Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today (The School of Life Library)

by Alain de Botton

In Plato’s eyes, love is in essence a kind of education: you couldn’t really love someone if you didn’t want to be improved by them. Love should be two people trying to grow together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the virtues you don’t have. This sounds entirely odd nowadays when we tend to interpret love as finding someone perfect just as they are. In the heat of arguments, lovers sometimes say to one another: ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t try to change me.’ Plato thinks the diametric opposite. He wants us to enter relationships in a far less combative and proud way. We should accept that we are not complete and allow our lovers to teach us things. A good relationship has to mean we won’t love the other person exactly as they are. It means committing to helping them become a better

Beautiful objects therefore have a really important function. They invite us to evolve in their direction, to become as they are. Beauty can educate our souls.

To be Sartrean is to be aware of existence as it is when it has been stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines. We can try out a Sartrean perspective on many aspects of our own lives. Think of what you know as ‘the evening meal

with your partner’. Under such a description, it all seems fairly logical, but a Sartrean would strip away the surface normality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath. Dinner really means that when your part of the planet has spun away from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion, you slide your knees under strips of a chopped-up tree and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew, while next to you, another mammal whose genitals you sometimes touch is doing the same. Or think of your job through Sartrean eyes: you and many others swathe your bodies in cloth and congregate in a large box where you make agitated sounds at one another; you press many plastic buttons with great rapidity in exchange for pieces of paper. Then you stop and go away. The next time the sky gets light, you come back.

2. We are free These weird moments are certai...

and rather scary, but Sartre wants to draw our attention to them for one central reason: because of their liberating dimensions. Life is a lot odder than we think (going to the office, having dinner with a friend, visiting our parents – none of this is obvious or remotely normal), but it’s also as a consequence far richer in possibilities. Things don’t have to be quite the way they are. We’re freer than we allow ourselves to imagine amidst the ordinary press of commitments and obligations. It’s only late at night, or perhaps when we’re ill in bed or taking a long train journey somewhere unfamiliar, that we give our minds licence to daydream in less conventional directions. These moments are at once unsettling and freeing. We could get out of the house, break off a relationsh...

would be possible. But through his descriptions of moments of disorientation, Sartre wants to give us access to a different way of thinking. He wants to push us away from the normal, settled perspective to liberate our imaginations: we might not have to keep taking the bus to work, saying things we don’t mean to people we don’t like or sacrificing our vitality for false notions of security. In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls the ‘anguish’ of existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because nothing has any preordained, God-given sense or purpose. Humans are just making it up as they go along and are free to cast aside the shackles at any moment. There is nothing in the non-human order of the world called ‘marriage’ or ‘job’. Th...

sign that we are fully alive and properly aware of reality, with its freedom, its possibiliti...

4. We’re free to dismantle capitalism The one factor that most discourages people to experience themselves as free is money. Most of us will shut down a range of possible options (moving abroad, trying out a new career, leaving a partner) by saying, ‘that’s if I didn’t have to worry about money.’ This passivity in the face of money enraged Sartre at a political level. He thought of capitalism as a giant machine designed to create a sense of necessity that doesn’t in fact exist in reality: it makes us tell ourselves we have to work a certain number of hours, buy a particular product or service,

pay people a specific low fee for their work. But in this, there is only the denial of freedom – and a refusal to take as seriously as we should the possibility of living in other ways.

‘Meursault doesn’t play the game … he refuses to lie. … He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened.’

Accordingly, Camus grew committed to, and deeply serious about, the pleasures of ordinary life. He said he saw his philosophy as ‘a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.’

Civilised people stopped thinking about what they wanted and felt – and merely imitated others, entering

into ruinous competitions for status and money.

As Smith put it: ‘The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.’

