Sometimes there’s an angry little man inside my head and I find it difficult to make him go away. He rants and raves with a sense of righteous indignation, leading me to shout from my bike at passing cars, to fire off angry e-mails, and to be generally irritable and bad company. This is unpleasant for all concerned. He literally generates bad blood which poisons my system and stops me from having a good night’s sleep. He turns my otherwise sanguine Dr Jekyll into a Mr Hyde.
He was there quite often just before my half-term holidays. He then disappeared while I enjoyed a relaxed and relaxing week of not doing much in Monfalcone, apart from seeing friends and family, cycling and walking and generally admiring the autumn foliage in particular of the “sommacco” on the Carso, even if the weather was rather indifferent.
No sooner had I returned to Brussels and work than he was jumping up and down inside my head again. So I thought it was time to get a grip and be more “philosophical” about my disappointments, frustrations and difficulties. I decided to deliberately exercise some patience and positive thinking during a two day trip away for work which would involve me having to confront some of my pet hates.
1) the inadequacy of STIB: I steeled myself for a Brussels public transport journey to the airport on a Belgian public holiday. I listened to some Shostakovich string quartets on my iPod: the perfect mood music for a cold and damp grey November morning with dead leaves being gusted down deserted ugly streets. The tram came on time but left me waiting 35 minutes outside for the airport bus while my feet gradually froze.
2) airport security: it took 20 minutes to clear security on a relatively quiet day for Zaventem, removing and replacing the requisite artcicles from about my person.
3) Finland in November: as expected we reached our hotel after nightfall (4 pm) it was even colder than in Brussels and raining heavily. The hotel turned out to be located conveniently close to the conference centre on the campus of Aalto University, but miles from anywhere else. So contrary to my usual custom, I decided not to bother to venture out from my hotel room, and contemplated the limited possibilities of filling in the next few hours.
Remarkably my Zen held up and the angry little man did not appear inside my head. In fact I was having quite an enjoyable day. The main reason was that I had started to read “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain de Botton.
Alain de Botton writes a good book, he has a direct and humorous style, he is careful to relate points to the everyday and he never fails to be thought provoking. In this book he writes about the thinking of six philosophers which may help console us in our daily lives.
He starts with the father of western philsophy, Socrates,
and his logical system for challenging commonly held beliefs. De Botton holds up Socrates as consolation for unpopularity: he stuck to what he believed to be true, even if it made him unpopular and he was sentenced to death for it.
In the classical world he next covers Epicurus. Epicureanism is not, as you might think, sheer hedonism and indulgence of luxury, but rather the ability to take pleasure in the simple things of life, where friendship counts for far more than material possessions. Epicurus offers us consolation for not having enough money.
Then comes the Roman Seneca, who was eventually ordered to death by his pupil Nero. He is included as the representative of the contrasting Stoics who concentrate on pain rather than pleasure and teach us to accept suffering and frustration as inevitable, which means they are not worth getting worked up about. We should expect the worst and not get angry when our desires are thwarted. Seneca offers us consolation from frustration. However, there is a fine line to draw between not letting something bother you and not caring about it. It remains important to engage and to strive to improve. This has been the motor of human progress after all. The Romans didn’t put up with water shortages in their cities, they built aqueducts to supply them.
It was with some pleasure that I found De Botton’s fourth philosopher to be one of the renaissance rediscoverers of the classics, Montaigne. Montaigne, let me remind you is my inspiration for writing these essays on this blog about myself. Montaigne believed that the human condition is fully present in every man. Therefore, the best way to write about it is to describe the person you know best - yourself. Montaigne’s book, the “Essais”, is unique and difficult to classify. I studied Montaigne at university as literature, but it is certainly not fiction. Bertrand Russell in his “History of Western Philosophy” clearly doesn’t rate him as a philosopher at all and only mentions him in passing. Yet, over 400 years later, Montaigne’s writings speak to us directly and truly about life and can teach us more about it than many other philosophers’.
His main message is that human existence is physical and that the mind and body are inseparable: “Et au plus eslevé throne du monde, si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul” (“And on the highest throne in the world, we are only seated on our arse”).
From this it follows that Montaigne was only really interested in those writers in his vast library of classical authors who had something to say that related to tangible life of which he had had a fair experience himself (having been mayor of Bordeaux and active in public affairs, managed a fair sized estate and travelled on horseback through what in those days was a fair portion of Europe). He had no time for mere bookish learning, his quest was for wisdom. And so, in the Greek etymological sense as a “lover of wisdom” (“philo-” love, “sophia” wisdom) he was a true philosopher.
In fact this concept of philosophy brings us back to Socrates and his notion that not enough attention is given to the craft of living, which ought to be our most important concern. He uses the analogy of the potter: there is an art and craft to making a Greek vase and you have to get it right if it is going to be any good. For Socrates there is an art and craft to living and this properly is the subject of philosophy.
