A Reconception of Destiny
“I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets…”
There is a sense in which the future already exists. If time is a dimension of reality in the same way that space is, our condition of moving along this dimension in a single direction should not mean that we are perpetually moving into a horizon of inexistence, making it real as we break it moment by moment. What lay beyond that horizon could be as real as what lay beyond the literal horizon on earth. It could be as real as any region of space in which we do not currently exist, even though we are not experiencing it right now. After all, when you are reading a novel, you are always situated at a specific point in the book, but that does not mean that the rest of the book does not exist. The text in its entirety is already there; your navigation of it does not determine its existence.
So it could be with your life. You could imagine taking the perspective of an extra-dimensional god, who can walk back along a dimension of time orthogonal to that which you are bound to move in the positive direction, and see all the breadth of your life, from beginning to end. What would it look like? Would the things that seemed so uncertain and surprising, when viewed through eyes fixed permanently in the negative direction, seem inevitable and satisfying? Can you see the reality of whatever it is that you are working for; are you finally happy in the region beyond achieving it? Would it look like whatever you’re doing right now—your work, your relationships, your priorities, your attitude—is moving you towards your destination, or would it look like a detour? Would your domain on the time dimension look smaller than it should be; can you see that you arrive at an abrupt end?
What are you, anyway? You’re certainly not any single, well-defined thing that is contiguous in time. Your body consists of an entirely different set of atoms than it did a few years ago, and some of your atoms were once the material of stars. The self is an illusion, and the story your mind narrates to a non-existent audience is simply an evolved mechanism of a social organism. If what you are is a centerless consciousness, then you routinely cease to exist every night when your sleep takes you away from the earth and waits to bring you about again in the dream world.
Perhaps what you are is a gestalt, a thing perceived all at once that evades specification, like a person’s face, an impression understood in its whole in an instant and not requiring the banality of a description or a definition, like an impression left on the people in our lives or the world itself. Would what you are seem so obvious from the god’s-eye view? A fuzzy body, a ship of Theseus, star stuff, an illusory self, a narrative, a consciousness twinkling in and out of existence?
You feel like you are a spiritual thing. You feel separate from the world. You feel that there is meaning to existence. You feel that any characterization of what you are is a reduction. You feel that there is some correct thing that you should be doing. What are you supposed to do about this? What are you supposed to do with your life?
In The Soul’s Code, published 1997, psychologist James Hillman proposes the “acorn theory.” The acorn theory states that you contain a destiny just as an acorn contains an oak tree. The god’s-eye view of the acorn includes the oak, and the god’s-eye view of your life includes your destiny. Your destiny is simply that which you will eventually become. “[The acorn theory] claims that each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.”
The acorn theory is not a scientific theory. It’s not really falsifiable, and The Soul’s Code contains almost no references to scientific literature. But the acorn theory isn’t exactly religious or spiritual, either.
The call to an individual destiny is not an issue between faithless science and unscientific faith. Individuality remains an issue for psychology a psychology that holds in mind its prefix, “psyche,” and its premise, soul, so that its mind can espouse its faith without institutional Religion and practice its careful observation of phenomena without institutionalized Science. The acorn theory moves nimbly down the middle between those two old contesting dogmas, barking at each other through the ages and which Western thought fondly keeps as pets.
The acorn theory is philosophical—but not so formal as that. It’s mostly linguistic and conceptual. It’s a myth.
The idea of the acorn originates from Plato’s Republic, in which he describes the “daimon”—the aspect of the heavens that inhabits your human body, and guides you to your destiny. Plato’s concept of the daimon is pretty similar to the secular concept of a calling, only with some mythological flair. In The Soul’s Code, Hillman does not shy away from this flair. The book is saturated with it. It reads more like Plato than it does Gladwell.
A daimon is a being from the heavens that chooses you—your physical body, your environment, your parents—to fulfill its calling. The daimon is the source of your passion, your irrational patterns, and your individuality. “It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, and accorded recognition.”
The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate. The core subject of psychology, psyche or soul, doesn't get into the books supposedly dedicated to its study and care.
Does the daimon actually exist, though?
No, of course, it doesn’t exist.
But Hillman does talk about it as if it really exists, the way a Christian preacher might talk about the soul and heaven. His language is explicitly dualistic. However, my reading is that this is just a style choice (a questionable one, maybe, but I guess that’s up to you), an effort to be assertive and distinguish his writing from that of popular science, self-help, and religious books.
