers, “God’s intimate knowing of human beings,” as the Scottish theologian John Swinton writes, resides in “God’s remembering of us.” If an eternal God remembers each and every one of us, then our existence is also real, forever fixed outside time and space.
Be that as it may, there remains the troublesome prospect that fundamentally we can never fully understand one another. How can we when people possess thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, fears, and regrets that preoccupy them, but to which we have no real access? Yet we have empathy for our fellow human beings. We may not know what being a bat feels like, but if you’re reading this, then you and I share similar characteristics and modes of thinking. As anthropologists like to remind us, human beings have evolved into highly socialized animals, to a point where our brains experience loneliness as both cognitively and physically taxing. Not only do we need the presence of others, we’re also built to feel what other people feel.
Human beings evidently have something called “mirror neurons” that mimic other people’s behavior. When we witness pain, shock, or humiliation in others, our automatic nervous system reacts to their suffering. If we take a painkiller, we may actually become less empathetic upon seeing another person’s look of discomfort. And apparently, people injected with Botox are not as good at detecting emotions precisely because their facial muscles can no longer engage in accurate mimicry. But I’m not convinced.
My mirror neurons may be activated when I see people in physical or emotional distress, but they remain dormant when it comes to people I don’t know. Perhaps one needs to have faith in God before one can truly believe in other people’s suffering. Only after he became an Anglican deacon did John Donne write, “No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe.” I’d like to think so, but in truth, not every death diminishes me. Then again, maybe every life does.
If I may reverse myself for a moment: there’s a long-standing tradition of thinking that deep down we’re all the same.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”
It’s comforting to believe that under the skin and above the fray, we’re more alike than not, but when recalling those lines of Hardy’s, one tends to forget the poem’s title, “The Man He Killed.” But that’s the truth of things. Even if we get to know one another, we’ll end up killing the other if misled by some ridiculous demagogue or maniacal general. At least 60 million souls were direct casualties of World War II (just one example of insanity masquerading as normality).
I don’t wish to sound cold-hearted. I remain alive to other people’s needs, curious about their lives, and am saddened and disturbed when tragedy befalls them. One has to be confined to a cell without a TV, computer, or smartphone not to have intimacy forced upon us. Indifference, unless one is a sociopath, is virtually impossible. Who could not feel horror and revulsion after October 7 of last year? Or when watching the needless loss of life in Gaza or anywhere else in the world? Nonetheless, this too shall pass. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. Sadly, “even the dreadful martyrdom,” as Auden knew, “must run its course.” We live minute to minute, and sooner or later, enough minutes accrue to shunt aside the suffering of others.
People are basic creatures, prone to habit, susceptible to prophets, charlatans, and demagogues, easily indoctrinated, and obviously incapable of doing the right thing even when the right thing will save themselves and others. The vast majority will do what the majority wants to do. (Schopenhauer believed that “we have to forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people.”) Which is why every political rally, every parade, every exhibition of pageantry, from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to the elaborate funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, makes me uneasy. It invokes our need to belong, to be part of something greater than ourselves, to subsume ourselves to the existence of others. It tells me that whatever the reason for the assemblage, most of the people in attendance have a void that needs filling.
What’s sorely lacking in us is what Keats termed “Negative Capability,” the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” According to Keats, Shakespeare possessed this quality, which enabled him to feel kinship with (and thus create) many different characters. And maybe if we were more like Shakespeare, there would be no major disagreements, no wars, no famines, no climate crisis, no nuclear arsenals, no President Trump, no mass shootings, no unfair laws, no racial injustice. But we’re not Shakespeare, and we’re not remotely comfortable in uncertainties and mysteries. So we devise strategies to override them, strategies that take the shape of politics, religion, and social legislation—dogma that separates rather than brings us closer.
If I seem to be downcast by all this, rest assured there are other, more hopeful outlooks. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for one, argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature that things are getting better, getting better all the time. Compared with previous centuries, crime and violence are down; life expectancy is up; most diseases have been eradicated or weakened (certain strains of viruses excepting); poverty in most countries is decreasing; and there has been nothing close to a world war since 1945.
