Delphic Maxim 61: Be on your guard
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
61. Be on your guard
I guess it makes sense that not every maxim can be some glorious reflection on friendship, virtue and the good life. From time to time, we must necessarily come across the more pragmatic and strategic advice about life. That’s how I am interpreting the call to be on your guard.
In previous posts I’ve talked about the idea of strategy — and the example of Odysseus as a cunning commander comes to mind. However, there’s a difference between being strategic when entering into a situation, and being on your guard. The first involves preparation and planning, a knowledge of the field of play and the rules of the game (and potentially how to cheat them). It’s all about foresight and anticipation, and you get to set the terms of the conflict.
On the other hand, being on guard means having a degree of situational awareness, of being prepared for the unexpected. In Donald Rumsfeld’s famous formulation, he describes the ‘known knowns (the things we know), the known unknowns (the things we know that we don’t know), and the unknown unknowns (the things we don’t know at all)’. (Interestingly, Žižek adds the ‘missing quadrant’ to this construction: the unknown knowns, the things we don’t know that we know — the stuff of the unconscious).
Being on guard is located in the domain of the unknown, and most likely the unknown unknowns. The risk is that we might read this as a call to paranoia, which I don’t think it is. Preparedness for uncertainty is about risk mitigation, not crippling retreat. We need to weight maxims like this against the system of virtues (the heroic virtues and sense of excellence which the Greeks called arete or ἀρετή). Being on your guard is an exercise in prudence, but it must be taken in the light of the virtue of courage. We don’t retreat from difficult situations, life doesn’t actually allow it. But we can be prepared for them.
It pays when thinking about how the Delphic maxims might be interpreted for a modern life to consider how our lives have generally changed from that time. Our work is fragmented and abstracted from concrete products. Australia is dominated by service industries, and the industrial revolution compartmentalised and complicated the processes of production. The work we do in offices, retail stores, banks and health services are radically different to the kinds of self-sufficient, heavily manual tasks that took up the time of the Ancients. Add to that, we live in a time of incredible abundance, and our technology has massively changed the way we spend our leisure time (we watch TV, see movies, listen to podcasts, play games, write for Medium, and so on).
Because of that change, being on guard is less about our personal security (though that’s always a good thing to be concerned about), and more a lesson about pragmatic care of the self. It’s about ensuring that we don’t get ourselves into tricky, inescapable situations. So there’s not just strategy about life here, but also sensibility.
Be prudent, be aware, and be prepared for the odd curveball.
