Philosophy for Life - Jules Evans Flashcards
Preface
The School of Athens - painted by Raphael, and found within series of of huge frescoes on the walls of the Vatican Palace private library. Plato points up to the heavens (realm of eternal ideas) and Aristotle points down to the street (realm of terrestrial matter).
This book is my ideal curriculum: a day-pass to the School of Athens. I’ve assembled 12 great teachers of the ancient world to teach us things left out of modern education: how to govern our emotions, how to engage with our society and how to live.
1 Socrates and the Art of Street Philosophy
I found university to be like a factory system: we clocked in, handed in our essay, clocked out, and then were left to our own devices as if we were already fully formed responsible adults.
Albert Ellis invented CBT in the 1950s. His ABC model of the emotions:
Activating Event (experience) Belief (interpretation) Consequences (emotional response)
Ellis, following the Stoics, suggested we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts or opinions about events.
Stoic philosopher Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them’.
According to CBT, and the Socratic philosophy that inspired it, what causes social anxiety and depression is not repressed libidinal instincts, as psychoanalysts might argue. Nor is it neurological malfunctions that can only be corrected with pharmaceutical drugs, as psychiatry might argue. It was certain toxic beliefs and habits of thinking.
Socrates was the first philosopher to insist that philosophy should speak to the everyday concerns of ordinary people. He was unblessed with wealth, political connections or good looks, yet he utterly bewitched his society.
He considered it a ‘good of the highest order’ to examine myself and others’, and ‘spend each day in discussion about the good’.
Most people, he suggested, sleepwalk through life, never asking themselves what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.
They absorb the values and beliefs of their parents, or their culture, and accept them unquestioningly.
Socrates insisted there was a strong connection between your philosophy and your mental and physical health.
He declared that it’s our responsibility to ‘take care of our souls’. Philosophy is a form of medicine we can practise on ourselves.
CBT tries to recreate this ‘Socratic method’, and to teach us the art of questioning ourselves.
Montaigne was right: we are all of us richer than we think we are.
There is evidence from neuroscience that when we change our opinion about a situation, our emotions also change. Neuroscientists call this ‘cognitive re-appraisal’.
‘Practising philosophy helped me overcome the sense of alienation that many of us feel at times, which comes from being in a society that wants to judge you to see what life chances you might be worthy of’.
Academic philosophy no longer teaches us how to live. “Oprah Winfrey asks more of the right questions than the humanities professors at Oxford.” Alain de Botton
The 2 great post-war liberal philosophers, Sir Karl Popper and Sir Isaiah Berlin warned that the search for a single formula for the good life was a ‘metaphysical chimera’.
Governments, Berlin insisted, should protect their citizens’ ‘negative liberty’ - their freedom from interference - while leaving them alone to pursue their own ‘positive liberty’: their own model of personal and spiritual fulfilment.
The four steps of the Socratic tradition
1/ Humans can know themselves. We can use our reason to examine our unconscious beliefs and values.
2/ Humans can change themselves. We can use our reason to change our beliefs. This will change our emotions, because our emotions follow our beliefs.
3/ Humans can consciously create new habits of thinking, feeling and acting.
4/ If we follow philosophy as a way of life, we can live more flourishing lives.
2 Epictetus and the Art of Maintaining Control
Epictetus was born a slave and his name means ‘acquired’
The Stoa Poikile (painted colonnade) was one of the most famous sites in ancient Athens and was the location from which Zeno of Citium taught Stoicism.
Stoic philosophy was a means of coping with chaos. Stoics claimed that if you use your reason to overcome attachments or aversions to external conditions, you can stay unperturbed under any circumstances.
Marcus Aurelius was probably more influenced by Epictetus than any other thinker.
The Discourses of Epictetus are a series of extracts of the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus written down by Arrian c. 108 AD.
STOIC FORK:
a) Zone 1 / Circle of concern: In our control = OUR THOUGHTS
b) Zone 2 / Circle of influence: Not in our control = body, property, reputation, job, parents, friends, boss, co-workers, the past
The small window in Zone 1 is the basis for human freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty.
In Zone 1, we are King, if we choose to exercise our sovereignty. We always have a choice what to think and believe.
