Who is the most famous person who’s ever lived? Tough question. Personally I’m inclined to say
Jesus, because I mean most people on Earth have at least heard the name. But maybe Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Alexander
the Great would be good picks. I mean it kindof depends on what you
mean by ‘fame,’ really. The dictionary says that being famous is being “known about
by a lot of people.” But what kind of knowledge are we talking about there?
Philosophers distinguish different kinds of knowledge. There’s knowledge-that:
knowing that something is true, like I know that the world is the round. There’s
knowledge-how, like I know to ride a bike: that's some thing I can do. And there’s knowledge-of:
I know my friends; we have knowledge of each other. Owen Wilson is a famous actor, he’s “known about
by a lot of people.” But I don’t know him the
way I know my friends, so can't be knowledge-of. I don’t know how to… Owen Wilson, that doesn’t make sense
so can't be knowledge-how. So it must be knowledge-that that's important to fame.
But there’s a problem with fame being grounded
in knowledge-that. Consider somebody like Jesus. There probably was a bloke who lived
roughly 2,000 years ago who was probably called something roughly like Jesus who maybe even said some of the things that are attributed
to him, but how much of the rest of the stories about Jesus are true? Well isn’t that the million
dollar question? Knowledge-that requires truth: you can't know
know things that are false. But some people are very famous, and yet we
don’t really know how much we know about them because they are figures of legend.
A lot of the philosophers who’ve discussed fame have quite an elitist attitude towards it, or
at least an elitist attitude towards the people who make other people famous, “the masses.” Schopenhauer wrote,
“Those eminent and remarkable works which are destined to belong to the whole of mankind
and to live for centuries, are too advanced when they are produced and are, on that account,
foreign to the cultural epoch and spirit of their times… So they do not gain the interest
of those who live and work in such times… Indeed, worms on the ground do not see the
bird on the wing."
And the Roman philosopher Boethius wrote, "Fame, in fact, is a shameful thing, and so
often deceptive. Euripides was right to make Andromache cry out, “O Fame, o Fame! -- many
a man ere this/ Of no account hast though set up on high.” Many, indeed, are the men
who have wrongly acquired fame through the false opinions of the people.”
Again though, both of those philosophers are relying on the idea that knowledge is what grounds fame.
That if only the people knew the right things different people would be famous. But for the reasons
we've already mentioned, I don’t think fame can be about knowledge. I think we need a different theory.
The vlogger Teresa Violet made a video a while ago called 'I want to be famous (No really)'
in which she said that, “When I say I want to be famous what I really mean is I want to
be admired by a lot of people.” But I think that that’s what fame is about either, since you could be very famous
and not admired; it’s called ‘infamy.’ Like Hitler is very famous but people don't
admire him. Or at least, people you should want to talk to don't admire him.
I also think it's a mistake to conflate fame with either success or money. My friend
BirdKeeperToby is a YouTuber and a while ago he made a vlog about fame in which he said he thinks it’s normal for people
to want to succeed, and yeah that’s probably true but you can be very famous and not have
any success. He also in that video said he thinks
it’s normal for people to want to stand in front of a crowd and say, “Look what I have to offer!” and again
that might be true, but I don’t think that’s what fame is either because
some very famous people didn't do that. Consider somebody like Marxist revolutionary
Che Guevara – his face is one of the most, if not the most, reproduced image in human history. This
photo is so famous it even has its own name, the "Guerrillero Heroico." But Che stood in front
of crowds and said, “Look what we have to offer.” He shunned the limelight so much
that after the Cuban revolution he could have stayed in Cuba and probably enjoyed a pretty decent
life, but he didn’t. He disappeared, he gave it all up, and actually went to start revolutions
in other countries. So he's incredibly famous, but he didn’t have a lot of money, he wasn’t universally admired,
he didn’t really seek the limelight, and outside of Cuba he didn't really have that much success either.
One thing that story nicely illustrates is that fame never happens in a vacuum;
it always happens in some socio-political context. Fame under capitalism might be quite
different from, say, fame under socialism. Consider somebody like Alexey Stakhanov, who became
a hero and a celebrity in socialist Russia for allegedly mining 227 tonnes of coal in
a single shift, and he became a symbol of the power of socialist labour. A very different kind
of fame from someone like, say, Henry Ford or Kim Kardashian. Not better or worse necessarily,
it's just different both in terms of how it impacts the famous person's life and how other people around them relate to them.
As far as things like institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, and
so on exist – that context too will affect who gets to become famous and the nature of that
fame. One of things that happens to famous people a lot
is that they get recognised. So maybe that's what fame is: maybe the
more famous you are the more likely you are to be recognised. That doesn't require anybody
to really know anything true about you, it doesn't mean you have to be rich or ambitious or successful so it means we don’t have
any of the problems we’ve talked about so far. But consider famous people like the Prophet Mohammed,
or Julius Caesar, or Emilia Earhart. If they appeared in the street tomorrow, would you recognise them?
I don’t think I would, and yet they are very famous.
There’s also another problem with the recognition idea, and this is just something I’ve noticed in my life.
Some famous people look in real life exactly how you think they do. Laci Green, for instance,
she looks exactly like that when you meet her. But some famous people don’t – and I dunno it's the way they're
photographed or what, but... Jedward, for instance, last time I met them
They don't really look like that. Like maybe it's just me, but it took me a little while to realise, "Oh wow that's them. Oh they really don't look like they do on TV."
Fans of this show who meet me almost invariably say, "Oh wow you're much taller than I was expecting you to be; you're much
broader than I was expecting you to be!" and I'm like
So if it’s not knowledge, and it’s not admiration, and it’s not success, or recognition,
or money, what the hell is fame? Well funnily enough, i think that story about me being
taller than people expect is I think the answer. I think to be famous relative to some population
is not for that population to have knowledge about you but for them to have expectations about you.
To be known about isn’t really to be known at all but to have people think they know you: to expect certain
things about you and your behaviour to be true.
The more famous you are, the more those expectations pile up and the smaller the ground on which
you can stand before you are defying those expectations. Again that's partly a function
of the context of modern capitalism, in which people are expected to specialise in one or
two related things. Like if you’re a famous actor, you might also do some writing and some directing as well.
Rarely nowadays do you see a true polymath: an expert in
very many fields. Somebody like Henri Poincaré, who was a
mathematician, physicist, an engineer, an astronomer, and a philosopher.
To be famous in the modern age is to face a much more limited set of expectations.
Like imagine if you found out that Judi
Dench does rocket calculations for NASA, or Serena Williams is actually Banksy,
or Rowan Atkinson has a Masters in electrical engineering. In theory there’s
nothing that should surprise you about that, they're all possible, but it’s just not what you expect. It’s not
what you think you know about them. Incidentally, that last one? That's true!
And of course, being famous might also involve being expected to do things like go to certain events, meet people,
smile, sign autographs, appear on certain shows, sign certain contracts, make certain
people money, and so on. Hannah Witton wrote a very cool blog a whole ago about her experience at Summer
in the City - the big YouTube convention last year, which she says is the first time she ever really felt “famous,” and in
it she describes being very busy. In other words, being expected to do all sorts of things.
So I think fame is an odd beast. Not knowledge, or admiration, or money, or success, but expectation.
That’s a theory that’s flexible enough to get around all the problems we've raised and incorporate
all the variation we’ve discussed. I started this channel so anybody in the world could get
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