Petite Philosophy

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 

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

In the late 1970s, an unusual figure became a central fixture in Manhattan’s premier night club, Studio 54 – normally frequented by celebrities, models, the young and the powerful. Sally Lippman was a retired attorney who had been elected to the New York State Bar in the 1920s and had recently lost her husband. Unwilling to spend her last years in silent loneliness, she bought some tight trousers, high-top sneakers and black leather boots and went out four nights a week, in the process making a number of new friends and earning herself the nickname Disco Sally. Nightclubs do not have a high reputation as therapeutic places. We associate them with grandstanding, a pressure to impress and a narrow group of initiates who intimidate the unfashionable and the ordinary. Most of us are held back from ever attending by a terror that we might be wearing the wrong clothes, that we might be too old or ugly and that we won’t know how to dance – as we put it – ‘properly’.  Disco Sally was wise ...

We collectively spend a lot of time looking out for ingredients that might make us thrive in business, among these, confidence, team-work, marketing, and a knack at numbers. But in the list of suggested answers, one thing that rarely comes up is self-knowledge.  This is to miss just how many businesses devote their energies to making products and services for customers that don’t exist. These organisations apply their best minds to attempt to solve problems that aren’t connected up to anything that might conceivably bother human beings as they currently exist. These businesses might be developing chairs that no one wants to sit on, publishing books that have nothing compelling to say, opening restaurants with oddly off putting menus or (in extremis) designing a rucksack to hold a baguette. And they do so for what may in essence be a single hugely consequential but simple reason: they haven’t asked themselves what they might truly need more of in their lives. A modesty has held them...

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...

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

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...

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 ...