Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations

by Jules Evans

Coué declared that the mind could make whatever it thought into a reality – it could think itself into health, wealth and happiness, or think itself into misery, sickness and destitution, simply by repeating phrases to itself.

The way to be rich is to think rich, to feel rich, to repeat self-affirming statements of richness until the money magically rolls in. For ‘a thought produces the thing that is imaged by the thought’. So one simply has to repeat statements like ‘I am successful in whatever I do’ or ‘Everything is getting better every day’ until one really believes them, and, abracadabra, it will be so. The New Thought movement used the techniques of ancient philosophy for the profane goal of personal enrichment.

The Sceptics insisted Socrates was the first Sceptic, because he was honest about how little he or anyone else really knew for sure. Sceptics decided that this acceptance of the limits of our knowledge is the essence of philosophy. They called themselves skeptikoi, meaning investigators, or enquirers.

Academic Sceptics argued that, while we can never ‘know’ reality, we can at least construct tentative hypotheses about it. The best we can hope for is an educated and provisional guess that a belief is accurate, unless proven otherwise. We can act according to our tentative hypotheses about reality, while continuously doubting those hypotheses, thereby resisting the foolish dogmatism of the Stoics, Pythagoreans, Epicureans and other schools.

It’s not only empty and meaningless – but it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless. And in that there’s an enormous freedom. All of the constructions, all of the rules you’ve placed on yourself, are gone. Nothing is an extraordinarily powerful place to stand, because from this nothing you can create a life. You can be what you want to be.

Diogenes Kynikos, or Diogenes the Dog-Like, which is where the word ‘cynic’ comes from. Originally, then, ‘cynic’ meant someone who has abandoned the false values of civilisation to follow a natural life of poverty, asceticism and moral freedom. Diogenes said: ‘Instead of useless toils men should choose such as nature recommends, whereby they might have lived happily, yet such is their madness that they choose to be miserable.’1 Why do we choose to be miserable? Because we want to be accepted by our civilisation.

The Cynic way of life involves a sort of voluntary desensitisation against public ridicule and disapproval. We’re far too worried about what others think of us, and are terrified of their disapproval. As a result, we end up anxious, miserable, and trapped in inauthentic lives. So we need to declare our independence, by refusing to hide our natural behaviour, and training ourselves not to care if others laugh at us or ridicule us. We need to attack our inner censor, kill the policeman in our heads. Civilised values have misdirected our natural sense of shame, so we have to reprogram ourselves, so that we feel shame about acts that are truly shameful, while feeling no shame about acts that are natural. Cynicism involves a revolution in personal morality – Cynics move from a false morality based on appearances to a genuine morality based on adherence to a personal moral code. Cynics don’t want to look good to strangers. They want to be good, according to their own personal code.

we also need to get out and practise in the street, in real-life situations. Each time we challenge our fears successfully, we lessen their hold over us. So, if we’re terrified of being looked at or laughed at (as people with social anxiety are) then we should practise intentionally drawing ridicule onto ourselves, to desensitise ourselves to the experience.

‘We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t last on people we don’t care about.’4 Smith himself admitted that, if we ever do ‘make it’ and become rich and successful, we often discover that we’re not actually any happier than when we began. We might even be less happy, more anxious, more bad-tempered and stressed. We realise we’ve been chasing an illusion, attempting to please an imaginary crowd of phantom spectators.

We are not, and should not try to be, invincible Stoic supermen, safe in our lonely fortresses of solitude. We need each other. We need to admit this need, and embrace it. In modern liberal society, we have struggled for centuries to wall off the individual from the interference of church, state and community. We have won our individual freedom and privacy, but at the cost of terrible loneliness. We place a great emphasis on the free, private, autonomous individual. If we hurt, we hurt in private.

it appears Europe will once again have a common Aristotelian goal of human flourishing.

At the core of Positive Psychology were the basic techniques taken by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis from Stoicism – changing your emotions by changing your habitual beliefs.

five different versions of happiness, which he calls PERMA: Positive emotion, or feeling good in an Epicurean sense; Engagement, or feeling absorbed in an activity; Relationships; Meaning, or feeling like you’re serving a worthwhile higher cause; and Achievement.

Seligman and his political backers are so keen to build an ‘objective science’, and to avoid the charge of moral paternalism, that they have built a model of the good life that leaves out moral judgement, ethical debate and free choice – all of which, I would suggest, are fairly crucial aspects of human flourishing.

What I’ve tried to show in this book is that Greek philosophy offers us not one model of the good life, but several. All of them follow Steps 1, 2 and 3 of the Socratic tradition – we can know ourselves, we can change ourselves, we can create new habits of thinking, feeling and behaving. They all agree on Step 4 – that philosophy can help us live better lives. But they all take Step 4 in quite different directions, when it comes to defining the good life and defining our relationship to society and to God. These philosophies involve different value judgements that the individual must make for themselves.

‘Aristotle understood our deep human desire for happiness and fulfilment, and the importance of friendship. However, he was obviously an elitist. He defined humans as “rational, free Greek men”, which is far too narrow. By that definition, a barbarian is not a person. Women and children are not really persons.

almost all Greek philosophy – tends to strive towards an ideal of perfect rationality and complete self-sufficiency.

there’s something valuable in that ideal: as adults, we need to learn to stand on our own feet, to achieve autonomy, to recognise that we don’t necessarily need the things we think we need. Yet we can become too independent, can strive for too much autonomy and invulnerability, ending up lonely and cut off. Loneliness, Vanier has written, is the great sickness of our time – and it partly comes from our shame at admitting that we’re all flawed, imperfect, wounded creatures.

being experts’ at the cost of the citizen’s autonomy. We’re in danger of committing the same mistake made by the followers of Karl Marx, who turned his living philosophy of the good life into a lifeless, technocratic and coercive state system.

I guess people should think constantly about the life they lead. Am I the kind of person I’d like to be?

Firstly, you bring your automatic beliefs and responses into consciousness, using techniques like Socratic self-questioning and the journal. And then you turn your new conscious insights into automatic habits of thinking and behaving, using techniques like memorisation, repetition, role models, and some of the other exercises we’ve explored.