Petite Philosophy

  Most of us are, to some extent, ugly. We should accept with Stoic good grace that personal appearance is simply one of the least democratic parts of life. We tend to misunderstand how common ugliness is, in part because the images in the media always highlight the pretty ones. In truth, beauty is as rare as mass murder. The problem is that we tend to think there are far more murders than there are. Thanks to the media, it can feel as if everyone is knifing everyone else. We recognise symptoms of panic when the frequency of a bad thing is exaggerated. We don’t yet recognise a similar hysteria when the frequency of a good thing gets exaggerated. Fortunately, not everyone minds ugliness. The reason is simple. People learn about love from their parents; our elders provide the template for affection that comes into force when children grow up. Fortunately for the ugly, many parents who are kind and loving are also peculiar in looks. Many people, even very attractive ones, therefore gr...

  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 detest. This article is from the school of lif...

  It is normal to assume that those who own the planes and the fancy cars, the penthouses and the yachts must be the confident ones among us. What solid and self-congratulatory types must be at the wheel of those Italian saloons and in the leather armchairs of those Gulfstream G700s. But ownership of luxuries can mask something more complicated and, from certain angles, more poignant. It would seldom occur to anyone to seek so urgently to impress the world unless they had not first been afflicted by a stubborn sense of being superfluous and invisible. We may be tempted to read Ferraris and Riva speedboats as signs of wealth, but they could with greater accuracy be interpreted as symbols of a background impression of invisibility and sorrow. They are evidence of deprivation. How poor one would need to feel in order to make all the sacrifices required to accumulate a fortune; how humiliated one must at some point have been in order to demand preternatural respect and obedience from e...

  A premeditation is a technical term, invented by the Stoic philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome, to describe a process, normally to be performed once a day in bed before getting up, whereby one looks into one’s future and systematically imagines everything going wrong in it. It is a deliberate, artful, ritualised meditation on varied options for upcoming disasters. The practice is based on the view that our minds are congenitally unable to face up to the risks we face and do us an enormous disservice through their sentimental, unexamined optimism, leaving us unprepared for the catastrophes that will inevitably come our way. A premeditation constitutes a deliberate attempt to bring our expectations into line with the troubles we face. It builds on a fundamental idea about anger: that we don’t get angry simply because something bad has happened; we grow furious only when it is bad and unexpected.  The Stoic philosopher Seneca believed that the greatest service we can pay ou...

  The late 4th century, as the immense Roman Empire was collapsing, the leading philosopher of the age, St Augustine, became deeply interested in possible explanations for the evident tragic disorder of the human world. One central idea he developed was what he legendarily termed 'peccatum originale': original sin. Augustine proposed that human nature is inherently damaged and tainted because – in the Garden of Eden – the mother of all people, Eve, sinned against God by eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Her guilt was then passed down to her descendants and now all earthly human endeavours are bound to fail because they are the work of a corrupt and faulty human spirit. This odd idea might not be literally true, of course. However, as a metaphor for why the world is in a mess, it has a beguiling poetic truth, as relevant to atheists as believers. We should not – perhaps – expect too much from the human race, Augustine implies. We’ve been somewhat doomed from the outset...

It used to be the favourite of the three pools in Joseph-Désiré Mobutu’s $100-million, 15,000-square-metre palace, on top of a hill above the jungle near the little town of Gbadolite in the north of what was once Zaire (now the DRC). There was a complicated waterslide and a golden jacuzzi. Servants would circulate with his favourite oysters and Belgian mussels, while the local village lacked electricity. He had a ready smile when he was in a good mood and cages full of wild animals for when he was not. He had a 32,000-metre airstrip built in the vicinity and hired Air France’s Concorde to go to Paris on shopping trips with his wives (the first of whom was called Marie-Antoinette). He had twenty-one children and explained proudly that he had slept with a thousand Zairean virgins. During his presidency he stole $15 billion from the central bank and – while things were good – found a lot of friends, among them Pope John Paul II, the Director of the CIA, Richard Nixon, George Bush and Valé...

