“The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain de Botton
Over a souvenir postcard of Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of Socrates prepared to meet his fate, de Botton mused:
“If the postcard struck me so forcefully, it was perhaps because the behavior it depicted contrasted so sharply with my own. In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on an opening night of a school play…I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed. I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had though me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harbored a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.”
A sumptuous treatment of what are perhaps banal concerns. Yet de Botton shows that everything depends upon a forced laugh or a hazy definition. Philosophy is made of banal concerns, elusive everyday stuff that can be unpackaged. Will more money make us happy? Does hardship bring wisdom? In showing how philosophers, men who ate, ached and puzzled as any others treated these concerns, de Botton describes the process of uncovering truths, accessible to us all.
Starting with this inspiration from Socrates, we wonder that if we are to create a set of beliefs of our own, how are we to handle possessing unpopular conclusions? Socrates was concerned with what justification people provided for their beliefs, and whether their beliefs could be justified. We are a product of our beliefs about the world, and if we never examined them or chose them, we would be no better than automata enacting instructions. On what basis can we chose? Socrates offers an an answer and a method. We ought to chose those beliefs that cannot be contradicted, that is, those that are necessarily true. We can discover these by taking a statement such as “being virtuous requires money” and questioning if there could be a situation in which the statement is not true, “could one ever have money and not be virtuous?” Exceptions will show the definition is either incorrect or that the definition is imprecise and must be modified. Rinse and repeat. The simple power of this algorithm speaks for itself. Already we see the tools for clarity are not difficult to master, one must only possess patience and will to to continue. As Epicures noted, “The man who alleges that he is not yet ready for philosophy or that the time for it has passed him by, is like the man who says that he is either too young or too old for happiness”.
For Socrates, truth-seeking itself offered salvation from our confusions, but Epicures sought a more direct means of inquiry to our satisfaction. A simple analogy suffices to describe his subject. Just as each of us may have intuitive diagnoses and prescriptions for our maladies, we are aware that we are often uninformed or worse, so under the influence of our ailments that we may make poor decisions about our health without the aid of someone trained to inquire and prescribe remedies. There is no reason why medicine should be such a privileged domain over any other, that we cannot believe the same may be true for our state of happiness as our state of health. Epicures offers philosophy of the utmost pragmatic value, “just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the sufferings of the mind.”
The conclusions Epicures and his friends drew is that happiness comes from the company of good friends, a life unencumbered by pursuit of money or status, and accordingly freedom to spend time in contemplation of life. In order to determine whether a pursuit will bring us happiness, we can bring the Socratic method to bear to ask if the pursuit will yield any of the three foundations of happiness. Given that we ought to know the answer in advance, application of the method may simply serve to show why it is so. Why do we err in seeking happiness? de Botton offers us his own insight:
“Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves.”
Advertisers exploit our natural desires - we may be tricked into buying a Jeep when we were really looking for freedom. If commerce is the stuff that makes life move forward, then ought we to believe that society is doomed to forever err? We will need to think more of happiness later.
Just as Socrates earlier, Seneca too faced death for what he believed, but Seneca’s strange calmness came from another source. Epicures hinted at this strength: directing thought to mortality, for example, is so that “what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation”. Early on, the infant learns the world is not willed from within and our condition is laid bare. If Socrates was primarily concerned with rationality and Epicures with feelings, Seneca offers a connection. What is frustration? A ready answer is that it is an emotion that surpasses our rational selves when we are thwarted. Seneca recognized that this did not answer the question, but merely left it to another to ask why an emotion should respond to conflicts of will at all. His answer is that we are frustrated because we came tot he problem with the assumption the world ought to work in our favor, we had hoped for the best of all worlds. To adequately cope with limited resources in a world without gumdrop rain and creampuff pillows, we ought to expect for the worst.
There are interesting consequences. A friend of Seneca, a loving mother was devastated by the loss of her son. Seneca showed that her torment lay in her belief in a just world. If she subscribes to the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people then she is left with a dillemma. Either she was a bad person that such a calamity befell her, or that she is a victim of failed administration of justice. Both of these feelings sap one of any feeling of agency, such are the gnarls certain beliefs leave in warping our mind. Conversely, in attributing the things that thwart us agency, as if they existed in order to thwart us, we make martyrs of ourselves. We feel impugned, and lose our sense of self and worth. It is essential to clear thought to maintain one’s identity independent of one’s circumstances.
Seneca showed us that a way out of frustration is to prize independence of mind by ensuring the uncertainties of the world are kept external to it. Montaigne took a different approach to handling the problem, instead advocating a celebration of our confusion and advertisement of our limitations. Seneca showed we are dogs tethered to a willful cart with the choice to fighting or easing our journey by following fate. Montaigne too believed we are tethered, to our worldly needs and epistemological limitations. The roots of frustration that Seneca identified has deeper roots still, originating in our belief that certain ideas are natural, an overconfidence in our view of the world. To learn, we must expose our minds to different ideas and question what is natural. Truth is to be found everywhere, not in books written in tortured prose for “difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment”. Montaigne is honest and detailed, even down to his sexual inadequacies and physical ailments, and here we profit from de Botton’s sense for the details that illuminate the beliefs a philosopher espouses.
This style works best for Schopenhauer’s life. We immediately see him as a harmless crank, and in light of this his beliefs that the world is made of frustration become comical. His search for satisfaction led him to ponder how his self-proclaimed massive intellect could be diverted by the gaze of a maiden. He could not as Montaigne could, cheerfully recognize the indignity of a fart or the frustration of an empty stomach. What could it be that could overcome the rational mind? It must be a powerful force independent of the human faculties, so Schopenhauer turned to nature for a will-to-life, a drive to stay alive and reproduce. Schopenhauer’s interpretation of biological evidence is to be praised in modern terms on a number of grounds. He offered evolutionary considerations in the design of the mind, and presciently recognized that conflicts of interest exist between an organism itself, their mates and the forces that produced them, which he believed to be “for the benefit of the species” but are more likely to be for the benefit of the genes. This even leads to a theory of love, that we are attracted to those who would best cancel out our genetic deviations (there is significant evidence that genetically average individuals are healthier, and attractive faces exhibit average traits) and that love is justified after the fact.
But our interest is not so much in Schopenhauer’s (or anyone else discussed here) empirical accuracy, but in his approach. In questioning why is love fraught with hardship, his answer was that love (and life, interrupted by love) was never about happiness to begin with. This serves as an abrupt lesson for the reader, accustomed to thinking philosophy as the device that converts experience into pleasurable conclusions. No one administers such bitter medicine with such delight as Nietszche:
“What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must have as much as possible of the other”
“…ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms…”
That essential belief that perhaps our other philosophers took for granted, that pain and pleasure are apposite is suddenly challenged. This epistemological challenge serves in order to show us that success is to be strived for, to be earned and paid for in blood, sweat, tears and toil. By Nietszche’s own admission, the mind is a product of the body and thus it’s climate, and de Botton cleverly shows us the alpine origins of a belief in striving for this Swiss (”I am distressed to be Swiss!”), how Nietszche came to realize that as with glaciers, “so it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise it’s house.” We all possess the potential to realize our will-to-self, but we must recognize we are born limited and must strive to earn our place. The solution, beyond Seneca, is not merely to accept uncertainty and difficulties but to endure in hope of being one of those unreasonable men that may change the world. Intellectual honesty is denigrated by pretending to deny our desires or accept inferiority. The worst, he said, would be to anesthetize oneself with consolations.