Being true to the good and bad of thine own self
No writer is quoted more reflexively than Shakespeare, which is too bad, because Will’s best lines not only repay close attention, but often demand it. Take the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Spoken like a true courtier, which is what Polonius is — a temporizing careerist whose summum bonum is survival. He is also a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” as Hamlet — uncharitably, but accurately — calls him after impulsively running the old duffer through in Act III.
It seems safe to say that, for Polonius, being true to yourself means nothing more than giving top priority to your own self-interest. My guess is that, in Polonius’s view, everyone is out for himself, and that this defines the extent to which anyone can trust anybody else — which is to say, hardly at all. It is a supremely cynical outlook, and how exactly it ensures against being false to anyone else is far from clear.
There is another play in which the notion of being true to yourself figures: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. When Peer visits the trolls, the troll king explains that the difference between humans and trolls is that while, among humans, the maxim is “to thine own self be true,” among trolls it is “to thine own self be — enough.”
But how do those differ, really? In both cases, the standard remains … yourself. The problem, I think, is that we tend to conflate the notion of being true to oneself with being true to one’s conscience. But the two are far from being the same thing, since being true to one’s conscience may occasionally make it necessary to act against one’s self-interest.
I have, a couple of times in my life, done what I thought was right even though doing so was bound to have — and indeed did have — a retarding effect on my career trajectory. Why? For the same reason Ring Lardner Jr. gave for not cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee: because to do otherwise would have meant “I would hate myself in the morning.”
It is easy to see why fidelity to conscience gets confused with fidelity to oneself — because we feel we are most true to ourselves when we are true to our conscience. At least most of us feel that way. Polonius probably wouldn’t; he’d likely regard fidelity to conscience as a luxury a courtier could ill-afford.
What makes this quote from Hamlet so intriguing is that, once you start thinking about it, you are forced to ask a prior question: Who is the self to which one is called upon to be true? It is a question that corresponds to the motto inscribed over the entrance to the temple at Delphi: Gnothi seauton: Know thyself.
Easy advice to give. Not so easy to follow.
After all, who am I? The fellow who did the right thing when to do otherwise seemed unacceptable — to him (that is, not in accord with his self-image) — or the fellow who, more often than not, followed the course of least resistance whenever there wasn’t any good reason not to? Well, I’m both.
We like to flatter ourselves that our true selves are reflected in our best qualities. Unfortunately, our true selves are precisely the mix of good and bad, the congeries of inconsistencies and contradictions, that we happen to be. We are only too true to them too often, which is why we are so often dissatisfied with, yes, ourselves.
And yet I suspect each of us feels that there is some essential core to our being that either transcends or else is somehow immune to the embarrassing messiness of our quotidian selves. I have a sense of this when I write poetry, which for me has always been a way of putting into words as precisely as I can a record of an experience that has struck me, for whatever reason, as peculiarly meaningful.
Only I never quite feel that the poem is mine exactly, something that I own, and that owes its existence solely to me. I feel, rather, that it is something that has come to me, been given to me, and that my role was simply to get it down on paper as accurately as I could. It is a lot like the feeling I have when I stare blankly out a window at nothing in particular and a certain calm comes over me. I am, at such times, aware of myself and of the world, but my self seems to have become an empty vessel, and my mind is suddenly free of its usual inconsequential chattering. It is then, oddly, that I feel most alive, most real, most myself. And yet my usual “I” seems no longer to be there.
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Frank,
Once again I disagree with the importance you place on the nature of the person speaking or the larger context of the original famous quote rather than on the enduring meaning of the words themselves. Who cares if the guy who first said, “Do or die” was a coward? Or if the words “To thine own self be true” were spoken by Madonna? Or some homeless guy living in a cardboard box? What if the words “God is love” were first offered by an athiest trying to mock both the subject and the object?
Does it matter once those words have entered the realm of cliche? “To thine own self be true.” seems good advice for anyone, even if sincerely presented by a total asshole.
Clark
Ah, but the question, Clark, is whether the advice can be sincere coming from an asshole like Polonius. And I think context is very important. Hamlet is not a sequence of one liners. It is a coherent drama. The lines are meant to be understood in context. Shakespeare, I am sure, wanted us to perceive that Polonius is a sententious fool – and to judge his advice accordingly.
We can’t just furnish our minds with needlepoint. Moreover, as I tried to suggest, given the ambiguity of the self, being true to oneself isn’t at all as easy as the simple-minded Polonius suggests.