The conventional wisdom is that we are always moving forward, that an organism necessarily improves as it evolves. Kant spoke for the Enlightenment when he ventured that history itself “may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution internally, and, for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.” For Kant and other thinkers, as knowledge increases, so does the power to make us safer, better, wiser. And so, despite the depletion of our natural resources and an unstable climate, we’re making headway morally and politically. And, of course, there is all that we have accomplished. We’ve split the atom, mapped the human genome, scanned the human brain, invented the internet, developed vaccines, deflected the path of an asteroid, created A.I., launched a telescope capable of “seeing” the beginning of creation, and on and on.
But then a Putin comes along, invades Ukraine, and we’re back in the middle of the 20th century. Or a terrorist organization invades Israel and kills and mutilates 1,200 people and we’re back in the Middle Ages. Sometimes—why be coy about it?—most of the time—as one switches channels, watches the latest movies, reads the news, and hears stories about how people behave, one simply wants to give up on the human race. Admittedly, I’m not saying anything new here. And I suppose I should be more sanguine if only because we have always catalogued and lamented the things that men do. If we’ve survived until now, then, by golly, we’ll continue to survive, despite rising sea levels, nuclear stockpiles, pandemics, fascist leanings in Sweden, Italy, France, and Michigan, and terrorists willing to use whatever they can get their hands on.
But survive as what?
It’s not just violence and wars and mass shootings and indifference to the suffering of others that’s appallingly normal; it’s also our tendency to find solace and meaning in people and events that rush to fill the void. When I watch crazed sports fans at a game heaping abuse on the opposing team, when I look at the rapt faces at rallies and political conventions, when I read about a hundred people being trampled at a soccer game, when I watch two million Muslims praying at Mecca or two dozen men davening in a synagogue, when I see what human beings are capable of during a war, when I listen to the blather of politicians and preachers and even the way that reporters and news anchors blithely repeat the same catchwords and phrases, I sense the fallibility of our species.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the history of humankind has been a sorry history. Cruelty, indifference, hatred, intolerance, and herdlike behavior have shaped the course of human events—and still do. And it’s not as though we haven’t been warned. Either Edmund Burke or John Stuart Mill said it centuries ago (though it doesn’t matter because no one really listens): “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
So we form cocoons inhabited by family and friends. We do good works. We provide for our children. We give to charity when we can. We love our family and our friends and grieve when they die. We can be noble, we can laugh at our foibles, we can poke the world with an ironic finger, we can justify our existence by acknowledging achievements in the arts and sciences, which are, indeed, considerable; and when catastrophe occurs—floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes—we give our sympathy and our dollars to the victims. But then we forget. We forget that the world is a dangerous place and that someone we don’t know is plotting against us, plotting to destroy us. He is religion or dogma or bitterness or misery, but he wants our death.
Worst of all, we forget that each of us has so little time on Earth—time which can be abruptly and undeservedly ended—that it seems crazy not to conduct ourselves in a more kindly and tolerant manner. Does a man live when others also live? Goddamn right he does, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In his diaries, Mann writes, “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world—always unpleasant.” But this is Goethe’s question writ small; people annoy us not because they exist but because they’re annoying. Nonetheless, their existence does present a huge, insurmountable, and sickening recognition that one’s own existence is no more essential than anyone else’s.
Do I wish them gone? Do I imagine myself in some Twilight Zone scenario where I have everything I want and no one is around to make me question the validity of my own existence? No, because despite my island-like tendencies, I’m very glad not to be alone on Earth. Evolution and my neural circuitry have seen to that. My brain isn’t comfortable unless other minds are in proximity—but those other minds also make life more problematic. All those separate relentless realities existing outside my own diminishing receptacle continue to baffle me. Outside my skull, people are thinking and planning and talking and texting and living and dying, and none of this has anything to do with me. I live, but I’m amazed that others also live. My insignificance blazes inside me like the hugely significant thing it is.