My interpretation of the daimon is that it is shorthand for a multitude of things that are mysterious: things that science hasn’t yet explained or can’t explain, our sense of purpose, a certain quality of subjective reality, the story of our lives, our gestalt, and our super-temporal totality (coincidentally, swap the ai for the o in “daimon” and you get “domain,” as in our domain on the x-axis of time). Hillman says that acorn, image, character, fate, genius, calling, daimon, soul, and destiny are all interchangeable names for the same thing, so the daimon isn’t something that properly exists as much as it is a unifying angle on the concepts of calling, character, and individuality—the god’s-eye view of a life—and he just likes the whimsy of treating the daimon as a mythological thing that actually exists (in fact he probably thinks there is utility in this whimsy, more on that below). “It is a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.”
You might feel a pull towards writing, music, film, games, math, software, or something else—the daimon is this pull. You might struggle with the puzzle of existence—the daimon is the nonexistent answer to this puzzle. You are different from everyone else—the daimon is this individuality. You are an image; just as your face is an aspect of you that is perceived all at once and impossible to characterize or reproduce, your character is the broader whole of you that is perceived all at once. The daimon is this image. “We each embody our own idea,” says Plato—the daimon is this idea.
What are we supposed to do with this “theory”? Should I meditate on my acorn; sit in periods of concentration and try to glimpse the destiny written in me? Or, should I visit an acornist therapist and ask them to analyze my calling and tell me what to do with my life? Should we be doing acornist science, philosophizing the physics of the daimon or analyzing the acorn of historical people?
Probably not.
The Soul’s Code is not a practical book. There is little in the way of methodology or ritual, since it’s explicitly not about science or religion. I don’t think Hillman would endorse any of these practices, or really anything formal, based on the acorn theory. I think he would suggest that we think about the acorn when we’re thinking about our lives, that even though we cannot take the god’s-eye view we try to imagine what that would be like, that we make room for myth in our understanding of the world, that we connect with the things about ourselves that don’t make sense, or the things that seem to make the most sense; “[looking at] our lives with the imaginative sensitivity we give fictions.”
With that being said, there is guidance in The Soul’s Code, albeit lofty and abstract guidance.
The acorn theory instructs us to “read our lives backward.” This is what Hillman does to all of the interesting little biographies in the book—of which there are dozens—to analyze daimons and callings. According to the acorn theory, we are attracted to eminent people and their biographies because they are daimons personified. They remind us that we have a calling ourselves, and we want to read their biographies because we want to find their humanity. This is how we link our lived human experience to our innate tentative belief in destiny and calling. “They give our lives an imaginary dimension.” We can apply this same biographical yearning to our own lives. We can view them with an imaginary dimension.
Reading your life backward means putting your childhood at the front and searching for signs of the daimon. These signs would be things that individualized you, things that were irrational (even from the perspective of a child), things that you could not let go of. These might be clues to your calling. Reading your life backward is more than this, though, too. It means taking the god’s-eye view. Imagine your life in its completion—what callings would make sense? What would seem like it was there all along?
But most of us, I think, will not feel or see a calling so strongly, even reading our lives backward. And indeed, most of us will not be eminent. What to do with this? What if I can’t figure out a calling? Am I doomed to mediocrity?
Well, probably. But we should probably reframe mediocrity from something that’s unacceptable to something that’s a necessary and even beautiful part of life (you’re not doomed to mediocrity, you’re called to it). Hillman says that the obsession with success and eminence is a particularly modern and western malaise that harms our willingness to embody our daimons and ultimately be satisfied with our lives. “As long as we regard people in terms of earning power and expertise, we do not see their character.” The Soul’s Code defines “character” as: “that inability to be other than what you are in the acorn, following it faithfully or being desperately driven by its dream.” Character is fully being our own image; embodying and deepening the impression we leave on the world.
Almost all of us are called to “mediocrity,” in the sense that most of our destinies are things like boring desk jobs, unglamorous trades, simple family life, and mediocre blogs. We do not have a grand calling pulling us to eminence, waiting to be realized. Your lack of fame is not your failure, as the modern western perspective seems to suggest, because there is certainly no guarantee that you will be wildly successful if you can fully connect with your daimon. The guarantee is that you will be satisfied with your life if you can connect with your daimon, and that means embracing whatever your calling is, even if it seems mediocre.