Deep down, we want to feel that we are helping people. We have to feel we are addressing genuine needs – not merely servicing random desires. Marx was aware of a lot of jobs where a person generates money but can’t see their energies ‘collected’ anywhere. Their intelligence and skills are dissipated. They can’t point to something and say: ‘I did that, that is me’. It can afflict people doing apparently glamorous jobs – a news reader or a catwalk model. Day-to-day, it is exciting. But over the years it does not add up to anything. Their efforts do not accumulate. There isn’t a long-term objective their work is directed towards. After a

number of years they simply stop. It’s the reverse of an architect who might labour for five years on a large project – but all the millions of details, which might be annoying or frustrating in themselves, eventually add up to an overall, complete achievement. And everyone who is part of this participates in the sense of direction and purpose. Their labours are necessary to bring something wonderful into existence. And they know it.

capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system, for example: that a person who doesn’t work is practically worthless, that if we simply work hard enough we will get ahead, that more belongings

will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money. In short, one of the biggest evils of capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top – this is true in any human hierarchy – but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.

What we need to be happy isn’t work or money or technology or even lots of friends, but time.

By ‘anarchy’, he didn’t mean people in black balaclavas breaking shop windows. Rather he meant something much more familiar and closer to home: a toxic kind of freedom. He meant a society where market forces dominate the nation; where the commercial media sets the agenda and coarsens and simplifies everything it touches; where corporations are barely restrained from despoiling the environment; where human beings are treated as tools to be picked up and put down at will; where there is no more pastoral care and precious little sense of community; where

hospitals treat the body but no one treats the soul; where no one knows their neighbours anymore; where romantic love is seen as the only bond worth pursuing – and where there is nowhere to turn to at moments of acute distress and inner crisis. It’s a world we’ve come to know well.

He recognised that, in a populist, market-driven society, it was no use keeping culture for the few, writing books that only a hundred people could understand. The real task was to know how to popularise. If culture was to be properly powerful, it would have to learn to be popular first.

In Arnold’s ideal world, the lessons of advertising – which in his day discovered how to sell expensive watches and fire tongs and special knives for boning chickens – would have to be used by intellectuals and educators. Instead of wondering how to persuade middle-income people to purchase potato peelers or soup dishes, they would ponder how to make Plato’s philosophy more impressive or how to find a larger consumer base for the ideas of St Augustine.

The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society. It’s a huge idea.

He spotted that craft offers important clues to what we actually want from work. We want to know we’ve done something good with the day. That our efforts have counted towards tangible outcomes that we actually see and feel are worthwhile.

An important clue to good consumption, Morris insisted, is that you should ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’

First, we ought to take more time for stillness. ‘To the mind that is still,’ Lao Tzu said, ‘the whole universe surrenders.’ We need to let go of our schedules, worries and complex thoughts for a

while and simply experience the world. We spend so much time rushing from one place to the next in life, but Lao Tzu reminds us ‘nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’ It is particularly important that we remember that certain things – grieving, growing wiser, developing a new relationship – only happen on their own schedule, like the changing of leaves or the blossoming of bulbs.

When we are still and patient, we also need to be open. ‘The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness,’ Lao Tzu said. ‘Empty yourself of everything. Let your mind become still.’ If we are too busy, too preoccupied with anxiety or ambition, we will miss a thousand moments of the human experience that are our natural inheritance. We need to be awake to the way light reflects off of ripples on a pond, the way other people look when they are laughing, the feeling of the wind playing with our hair. These experiences reconnect us to parts of ourselves. This is another key point of Lao Tzu’s writing: we need to be in touch with our real selves. We spend a great deal of time worrying about who we ought to become, but we should instead take time to be who we already are at heart. We might rediscover a generous impulse, or a playful side we had forgotten. Our ego is often in the way of our

true self, which must be found by being receptive to the outside world rather than focusing on some critical, too-ambitious internal image. ‘When I let go of what I am,’ Lao Tzu wrote, ‘I become what I might be.’

Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished. Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Do not resist them. That only causes sorrow.

Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are.

In a world full of social media profiles and crafted resumes, it might seem odd to want to escape our individuality – after all, we carefully groom ourselves to stand out from the rest of the world. Bashō reminds us that muga, or self-forgetting, is valuable because it allows us to break free from the incessant thrum of desire and incompleteness that otherwise haunts all human lives.

contentment relies on knowing how to derive pleasure from simplicity, and how to escape (even if only for a while) the tyranny of being ourselves.

some people are wiser, more intelligent, kinder, or more mature than others and for these very good reasons should be listened to with special attention. Democracy was, he thought, fatally biased towards mediocrity.

