Petite Philosophy

We tend to feel disturbed by religion. We’d like to be respectful but so many of the ideas sound entirely bizarre and impossible. We don’t want to be mean to friends, relatives, or strangers who are devout but how can we make sense of their apparent devotion to absurdities? The Golden Bough is the book to help us, for it explains how a conviction can be at once empirically false and yet profoundly meaningful and moving.  Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854; he was a spectacularly diligent student, winning a scholarship to Cambridge and then a Fellowship at Trinity, then the most prestigious and intellectual of the many colleges that make up the University.  Initially published in two-volumes in 1890, Fraser kept adding to the text and by 1915 it had grown into an enormous twelve volume set. It was the first very widely read study of myth and anthropology.  Frazer’s interest is in shared myths: he’s struck by how, across time and space, different societies have invented sim...

Wheat has, by most accounts, been an astonishing success for our species and a particular triumph for Canada. Half of the 35 million tonnes of wheat the country grows every year (it’s the earth’s fifth largest producer) is harvested in Saskatchewan, and most of that is grown in the bottom third of the province. If 1 tonne of wheat makes 1,700 loaves of white bread, a great many of the world’s slices of toast will have originated in these parts. Head out from Regina, the provincial capital, in late August or early September and the horizon will be dotted with rows of gigantic John Deere S690s and New Holland CR10s cutting their way through vast prairie-lands carpeted with the heavy blonde stalks of the most fecund grass the planet has ever known. We’ve only been doing this for a – relatively – short while. Homo sapiens goes back 200,000 years, but it was only around 9,500 BC in southeastern Turkey that we started wheat cultivation. The story is usually told as one of triumph: our pre-ag...

Why do people’s levels of confidence differ so much? Why does one person feel free to dress how they please, to follow their professional dreams and to pursue their own sexual tastes — while another spends their entire life in timidity, resignation and compliance? We can venture: confidence is the fruit of having been boundlessly and extravagantly loved by an adult in the early years. The strength to withstand attack, ignore critics and fight back against one’s enemies is — almost always — the beautiful, fortunate fruit of having felt indominably at the centre of someone else’s affection for as long as it took for our bones to harden and our spirits to rise. Confidence-inducing behaviour has little of the robustness of confidence itself. Its hallmark is tenderness. It starts with someone being profoundly pleased to see us when they pull back the curtains in the morning. We are their champion, their tiny button and their adored little rabbit. They love our limbs and our cheeks, our hair...

One of the characteristic flaws of our minds is to exa ggerate how fragile we might be; to assume that life would be impossible far earlier than in fact it would be. We imagine that we could not live without a certain kind of income, status or health; that it would be a disaster not to have a certain kind of relationship, house or job. This natural tendency of the mind is constantly stoked by life in commercial society. This kind of society goes to extraordinary lengths to make us feel that we really need to go skiing once a year, to have heated car seats, to fly in business class, to own the same kind of watch as a famous conductor, and to lay claim to lots of friends, perfectly muscular health and a loving, kind, sex-filled relationship. In fact, our core needs are much simpler than this. We could manage perfectly well with very much less – not just around possessions, but across every aspect of our lives. It’s not that we should want to, it’s simply that we could. We could cope quit...

Politeness can sound very boring, a trivial social convention connected up with hypocrisy and perhaps snobbery. Under its dictates, we are urged to say that we’ve had a nice evening when we haven’t really or to tell someone we’re delighted by news of their success, when in truth we’d like them dead. Shouldn’t we just be frank? There are some deeply serious reasons why politeness matters. Proceeding politely through the world is founded on a recognition of how easy it is to get things wrong and therefore how important it is not to be quick to anger, not to burn bridges and not to make statements it will be hard to row back from. The polite recognise that their minds have great capacities for error and are subject to moods that will mislead them – and so are keen not to make statements that can’t be taken back or to make enemies of people they might decide are in fact worthy of respect down the line. Sceptical about themselves, the polite person will suggest that an idea might be not qui...