Souls cannot be mediocre, says Hillman, so we need not worry about having a “mediocre” calling. To realize your calling—whether it’s as a CEO or a mid-level manager, a paradigm-shifting scientist or a professor who simply has an impact on a few undergraduates, a rock star or someone who simply gets a lot of satisfaction from playing music—is extraordinary. “Character is not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Even with an unglamorous calling, you can have exceptional character. And maybe most importantly, “habit is character, and character becomes fate.” The way we live our lives becomes our lives; our fate is written in how we live each day.
How should we live each day? Basically we need to “grow down.” Growing down is an effort to become more in touch with worldly things and humanity (we say someone that is in touch with what matters is “down to earth.”)
“Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkening and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.”
Difficult experiences: poverty, loss, injury, and sickness, violence are things that might help growing down, as are things like travel, meaningful relationships, sex, physical activity, drugs, and mindfulness. Humor, too, is an important part of growing down (e.g. “taking ourselves down a peg.”) Our job as humans, says the acorn theory, is basically to pull the daimon down to earth, to bring our heavenly selves into contact with the fact of our corporeal reality, to connect with the physical world. And isn’t this our basic problem? That we are all subject to meaningless despair?
And aren’t we all aloft in our own heads? You might think that of course you aren’t a dualistic being that is partially tethered to the heavens, but don’t you irrationally feel, at times, that you are something besides a brain in a body? That you are separate from and above the rest of the world and even the people around you? Aren’t you making an effort to touch down? Shouldn’t you be?
The job of parents, then, is not to help our children grow up, but to help them grow down. Raise them to be down to earth. TSC doesn’t offer much in the way of specifically how to do this, but I think it would involve things like showing your kids various aspects of the world, exposing them to different cultures, meeting lots of different kinds of people, teaching them empathy, not sheltering them too much, and guiding them through darkness and despair. And Hillman says you can only really help kids grow down if you are in touch with your own daimon. Otherwise, you will fail to recognize your kid’s daimon and maybe even impose your own daimon on him/her. Parents should entertain their kid’s sense of wonder, and support their obsessive interests. They should recognize their kids as individuals.
Should the onus of soul-making in the parent shift to making the soul of the child, then the parent is dodging the lifelong task set by the acorn. Then the child replaces the acorn. You feel your child is special, and you care for it as your calling, seeking to realize the acorn in your child. So your daimon complains because it is avoided, and your child complains because it has become an effigy of the parents’ own calling. Your mother, as I said, may be a demon, but she is not your daimon; so your child, too, is not your daimon.
Parents should also recognize, however, that in their role as caretakers, they are not up to the monumental task of fostering the child’s daimon—the parental role is a little too down to earth for that. To fully satisfy the daimon, you need a mentor. “One of the most painful errors we make is to expect from a parent a mentor’s vision and blessing and strict teaching.” A mentor is someone who can meet you on a spiritual level. Someone who understands your calling and wants to see it borne. The Soul’s Code acknowledges, supports, and answers Erik Hoel’s writing on aristocratic tutoring; Hoel asks, “Why did we stop making geniuses?” and the acorn theory answers: “Because we are neglecting the daimon.” Aristocratic tutoring might be impossible now, but the acorn theory might offer a perspective that can help us recover some of its effects.
So why the dualistic language? Why the archaic and mystical concepts; why the dependence on ancient religious texts instead of empirical evidence? Why the detachment from causality and fact? Causality is, like, real, right? Hillman is a psychologist, after all—why not take all these ideas and tie them together in a scientific theory, instead of a myth?
Hillman states “This book’s main thesis: We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives.” He could have written a scientific theory instead of a myth, but he didn’t think that would do as much good. He thinks that rationality and attachment to scientific explanations are part of the problem.
Samuel Arbesman, who writes the Cabinet Of Wonders, advocates for wisdom literature in the “Whirligig Age”:
Our current era is overwhelming, combining rapid technological change, a feeling of being unmoored from the past, a sense of disenchantment, and even decadence and stasis, despite change. What to call this instability amidst dizzying change? The “Whirligig Age.” And how can we best live in The Whirligig? We can turn to wisdom literature.
He includes the book of Ecclesiastes, William B. Irvine’s The Stoic Path, and Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism as examples of the “Modern Wisdom Literature Canon.”