We have to accept that we don’t have complete sovereignty over Zone 2. An intense focus on Zone 2 is a recipe for paranoia, helplessness and alienation.
Zone 1 and Zone 2 are also known as circle of influence and circle of concern respectively. The more we focus our energy on the circle of influence, the happier and more effective we will be.
Do not abrogate (evade) responsibility for your own beliefs and feelings.
3 Musonius Rufus and the Art of Fieldwork
We tend to think of philosophy as a purely intellectual activity. Wisdom cannot be purely theoretical: we need to say how we fare in real-life situations.
The philosopher who best emphasised the idea of philosophy as mental and physical training was Epictetus’ teacher, Musonius Rufus. He was nicknamed the ‘Socrates of Rome’.
He insisted philosophy was worthless if it wasn’t embedded in practical training, or what the Greeks called askesis (severe self-discipline).
Stoics don’t practice for the applause of the public. They practice to attain inner freedom and resilient to adversity.
Philosophical training takes times. It’s not enough to come back from a class feeling like you’ve made a breakthrough and are a changed person.
Greatest example of a journal we have from the ancient world is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - emperor of Rome from AD 161 to 180. He wasn’t writing to please an audience. The book’s title is literally translated as ‘thoughts to myself’.
The excesses of Christianity gave asceticism a bad name. In rejecting these extremes, Western philosophy lost sight of the idea of philosophy as a mental and physical training.
The idea of training ourselves to improve our self-control has become a focus of research for modern psychology.
Work of Walter Mischel at Columbia University: the longer the children deferred marshmallow gratification, the fewer behavioural problems they had later in school, and the better they did academically.
Ancient philosophy, as Cicero put it, trains us all to be doctors to ourselves.
4 Seneca and the Art of Managing Expectations
One of the first works of anger management in Western culture was written by Seneca (Roman Empire 4 BC until AD 65).
He wrote that philosophy ‘moulds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone…countless things that happen every hour call for advice; and such advice is to be sought in philosophy.’
Seneca’s letters, essays and tragedies are literary masterpieces. TS Eliot suggested that Seneca’s Stoicism was the main influence on Shakespeare’s world-view. Seneca was Rome’s greatest tragic playwright - close to the brutal and chaotic worlds of King Lear and Hamlet.
Seneca suggests that perhaps the main fallacy that leads to anger is an excessively optimistic expectation of how things will turn out.
We live, Seneca writes, in the realm of Fortune, and ‘her rule is harsh and unconquerable, and at her whim we will endure suffering deserved and undeserved.’
Watching tragedies was for Seneca and Aristotle, a form of mass therapy. We tell ourselves stories of catastrophe to prepare ourselves for adversity.
Fortune can only damage externals and the Stoic puts no moral values on externals - not for the sake of a good reincarnation but because they believe virtue is its own reward.
Tortoise-like they withdraw from externals, and find happiness what Marcus Aurelius called the ‘inner citadel’ of their soul.
What is really valuable is not your house, career or reputation, but your soul.
Thanks to Stoicism’s influence on CBT, we can experience the benefit of these techniques for transforming the emotions.
Epicurus and the Art of Savouring the Moment
Career is a try-hard notion - it’s a middle-class affliction.
The financial slavery of mortgages and pension plans are all part of capitalism’s conspiracy to make us defer the pleasures of the present moment for the distant prospect of some future felicity.
We are kept quiet by means of the idea that, at some point in the future, things are going to get better.
For all their enmity and rivalry with the Stoics, the Epicureans shared with them a conception of philosophy as therapy.
The fewer and simpler your desires, the easier is to meet them, the less you have to work, and the more time you have for friends. In fact, all you need of for the good life is some basic security, your health, your reason, and your friends.
We must put off our happiness, telling ourselves as we squeeze onto the Tube to go to our spirit-crushing job that at some point in the future we’ll be happy. Meanwhile the present moment flows by, unnoticed and unenjoyed.
The Zen teacher Alan Watts once said, “Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by now. That’s the birth of responsibility. You have to face the fact that you’re doing all this. There’s no alibi,”
‘Death is nothing to us’, Lucretius insists. Non-existence is nothing to be afraid of.
