What would Schopenhauer do?

"Lives of great men all remind us / we can make our lives sublime, / and, departing, leave behind us / footprints on the sands of time." These mighty lines of our great and neglected Longfellow eloquently state a commonplace human longing for ethical role models, people we can look up to, people we can hope to follow in making our own difficult life choices. I suppose that the fact that such choices are often moral choices has determined that most of our footsteppers have been religious leaders. Like so many of my fellow Christians I continue to find sustenance in the immortal "Imitation of Christ," now more than 600 years old, and one of the most widely published books in history. But its possible author, Thomas à Kempis, had a medieval Catholic and allegorical temperament uncongenial to today's pragmatic, down-to-earth Evangelicals, who apply the question "What Would Jesus Do?" ("WWJD?", in the lingo) to real-life situations; and they look for real-life answers. My first introduction to WWJD?, slightly oblique, came from my grandfather, who remarked with regard to a particularly hypocritical local preacher that "Jesus must be spinning in his grave" at the preacher's behavior — an opinion in which even a stripling youth could detect his uncertain grasp of important details in the gospels.

We know for a fact what Jesus would do when faced with a leper, a desperate Syrophoenician mother, or a woman taken in adultery; but only the last-named group is statistically significant in today's world. Incidentally, ladies, the best advice I have for this group is geographical. It is probably best for a woman not to be taken in adultery anywhere in Nigeria, but if you feel it's an absolute must, you should definitely opt for the Christian south as opposed to the Muslim north. Up north, of course, the question is WWMD? That is a very touchy question as we have recently learned when the proposal to hold the Miss World pageant caused mayhem in the northern city of Kaduna. An insufficiently theological journalist tried to allay pious outrage at the thought of a public display of feminine pulchritude with a real lead balloon of a suggestion: The Prophet, far from entirely disapproving of the babes, might have married one of them! Then the followers of the Prophet rioted, burned down the newspaper, and butchered several score followers of the Prince of Peace. Now the state government of Zamfara has confirmed a capital "fatwa" against the fashion writer! WWMD? A question that can be so unwisely answered is perhaps not wisely asked.

Back to WWJD?, some eco-evangelicals, folks who take global warming as a serious dereliction of the stewardship of the earth entrusted to mankind in Genesis 1:28, have started asking "What Would Jesus Drive?" The answer is something like a Civic or an Accord — anyway, no gas-guzzler for Jesus. Indeed I find poetic comfort in imagining the Master of the New Testament puttering about in his well-tuned Old Compact. After all, his only known mode of land-travel was "a colt, the foal of an ass" (Mathew 21.5), apart, of course, from the usual Shank's Mare, a horse of an entirely different color. Let OJ drive his Bronco; just plain J will make do with a Ford Foal — as soon as the eco-evangelicals can persuade Detroit to make one, that is. While the world SUVes, Jesus saves.

So far the suggestion that Jesus would conserve gas, spare the trees, and walk lightly on the earth has led to the slaughter of no Muslims and the threatened decollation of no journalists; yet its other dangers are manifest. Spiritual leadership is all well and good, but just think practically for a minute about what would happen if the bicycle actually replaced the Buick in our nation: total economic collapse, America today, tomorrow the world. Herein lies the danger. The excessive ecological imitation of Jesus, such as that practiced by Saint Francis, caused a major crisis in the thirteenth-century Church. Fortunately the authorities were able to contain the situation through a public works project: a multi-million-dollar monument to evangelical poverty erected on the mountainside at Assisi.

The trouble with the "footprints on the sands of time" left by our religious leaders, from the semiotic point of view, is that they are at once too conspicuous and too vulnerable to misinterpretation. Everybody sees them, but folks disagree as to which direction is toe and which heel. It does make a difference. I think we need to find some safer, more secular heroes, and we surely could do with a little more uncertainty: hieroglyphics on the sands of time, perhaps, or vague chicken-scratches. One doubts, for example, that any conceivable answer to the question "What would Marcel Proust do?" would lead to riots in the street. Yet Proust may be just a tad too secular. After considerable thought, I want to nominate as default footprinter Arthur Schopenhauer, who is ideal for several reasons. Though undeniably secular, he still claimed that parts of his masterpiece, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," had been written by the Holy Ghost; so he's right up there with the big guys. Also, Schopenhauer seems pretty safe. Most people have heard of Schopenhauer, vaguely, but are radically unsure just what they have heard. Hence I advise you, when faced with a really tough decision, ask yourself "What would Schopenhauer do?"

We can be confident, perhaps, that in any given situation Schopenhauer would do something as ethically weighty from the cerebral as it would be wholly inconsequential from the practical point of view, and that in any event his proposed action would be expressed as an inscrutable and contingent opacity in a largely incomprehensible sentence not unlike this one, actually, except of course that, being in German, it would be a little longer, a little more polysyllabic, a little more reduplicative, and considerably more reticent in revealing its predicate. Thus we could have the comfort of inspiration from a footprinter without plunging the nation into a prolonged economic recession. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.