Much of wisdom literature (although less of “modern wisdom literature”) is myth. Wisdom is old and functional knowledge. It tells us about life, not reality. Wisdom, like myth, appeals to intuition more than it does truth. Hillman says, “Intuition is mythic sensibility… When a myth strikes us, it seems true and gives sudden insight.” He quotes Plato scholar Paul Friedländer: “Myth is a mixture of truth and poetic fancy,” and Roman historian Sallust: “Myth never happened but always is.”
He describes mythic sensibility as a “softer sensibility in intellect,” which means not being too attached to what is known to be true, not dismissing the humanities, not being too averse to wonder. Myth is valuable much in the same way fiction is valuable. It tells us something about ourselves the way that a novel does, not the way a psychological theory does. We are predisposed to understand the world and our lives as stories—“I am embedded in a mythical reality of which the acorn is but my particular and very small portion.”
The point of wisdom and myth is not to figure what’s true, but what helps; it’s not for describing how things are, but how we experience them.
“The reason we resist the myth of the daimon, I believe, is that it comes clean. It is not disguised as empirical fact. It states itself openly as myth.”
Despite my interpretation of the acorn theory as a non-dualistic shorthand for a multitude of things we cannot understand, many readers, I’m sure, will reject it as too dualistic anyway. And that is perfectly fine, because the power of myth is personal—it will work for some people and not others. I only ask that you recognize that your preferred orientation, whether it be materialism and determinism or chaos and fundamental randomness, is mythical too; for we can not explain everything in terms of fact and causality, either. We choose the myths that work for us. This is not to say that chaos and randomness aren’t more factually true than destiny or fate, or that science is nothing but a myth—I’m not using myth in the modern way we use it, as a simple falsehood, but the way Hillman uses it, to mean explanation in the form of story—this is to say that we choose how to make ourselves comfortable with mystery and uncertainty. Hillman is concerned that we are too averse to mystery.
Myth serves a different purpose from science. A myth is a whimsical way of thinking about the world. It is your lore. You choose the myths that work for you (but having no myths is not an option), independent of truth—their truth exists in their resonance with you. Does it serve your story? Does it embody your idea? If not, then it is not true. You decide. You are the author.
Nonetheless, it is hard to get over the “unscientificness” of The Soul’s Code. Hillman might be a little too ready to give up on facts & causes.
The Soul’s Code is stuffed with little biographies, flashes from the lives of all sorts of eminent people, from Judy Garland to Adolf Hitler, e.g.:
Then there is the high school dropout guy who dressed mostly in black, drove a silver Civic, dined at Denny’s and Jack in the Box, read crime novels and comics voraciously, loved Elvis and the Three Stooges, always celebrated his birthday at the movies, and legend has it—amassed $7,000 in parking tickets. The movies he particularly liked portrayed women in prison and Asian martial arts. The person? Quentin Tarantino, scriptwriter and film director.
Hillman analyzes these biographies from the perspective of the acorn theory, to show the reader how it works. Judy Garland performs once as a child and tells her parents that she is going to be a singer. Hitler, in his youth, has a habit of orating to his peers. But Hillman’s analyses are unfalsifiable. Of course you can look at people’s lives and say they were “destined” for whatever. They feel a bit like freudian analysis with reversed causality.
And he seems to endorse a few biographical subjects’ habit to confabulate stories.
Biographical “falsifications” belong as much to the narrative as do the “facts.” Who knows most—Henry Ford, or his sister Margaret, or other contemporaries—about what “really happened”? What is real is the legend of Henry Ford, which exemplifies the power of invention at work sort in this inventor’s own story. As we live we are being invented…
“I am not your facts. I will not let what is strange in me, about me, my mystery, be put in a world of fact. I must invent a world that presents a truer illusion of who I am than the social, environmental, ‘realities.’ Besides, I do not lie or invent: Confabulations occur spontaneously. I cannot he accused of lying, for the stories that come out of me about myself are not quite me speaking…”
When the daimon speaks it says: The stories [confabulations] I tell are the facts. The fables I tell more truly tell who I am, I am telling the story that gives backing to what has happened. I am reading life backward, I am telling the story of genius, … and so I must tell a story of distortions to really tell the truth. The story must be adequate to the exceptionality of the genius.
His scare quotes on the words “facts” and “realities” do in fact scare me.
But the biographies and analysis are not meant to be evidence for the acorn theory—there’s no room for empiricism here—they are meant to be illustrations. Yes, in fact, of course you can say whoever is destined for whatever when you look back on their life. This is the whole point. It’s not a scientific point, it’s not an observation, it’s a suggestion. That you look at your life this way.
