The Consolations of Philosophy

by Alain de Botton

A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt

If we cannot match such composure, if we are prone to burst into tears after only a few harsh words about our character or achievements, it may be because the approval of others forms an essential part of our capacity to believe that we are right.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

So my good friend, we shouldn’t care all that much about what the populace will say of us, but about what the expert on matters of justice and injustice will say.

The validity of an idea or action is determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled but by whether it obeys the rules of logic. It is not because an argument is denounced by a majority that it is wrong nor, for those drawn to heroic defiance, that it is right.

The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion. To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen always to the dictates of reason.

‘The beginning and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.’ Philosophy properly performed was to be nothing less than a guide to pleasure: 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.

We are often, in the words of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, like ‘a sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady’. It is because they understand bodily maladies better than we can that we seek doctors. We should turn to philosophers for the same reason when our soul is unwell – and judge them according to a similar criterion:

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 suffering of the mind.

The task of philosophy was, for Epicurus, to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire and thereby save us from mistaken schemes for happiness. We were to cease acting on first impulses, and instead investigate the rationality of our desires according to a method of questioning close to that used by Socrates in evaluating ethical definitions over a hundred years earlier. And by providing what might at times feel like counter-intuitive diagnoses of our ailments, philosophy would – Epicurus promised – guide us to superior cures and true happiness.

Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. Such was his attachment to congenial company, Epicurus recommended that one try never to eat alone: Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.

Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognized that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.

There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.

Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.

Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.

The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?

He had from the first conceived of philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality.

at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions. Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible on the adamantine wall of reality.

This account runs directly counter to Seneca’s view of the mind, according to which anger results not from an uncontrollable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and correctable) error of reasoning. Reason does not always govern our actions, he conceded: if we are sprinkled with cold water, our body gives us no choice but to shiver; if fingers are flicked over our eyes, we have to blink. But anger does not belong in the category of involuntary physical movement, it can only break out on the back of certain rationally held ideas; if we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger.

And in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like.

Such rages are never beyond explanation. Vedius Pollio was angry for an identifiable reason: because he believed in a world in which glasses do not get broken at parties. We shout when we can’t find the remote control because of an implicit belief in a world in which remote controls do not get mislaid. Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.

Seneca wagered that once we look rationally at what will occur if our desires are not fulfilled, we will almost certainly find that the underlying problems are more modest than the anxieties they have bred.

wasn’t hypocrisy. Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a productum, a preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime. Stoics may live with as many gifts of Fortune as the foolish. Their houses can be as grand, their furniture as beautiful. They are identified as wise by only one detail: how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair.

The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself. The wise man is self-sufficient … if he loses a hand through disease or war, or if some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satisfied with what is left.

Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely taken them, not torn them from me.

shall tell you what I liked today in [his writings]; it is these words: ‘What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.’ That was indeed a great benefit; … you may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

Abject interpretation: The builder is hammering in order to annoy me. Friendly interpretation: The builder is hammering and I am annoyed.

for Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity.

Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

Ancient philosophers had believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. Reason allowed us to control our passions and to correct the false notions prompted by our instincts. Reason tempered the wild demands of our bodies and led us to a balanced relationship with our appetites for food and sex. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves.

Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind. And yet if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery we did not have, we stood to find – in Montaigne’s generous, redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate in our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way.

If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.

Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.

What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout …?

To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.

readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.

I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.

But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old:

We are richer than we think, each one of us.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. From this it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apophthegms, find frequent application in real life.

The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.

The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the impossibility of fulfilment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety that we typically encounter in its pursuit:

We know that life consists of suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we [should] discard the goods of life and practise abstinence.

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other … you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.