Philosophy as an academic discipline has rather lost sight of this. I listened recently with great interest to podcasts of Marianne Talbot’s lively five introductory lectures to philosophy at Oxford University. However, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too abstract, too sterile for me. Philosophers, over the centuries, have spent far too much time pondering on the nature and perception of reality. It sems to me that such a debate is purely theoretical, only of the mind. The body can tell you straight away what reality is. Life is not so much a case of “I think, therefore I am” as a case of “I eat and shit, therefore I am”. There are more urgent things to apply my mind to than “how can I be sure that I am sitting on a chair looking at a computer screen ?” My bum and eyes know the answer already. In my opinion, any speculation otherwise serves no useful purpose whatsoever. “Ah, but how do you define ‘useful’ ?”, asks the academic philosopher. Good point; so I will accept there is room for pure philosophy just as there is for pure mathematics as an academic discipline. What I am really interested in myself though is, I suppose, applied philosophy.
So let us return to De Botton’s book on the Consolations of Philosophy. Montaigne can offer us consolation for inadequacy: the human condition by its nature is not going to be perfect, that indeed should be its charm which we all share, rather than a source of disappointment to us.
The next chapter covers another physical aspect of ourselves viewed through the thoughts of Schopenhauer. I’ve not read Schopenhauer and I’m sure he covered a lot of other things, but De Botton uses him to offer consolation for a broken heart.
Deep within us and beyond our control is a will to live, felt by even the most pessimistic and world-weary. The will to live takes two forms; the desire to survive and the desire to reproduce. So given the importance of the second, it should come as no surprise that we are constantly distracted and our chain of thought interrupted by, to put it bluntly, sex. The problem is that the body (or subconscious, if you prefer) makes its choice of potential reproductive partner and therefore is sexually attracted to persons of the opposite sex whose genes would best complement our own in our offspring (often by being the opposite). This does not necessarily, and in fact most usually does not, make the loved one the ideal companion to live with. So we should not be surprised that many relationships don’t work out and our hearts get broken. You see, Schopenhauer was a pessimist. It’s an interesting theory, but I personally feel that the bond of shared experience in a couple will prove stronger than sometimes divergent interests.
The chapter on Schopenhauer is something in the way of a short amusing digression before De Botton takes us on to the weightier Nietzsche. Nietzsche too started off as a pessimist but had something of a revelation while holidaying in the bay of Naples, swimming in the Mediterranean, eating good Southern food and enjoying the stimulating companionship of arty intellectuals: he realized that life was actually ok, in fact rather good. I can identify with that, enjoying a stay in Italy myself.
Only patches of it are not so good. In the same way that you cannot separate mind from body, you cannot separate pleasure from pain in life; they make up a whole.
Nietzsche was also a keen mountain walker. I can identify with that too. He knew that the uplifting glorious vistas can only be reached after a period of hard slog during which you might otherwise be tempted to give up and go back down. So Nietzsche offers us consolation for difficulty. It is an integral part of life; in fact difficulty is even worth seeking out and when you come through it you feel satisfied and fulfilled.
This is something I have often felt myself, but I needed reminding of it.
Indeed, after a spell of being a grumpy old man, it was good to be reminded of the consolations of philosophy, to become more philosophical about my lot, to keep the angry little man at bay.
So to recap on De Botton’s six philosophers and how they might have an impact on my life.
Considering Socrates and his logic, I like to think that I can think for myself, but you had best judge yourself from these blog postings and I won’t be offended if they don’t please you.
I reckon I am fairly close to Epicurus and tend to be more interested in and get more pleasure from doing and being rather than from having; last week I skipped Italian shopping and went mountain biking on the Carso. I ought to spend more time with my friends though.
I could still learn a lot from Seneca about not feeling frustrated. Getting irate is just counter-productive. Between the Epicurean and Stoical approach to life, I must not forget that on the whole my life is very comfortable and my frustrations only minor.
While in Finland, the Mayor of Espoo proudly pointed out that Newsweek had worked out that Finland is the world’s best country to live in. Well, that’s the kind of result you get when you take a series of “objective” indicators like per capita GDP, public services, law and order, health and education, lack of corruption and so on. Yes, it’s clean and things work, but the who the hell wants to live in a country where it is dark and freezing for half of the year ? What about those statistics on alcoholism and suicide in Nordic countries ? All in all, Belgium is not a bad place to live, even if I don’t rate the public transport too highly.
Montaigne I have long admired and feel close to in spirit.
Not suffering from a broken heart, I have no immediate need for Schopenhauer.
My curiosity has been aroused about Nietzsche and I shall read some of his writings.
But what of the six philosophers' application of philosophy to their own lives?
Scorates and Seneca were sentenced to death by the powers that be, but took it with equanimity; Socrates because he knew he was right and preferred the truth to popularity; Seneca because he always knew the worst was going to happen. Schopenhauer was a miserable old bugger. Nietzsche went crazy. Epicurus basically lived with friends in a commune.
The one with the sanest, most useful life was, you guessed it, Montaigne.
Well, if you were expecting to learn a lot about philosophy from this essay, you’re probably disappointed and you would be better off reading Bertrand Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy”, which I promise I will finish one day.
My point is rather that if the distilled thoughts of some of the great minds from the past are to be of real value to us, they are better put to practical use in everyday life rather than studied in a vacuum.
I need philosophy to make the angry little man go away.
Philosophy is for everyone every day.
