For the Glory

The Ancient / Modern Debate about the Good Life

I’m fascinated by the topic of glory.

I.

Human beings seem to have a universal desire to pursue projects for the amorphous goal of attaining glory; that glory could be praise and recognition, or it could be an internal sense that you’ve done something awesome, even if nobody knows. Or perhaps you’re looking for glory from God—and you’ll get a big hug in heaven or a big house in the Metaverse, accordingly.

There are an infinite number of things one could do to pursue glory, from emulating a Franciscan monk who takes a vow of poverty to emulating Warren Buffett, from emulating Oscar Schindler to Thomas Edison. Being the person that everyone says is a mensch also qualifies as glorious if you want it to be. You don’t have to be the best at some well recognized thing to feel yourself in pursuit or attainment of glory. Publishing a poem is for many a kind of glory, even as it likely won’t be read by more than 10 people, and will most probably not be remembered in a few years’ time.

The aspiration to glory seems different than the aspiration to recognition in that glory is less about social status and more about a sense of having lived well. The two overlap but all the external praise in the world may mean little to a person measuring herself against her own yardstick.

II.

A theme that comes up in the glory discussion is whether it’s more glorious to pursue things which wouldn’t happen otherwise or whether it’s just as glorious to be the inventor of something even if, say, the thing would be invented by someone else. Prima facie, inventing something contingent seems better than inventing something that is destined to be. So, for example, if Socrates invented Socratic dialogue, but someone else 5 years later would have come to the same form, it’s less glorious. Socrates won a race, but he wasn’t really original—that’s just an illusion.

If you find a cure for a disease that would end up getting cured a year later, the argument goes, you should only really get credit for a year’s worth of curing people. You shouldn’t get credit in perpetuity. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the smartphone, just the iPhone. His value-add to humanity is pretty negligible if you think that we’d still be using internet enabled phones without him.

I don’t agree with that conclusion. And I don’t think the ancients do, either. It seems that moderns glorify contingency, but ancients find glory in destiny. In other words, what makes Socrates great isn’t that he was the first to invent something but that he did what he was meant to do; he fulfilled his purpose.

The ancients have a sense of teleology—this means that glory isn’t fundamentally about competing with others for a prize, it’s about living up to your potential. Who cares if someone else would invent the thing that you invented two years later?

The reason for the ancient/modern divide on glory is not only about whether there is teleology and purpose inherent in a human life vs. life being fundamentally a project of self-construction, it’s also about whether the good life is determined by an internal compass called the soul or an external one called “social impact.”

Should you pursue projects which nobody else can and will if you don’t? This seems to be the modern conclusion which favors contingency. Or perhaps it is enough to ask what am I meant to do, and not worry too much about who else is doing it. That’s not your department. It is enough to embrace your fate.