Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations

by Jules Evans

schools, universities and adult education should offer some guidance to people, not just for their careers, but for life at its best and worst. That’s what the teachers depicted in The School of Athens once provided: they taught their students how to transform their emotions, how to cope with adversity, how to live the best possible lives. I wish I had encountered their teachings in those difficult years. Instead, I found university to be more 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.

‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them.’

the heart of CBT: we experience an event (A), then interpret it (B), and then feel an emotional response in line with our interpretation

According to CBT, and the Socratic philosophy that inspired it, what caused my social anxiety and depression was not repressed libidinal instincts, as psychoanalysis might argue. Nor was it neurological malfunctions that could only be corrected with pharmaceutical drugs, as psychiatry might argue. It was my beliefs. I held certain toxic beliefs and habits of thinking which were poisoning me, such as ‘I have permanently damaged myself’ and ‘Everyone must approve of me, and if they don’t, it’s a disaster.’ These toxic beliefs were at the core of my emotional suffering. My emotions followed my beliefs, and I would feel extremely anxious in social situations, and depressed when those situations did not go well. The beliefs were unconscious and unexamined, but I could learn to examine them, hold them up to the light of reason, and see if they made sense.

Socrates, who lived from 469 to 399 BC, was the first philosopher to insist that philosophy should speak to the everyday concerns of ordinary people. He himself was of humble origins

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. But if they happen to absorb wrong beliefs, it will make them sick. Socrates insisted there’s a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health.

CBT tries to recreate this ‘Socratic method’, and to teach us the art of questioning ourselves. During a session of CBT, you don’t simply lie on a couch delivering a monologue about your childhood. Rather, you sit up and engage in a dialogue with your therapist, who tries to help you discover your unconscious beliefs, see how they shape your emotions, and then question those beliefs to see if they make sense. You learn to be Socrates to yourself, so that when a negative emotion knocks you off your feet, you ask, am I responding wisely to this? Is this reaction reasonable? Could I react more wisely? And you take this Socratic ability with you through the rest of your life.

Daniel Kahneman suggest we have ‘dual processor’ brains, with one thinking system that is mainly automatic and habit-based, and another thinking system capable of more conscious and rational reflection.

If philosophy is going to change us, it needs to work with both systems. And that was what ancient Greek philosophy did. It involved a two-fold process: first make the habitual conscious, then make the conscious habitual. First, we bring our automatic beliefs into consciousness through Socratic examination to decide if they are rational. Then we take our new philosophical insights and repeat them until they become new automatic habits.

Philosophy is a training, a set of daily mental and physical exercises that become easier with practice.

Self-help in the ancient world was far more ambitious and expansive than modern self-help. It linked the psychological to the ethical, the political, and the cosmic. And it didn’t offer people short-term fixes to be practised for a month or two until the next self-help fad arrived. It offered people an enduring way of life, something to be practised each day for years, to radically transform the self – and perhaps to transform society.

three Socratic steps: 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.

all the philosophies we’ll meet then take a fourth step: 4) If we follow philosophy as a way of life, we can live more flourishing lives.

Stoicism originated in the third century BC, a century after the death of Socrates, when Greek city-states were being conquered by marauding empires. Its philosophy was a means of coping with that chaos: Stoics claimed that if you use your reason to overcome attachments or aversions to external conditions, you can stay unperturbed under any circumstances

we only have limited control over what happens in the world. We have to accept this, otherwise we’re going to be angry, afraid and miserable for most of our life.

A lot of suffering arises, Epictetus argues, because we make two mistakes. Firstly, we try to exert absolute sovereign control over something in Zone 2, something external which is not in our control. Then, when we fail to control it, we feel helpless, out of control, angry, guilty, anxious or depressed. Secondly, we don’t take responsibility for Zone 1, our thoughts and beliefs, which are under our control. Instead, we blame our thoughts on the outside world, on our parents, our friends, our lover, our boss, the economy, the environment, the class system, and then we end up, again, feeling bitter, helpless, victimised, out of control, and at the mercy of external circumstances. Many mental illnesses and emotional disorders come from these two fatal mistakes.