Anyway, I think we should give Hillman a break, because he’s really quite upset about psychological science.
By psychology’s “mortal” sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional psychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones, the bulk of its textbooks, the serious pretensions and bearded proclamations of new “findings” that could hardly be more banal, its soothing anodynes for self-help, its decor, its fashion, its departmental meetings, and its tranquilizing consulting rooms, those stagnant waters where the soul goes to be restored, a last refuge of white-bread culture, stale, crustless, but ever spongy with rebounding hope… All the while psychology, without beauty, becomes victim of its own cognitive strictures, all passion spent in pushing for publication and position.
Hillman is very pessimistic about established psychological and psychiatric methods and paradigms. He thinks that modern western thinking cannot meet the challenges of the human mind, and practices like pharmacology, therapy, and school might be doing more harm than good.
The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mindset. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustment.
In particular, Hillman thinks that psychology is failing to help us understand children. He includes many biographical examples of extremely smart and successful people who hated or did poorly in school, and suggests that this rejection is a pattern of the daimon; for the daimon is a being individuality—how could it succeed in a homogenizing environment like school?
Maybe we should read the data of learning disorders and the cases of school problems differently. Instead of “failed at school,” see “saved from school”—not that this is my personal recommendation. I ask only that the sadnesses of children in school be imagined not merely as examples of failure but as exemplars of the acorn. The daimon’s intuition often cannot submit to the normalcy of schooling and becomes even more demonic.
(I respect his shameless use of the word “demonic” to describe difficult middle schoolers.)
He also describes the “parental fallacy.” This is a paradigm, perhaps termed as freudian from the perspective of psychology, that attributes almost all of our psyche to our parents and our early environment. This is the tendency to explain a person’s behavior and tendencies in terms of the effects of parenting. Someone has a fear of abandonment because their father left him. Another person has an obsession with keeping things clean because that’s what her mother did in the childhood home. Jeffrey Dahmer become a gruesome serial killer because his dad was a jerk. The parental fallacy shackles individuals to the end of a chain of causes, obscuring our individuality, agency, and personal responsibility. But of course this goes beyond freudianism into the paradigms of science in general, which always chase down chains of causes. How are we supposed to understand as individuals when the only explanation science can give is that “I am then a mere effect myself”?
There is a chapter dedicated to the “nature vs. nurture” paradigm. Hillman argues that nature and nurture are not enough to explain individuality, giving some examples of traits like propensity for schizophrenia that differ even for twins raised in the same environment. He also explains the challenge with the concept of environment, which really you can never have a “shared” environment, can you, because besides infinite subtle differences even between twins raised in the same household, our environment includes our own subjective experience, which can never be touched by science.
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts’ (T. S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
If our destinies are written in our acorns, isn’t life fatalistic? If all of time already exists, doesn’t that mean that the universe is deterministic? How could we possibly have free will?
Unfortunately, Hillman’s responses to these concerns are unsatisfying, despite acknowledging them and clearly believing in free will and clearly not believing in determinism or fatalism (although he mostly uses the word fatalism but seems to use it to mean determinism; it’s possible [likely? certain?] he would agree with some form of fatalism).
Personally, I don’t really have a problem with a bit of fatalism. It doesn’t bother me to imagine there is an outcome to my life (in fact I find it oddly comforting). Determinism, though, does bother me a little bit, because it seems to take all the meaning out of intention and decisions. But determinism seems unlikely to be actually true given that we can observe randomness in the universe. Even so, free will may not exist (if the only thing that’s not determined is fundamental randomness, we still don’t have free will), and Hillman’s perspective on time are effective for me as an argument against free will. He doesn’t really present a formal argument for the existence of free will, but he presents something:
Hillman’s definition of “fate” seems to be “chance events,” as in, “The roads are icy, so it’s not safe to drive to my dentist appointment. I guess it’s fate.” Fate is the set of things that manifest along the domain of your life that take you along the path to your destiny. It’s a bit tautological; once you can look backwards and see that something happened the way it did, you can call it fate, despite being properly random and pointless. However, Hillman’s unglamorous framing of fate disrupts the freudian chain of causes that absolve us of individual responsibility. This gives us the opportunity to meaningfully analyze our decisions and habits, read our lives backwards, take responsibility, and move forward, unshackled by the chain of causes.
