Petite Philosophy

 RELATIONSHIPS  Emotional Scepticism refers to an attitude of good-natured suspicion towards the majority of our first impulses and feelings. The Emotional Sceptic rarely fully trusts what they immediately desire, what they fear and what their so-called ‘gut’ tells them. They understand their minds to be Faulty Walnuts, highly liable to be throwing off inaccurate or misleading emotions. They like to pause and create a ‘fireguard’ between their feelings and their actions. Emotional Sceptics will take their time coming to decisions. They sleep on things. They don’t simply act on impulse. They are disinclined to get married after two exceptionally glorious weeks. Our current culture looks askance at Emotional Scepticism. It sounds very boring, sexless and unimpressive. We are still guided by the Romantic notion that emotions are the voices of our true selves, requiring to be honoured as faithfully and as quickly as possible. This background ideology explains why there is still so...

 RELATIONSHIPS  One of the unlikeliest ideas we can entertain of people, especially those we are drawn to or respect, is that they might, beneath it all, be lonely. We know so much about our own sense of isolation; how it has been with us from the start, began in kindergarten, haunted us at school, didn’t quite leave us at university and has dogged us intermittently throughout our adult lives. We know how badly we ache to find an echo in others’ hearts of a range of our own fears and melancholy insights. However, we are terrified that, were we to try to unburden ourselves, we would meet with only puzzlement or jollity or changes of subject. The loneliness of others remains an abstract, almost unreal proposition. It simply doesn't seem plausible that many of the feelings of freakishness and shame we know so well might be besetting friends, acquaintances or thoughtful-looking strangers we pass by in the street. We are all such masters at conveying purpose, invulnerability, good ...

  RELATIONSHIPS  Without our quite noticing it, and to our immense misfortune, the value of domestic life has come to occupy a degraded position in our collective vision of importance. The pleasures and challenges of managing a household can be made to seem almost comically trivial in comparison with making a great fortune in business, succeeding in sport or entertainment, or occupying a prominent place in the media. Yet the small, bounded, repetitive issues of the domestic realm play a great part in the essential task of living and dying well. ‘If we wish to be happy, we must learn to cultivate our garden’ was Voltaire’s legendary and deliberately unheroic advice on the matter. A consequence of our disregard for domesticity is that we often become enraged by what we consider ‘small’ irritants. Couples fall out spectacularly over whether it is necessary to use a chopping board when cutting bread, how clean the bathroom needs to be or whether it matters if a drawer is left slig...

POLITICS It’s a betiful idea: everyone’s vote is equal, whatever their income or education. It feels profoundly wicked to say a word against democracy. Yet democracy is obviously a touch unreasonable – and the Greek philosophers knew it. Plato said so most clearly in his great book, The Republic: it’s impossible that every single person’s view can be equally astute. A democratic vote is like the captain of a ship having to consult every passenger about the best course to chart through an approaching storm. For admirable reasons, we are committed to a political system that is problematic. The solution – according to Plato – should be intense universal education to foster wisdom in everyone. We cannot allow everyone to vote until everyone has learnt to think. Till then we need to laugh warmly at the tragi-comic nature of our predicament. There will be a lot of erratic choices. The Ancient Greek philosophers – whom we mistakenly believe all loved democracy – had a clear-eyed view of the m...

LOVE The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who specialised in working with parents and children, was disturbed by how often he encountered in his consulting rooms parents who were disappointed with themselves. They felt they were failing as parents and hated themselves as a result. They were ashamed of their occasional rows, their bursts of short temper, their times of boredom around their own children and their many mistakes. What struck Winnicott, however, was that these people were almost always not bad parents at all. They were loving, often very kind and very interested in their children. They tried hard to meet their needs and to understand their problems as best they could. As parents, they were – in his memorable and important phrase – ‘good enough’. Winnicott identified a crucial issue. We often torment ourselves because we have in our minds a demanding – and in fact impossible – vision of what we are supposed to be like across a range of areas of our lives. ...