Petite Philosophy

We’ve maybe only put our head down a few inches into the warm clear sea, our backs are still up there in the sunshine, but we’ve entered another world; strands of seaweed billow elegantly in the light currents; a crab goes by on the sandy bottom; there’s a bright small clownfish darting about. We float and observe; we’re not really participants - there’s nothing we’re supposed to do. The rest of life above, suddenly, feels slightly unreal and irrelevant, relativised by this vast new world that is so rarely spoken of. We’re in an alien element that would drown us - were it not for a short section of tube, which assures us total safety. It takes only a simple, ingenious device to massively extend the range of our experience. All society’s excitement seems directed towards discovering new planets. And yet we need only slip on a mask - and can discover galaxies. This article is from The School Of Life 

The English psychotherapist John Bowlby (1907–1990) was the prime force behind the development of attachment theory. This is the study of the way in which children form an emotional bond with their carers – the basis upon which they later manage relationships as and with adults. Bowlby identified an ‘avoidant’ attitude in which we habitually push away or act coldly towards people who, in fact, we would like to be close to. We do this, Bowlby argued, because our capacity to trust others was damaged in childhood and we learnt a technique of shutting down engagement as a way of preserving our integrity. Without realising we are doing this (because we have forgotten the past), whenever problems arise with a lover, we are so afraid that we may be unwanted that we disguise our need behind a façade of indifference. At the precise moment when we want to be close, we say we’re busy; we pretend our thoughts are elsewhere; we become sarcastic and dry; we imply that a need for reassurance would be...

We can’t know a lot about what lies ahead of us: the coming few billion years are somewhat murky. But, oddly, we can with an astonishing degree of certainty know what will be coming to us at the very end. The conclusion to history is — already today — definitively clear. And, in a sense, very sad. But also, in a minor way, redemptively and profoundly comedic. The sun formed 4.5 billion years, some 40 million years before the earth. While it appears stable, it is in truth working its way through a limited supply of hydrogen and helium at its core. The more it does so, the more its heat will increase: 3.5 billion years from now, the sun will be 40% brighter than it is today, which will be enough to cause devastation on earth: all the oceans will boil away, the atmosphere will evaporate into space, the ice caps will melt and the surface of the planet will be a molten toxic wasteland resembling Venus. Nothing — not the tiniest earthworm or parasite — will survive. If this is not challengin...

It wasn’t, hopefully, too serious, just enough to keep you in bed, and feeling miserable, for three or four days. You had a bowl of lentil soup - hot and bland - and sensed its worthy goodness and nutritious calm. Someone brought you a cup of weak tea and touched you deeply with their attention. While you were feeling poorly, certain themes of your life took a back seat. It didn’t seem to matter so much what was happening at work. You didn’t have the energy to get roused by news. You didn't feel obliged to respond to texts. Your sexual appetites were in recession. Things you’d never normally even notice are now sources of positive pleasure; being able to breathe easily, swallowing without wincing. You can focus on the the back of your head; there’s not a trace of the throb that was your agonising companion for the last 48 hours. Your eyes feel energetic. Your brain is coming alive. The mere act of standing up (without feeling dizzy or weak) is a delight. It’s fascinating to put on ...

There are certain things in life that are genuinely frightening: things we should run away from as fast we possibly can. Born in Berlin in 1923 Judith Kerr had a horrifically acute knowledge of true fear. When she was nine, the National Socialists threatened to arrest her father, a prominent Jewish journalist, and the family fled to the UK. This book — which she also illustrated, was first published in London in 1968, when she was in her mid-forties — is, behind the scenes, a meditation on unnecessary fear.  Little Sophie and her mother are at home, when an enormous, very stripey Tiger turns up. He doesn’t say much. But he’s obviously extremely hungry and thirsty, because he eats all the food in the house, drinks all the milk and ‘all the water in the tap’. He gives Sophie a ride on his back, Then he politely, but silently, takes his leave. And that’s the whole story — except for one thing. Daddy gets back shortly afterwards and, of course, now the family can’t have tea — sinc...

