Audiences for Our Lives: The Philosophy of Fame
When asked to reflect upon the death of his father, Canadian academic and former politician, Michael Ignatieff described the feeling as ‘losing the audience to his life’. Parents give us our first taste of fame; from infancy most of us are fawned over in our every step, smile and stumble. We become accustomed to the idea that someone will always care about the details of our life, no matter how mundane; we become accustomed to the idea that there will always be eyes on us.
Ignatieff’s father, it seemed, had been the sort of parent that we all might seek to be ourselves — a loyal fan; a season ticket holder to his son’s life who, rain or shine, could be trusted to be in the stands cheering-on his team. And someone who cared about the details of the game much more than the outcome. Perhaps this feeling of being watched, this warm fetishisation, this fame, cannot be truly appreciated until our audience dies and we are suddenly alone, competing in an empty stadium.
Yet fame is more than merely being watched and adored, and it is more than a legacy of childhood conditioning. Fame is about recognition, which is why we are happy to tolerate it in adulthood. It holds an accompanying sense of justice and balance; those who achieve fame as adults presumably do so because they have earned the privilege through hard work, talent and/or achievement. Our attention is their reward for doing what entertains us, or being what we would like to emulate.
If, like children, adults simply demanded our attention by virtue of their existence, it would likely have the opposite affect: repulsion rather than attraction. Fame comes with qualifications. Children are new toys, they delight us by their mere presence, so they are excused from their neediness. They have already given us enough, so we are happy to overlook this character flaw.
With adults, particularly those unrelated to ourselves, we are less forgiving of demands for our attention and more discriminatory in our application of fame. We only fawn over those people who we believe actively deserve it in some way. And this causes problems, because a desire for recognition burns in us all. How many professionals feel underappreciated, how many lovers are inconsolable, how many people are circling the rim of suicide at this very moment due to a simple lack of recognition from specific people in their lives?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, though he perhaps placed too much emphasis on its impact, understood this ever-human longing: “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness”. Our very identity requires the eyes of others. Yet as stark as the difference between the gaze of a lover is to that of a stalker, being watched is not always a good thing. And so we all tend to cringe when we see parents pushing their children into the lime light from a young age.
The more people are paying attention to you, the more scrutiny you are also under; and the more pressure you feel to satisfy those eyes in a way that they approve of. You are less free. With every spike in fame comes an inverse trough in personal privacy, and perhaps more perniciously, a twisting of your desires to match the expectations of others. Rather than simply fulfilling our personality, fame also steals something away.
Such a trade-off can be reasonable; indeed life can often seem like nothing less than a series of moments where we barter parts of ourselves away in the hope of an overall upgrade in fortunes. However, just as we believe that children lack the necessary maturity to sign legal contracts, we tend to also doubt that they are capable of truly understanding the sacrifice that fame demands. We have neatly packaged this concern into a new-age illness called ‘child-star syndrome’; embodied by a generation of dysfunctional adults who have been destroyed emotionally by the fame they felt in childhood. Fame, it seems, has a minimum drinking age.
But if fame comes with such an ‘adults-only’ warning label, experience tells us that this is just not enough of a caution. The world is seemingly full to the brim with ‘tragic’ adults, seeking fame as an end unto itself. People who find their unremarkable existence to be so intolerable, that fame is viewed as a self-contained solution, rather than as a side-effect of high achievement. Fame is, after all, a guaranteed cure for feelings of inadequacy: it is hard to feel unloved when everyone loves you.
As misguided as such behaviour might be, it pales in comparison to the door that we are beginning to pry open. Mark Chapman shot dead John Lennon in the hope that “by killing him I would acquire his fame”. And although lamenting at a recent parole hearing “I’m a bigger nobody than I was before”, he clearly achieved all he set out to. After all, his name is receiving mention in this article for no other reason than his pulling of that trigger.
If all you really seek is fame, then what better way to achieve it than through violence and fear? You will be hard-pressed to find someone more universally recognisable — both in life and death — than Osama Bin Laden. And even then, how many people knew his name before September 11th, 2001. The unavoidable fact is, that the more violent he became, the more we paid attention to him.
Decades after their crimes Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy are all still household names. Their depravity lives on in our minds; they have managed to achieve a kind of timeless fame that most movie stars can only dream of. Every gruesome murderer is famous, if only for a day. Even if we accept the re-categorising of this type of attention as the ugly cousin of fame, with the pejorative term ‘infamy’, functionally there is little difference. If ‘eyes-on-us’ is the only goal (fame for fame’s sake) then the infamous are clearly the high achievers in the class.
Fame, it seems, should be earned, and earned in a particular way. Just as John Stuart Mill discriminated between higher and lower pleasures in order to ensure that his utilitarianism did not pander to the lowest common denominator, fame also requires a quality assurance mechanism. We, as the audience to the famous, need to be a little more judicious in our viewing habits.
In some ways we already know this to be true. Like the fat person who cheats on his/her diet only when no-one is there to judge them, we all read different books, watch different TV shows and pay attention to different celebrities when we feel unburdened by the gaze of others (this is the ‘hermeneutics of fame’). We know what we are doing is wrong, we know we should be aspiring to more, and for it we are smothered in guilt. Fame is our dirty little secret.
Yet, just as the presence of a falsely imprisoned person instinctively feels like a greater injustice than that of an unconvicted criminal, underserved fame is still slightly more palatable than unrecognised fame. The fact that Vincent Van Gogh couldn’t sell his paintings, Johann Sebastian Bach was unrecognised as a musical composer, and Friedrich Nietzsche had to pay publishers to print his works, just intuitively feels unfair. It is nice to think that those people who deserve our attention and admiration actually receive it as penance for their talent and hard work. It is a difficult reality to swallow, as Nietzsche lamented about his own plight, that “some are born posthumously”.
Yet perhaps these people didn’t appreciate just how lucky they were. Perhaps fame, even if properly earned, is just too toxic a substance to be handled safely by human beings. David Brooks in his book ‘The Road to Character’ explained how the successful lives of various people have been moulded, not by due acknowledgement of their talents, but by an underappreciation, an aversion to the lime light and a stoic acceptance of suffering. The review in the Economist read: “If you want to be reassured that you are special, you will hate this book”. This is fame as a universal vice; that which holds us back by allowing us to rest easy on the bed of other people’s appreciation.
Nietzsche knew the value of suffering as well as anyone, yet it is impossible to change the world without first being recognised by other people. If fame is avoided at all costs as a matter of principle, then it is conceivable that the great minds of our time might simply slip through history unnoticed. Regardless, to ask that people actively avoid fame is almost certainly a hopeless argument. It is just too deep in our DNA, it strokes our ego in just the right way, it pushes us to the top of social hierarchies and it represents the perfect revenge story against anyone who has ever belittled us.
The eyes of other people are just too addictive — we will always seek audiences for our lives.
