Petite Philosophy

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...

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...

Modern culture places huge emphasis on training to be physically fit. Confucius emphasised the importance of training to be morally good. This sounds deeply strange, reminding us of how much our culture overlooks the pursuit of ethical development. Confucius identified five central virtues that make us good: Compassion (ren),  Ritual Propriety (li), Justice (yi), Knowledge (zhi)  Integrity (xin). Crucially, Confucius felt that these five had to be worked on over a whole lifetime. He told his followers: ‘At fifteen, I had my mind bent on intellectual learning. At thirty, I was busy and practical. At forty, I had doubts. At fifty, I started to learn. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I had learnt to follow the five virtues.’ In other words, training to be good takes a lot of time. No wonder Confucius revered old people; their skin might not be as supple or their faces as pretty but – he argued – they stand a slightly higher chance of ...

PHILOSOPHY  Early in his career, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner formulated an enviably ambitious plan: he would spend the rest of his life tracking down and describing every animal on the planet, from the armadillo to the green chameleon, the Egyptian mongoose to the rhinoceros. His labours resulted in one of the first and most beautiful works of zoology, 'Historia Animalium', published in Zurich between 1551 and 1558. Gessner got a lot of things wrong. He was muddled about names and numbers of legs. Many of his colours were off. He was confused about the numbers of stripes on the tiger and spots on the leopard. But it is Gessner’s boldness that continues to impress. He didn’t worry about the odd mistake, and nor did he limit his aspirations for fear of treading on other experts’ toes. He did have one enormous advantage, however: he was early on in the game. He did not have to suffer from the dispiriting sense — which too often subsumes us today — that everything must sure...

ART In mid-September 1888, a penniless Dutchman, who would in a few months be committed to an asylum and be dead within two years, sat down in the eastern corner of the Place du Forum in Arles and set to work on one of the most astonishing and beloved paintings ever made. ‘Café Terrace at Night’ juxtaposes our snug night time rituals under our defiant man-made lamps with the ultimate mysteries and sublimity of the cosmos. And yet, as we know, Van Gogh found no buyers for his masterpiece; no museum came begging, no gallery gave a damn. His work appeared wholly worthless to his entire era. He could barely afford lunch or a new pair of shoes. The local children mocked him. Rarely has a more despised or marginal figure walked the earth. The story is so familiar that we are apt to lose sight of its ongoing relevance and universal import: people miss things. On a very large scale. They did so then — and, by implication, they must continue to do so now. The reasons are not very complicated an...

CONFIDENCE Shortly before completing a study of some delightful pigeons that had come to keep him company on the balcony of his villa in Vallauris in the South of France, Picasso observed a group of young children in a classroom painting with particular exuberance and vitality. ‘At their age,’ he rued, ‘I knew how to paint like Titian. It’s taken me a lifetime to relearn to paint like them.’ That Picasso, one of the most courageous of all artistic figures, should have confessed to an occasional struggle to create with simplicity and emotional candour tells us a lot about how in thrall we can all be to unnecessary ideas of respectability and elaboration – across every area of our lives. We tend to overcomplicate matters out of a timid fear that our true feelings, gestures and thoughts might not be enough on their own. In art, we lean on academic ideas of propriety; in literature, we use dense, obfuscatory language; in cookery, we prepare heavy convoluted meals; in conversation, we talk ...