Therapy cannot make us happy every day, but its benefits are tangible nevertheless. After a course of therapy, we will stand to feel substantially freer. We will realise that what we had believed to be our inherent personality was really just a position we had crouched into to deal with the prevailing atmosphere. Having taken a measure of the true present situation, we may accept that there could be other, sufficiently safe, ways for us to be. We had learnt to be ashamed and silent, but the therapist’s kindness and attention encourages us to be less disgusted by ourselves and less furtive around our needs. Having once voiced our deeper fears and wishes, they can become slightly easier to bring up again with someone else. There may be an alternative to silence. We can be more compassionate. Inevitably, in the course of therapy, we realise how much we were let down by certain people in the past. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual, mature reaction, building on an understa...

One of the many striking things about walnut kernels, alongside their delicate and noble flavour and the neatness with which they can be extracted from their shells, is their uncanny resemblance to the lobes of the human brain. The comparison is deflationary and, with wry sympathy, slightly mocking. We may think of ourselves as extraordinary creatures capable of mighty feats, but we are in the end reliant on a highly flawed, walnut-like contraption that gets an awful lot wrong. Acknowledging this, far from a defeatist move, is the beginning of wisdom. Socrates remarked:  I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don’t know. The more closely we introspect, the more we start to appreciate the range of tricks our minds play on us - and therefore the more we appreciate the extent to which we will continually misjudge situations and the feelings they provoke. This critical attitude towards our own thought-processes is technically called scepticism, after the Ancient Greek philo...

The best time and place to come and see Zebras in their thousands is during the rainy season, as they travel between the Chobe River floodplains in Namibia and the grasslands of Botswana’s Makgadikgadi region 500 kilometres away. Their stripes are every bit as astonishing as they seemed when we were children, defying us to believe that they have not been patiently painted on by a skilled artist. Each example has a thick dorsal line running from the forehead to the tail, and branching stripes running downwards along the body except for where they arch and split over the front and rear legs. Every backside has its unique pattern, allowing their young to find their mother in the herd, while the collective shimmering of the lines confuses their most feared predators, the colour-blind lion and hyena, as well as providing protection from horseflies, which appear averse to landing on such complicated decoration. Zebras may share a common ancestry and profile with horses but they have none of ...

When our work feels interminable, as it often does, we should turn our thoughts to Cologne Cathedral - for strength and patience. Construction began in 1248, but paused in 1473 when funds ran out. It started again in 1842 and finished in 1880, 632 years after things kicked off (the event was marked by a nation-wide celebration headed up by Emperor Wilhelm I). However, it wasn’t the end, because World War II created a whole new round of damage, so much of it that construction goes on to this day. Only in 2007, the Cathedral acquired a new stained glass window by Gerhard Richter. What is especially gratifying is that the Cathedral is extremely beautiful and will be sublime when entirely finished. The best things tend to take a lot of time. This article is from The School Of Life 

In our darker moments, we come face to face with the idea of our own failure. We’ll crash financially, we’ll arrive at a dead-end job, we’ll let down those we most care about and give them reason to despise us, we’ll be socially disgraced. We’re terribly alone with our fears; we hardly even dare share them with our closest friends or our families. We will not only be unloved — worse, we will be unworthy of love. The power of Gospels comes from the fact that it is addressed to these fears. Written at varying times during the 1st Century AD, when the Roman Empire was at its height, the Gospels consists of four different but convergent accounts of the life of Jesus — a carpenter turned wandering preacher who had lived and died a few decades earlier in the province of Judea,  When (in the image above) Rembrandt imagined Jesus talking to people, he placed him not in the Middle East in ancient times, but in the sordid back-streets of contemporary Amsterdam amongst people who have already...

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...