 L Much of our distress is around what is happening right now. We’ve got ten things to do and the boiler has stopped functioning; we’ve split some red wine on our white trousers; our partner has just said something almost designed to upset us. Yet, very oddly, we know that — with time — most of these frustrations will melt away. As time sweeps on they'll be submerged in the bigger picture. It always happens. Remember that time ages ago when our flight got canceled in Canada and we got incredibly agitated? Now the anxiety feels like it happened to someone else. It’s one of the most tantalising aspects of existence: we suffer now, yet we know that when we see these things from afar we won’t care so much.  The Upanishads is the collective name for around one hundred philosophical reflections, mostly originating in northern India between about 2500 and 2000 years ago. The ideas, which form the intellectual core of Hinduism, were transmitted orally for many generations. The name Up...

Strachey was born, in 1880, into a rather grand and pr osperous English family. His father, Sir Richard, was a general; the Earl of Lytton, the godfather after whom he was named, was Viceroy of India. At Cambridge University he was a much loved member of the ultra-elite and secretive ‘Apostles’: a group of the twelve most intellectually and socially distinguished undergraduates who met on Saturday evenings to discuss ideas and eat sardines on toast.   Eminent Victorians, which Strachey worked on for several years and which came out shortly after his 38th birthday, was his masterpiece: in a quiet, funny and immensely elegant way, it dismantles all that his parent’s generation had assumed was centrally important.  In the book he selects four of the most revered characters of the previous era. His first target, Cardinal Manning, was the leader of the English Catholics: a brilliant administrator, string-puller, oily manipulator and (in Strachey’s unbelieving eyes) an absurd c...

Thinking is hugely important, but on its own, within therapy, it is not the key to fixing our psychological problems. There is a crucial difference between broadly recognising, for example, that we were shy as a child and re-experiencing, in its full intensity, what it was like to feel cowed, ignored and in constant danger of being rebuffed or mocked. Or we might know, in an abstract way, that our mother wasn’t much focused on us when we were little. It is another thing entirely to reconnect with the horrific feelings we had when we tried to show her something we loved or tell her of a deep upset and she wasn’t interested. Therapy builds on the idea of a return to live feelings. It is only when we are properly in touch with feelings that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives. Oddly, this means that intellectual people can have a particularly tricky time in therapy. They become interested in the ideas, but...

A central problem of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave, but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct. We know in theory about not eating too much, being kind, getting to bed early, focusing on our opportunities before it is too late, showing charity and remembering to be grateful. Yet in practice, our wise ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour. Our knowledge is both embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us. The Ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: 'akrasia', commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is because of akrasia, they proposed, that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles. There are two central solutions to akrasia, located in two unexpected quarters: art and ritual. The real purpose of art (which includes novels, films and songs as well as photos, pain...

One of the odder features of modern culture is the belief that, ideally, we should read as widely as possible. There are so many fields that we feel we should be informed about and so many books others have recommended. And so we are always vaguely haunted by the sense that we’re not reading enough.  In Islamic culture, the Quran is THE book. The words were sent, sentence by sentence, from God to the Prophet Muhammed around 1500 years ago and, over a period of more than twenty years, he simply wrote down what God wanted the whole word to know.  The Quran, therefore, suggests a radical view of reading. There is only one book we truly have to read and that we should spend our whole lives absorbing and reflecting on its message. To deeply know and understand one book is more important than to skim our way through hundreds. We may, ideally,  end up committing large parts of this book to memory and feel no shame that we have scarcely opened another volume.  Though current...

John Ruskin was one of the great intellectual figures of the 19th century. He was born in London in 1819, the only child of deeply devoted parents. His father was a hugely successful, and immensely respectable, wine merchant. From an early age Ruskin wrote beautifully and powerfully about the arts; he was a tireless teacher and advocate of all that he thought was missing from rapidly developing economies of the mid 1800s. As he aged he moved from art criticism to social criticism.  The essays that make up this book were first published, across six months in 1860, in The Cornhill Magazine — one of the grandest and most prestigious periodicals of the era. They were so hated by the readers that the editor (who rather admired them) had to terminate the series. The plain cover of the first edition, in which the essays were collected as a book, gives no hint of the fireworks of the text.  Uncontroversially, economics is the study of the production and distribution of ‘things of valu...