Resilience, and mental health, come from focusing on what is in our control in a situation, without driving ourselves crazy over what is not.

‘What happens to us may not be our fault, but how we think about it is our responsibility.’

For the ancients, by contrast, philosophy was a full-body workout, which was taught and practised in the gymnasium as much as the classroom. Philosophers were celebrated as much for their physical toughness as their mental acumen:

Rufus insists that philosophical training is physical as well as mental. The Stoic student should, Rufus said, be trained to ‘adapt to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, plain food, a hard bed, abstinence from pleasure, and endurance of strenuous labour.

Rufus’ student Epictetus suggests we should take some water in our mouths when we’re thirsty, ‘spit it out, and tell no one’.

journals, or hupomnemata as they were called in ancient Greek. At the end of each day, the trainee-philosopher writes a brief account of their behaviour that day in their journal. They consider how they spent the day, what was done well, and what could have been done better.

Epictetus says a similar method can be used for kicking other bad habits. According to him, the magic period for kicking a habit is thirty days. Epictetus said: ‘If you have omitted [a bad habit] for thirty days, make thanks to God because the habit begins at first to be weakened, before it is destroyed completely.

The social psychologist James Pennebaker has studied self-writing, and how people are often profoundly helped by writing about traumatic experiences. He’s found those who were most helped by self-writing moved from using mainly the first person pronoun in their writing (I, me, my) to using a variety of different pronouns (you, they, we, it) and causal connecting words (because, therefore, that’s why).9 They depersonalise a difficult situation, hold it at arm’s length, and come to terms with it – literally. This is what we see Marcus doing – seeing difficult situations from multiple perspectives, making his mind flexible, like in a yoga workout, and then rehearsing new attitudes until they’re habituated.

The longer the children deferred marshmallow gratification, the fewer behavioural problems they had later in school, and the better they did academically.12 Since then, self-control has become one of the main focuses of interest for psychology, and several studies have suggested it is a better predictor of academic success than IQ. It also predicts our financial stability, our job stability, even our marriage stability.13 Self-control appears to be the key character-strength.

Mood Mapper

journal by cognitive therapy.

‘gratitude journal’).

We need to repeatedly challenge the core beliefs that lead to anger, because those core beliefs have become ingrained and habitual. The old habits need to be replaced with new habits.

The angry person is acutely sensitive to all they are owed by the world, and blind to all they have received. If over-optimistic expectations are one of the main causes of anger, then the cure is to lower our expectations, to try to bring them more in line with reality, so that we’re not constantly feeling let down by the world. The Stoic tries to see the world as it really is, rather than demanding that it fits their expectations. They practise reminding themselves what this world is like, and what we can expect to encounter in it. Seneca writes that the wise person ‘will ensure that none of what happens to him will come unexpectedly.

Rage stems from an overestimation of our power to get what we want. And it personalises something that is impersonal. We rage at the weather and say, ‘How dare this happen to me!’ But it’s not happening to you. It’s just happening. What about when someone is rude to us? Surely that is a ‘personal’ insult? Not necessarily. Think back to Jesse’s colleague who was rude to him. Jesse thinks about the person’s character and decides that, actually, he’s just a rude person. He’s always rude. So to expect him to behave other than rudely is, frankly, over-optimistic. And the same goes, unfortunately, for the rest of the human race. You might get angry when people are thoughtless, rude, incompetent, selfish, inconsiderate and so on. But the fact is, people are all of those things, often and sometimes chronically. So expect it.

On the other hand, Stoicism has a very optimistic world-view, because Stoics, like the other schools of the Socratic tradition, believe that nature has blessed us with consciousness, reason and free will, and these blessings mean we can adapt ourselves to any circumstance to achieve happiness here on earth. Where the angry person is inflexible and dogmatic in their demands, the philosopher is flexible.

We might not embrace the Stoic goal of attaining a completely dispassionate detachment from externals, and no government-financed therapy like CBT could ever promote such an extreme therapy, but we’ve still benefited from understanding how emotions arise and how we can change them. Only a few hardcore Stoics today pursue the goal of becoming entirely without passions. More common today is the Aristotelian position that measured emotional reactions to the world are appropriate and useful, as long as we don’t allow them to become fixed into chronic emotional disturbances.