Melanie Klein (1882–1960) was a Viennese psychotherapist who studied the deep-seated human tendency for splitting. Throughout life, but particularly in infancy, we are confronted by frustrations and disappointments. We are let down and hurt by people we long to rely on. These frustrations can feel so intolerable, we defend ourselves by splitting people into the purely good and the purely bad. We denigrate certain characters entirely so as to preserve a pure hope around others. Everyone who annoys us becomes evil; everyone who gratifies us is perfect. The therapeutic response to splitting is to gently move us towards what is known as integration. With the help of a therapist, we learn sympathetically to see why we made a split but then slowly and painfully start to acknowledge a more complex reality. A parent can be annoying in some ways yet loveable in others; someone can criticise us without being mean or stupid; we ourselves can have many genuine failings and yet still be quite good ...

Many of Western philosophy’s greatest texts have run to hundreds of thousands of words. Some of the deepest works of Zen philosophy have been written in the form of three-line poems. Haikus, as these are known, contain three parts, two images and a concluding line which helps to juxtapose them. The best-known haiku in Japanese philosophy is called ‘Old Pond’, by Matsuo Bashō: 'Old pond / A frog leaps in / Water’s sound.' It is all (deceptively) simple – and yet contains, when one is in the right frame of mind, a gracious call to redemptive reverie. Here is another by him: 'Violets / how precious on / a mountain path.' Bashō believed that poetry could ideally allow one to feel a brief sensation of merging with the natural world. One might become – through language – the rock, the water, the stars, leading one to an enlightened and prized frame of mind known to Zen Buddhist philosophers as muga, or ‘a loss-of-awareness-of-oneself’. This article is from the school of life

The problem with libraries is that they can be so large, impressive, and filled with knowledge that they unwittingly embed in us an idea that everything worth registering, everything valuable and true, must lie ‘out there’, must already have been classed on a shelf with an index number to await our discovery the moment we cease to be so preoccupied with ourselves. But what this modest, respectful and quietly self-hating conclusion disguises is that each one of us is an unparalleled and superlative center of knowledge in and of ourselves; our minds have more ideas stored in them than are to be found in the collective catalogues of the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the British Library in London; we have vaults filled with a greater number of moving and beautiful scenes than those of the world’s greatest museums put together. We are just failing to wander the stacks and galleries as often as we should; we are failing to notice wha...

We often hold ourselves back from our more courageous ventures by a frightened and stern question: "What if I am — in fact — an idiot?" To which kindly voices will tend to reply that naturally we are far from being any such thing: we’re clever, we work hard, we’re beautiful inside. However — if confidence is the goal — a starkly different yet far more effective route to reassurance is to be recommended. We shouldn’t focus on whether or not we’re idiots. We can take it for granted that of course we are. But the good news is: so is everyone else. We’re on a planet of eight billion idiots. Everyone we see is substantially unreasonable and daft. There go the parents, messing up another generation by failing to understand their own minds; there are the business people, creating money out of unnecessary desires; there are the school teachers, instructing people for a life they haven’t fathomed themselves; there are the scientists, helping people to live longer who haven’t even gras...

One of the reasons why we may withdraw from the entire idea of becoming more confident are the images we carry in our minds about what a confident person might be like. Confidence can seem synonymous with brash arrogance and unthinking boosterism; with the chiselled-jaw jock we knew from university or the garrulous financier we met on holiday. We can end up taking counterproductive pride in underselling ourselves and staying quiet because we cannot find any confident characters with whom we would remotely seek to identify. Hence the importance of a group of people sitting on a lawn in a square in central London in 1915. They belonged to what we now know as the Bloomsbury Group, the most influential intellectual movement of their age responsible for pioneering developments in literature, science, economics and art. Part of what distinguished these avant garde thinkers was the extremely cautious and outwardly modest way in which they carried out their revolution. Many were known for thei...

The Friesian is named after the tribe that first bred them two thousand years ago in what is now the Netherlands - though it is also known as the Holstein in the US. Over many generations it was developed for dairy production. It spends more than half its life dozing or asleep; and much of the rest of its existence  is devoted to slowly chewing grass or hay, taking only a very small mouthful at a time. The 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, saw the cow as a symbol of a human ideal. In a section of Thus Spake Zarathustra, he asserts: ‘Unless we change (or be converted) and become as cows, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ In other words, in Nietzsche’s view, unless we adopt key qualities of the bovine character, among them, patience, a lack of rancour, perspective and a freedom from bitterness, we won’t find the degree of peace and consolation that makes life fulfilling and endurable. A cow does not suffer from envy, it does not think of revenge; it doesn...