Mettā is a word which, in the Indian language of Pali, means benevolence, kindness or tenderness. It is one of the most important ideas in Buddhism. Buddhism recommends a daily ritual meditation to foster this attitude (what is known as mettā bhāvanā). The meditation begins with a call to think very carefully every morning of a particular individual with whom one tends to get irritated or to whom one feels aggressive or cold and – in place of one’s normal hostile impulses – to rehearse kindly messages like ‘I hope you will find peace’ or ‘I wish you to be free from suffering’. This practice can be extended outwards ultimately to include pretty much everyone on Earth. The background assumption is that our feelings towards people are not fixed and unalterable, but are open to deliberate change and improvement. Compassion is a learnable skill – and we need to direct it as much towards those we love as those we are tempted to dismiss and  This article is from The School Of Life 

There is a rare and hugely touching alliance that c an form between an elderly grandmother (who is gradually becoming weaker) and a young grandchild (who is slowly becoming stronger). At the moment, from opposite ends of the spectrum, they both understand frailty quite well. The grandmother's awareness of her own short tenure on life makes her feel the preciousness of mere existence. She’ll probably die before the course of your adult life is established. She might not be able to talk about Minecraft or know how to make a spaceship out of Lego, she can’t make an obstacle course round the sitting room out of cushions and upturned chairs. But she’s very interested in whether you still like Toblerone and if you might be feeling a little bit cold. She may be the only person who simply wants you to happy. She embodies a species of wisdom: the knowledge that achievement is in the long-run over-rated. She’s seen children grow into lawyers and then judges; or A grade students, doctors and ...

In theory we know we’re going to die. But there is a huge difference between an intellectual knowledge of the fact - and a direct sensory realisation. The oversight costs us dear, for it is only through a visceral awareness of our impending end that we are granted the courage and urgency to get on with the vital (but often daunting) tasks of our lives.  The Renaissance artistic tradition of the Memento Mori (‘Reminder of death’) provided striking visual images to keep the idea of our own mortality and the radically uncertain time of our demise constantly before our eyes. The theorists of this tradition grasped that for an idea to be compelling and to guide our conduct with true force, it needs to come via art – that is, wrapped up in a seductive outer layer that appeals to our emotions. We need to see a haunting skull, weeping mourners, rotting flesh, so that what might otherwise have been merely abstract and easily dismissed can turn into a resonant truth with a chance of truly in...

One of the deep conundrums of the modern human soul emerges around the notion of equality: it feels shameful, even a touch insane, not to be an egalitarian and yet this vision seems to imply its own varieties of madness: truth is to be determined by public opinion; expert views have no special legitimacy; the merit of a book, a work of art or an idea is defined by its popularity — and to suggest otherwise is to be labeled the worst of all things: an 'elitist'. Are we not allowed to lament at all the loss of dignity, grace, elegance, refinement and even good manners that the equality of all seems to bring with it?   If we suffer from these quiet but serious worries, Alexis de Tocqueville is our great friend and helper. Born, in 1805, into an old family of the Normandy nobility, he was a political philosopher and, in his later years, briefly, French Foreign Minister. He was an ardent democrat and — at the same time — terrified of certain tendencies in democracy.  These fear...

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...

They have become – quite unfairly – associated with aggravation and ugliness, but more imaginatively considered, airports are among the most impressive structures ever put up by our wretched species. If we were tasked with showing a visiting Martian the best of human capacities, we could do worse than to take them to the airport for a look around. We are, for the most part, messy, indolent, querulous, and irrational animals, but in the operations of an airport, we put our better sides forward: our powers of foresight, temperance, reason and ingenuity. At home every night, we shout, despair, curse and degrade, but within the airport precinct, only our more inspiring strengths are encouraged to emerge. We carefully track and help bring down to earth a 200-tonne airliner approaching the airfield at 150 knots from the southeast in a rainstorm; we inspect the fan blades inside an engine that was – only a few hours ago – firing across northern Greenland at temperatures of 1700°C; we fill two...

A Job Fixation is a determination to secure a particular kind of job that, for one reason or another, turns out not to be a promising or realistic option. It may be that the job is difficult to attain, it may require long years of preparation, or it might be in an industry that has become precarious and therefore denies us good long-term prospects. We call it a fixation – rather than simply an interest – to signal that the focus on the job is problematic because we have an overwhelming sense that our future lies with this one occupation and this occupation alone, while facing a major obstacle in turning our idea into a reality. The solution to such fixations lies in coming to understand more closely what we are really interested in: the more accurately and precisely we fathom what we really care about, the more we stand to discover that our interests exist in a far broader range of occupations than we have until now been entertaining. It is our lack of understanding of what we are real...