He claims free will: “These are your choices, resulting from the meaning you find in the wind.” He asks us to consider telos—the purpose of an occurrence, the reverse of a cause, defined as “that for the sake of which,” by Aristotle—but not embrace teleology— “the belief that events are pulled by a purpose toward a definite end.” This sort of spins the free will issue around on its head. “For telos it's enough to say I went to the store for the sake of the family breakfast,” instead of explaining your trip to the store in terms of a chain of causality that leaves no room for free will.
The question of free will is still pretty hit or miss if you ask me, but he follows with some important clarification on the daimon and his concept of destiny:
The acorn seems to follow just this sort of limited pattern. It does not indulge in long-term philosophies. It disturbs the heart, it bursts out in a temper… It excites, calls, demands—but rarely does it offer a grand purpose.
The pull of purpose comes with force; you may feel full of purpose. But just what it is and how to get there remains undetermined. The telos may even be double or triple and confused about whether to sing or dance, write or paint. Purpose does not usually appear as a clearly framed goal, but more likely as a troubling, unclear urge coupled with a sense of indubitable importance.
I feel that this really captures the sense of small-d destiny that most of us have. He goes on:
The easy part is following the trajectory with dedication. We often feel what we must do. The image in the heart can lay how strong demands and it asks us to keep faith. The hard job is making sense of accidents, those trivial gusts that take you off course and seem to be delaying your projected arrival in the teleological harbor. Are the hindering gusts distractions? Or has each one its particular purpose? Do they together combine to advance the boat—maybe to a different port? You will not be able to find any point in an untoward incident if your compass is pointed too fixedly on the far horizon and your teleological vision knows where you should be going, what you should be doing to get there, and where you are right now.
Even more: What matters is not so much whether an interference has or does not have purpose; rather, it is important look with a purposive eye, seeking value in the unexplained. The purposive eye starts from the assumption that events can indeed be accidents. The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but—and this “but” is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting… The eye of purpose merely looks into each “accident,” as these events are called, for what it says about itself. The soul seeks to fit it into its form.
Herein lies the really valuable idea of The Soul’s Code. Whether destiny exists or not, whether we can redefine it as a tautology, or whether we are capable of taking the god’s-eye view, we have a choice: to look at accidents as simply accidents, or to look at these things as fate, to give them telos even if we do not believe in a grand purpose and teleology. We are all subject to all kinds of forces much greater than ourselves. Life will yank us all around. Will you be merely yanked? Jerked around, and mad at the world for being convenient? Or will you lean into your circumstances, embrace or at least accept accidents, look at them backwards and see how they fit into your life? Because eventually, the only direction we will be able to look is backwards (if we’re lucky). Our image will be more or less complete and available for viewing; how will understand the accidents to fit into the picture? From this perspective, the accidents will appear necessary. The reconception of destiny in The Soul’s Code is the suggestion that we might live from this retrospective and wisened posture; to grant ourselves fate rather than believe in it.
Appendix A: quotes, taken out of context, from The Soul’s Code
“The daimon is shredding my love map.”
“There are many philosophies of breakfast that can satisfy your teleological vision of life. Many gods come to the breakfast table.”
“Biographers are ghost writers, even ghost busters.”
“And what about time, has anyone seen it recently?”
“‘Dad! Are you home? Is anybody here?’ No. Dad is out to lunch. And he should be—as I shall claim.”
Appendix B: the actual review
I first read The Soul’s Code (subtitle: In Search of Character and Calling) during my sophomore year of college. It was my first experience with any sort of philosophical text. I picked it up in Barnes & Noble, in the pop-psychology section where I would usually browse during those days (the book I had read before The Soul’s Code was probably Outliers, to give you an idea of the density that I was equipped for) and must have thought Yes, I am In Search of Character and Calling, so I took it home and started reading it. It was extremely difficult to read. I had a hard time following the writing, I didn’t understand any of the references, and many of the concepts went over my head. It probably took me six months to finish the book. But it had an impact on me.
Picking it up again for the purposes of this review, after years of digestion, was thrilling. To say that there is wisdom on every page is not an exaggeration. The Soul’s Code is a superbly interesting book, written in a style that makes you feel like your own life is an ancient myth, and that forces you to rethink your life in general; to zoom out, to consider the grander sense of it. Even if you can’t get all the way over the dualism and mysticism, stylistic or not, you will encounter writing and thinking you are unlikely to find anywhere else. I would highly recommend reading it, but you can skip the “Note on Methodology” at the end, which is basically just ten pages of comparisons between acorns and penises.