This psychological theory of the True and the False Self is the work of the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896–1971). In Winnicott’s eyes, we are all born with a true self. The baby’s true self isn’t interested in the feelings of others. It isn’t socialised. It screams when it needs to, even if it is the middle of the night or on a crowded train. It may be aggressive, biting and – in the eyes of a stickler for manners or a lover of hygiene – shocking and a bit disgusting. Winnicott added that if a person is to have any sense of feeling real as an adult, they need to have enjoyed a period of letting the true self have its way. Gradually, a false self can develop, which has a capacity to submit to the demands of external reality (school, work, etc.). Winnicott was not an enemy of a false self; he simply insisted that it belonged to health only when it had been preceded by a thorough earlier experience of an untrammelled true self. Unfortunately, many of us have not been given a...

The blunt phrase appears in an essay by the 16th-century French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne wasn’t being mean. His point was kindly: he wanted us to feel closer to (and less intimidated by) people whose overt mode of life might seem painfully impressive and very far from our own. And he could have added: in secret these people also feel inadequate, fear rejection and mess up their sex lives. We could also update his examples to speak of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and the over-achieving person we went to college with. Montaigne was attempting to free us from underconfidence and shyness, born out of an exaggerated sense of the differences between ourselves and mighty others. At moments of panic, before an important speech or a much-anticipated date, we should run Montaigne’s phrase through our febrile, underconfident minds and remind ourselves that no one, however outwardly poised, is more than a few hours away from a poignantly modest and vulnerable moment. This article is fro...

Few places in the world are as therapeutic as our own bed; our bed deserves to be recognised as the supreme location of mental reorganisation and consolation. Were we unable to travel any distance beyond its limits, we would still have a world of reassurance at our fingertips. A bed does not – of course – carry any overt glamour. We don’t earn respect or interest for revealing that we have, once again, spent the weekend, or even the whole holidays, sleeping and reflecting under the duvet. A bed lacks the grandeur of the desert or the edifying ancientness of a past civilisation. And yet it may, at points, be exactly what we need to dampen our mania or make sense of our sadness. A bed offers ideal conditions in which to think. It can be hard do so properly at a desk. The mind may release its better thoughts only when we are horizontal and are under little pressure to produce very much. It is then that our wilder, odder, more valuable ideas dare to make themselves felt – and we should be ...

It is extremely rare properly to delight in something like an alpine flower (for example, the tiny Chamois Ragwort that blooms on the border between Switzerland and Italy for a few weeks a year) when one is under twenty-two. There are so many larger, grander things to be concerned about than these small delicately-sculpted fragile and evanescent manifestations of nature, for example, romantic love, career fulfillment and political change. However, it is rare to be left entirely indifferent by alpine flowers after the age of fifty. By then, almost all one’s earlier, larger aspirations will have taken a hit, perhaps a very large one. One will have encountered some of the intractable problems of intimate relationships. One will have suffered the gap between one’s professional hopes and the available realities. One will have had a chance to observe how slowly and fitfully the world ever alters in a positive direction. One will have been fully inducted to the extent of human wickedness and ...

Fame seems to offer very significant benefits. The fantasies go like this: when you are famous, wherever you go, your good reputation will precede you. People will think well of you, because your merits have been impressively explained in advance. You will get warm smiles from admiring strangers. You won’t need to make your own case laboriously on each occasion. When you are famous, you will be safe from rejection. You won’t have to win over every new person. Fame will mean that other people will be flattered and delighted even if you are only slightly interested in them. They will be amazed to see you in the flesh. They will ask to take a photo with you. They will sometimes laugh nervously with excitement. Furthermore, no one will be able to afford to upset you. When you’re not pleased with something, it will become a big problem for others. If you say your hotel room isn’t up to scratch, the management will panic. Your complaints will be taken very seriously. Your happiness will beco...

We tend to assume that all is well with good children. They don’t pose immediate problems; they keep their bedroom tidy, do their homework on time and are willing to help with the washing up. But the very real secret sorrows – and future difficulties – of the good child are tied to the fact that they behave in this way not out of choice, but because they feel under irresistible pressure to do so. They are trying to cope with adults who project the idea that only the ideally compliant child is truly loveable. As a result, the good child becomes an expert at pleasing their audience, while their real thoughts and feelings stay buried. Eventually, under pressure, these good children may manifest some disturbing symptoms: secret sulphurous bitterness, sudden outbursts of rage and very harsh views of their own imperfections. The good person typically has particular problems around sex. As a child, they may have been praised for being pure and innocent. As an adult the most exciting parts of ...