‘All the evidence shows that the best way to be happy is to work for other people’s happiness’. Richard Layard (Action for Happiness)
6 Heraclitus and the Art of Cosmic Contemplation
Heraclitus bequeathed us a very dynamic picture of the universe, in which everything is constantly changing. He saw ceaseless flux and transformation.
This dynamic theory only returned to astrophysics in the last hundred years, after the astronomer Edwin Hubble gazed out of his telescope and discovered, to his shock, that the Universe was far bigger than we imagined, and getting bigger all the time.
Contemplating the universe was a form of therapy for the ancients. Seeing the Big Picture puts our own troubles and anxieties into a cosmic perspective, so that our anxious egos become stilled with wonder and awe.
‘Visions of this kind purge away the dross of our earth-bound life’. Aurelius
Contemplating the stars elevates our spirit.
Aurelius writes: ‘Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy. Let your though sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity.’
Watching Sagan’s Cosmos is an emotional as much as an intellectual experience. It is a meditation.
One of the roles of philosophy and religion is to give us a sense of the infinite.
Is the evolution of self-awareness in sentient beings the Universe’s goal? Does the Universe want to be noticed?
What’s the evolutionary function of our endless self-questions as to the meaning of life? We consider Hamlet one of the most interesting characters ever created. But from an evolutionary perspective, he’s a complete dud. he wanders around asking metaphysical questions, then shuffles off before he’s reproduced.
Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
7 Pythagoras and the art of memorisation and incantation
Maxims are like neural shortcuts, like icons on a desktop that instantly connect you to a body of information.
The philosopher who invented this technique of compacting philosophy into memorable bite-size maxims was Pythagoras. His teachings were a major influence on Plato.
Music had a central place in the Pythagorean care of the soul.
Epictetus told his students: ‘Land, wealth, reputation - philosophy promises none of these things.’
Emotional disorders like depression are, to a great extent, caused by ‘self-talk’: by the running monologue that we keep with ourselves throughout the day.
This unconscious self-talk directly impacts our emotions and our experience of reality.
From birth, you have been soaked in messages, from your parents, your friends, your colleagues, advertising, the media, all of which have embedded certain values, beliefs and habits of thinking and feeling in your nervous system. It’s unlikely that you were installed with entirely wise and enlightened principles.
The reason people practise philosophy is because they suspect that some of the beliefs they have been carrying around are not that wise, and not that conducive to their flourishing.
However, your new philosophy will only be skin deep if you don’t really soak yourself in it.
8 Sceptics and the Art of Cultivating Doubt
The Sceptics insisted Socrates was the first Sceptic, because he was honest about how little he or anyone else really knew for sure.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche decided Hume was right: we cannot really be certain about anything. Beneath all human theories and values yawns an abyss of nothingness, and this nothingness means that what counts is not reason or logic, but power and faith.
‘Nothing is an extraordinary powerful place to stand, because it is only from nothing that you can create. And from this nothing, people were able to invent a life.’
Out of the nothingness of extreme Scepticism, we can empower people to create new selves.
We’re liberal narcissists, but we’re also conformists at a deep level.
According to CBT, what typically causes emotional disorders is over confidence in our dogmatic interpretations of the world. A depressed person is sure things will go wrong.
Excessive confidence in the social sciences can cause just as much harm as religious fanaticism. The Credit Crunch was not caused by the Religious Right, it was caused by bank’s faith in economic risk-modelling, and investors’ faith in Alan Greenspan, and Alan Greenspan’s faith in the market’s perfect rationality.
It’s our inherent human tendency to be over-confident in authority figures and systems of belief, and to attack anyone who criticises those beliefs.
9 Diogenes and the Art of Anarchy
What percentage of the population is caught up in a consumerist trance? Are we all completely brainwashed?
Only a minority of people show any desire to give up consumerism?
Diogenes decided that humans’ emotional discontents arose from the false values of civilisation.
Originally, ‘cynic’ meant someone who has abandoned the false values of civilisation to follow a natural life of poverty, asceticism and moral freedom.
Why do we choose to be miserable? Because we want to be accepted by our civilisation.
It’s our inherent sense of shame and our desire for public approval that enables civilisation to exist. We internalise the gaze of others, and this internal spectator becomes all-powerful over us.