All day, we felt a strong need to listen to this particular song. It’s euphoric and joyful, with a chorus that rises to sublime heights. That’s not quite been our dominant mood over the last few hours, but the song is helping out our tentative inclinations to hope and courage. It is strengthening the best sides of our nature. Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there in us and makes it louder. By finding the right piece of music at the right time we’re adding an accompanying score to our lives that allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We can live according to what we actually need to feel. This Is from the school of life 

Nature is valuable not only for itself; it is also to be revered as the single most persuasive and redemptive work of philosophy. Nature corrects our erroneous, and ultimately very painful, sense that we are essentially free. The idea that we have the freedom to fashion our own destinies as we please has become central to our contemporary worldview: we are encouraged to imagine that we can, with time, create exactly the lives we desire, around our relationships, our work and our existence more generally. This hopeful scenario has been the source of extraordinary and unnecessary suffering. There are many things we desperately want to avoid, which we will spend huge parts of our lives worrying about and that we will then bitterly resent when they force themselves upon us nevertheless. The idea of inevitability is central to the natural world: the deciduous tree has to shed its leaves when the temperature dips in autumn; the river must erode its banks; the cold front will deposit its rain...

Today we probably think of monasteries as distant, rather grand and beautiful reminders of the Middle Ages – as far removed from any of the concerns of our modern lives as it is possible to get. However, in their heyday, monasteries were doing something that retains a universal relevance even for those of a secular disposition. They were highly engineered machines for helping their inhabitants to think. They were begun because certain people wanted to think very carefully about a range of vital questions: what is the nature of God and what does God want from me? What is the Divine and what is Grace? What is owed to Jesus and what is owed to Caesar? These believers realised that the human mind is an extremely flighty and easily distracted organ. The prospect of a party at the end of the week, the chatter of a few people out in the street, the sight of an exciting book – all these can derail our attempts to focus our minds. So the founders of monasteries went to immense efforts to create...

One of the paradoxes of trying to understand our minds is that, at particular moments, we need to acknowledge that what passes through them — the ideas we entertain and the moods we’re in — may have very little to do with the workings of these minds themselves. It may — for example — suddenly seem as though we have a new and very specific take on the world: we are sure that we should leave our job, say goodbye to our partner and never see our ungrateful children again. Or we may feel that we have come to a resolute new political certainty: that society is irredeemably corrupt and human nature inherently selfish. And yet, with hindsight, we may realise that these ideas were not necessarily logical or true, they were just emanations of a hard-to-notice detail: that we had missed out on four hours of sleep the night before or hadn’t drunk anything since early morning. Much that we think about — though it seems to be rationally founded — stems in essence from the ups and downs of the compl...

In 1865, two French illustrators and a science fiction writer holed themselves up in an apartment in Paris and set to work imagining a journey to the Moon. They wondered what a rocket should look like and drew something with multiple stages that could be discarded on the way out of the atmosphere, leaving only a small shiny steel capsule to travel to the Moon itself. They wondered where a rocket might be launched from and, after a few calculations of escape velocities, decided on Florida. They asked themselves what the rocket should be called and came up with Columbiad. They speculated on how the rocket might return to Earth and had the idea that it might ditch somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. During a TV broadcast aboard Apollo 11, 104 years later, Neil Armstrong named Jules Verne as one of the reasons why he and his crew had made it to the Moon. The power of art helps us to imagine the lives we want to lead ahead of our capacity to actually lead them. Verne and his illustrator...

One of the most useful realisations we might come to about ourselves is that we are ‘paranoid.’ The word is easy to laugh off as impossibly eccentric, evoking people who insist that they are being tailed by the secret service or watched over by an alien species. But the reality is lot more normal-looking and far less comedic-feeling. To be paranoid in the true sense is to suffer from a repeated feeling that most people hate us, that most situations are extremely dangerous and that some kind of catastrophe is likely to befall us soon. It may not be immediately obvious what connects up — for example — our impression that a colleague is taking us for a fool, with our fear of being talked about unkindly by our friends, with our impression that the waiter has deliberately placed us at the worst table and our dread that we’re about to be caught up in a scandal. But our sense that the world is permanently and imminently conspiring to belittle, attack and humiliate us is most likely the outcom...