At first glance, it could almost be mistaken for a scene from an ordinary busy international airport – until we realise that something darker and more unusual is afoot. Most of the airliners are on crates; their nose cones have been hacked off, their ailerons are missing, their doors have been removed, their engines have been ripped out. This isn’t an airport, it’s a graveyard, a place where planes come to die when they have grown weary of crossing our stratosphere. Many of their old owners, like ageing actors who can longer bear to look in the mirror, specify that the logos on their tailfins be painted out, as if an acknowledgement of decrepitude would violate the always youthful promises of technology. There are representatives from all the continents and the most famous airlines. They have come here from Australia, Germany, Britain and America. Machines that spent their working lives being meticulously cared for by specialist mechanics are, in death, hacked at with chainsaws and dig...

Though it has been in the sky for a while, for most of human history, no one was especially interested in looking very much — or at least very closely — at the moon. The Ancient Summerians took a quick look and decided that the moon was a God of wisdom called Nanna; for the Ancient Egyptians, it was a fertility god called Khonsu and for the Ancient Greeks, it was self-evidently a goddess called Selene, daughter of the Hyperion and Theia and sister of the goddess of dawn Eos and of the sun god Helios. Despite these conflicting certainties, the one thing that all traditional cultures were united on was the need not to study the subject any further. It is therefore hard to overestimate the significance of what happened on the night of the 30th of November 1609, when a hitherto obscure professor of mathematics at the university of Padua pointed his telescope up at the moon — and had the first open minded scientifically ego-less look at our earth’s natural satellite. Galileo Galilei had hea...

SELF KNOWLEDGE  It is clear that many of us eat too much. In response, a huge industry has grown up that advises us to consume more quinoa, pomegranate and fennel salad and, as often as we can, kale and apple soup. But this is to misunderstand why we start eating excessive amounts. It has nothing to do with food, and therefore trying to change our diet isn’t the most logical place to focus our efforts. We eat too much because what we’re really hungry for isn’t available. When reaching for a tube of potato chips or biting into yet another burrito, the problem isn’t our unconstrained appetite; rather, it is the difficulty we have in getting access to the emotional and psychological nutrients that would feed our broken souls – nutrients that include understanding, tenderness, forgiveness, reconciliation and closeness. We eat too much not because we are (as we brutally accuse ourselves) greedy, but because we live in a world where the emotional ingredients we crave are so elusive. A va...

SELF KNOWLEDGE  It has no choice; its life-cycle is clearly defined from the outset, from its earliest beginnings in March, when it was still coiled within the bud and the wind felt harsh and pitiless. There was the first day when it emerged, sometime in mid-April, exquisite fresh and delicate. There were days of rain, hail and sunshine as it gradually grew and thickened. In May, a caterpillar paid a visit and nibbled, non-fatally, one of its lobes. The summer was balmy and generous. Dust coated it over the windless August days. Over a weekend in September, the first tinge of mortal gold appeared; deepening and darkening every day until the whole leaf was brown and brittle. It held onto its familiar twig though a calm, cold week in early October but was finally shaken off on a blustery Tuesday morning on the 15th. It fluttered down to join thousands of its companions on the pavement, it was kicked about joyously by a child and noisily blown into a heap by a municipal worker; it gra...

LOVE  In the Islamic tradition, love is nothing if it does not have within it a strong dose of forbearance or, in Arabic, hilm (الحلم). It is easy to love someone perfect; it is divine to love someone humanly flawed. We show hilm whenever we cease to give everyone their ‘due’ and give them what they actually need instead. Crucially, Islamic scholars stress that the fastest way to generate hilm is by making an effort to view our wrongdoers as children. We forgive children so readily because we know – and can see – that their ‘badness’ and difficulty are invariably the result of some form of pain, discomfort, hurt or wound. The child is never evil, they become challenging in response to injury, fear or sorrow.  Though the idea sounds provocative, the reason why little children and big people do wrong is – despite the differences in age and size – exactly the same. One category may be no bigger than a chair, the other can be gigantic and able to carry guns, post lengthy screeds o...