Diogenes insisted that our sense of shame has become so over-refined by civilisation that we’ve become anxious, neurotic, alienated beings, who are terrified of making a bad impression on others.
We spend all our energy trying to look good to strangers, putting forward a carefully tended mask of civility, while hiding anything from the public’s view that might seem uncouth, rude or primitive. This terror of making a bad impression is the cause of many of our civilised discontents.
We end up anxious, miserable and trapped in inauthentic lives.
The Cynic way of life involves a sort of voluntary desensitisation against public ridicule and disapproval.
“People are being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”
We realise we’ve been chasing an illusion, attempting to please an imaginary crowd of phantom spectators.
Yet Adam Smith decides, it’s good that we’ve been chasing this false dream, because all our neurotic production and consumption helps the economy to grow.
Or as he puts it: “It is well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in motion the continual industry of mankind.”
If we were all ascetics like Diogenes, the capitalist economy would collapse. Capitalism needs us to be vain, deluded, insecure and miserable.
When Alexander the great visited Diogenes in his barrel, and asked him what he could grant the philosopher, Diogenes replied, ‘Only that you stop blocking the sun’.
In the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was labelled a mad descendant of Diogenes as he lambasted his age in very Cynic terms.
Civilisation, he declared, has made us miserable slaves to public opinion. Civilised man ‘lives outside of himself and can only live in the opinions of others.’
The artist Banksy, perhaps, is a modern descendant of Diogenes, using street art to deface the values of consumer capitalism.
More and more people have started to think that the present system is rigged: private profits and socialised losses.
10 Plato and the Art of Justice
Platonism refers to the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm” distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism.
The central concept of Platonism, a distinction essential to the Theory of Forms, is the distinction between the reality which is perceptible but unintelligible, and the reality which is imperceptible but intelligible.
The Forms are typically described in dialogues such as the Phaedo, Symposium and Republic as transcendent perfect archetypes of which objects in the everyday world are imperfect copies.
Like Pythagoras, Plato believe that the study of geometry, logic and music revealed the eternal truths behind the apparent flux of material reality, which human reason could discover if it was sufficiently enlightened and disciplined.
From his other great teacher, Socrates, he took the technique of dialectic, and the method of restlessly searching, through dialogue for better and more comprehensive definitions of moral terms like freedom, beauty and justice.
Plato suggested that, just as there exists a pure realm of mathematical truths, in which 2+2 always equals 4, so there must exist a pure realm of moral values - Truth, Beauty, Justice - which we can approach through dialectic.
Plato was the first Western thinker to suggest we have an unconscious which is free to express its unlit awful desires.
The philosopher was often a figure of ridicule rather than veneration. Socrates, for example, was mocked in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds for, literally, having his head in the clouds.
The death of Socrates was a traumatic event for Plato. ‘He was the best and wisest man I ever knew.’
After his death, Plato seemed to have lost faith in democracy and in his fellow citizens. Philosopher, he wrote, ‘is impossible among the common people’.
Philosophy becomes an individual journey to spiritual fulfilment, and a private declaration of independence from the corrupt values of modern society. It becomes personal mysticism, or self-help.
Plato could not help but wonder: what if philosophers were in charge? This was the conceit of the Republic.
11 Plutarch and the Art of Heroism
Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings.
As he explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, but with exploring the influence of character, good or bad, on the lives and destinies of famous men. He wished to prove that the more remote past of Greece could show its men of action and achievement as well as the nearer, and therefore more impressive, past of Rome.
His interest was primarily ethical, although the lives have significant historical value as well.
We are who we imitate. We use other people as patterns to copy, or as standards to measure ourselves against.
We can learn to be more conscious in the role models we choose and the patterns we emulate.
Plutarch thought deeply about how to instil and cultivate character in young people, and for many centuries his method was at the heart of Western education.
‘Character,’ he wrote ‘is habit long-continued.’
Plutarch’s work is based on the premise that the tales of the excellent can lift the ambitions of the living.
12 Aristotle and the Art of Flourishing
The ideal of self-sufficiency one often encounters in Ancient Greek philosophy is not sufficient for a good life. We are mot, and should not try to be, invincible Stoic supermen, safe in our lonely fortresses of solitude. We need each other.