Epicurus tells us that we’re only on this planet for a few years before we disappear, and while we’re here there’s nothing we have to do. There’s no one we have to please. There are no commandments we have to follow. We can choose simply to enjoy ourselves, rather than finding reasons to be miserable. We can make the radical choice of happiness.

The fewer and simpler your desires, the easier it is to meet them, the less you have to work, and the more time you have for hanging out with your friends. In fact, all you need for the good life is some basic security, your health, your reason, and your friends. Epicurus put friendship at the very heart of the good life: ‘Of the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life,’ he said, ‘by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.’ It was far more important to him than sexual love, which led to jealousy and all kinds of emotional disturbances; or the family (he never married); or the state.

Epicurus grasped how incredibly bad we are at being happy, and how talented we are at making up reasons to be miserable.

Seneca, who admired this aspect of Epicureanism, wrote: ‘What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then?’

This is the difference between cognitive therapies like Epicureanism, and psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis encourages us to dive into the past to discover all the culprits for our misery. Epicureanism, like Stoicism and Buddhism, brings us back to the present moment, and our beliefs in the here-and-now.

‘Death is nothing to us,’ Lucretius insists. After we die, we will not be. Non-existence is nothing to be afraid of. So enjoy life, pursue pleasure wisely, and avoid getting hung up on anything like wealth or religion or sexual love (Lucretius is very wary of falling in love, which he thinks causes more pain than pleasure).

The School of Life, which Alain de Botton and friends established in Bloomsbury in 2008, was set up in conscious imitation of Epicurus’ Garden.

it’s a rather selfish and un-civic solution. The Epicureans declare themselves free of any responsibility for those poor fools who are still suffering from ignorance and deprivation:

fixating on happiness as the ultimate goal of life may paradoxically make us less happy and more neurotic, as some psychological research has found.

‘All the evidence shows that the best way to be happy is to work for other people’s happiness.’

if we could get our political leaders to have a summit meeting in space, life on Earth would be markedly different, because you can’t continue living that way once you have seen the bigger picture.

Where other philosophers searched for the stable element that underlay the universe, Heraclitus saw ceaseless flux and transformation. He is also quoted by Plato as saying: ‘Everything flows. Nothing stands still.’ Nothing exists separately and permanently in itself, but everything is part of the interconnected flow of nature. The universe is a dance of opposites, each thing turning into something else: ‘Cold things become hot; hot things, cold. Wet things dry, dry things wet.’

Beneath the apparent chaos, the universe is unified and guided by a cosmic intelligence, which Heraclitus called the Logos.

Rather like the superheroes of popular culture, philosophers would imagine themselves rising up into space, looking down on their street, then their city, then their country, and finally at the whole planet from the perspective of space. This flight of imagination would expand their minds, lifting them from their particular personal and tribal attachments, and turning them into cosmopolitans – citizens of the universe. 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.

The View from Above is what psychologists call a distancing or minimisation technique. It’s a method of zooming out from your life, placing it in a cosmic perspective, and thereby gaining a measure of detachment. We say that anxious or depressed people ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’, zooming in on their problems until each little obstacle seems of enormous and terrible proportions. We can practise doing the opposite, zooming out, widening our perspective to cosmic dimensions so that we make a molehill of every mountain.

The teachings of Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Pythagoreans and Platonists were often condensed into short, pithy maxims designed to be easily remembered, so that they would pop up in our heads when we were in stressful situations. Many of these maxims have come down to us today: ‘know thyself’; ‘life is but what you deem it’; ‘nothing to excess’; ‘it’s not what happens to you but what you do about it’; ‘be the captain of your soul’; ‘no one can harm you without your permission’; ‘difficulties are what show men’s characters’, and so on.

Philosophy, for Pythagoras, was supposed to be memorised, repeated and sung so that it imprinted the magical words of the Logos into our flesh, blood and nervous system.