In the Weberian analysis, certain countries fail to succeed at capitalism because they don’t feel anxious and guilty enough, they trust too much in miracles, they like to celebrate now rather than reinvest for tomorrow, and their members feel it’s acceptable to steal from the community in order to enrich their families, favouring the clan over the nation.

Weber, though personally a cautious man, is an unexpected source of ideas on how to change things. He tells us how power works now and reminds us that ideas may be far more important than tools or money in changing nations. It is a hugely significant thesis. We learn that so much that we associate with vast impersonal external forces (and that hence feels entirely beyond our control) is, in fact, dependent upon something utterly intimate and perhaps more malleable: the thoughts in our own heads.

What kind of career should you have? Where should you live? What kind of holiday should you go on? What is a marriage supposed to be like? How should you bring up children? Under capitalism, the collective answers get weaker, less specific. There’s a lot of reliance on the phrase: ‘whatever works for you.’ Which sounds friendly but also means that society doesn’t much care what you do and doesn’t feel confident it has good answers to the big questions of your life. In very confident moments, we like to think of ourselves as fully up to the task of reinventing life, or working everything out for ourselves. But, in reality, as Durkheim knew, we are often simply too tired, too busy, too uncertain – and there is nowhere to turn.

Durkheim also saw that religion created deep

bonds between people. The king and the peasant worshipped the same God, they prayed in the same building using the same words. They were offered precisely the same sacraments. Riches, status and power were of no direct spiritual value. Capitalism had nothing to replace this with. Science certainly did not offer the same opportunities for powerful shared experiences. The periodic table might well possess transcendent beauty and be a marvel of intellectual elegance – but it couldn’t draw a society together around it.

Increasingly, the ‘family’ in the traditional expansive sense has ceased to exist. It boils down

to the couple agreeing to live in the same house and look after one or two children for a while. But in adulthood these children do not expect to work alongside their parents; they don’t expect their social circle to overlap with their parents very much and don’t feel that their parent’s honour is in their hands. Our looser, more individual sense of family isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that it’s not well placed to take up the task of giving us a larger sense of belonging – of giving us the feeling that we are part of something more valuable than ourselves.

Conclusion Durkheim is a master diagnostician of our ills. He shows us that modern economies put tremendous pressures on individuals but leave us dangerously bereft of authoritative guidance and communal s...

problems he identified but he knew that capitalism would have to uncover them, or collapse. We are Durkheim’s heirs – and still have ahead of us the task he accorded us: to create new ways of belonging, to take some of the pressure off the individual, to find a correct balance between freedom and solidarity and to generate ideologi...

Here Mead tapped into a deeper criticism of her own culture. She saw life for Americans of her time as one in which people are brought up ‘denied all first-hand knowledge of birth and love and death, harried by a society which will not let adolescents grow up at their own pace, imprisoned in the small, fragile, nuclear family from which there is no escape and in which there is little security.’ Although much has changed in America and in the Western world since this time, her insights still apply in many ways. Our adolescents are still pressured to conform to particular models of human sexual behaviour, and these pressures, along with the pressures that we

experience long into adulthood, make our lives more difficult and empty than they would otherwise be. Our modern life does not allow us to be as freely loving and sexual, as complex and full of change, as other cultures allow.

‘Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’

open prison within which we exist.

But Adorno pointed out that our real wants are carefully shielded from us by capitalist industry, so that we end up forgetting what it is we truly need and settle instead for desires manufactured for us by corporations without any interest in our true welfare. Though we think we live in a world of plenty, what we really require to thrive – tenderness, understanding, calm, insight – is in painfully short supply and utterly disconnected from the economy. Instead, capitalism’s tool of mass manipulation – advertising – exploits our genuine longings to sell us items that will leave us both poorer and