When you picture a philosopher, what do you see? A guy with a beard. Maybe looks a bit Greek? Or French, with a cigarette in one hand and an espresso in the other?
Wrong! So Leo Tolstoy would say. The Russian writer behind epic novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace spent years searching for the meaning of life in academic works. But the highbrow discourse of the intelligentsia left him cold. Instead, he reckoned the real philosophers were ordinary people – peasants, as they were called in his time.
Tolstoy was impressed by the resilience and sense of purpose shown by people with little material wealth. He put it down to an uncomplicated Christian faith practised close to nature, not unlike the dominant native philosophy in Ireland in the century before the second World War.
Peig Sayers (1873-1958) provides a link to that tradition. Her memoir was on the Leaving Cert Irish curriculum between 1962 and 1995, and anyone exposed to it will not easily forget her love of stoic proverbs or seanfhocail.
Dismissed by some as misery lit, Peig epitomises a kind of earned wisdom. Her beliefs didn’t come from books. They came from experience where the only certainty was death: “Is fearr súil le glas na súil le huaigh.” (“It’s better to expect a release from imprisonment than a release from the grave.”)
Peig came to mind while I was reading a new book on folk wisdom. It hailed from Mexico rather than Ireland – Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us Toward the Good Life. The author, Carlos Alberto Sánchez, is the eldest son of undocumented migrant farm workers in the United States. He was the first member of his family to go to college and is now a professor of philosophy at a Californian university.
The book is a fascinating introduction to Mexico’s indigenous belief systems. But of particular interest to Irish readers is how life lessons found in Guadalajara could easily have come from the Great Blasket Islands.
Sánchez grew up, like many children, thinking he knew better than his mother, but once he became a parent himself, he realised she had a lot more knowledge than he gave her credit for. When he confessed this to his mother, she replied: “Well, just because I never went to school doesn’t mean I don’t know things, mijo. Remember el dicho your grandmother used to say: Más sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo” (“The old devil knows more from being old than from being the devil.”)
“Mexican philosophy privileges experiences over reason,” Sánchez writes. It “sees solutions to fundamental problems as rooted in history and circumstance rather than in some disembodied (logical or transcendental) rules”.
Irish folk wisdom similarly focuses on the practical rather than the theoretical. You don’t need to be schooled in fine philosophical concepts to understand a seanfhocail like “wine drowns more men than water”, or “better go to bed supperless than to rise in debt”.
A concept in Mexican philosophy that is mirrored in Irish folklore is neplanta, or “in-between-ness”. This is “the state of being caught in between different worlds – the world that is ‘home’ and an unfamiliar or alien world”. It can apply to that realm between modernity and tradition. Or between family and society. Or between life and the hereafter.
The person in neplanta is “neutral”, Sánchez explains, committed to neither one side nor the other. In Kerry, you might call it “cuteness”, keeping all your options open. An echo of neplanta is there in the first line of Peig: “Seanbhean is ea mise anois, a bhfuil cos léi san uaigh is an chos eile ar a bruach.” (“I’m an old woman now, with one foot in the grave, and the other foot on its edge.”)
Another concept in Mexican philosophy that Peig would relate to is Zozobra. The term is of Spanish origin with Latin roots, coupling sub and supra. It describes the emotion of floundering, conjuring up an image of being pulled “under” and “over” a strong current. Zozobra goes beyond everyday anxiety. It translates “as an always-just-below-the-surface sense that the worst is yet to come”, Sánchez explains.
Many seanfhocail are infused with pessimism, occasionally drifting into begrudgery and cynicism: “Don’t scald your lips with another man’s porridge ... Creditors have better memories than debtors ... Man proposes, God disposes.”
There are economic reasons for this, as UCD psychologists Michael O’Connell and the late Aidan Moran wrote in their book Timeless Wisdom: What Irish Proverbs Tell Us About Ourselves. In a society of few opportunities, battles for status resulted in “bitterness, suspicion of others’ wealth and envy, as well as thrift, born out of poverty and bordering on meanness”.
Ireland has been transformed economically since Peig’s day. But the sense that everything could go pear-shaped overnight remains. So there’s good reason to still pay attention to Irish folk wisdom.
We might also learn something from Mexican tradition. Once a year, an effigy of Zozobra is built in New Mexico and then set alight, like a giant wicker man. Giving a name to our deepest anxieties and then torching it in a massive bonfire: now that’s the sort of communal therapy Irish people can get behind.
“Ultimately, Zozobra may at some time terrorise us all,” says Sánchez, “but to know this is to be ready for it.”
