What Can Guide Man?

Inside some of my current reading is a deceptively simple question: what can guide man? Across a handful of ancient and modern texts, the answers range from reason to justice to desire to God himself. What follows is my attempt to gather those voices in one place and hear what they say together.

Marcus Aurelius posed the question bluntly in the second book of his Meditations. After sketching the human condition in a few stark strokes, he writes:

Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. Then what can guide us? Only philosophy.

Meditations 2.17

It is a bracing answer. These suggest that if philosophy is our guide, philosophy itself, honestly pursued, keeps gesturing beyond itself.

Plato’s Cratylus begins from a different angle but circles the same question. Man is the creature who names things, and who cannot stop reaching for truth with imperfect instruments. The dialogue asks whether names correspond to reality by nature or by convention, only to have Socrates dismantle both simple answers. Words are tools fitted to reality, yet they always fall short of it. The gap between what we mean and what we manage to say never quite closes, and still we keep naming. That stubborn drive to speak truth, even when our words limp, is itself a portrait of what we are.

In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, man is the creature capable of justice, though not naturally inclined toward it. The trilogy traces a grim chain of blood: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Clytemnestra murders him, Orestes kills her, and the Furies hound him. What finally breaks the cycle is not a more decisive act of violence but a different kind of action: a law court in Athens, a jury, arguments, and a verdict. Aeschylus does not present this turn from vengeance to deliberation as easy or inevitable. Yet the possibility of moving from retribution to reasoned justice is real, and distinctly human.

Sophocles’ Philoctetes turns our attention to the interior cost of such decisions. Here man is the creature whose dignity is measured by what he refuses to do under pressure. Neoptolemus is sent to deceive a wounded man and steal his bow for the war effort, yet he finds he cannot carry the plan through. He would rather lose in a noble action than win by an ignoble one. Philoctetes himself shows the other side: what nine years of isolation and an unhealed wound can do to a person. Suffering left untended becomes its own prison. Sophocles presses us to ask what we owe those who are difficult and broken, and whether our obligations end when someone’s pain makes them hard to bear.

With Marcus Aurelius, the question comes into sharper focus. Man, for him, is a rational being obligated to live in accord with his nature and nothing else. He returns again and again to one conviction: the only thing in your control is your rational response to what happens. The body decays, fortune turns, fame flickers and dies. Reason alone, he believes, can be trusted to guide us. It is a demanding answer with real moral power. Yet, as the later texts on this list show, it is incomplete.

Augustine’s Confessions presses exactly where Aurelius leaves off. Man, for Augustine, is a creature of disordered desire, made for God and unable to rest anywhere else. Where Aurelius says philosophy can guide us, Augustine says it cannot reach deep enough. The core problem is not merely wrong ideas but wrong loves. His own story becomes a catalog of substitutions: pleasure, ambition, friendship, and philosophy itself, each pursued as though it could quiet what only God can. His opening line is the thesis in miniature: God has made us for himself, and our heart is restless until it rests in him. The ache that nothing in this world fills is not a defect. It is a direction.

Erasmus’s Praise of Folly turns Augustine’s diagnosis into satire. Here man is a self-deceiving fool who mistakes vanity for wisdom. Folly herself delivers the charge, and the joke is that she speaks more plainly than the scholars do. The learned dress their foolishness in the language of reason, and the powerful baptize their ambition as duty. We are not foolish by accident. We are foolish because foolishness flatters us. Read alongside Augustine, Erasmus confirms the same disease from a different angle.

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground explodes any hope that the disease can be cured by rational calculation alone. Man, in this short book, is an irrational creature who will spite his own interests rather than be reduced to a formula. The Underground Man resents every tidy account of human nature. The Enlightenment dream of a rational social order fills him with contempt, and he would rather act against his own good just to prove that he can. Dostoevsky is not endorsing his narrator. He exposes what both Stoics and rationalists miss: that man’s resistance to being fully explained is not a glitch in the system but part of who he is.

Eva Brann’s reading of Heraclitus, in The Logos of Heraclitus, returns us to the word Aurelius loved: logos. Man is the creature capable of hearing the rational principle that orders all things, and who mostly fails to listen. Heraclitus insists that a logos runs through reality, holding the flux together, and that man shares in it by virtue of his reason. Yet most people live as though they had no share in it at all. They are awake to the world and asleep to its order. Read alongside the Cratylus, this deepens Plato’s problem: our words fall short of reality, and our attention often fails to show up in the first place.

Wendell Berry’s This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems offers a quieter answer that nonetheless cuts against much modern habit. Man is a creaturely being whose humanity is expressed not in mastery but in faithful attention to what is near and given. Berry’s Sabbath poems argue in verse what many of these other texts argue in prose: to be human is not to transcend creatureliness but to inhabit it with care. Against the habit of treating the world as raw material and the self as a project, he insists on limits, rest, and the particular field on the particular day. His vision sits in productive tension with the more heroic, rationalist answers around it.

Finally, C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man brings Aurelius’s question into the late modern world. Here man is the being who can abolish himself and is already in the process of doing so. Lewis argues that when we strip the objective moral reality he calls the Tao of its authority, we do not liberate man. We hollow him out. Those who come after, reshaping humanity with no standard beyond their own will, are not more than human. They are something less. Aurelius asked what can guide man. Lewis warns that if man decides nothing can, if he refuses every given standard, what remains is not freedom but the abolition of man himself.

Ten texts, one question, no tidy resolution. Aurelius’s answer was that philosophy can guide us. Taken together, these readings suggest that philosophy, pursued with honesty, keeps pointing beyond itself: to a logos we did not invent, to a justice we receive rather than create, and to a rest our own powers cannot finally secure.

That logos, that justice, that rest are not abstractions but a person: Jesus Christ, the one in whom all things hold together and through whom God is reconciling the world to himself.

~PW 🌮🛶

Bibliography

• Aurelius, Marcus. The Emperor’s Handbook: A New Translation of the Meditations. Translated by C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks. New York: Scribner, 2002.
• Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New York: Modern Library, 2018.
• Berry, Wendell. This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014.
• Brann, Eva. The Logos of Heraclitus. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011.
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1994.
• Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Translated by Clarence H. Miller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2001.
• Plato. Cratylus. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
• Sophocles. Philoktetes. Translated by Seth L. Schein. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2003.
• Taplin, Oliver, trans. The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, Orestes in Athens. By Aeschylus. New York: Liveright, 2018.