Petite Philosophy

What many of us would dearly love to do — if only we had the confidence — is to start our own businesses. But here, as in so many other fields,  what may deter us is a dispiriting feeling that everything has surely already been done; the world obviously doesn’t need yet another bakery, grocery store, pet shop or skin cream manufacturer.  But such pessimism is a sign of a punish ingly and misguidedly narrow conception of what business is actually for.  The ultimate purpose of business is to satisfy human needs. Put more colloquially, it is to make people happy. And once we frame matters like this, what we quickly see is that business as a whole hasn’t begun to fulfil its historic mission — because human beings are still so pervasively, fascinatingly and (if one can put it this way) inspiringly miserable. There are — of course — a few areas where enterprises have learnt to satisfy our needs rather well. The world truly doesn’t require yet another brand of breakfast cereal. ...

  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...

  Guanyin is a saintly female figure in East Asian Buddhism strongly associated with mercy, compassion and kindness. She occupies a similar role within Buddhism as the Virgin Mary within Catholicism. There are shrines and temples to her all over China; one, in the province of Hainan, has a 108-metre statue of her (it’s the fourth-largest statue anywhere in the world). Guanyin’s popularity speaks of the extent to which the needs of childhood endure within us. She is, in the noblest sense, ‘mummy’. Across China, adults allow themselves to be weak in her presence. Her gaze has a habit of making people cry – for the moment one breaks down isn't so much when things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence for too long. Guanyin doesn’t judge. She understands that you are tired, that you have been betrayed, that things aren’t easy, that you are fed up: she has a measure of the difficulties involved in trying to le...

  In 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, Eve, the mother of all people, 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 perhaps not expect too much from the human race, Augustine implies. We have been somewhat doomed from the outset. And ...

  Nowadays, we don’t much believe in luck – or what in earlier ages was known as Fortune. We would think it extremely suspicious if someone explained that they had been sacked, but added that this was simply the result of ‘bad luck’. We would think it equally strange if someone said they had made many millions, but ascribed their triumph to mere ‘good luck’. We resist the notion that luck can play a significant role as much in our failures as in our successes. Luck presents a substantial offence against modern ideals of control, strategy and foresight. We understand ourselves to be – for better and for worse – the authors of our own destinies. Modern civilisation itself could be viewed as a gigantic protest against the role of chance in human affairs. Science, insurance, medicine and public education take up arms against luck, and have won enormous battles against it; so many, in fact, that it has grown devilishly tempting to believe that we may have vanquished chance altogether. H...