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...

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...

The Femminello Lemon, much cultivated in the sunny valleys of central Sicily, has a golden yellow rind, pale flesh and a clear, sharp scent. Its value for us is most poignant not when we meet it in its natural setting, in early August at a table in a small fish restaurant in Naples, but when we encounter it in winter, deep in the cold, rainy north. Then, it possesses an exceptional ability to lift us from present circumstances and can, especially when we press it to our lips and breathe in the messages of its rind, deliver a superlative meditation on warmth, summer, ease and everything that these ultimately symbolise: hope. Most of us have only a tenuous hold on sources of hope. Despair stalks us. We are only ever a few bits of bad news away from collapse. There seem, on many days, so many reasons to give up and surrender to self-loathing and despondency. This explains why the Femminello Lemon is not merely nice, it is an ally in our mind’s constant attempts to structure arguments why ...

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 his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, published in 1830, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proposed that history moves forward in what he termed a dialectical way. A dialectic is a philosophical term for an argument made up of three parts: a thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis. Both the thesis and the antithesis contain parts of the truth, but they are exaggerations and distortions of it and so need to clash and interact, until their best elements find resolution in a synthesis. Hegel proposed that the world makes progress only by lurching from one extreme to another and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found. He reminds us that big overreactions are eminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction. The dark moments of history aren’t the end, they’re a challenging but (in some ways) necessary part of an antithesis that will – eventually – locate a wiser point of synthesis. We...

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...

We tend to feel disturbed by religion. We’d like to be respectful but so many of the ideas sound entirely bizarre and impossible. We don’t want to be mean to friends, relatives, or strangers who are devout but how can we make sense of their apparent devotion to absurdities? The Golden Bough is the book to help us, for it explains how a conviction can be at once empirically false and yet profoundly meaningful and moving.  Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854; he was a spectacularly diligent student, winning a scholarship to Cambridge and then a Fellowship at Trinity, then the most prestigious and intellectual of the many colleges that make up the University.  Initially published in two-volumes in 1890, Fraser kept adding to the text and by 1915 it had grown into an enormous twelve volume set. It was the first very widely read study of myth and anthropology.  Frazer’s interest is in shared myths: he’s struck by how, across time and space, different societies have invented sim...

Wheat has, by most accounts, been an astonishing success for our species and a particular triumph for Canada. Half of the 35 million tonnes of wheat the country grows every year (it’s the earth’s fifth largest producer) is harvested in Saskatchewan, and most of that is grown in the bottom third of the province. If 1 tonne of wheat makes 1,700 loaves of white bread, a great many of the world’s slices of toast will have originated in these parts. Head out from Regina, the provincial capital, in late August or early September and the horizon will be dotted with rows of gigantic John Deere S690s and New Holland CR10s cutting their way through vast prairie-lands carpeted with the heavy blonde stalks of the most fecund grass the planet has ever known. We’ve only been doing this for a – relatively – short while. Homo sapiens goes back 200,000 years, but it was only around 9,500 BC in southeastern Turkey that we started wheat cultivation. The story is usually told as one of triumph: our pre-ag...