At 18, Aristotle was sent to Athens to study under Plato at the Academy. He would become Plato’s most famous pupil , and his greatest critic.
Plato is not interested in the terrestrial or the particular, but in the abstract and divine. Aristotle, by contrast, was much more of a scientist, fascinated by how things function here on Earth.
According to some, Aristotle was the greatest ever biologist.
Aristotle was an astonishing polymath, writing definitive works on everything from biology to logic to literary criticism.
He created a philosophy that encompassed the entire universe, from biology to psychology to literature to ethics to politics to astrophysics. For several centuries, this philosophy was the foundation of medieval Christendom.
Aristotle’s most 2 famous works - the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics - offer us a unified vision of human psychology, ethics and politics.
Aristotle introduced the idea that there are certain cardinal virtues - courage, temperance, patience - which exist in a ‘golden mean’ between excesses.
Courage, for example, is the golden mean between the excesses of rashness and cowardice.
Good humour is the golden mean between the excesses of over-solemnity and buffoonery.
True happiness is eudaemonia: the joy that comes from fulfilling what is highest and best in our nature.
‘Happiness,’ he wrote, ‘is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.’
The good society is one which enables its members to reach human fulfilment.
Aristotle’s vision of human nature was tested out in the 1970s by 2 psychologists. They found that humans are not the profit-motivated creatures that liberal economics believed. It suggested that humans will work harder at projects for less money, or even no money, if they find these projects to be meaningful, challenging, socially engaging, and fun.
If we look back to the early Renaissance, Aristotelian philosophy was, for a while, the official philosophy of the whole of Christendom, thanks to Thomas Aquinas who synthesised Aristotle’s philosophy with the Christian faith and persuaded the Vatican to endorse it.
Thomist Aristotelianism provided a foundation for European culture, a sense of common values, and a bridge between science and culture, reason and faith, man and the cosmos. This foundation helped pave the way for the sublime visions of Chaucer, Dante and Raphael.
Unfortunately, because Aristotelianism becomes the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, it calcified into religious dogma.
The decline in the intellectual authority of the Church meant that. from the 18th century to the present day, the West no longer has any common philosophy of the good life.
Modern philosophy successfully undermined the moral authority of the Catholic Church but failed to provide a replacement to Christianity, in the form of ethical systems for ordinary people, grounded in symbols, stories, festivals or genuine forms of community.
‘A good society is one in which you enable people to meet, not to tell each other what to do, not to prove we are betting than each other, but to reflect on our common humanity, to create friendship, to celebrate life by eating together, living together, dancing together. There is not much dancing in Greek philosophy.’
Is Socrates over-optimistic about human reason?
The ancient Greeks and behavioural psychologists (like Kahneman and Ariely) didn’t think humans were born perfectly rational and autonomous creatures.
However, we DO have the capacity to correct our habitual cognitive fallacies, if these fallacies are shown to be wrong and damaging to our personal flourishing. But it’s very hard, and takes a lot of energy, effort and humility.
Appendix Three: Socrates vs Dionysus
The Dionysian tradition (including Romantic things like William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche and DH Lawrence) is hostile to and critical of the Socratic tradition.
The virtues of the Socratic tradition are self-control, rationality, self-consciousness and measure. It typically puts forward a hierarchy of the psyche, in which the conscious, reasoning parts of the psyche are highest, and the intuitive, emotional and appetite parts of the psyche are considered lowest.
Following this hierarchy, Socrates and the his disciples suggest that the highest possible existence is the cerebral existence of the philosopher, as compared to the more physical or intuitive life of, say, the artist, the soldier, or the lover.
The Dionysian tradition celebrates a very different way of life. Dionysus urges us to lose ourselves in sex, music, dancing and ecstasy. Where Socrates preaches rationality and measure, Dionysus urges us to exceed all measure and constraint.
We should celebrate the deep sense of vitality and joyous existences we get when we’re dancing, or making love, or intoxicated.
Lawrence was the great sickness of modern civilisation to be over-thinking.
However, the answer is not to escape conscious thinking. It is to stop thinking stupidly, badly, destructively.
We can start thinking less, and simply enjoy the moment, the body, the flow.
