The Thinker and the Doer

“And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  (from Shakespeare’s Hamlet)

Thinking is a lot of work and I've been thinking a lot about this blog entry.  In the course of all this thinking, I got to thinking about a discussion I once had with my wife, Sue, about thinking.

Sue and I were at a hotel.  I was reading about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  The television was on.  I put down my book to watch a show about the history of food in America.  The particular episode was about the Hershey chocolate factory and its founder Milton Hershey.  When the show ended, I turned to Sue and asked, “Nietzsche or Hershey, who do you think was more important?”  She was amused by my question, but I was serious.  I was reading existential philosophy, wrestling as I am wont to do, with questions about life’s meaning.  In the end, is it better to be like Nietzsche or like Hershey?  Will the aphorisms of Nietzsche or the Kisses of Hershey linger longer on the lips of mankind?  I didn’t have to ask who brought more joy and comfort.  Nietzsche gave us existential angst.  Hershey gave us chocolate.  But, in the end, who will have given us more, the philosopher or the candy maker, the thinker or the doer?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) probed the depths of the human unconscious thirty years before Freud.  Nietzsche attacked the facades and pretenses of society.  He preached that the individual must rise above the conventional morality, that God is dead and that one must become self-reliant, an ‘ubermensch’.  Like so many famous philosophers, Nietzsche led a somewhat solitary and unmarried life.  He was chronically ill, suffering from headaches and digestive problems.  He died an early death after a long descent into insanity.

I have read about many philosophers, but I had never before read about a candy maker.  I googled ‘Milton Hershey’.  The first line of the first article began, “Mr. Hershey was a ‘doer’, not a philosopher.  He never wrote and seldom spoke about his beliefs.”  Milton Hershey (1857-1945) was born into a Pennsylvania Mennonite family.  By all accounts, Hershey was a man of unquestioned kindness, generosity and integrity.  He not only built a candy factory, he built a town for the factory workers, a planned community assuring a quality life for all his employees.  He was a devoted husband, and though he and his wife did not have children, they committed their wealth to helping children in need.  In 1909 he founded the Milton Hershey School for orphans, a school that continues to thrive.  The subtitle of a Milton Hershey biography reads, “His Deeds Are His Monument, His Life Is Our Inspiration”.

Who mattered more?  Ironically, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) seemed to side with the doer.  Levinas called philosophy the “temptation of temptations”.  “We (philosophers) do not want to undertake anything without knowing everything”.  In other words, too much thinking can lead to too little doing.

Levinas favored the doer.  Sue favored the doer.  Me, I’m still thinking about it.