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As an antidote, Socrates advocated the regular, careful examination of our minds. He recommended systematically asking ourselves, ideally in the company of a patient and thoughtful friend, questions like: what are my priorities? What do I really fear? What do I truly want? Investigating and interpreting our thoughts and feelings was, and remains, the essence of what it means to be a philosopher.
The wise know how to laugh at the constant collisions between the noble way they would like things to be, and the demented way they often turn out.
The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that it was to be fulfilled. What distinguishes happiness from fulfilment is pain. It is eminently possible to be fulfilled and, at the same time, under pressure, suffering physically or mentally, overburdened and in a tetchy mood.
We become weepy and furious, says Stoicism, not simply because our plans have failed, but because they have failed and we strongly expected them not to. Therefore, thought Seneca, the task of philosophy is to disappoint us gently before life has a chance to do so violently.
We should not expect too much from the human race, Augustine implies; we’ve been somewhat doomed from the outset. That can be a redemptive thought to keep in mind.
‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’ So wrote the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who urged us to recognise that everything that human beings do will be slightly wonky, because we are as much creatures of passion and erroneous instinct as of reason and noble intelligence.
Hegel proposed that the world makes progress only by lurching from one extreme to another and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found. He reminds us that big overreactions are eminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction. The dark moments of history aren’t the end; they are a challenging, but (in some ways) necessary, part of an antithesis that will eventually locate a wiser point of synthesis. With Hegel in mind, we must strive to be patient with the zigzag course of events.
Confucius identified five central virtues that make us good: compassion (ren), ritual propriety (li), justice (yi), knowledge (zhi) and integrity (xin). Crucially, Confucius felt that these five had to be worked on over a whole lifetime. He told his followers: ‘At fifteen, I had my mind bent on intellectual learning. At thirty, I was busy and practical. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I started to learn. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I had learnt to follow the five virtues.’ In other words, training to be good takes a lot of time.
Compassion is a learnable skill, and we need to direct it as much towards those we are tempted to dismiss and detest as to those we love.
It is not shameful to need repair; a mended bowl is a symbol of hope that we too can be put together again and still be loved despite our evident flaws.
Away from others, we have a chance to reacquaint ourselves with our deeper thoughts and less socially compromised ways of thinking.
