Great Thinkers: Simple tools from sixty great thinkers to improve your life today (The School of Life Library)

by The School of Life

eudaimonia. This peculiar but fascinating Greek word is a little hard to translate. It almost means ‘happiness’ but is really closer to ‘fulfilment’, because ‘happiness’ suggests continuous chirpiness – whereas ‘fulfilment’ is more compatible with periods of great pain and suffering – which seem to be an unavoidable part even of a good life.

He observed how many of our ideas are derived from what the crowd thinks, from what the Greeks called ‘doxa’, and we’d call ‘common sense’. And yet, repeatedly, across the thirty-six books he wrote, Plato showed this common sense to be riddled with errors, prejudice and superstition. Popular ideas about love, fame, money or goodness simply don’t stand up to reason.

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.

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 version of themselves

Aristotle also observed that every virtue seems to be bang in the middle of two vices. It occupies what he termed ‘the golden mean’ between two extremes of character.

Knowing how to have a good conversation is one of the key ingredients of the good life, Aristotle recognised. Some people go wrong because they lack a subtle sense of humour: that’s the bore, ‘someone useless for any kind of social intercourse, because he contributes nothing and takes offence at everything’. But others carry humour to excess: ‘the buffoon cannot resist a joke, sparing neither himself nor anybody else, provided that he can raise a laugh and saying things that a man of taste would never dream of saying’. So the virtuous person is in the golden mean in this area: witty but tactful.

Tragedy reminds us that terrible things can befall decent people, including ourselves. A small flaw can lead to a whole life unravelling. So we should have more compassion or pity for those whose actions go disastrously wrong. We need to be collectively retaught these crucial truths on a regular basis. The task of art, as Aristotle saw it, is to make profound truths about life stick in our minds.

Aristotle was more ambitious. He invented what we still call rhetoric – the art of getting people to agree with you. He wanted thoughtful, serious and well-intentioned people to learn how to be persuasive, to reach those who don’t agree already.

He makes some timeless points: you have to soothe people’s fears, you have to see the emotional side of the issue – is someone’s pride on the line? Are they feeling embarrassed? – and edge around it accordingly. You have to make it funny because attention spans are short, and you might have to use illustrations and examples to make your point come alive.

To regain calm, what we need to do is systematically and intelligently crush every last vestige of hope. Rather than appease ourselves with sunny tales, it is far better – the Stoics proposed – to courageously come to terms with the very worst possibilities – and then make ourselves entirely at home with them.

Stoicism is nothing less than an elegant, intelligent dress rehearsal for catastrophe.

Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality. We don’t shout every time something sad happens to us, only when it is sad and unexpected. To be calmer, we must, therefore, learn to expect far less from life.

Though not religious, the Stoics were fascinated by the Roman goddess of fortune, known as Fortuna, whom they took to be the perfect metaphor for destiny. Fortuna, who had shrines to her all over the empire, was popularly held to control the fate of humans, and was judged to be a terrifying mixture of the generous and the randomly wilful and spiteful. She was no meritocrat. She was represented holding a cornucopia filled with goodies (money, love, etc.) in one hand, and a tiller, for changing the course of life, in the other. Depending on her mood, she might throw you down a perfect job or a beautiful relationship, and then the next minute, simply because she felt like it, watch you choke to death on a fishbone.

‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare,’ warned Seneca.

To regain composure, we must regularly be reduced in our own eyes. We must give up on the very normal but very disturbing illusion that it really matters what we do and who we are.

Epicurus proposed that we typically make three mistakes when thinking about happiness: 1. We think we need romantic relationships

Then, as now, people were obsessed with love. But Epicurus observed that happiness and love (let alone marriage) almost never go together. There is too much jealousy, misunderstanding and bitterness. Sex is always complicated and rarely in harmony with affection. It would be best, Epicurus concluded, never to put too much faith in relationships. By contrast, he noted how rewarding most friendships are: here we are polite, we look for agreement, we don’t scold or berate and we aren’t possessive. But the problem is we don’t see our friends enough.

We think we need lots of money

What makes work really satisfying, Epicurus believed, is when we’re able to work either alone or in very small groups, and when it feels meaningful, when we sense that we’re helping others in some way or making things that improve the world.

We put too much faith in luxury We dream of luxury: a beautiful home, elegant rooms and pleasant views. We imagine trips to idyllic locations, where we can rest and let others look after us … But Epicurus disagreed with our longings. Behind the fantasy of luxury, what he believed we really want is calm.

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

We’re all lustful, mad, erratic, deluded deviants with no earthly chance of happiness

It was Augustine who came up with the idea of ‘Original Sin’. He proposed that all humans, not merely this or that unfortunate example, were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam.

All hierarchies are unfair; there is no social justice; those at the top naturally won’t all be good or those at the bottom bad – and vice versa

‘to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing; we must learn a more ample and important lesson; that we are but blockheads … On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.’ And, lest we forget: ‘Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.’

Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult.

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

Perhaps the most classic and perfect of all La Rochefoucauld’s aphorisms is: We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

He that refuses praise the first time it is offered does it because he would like to hear it a second.

La Rochefoucauld knew otherwise. Most of us are so distracted, if someone wants to get a point across to us, they must use all the devices of art to seize our attention and cauterise our boredom for the necessary span. The history of philosophy would have been very different if its practitioners had all imagined themselves to be writing for an impatient non-professional audience with meandering minds in the midst of a chatty Parisian salon.

His fully fleshed-out ideas were to be expressed in his great work, the Ethics, written entirely in Latin and published in 1677. In the Ethics, Spinoza directly challenged the main tenets of Judaism in particular and organised religion in general: · God is not a person who stands outside of nature. · There is no one to hear our prayers. · Or to create miracles. · Or to punish us for misdeeds. · There is no afterlife. · Man is not God’s chosen creature. · The Bible was only written by ordinary people. · God is not a craftsman or an architect. Nor is he a king or a military strategist who calls for believers to take up the Holy Sword. God does not see anything, nor does he expect anything. He does not judge. He does not even reward the virtuous person with a life after death. Every representation of God as a person is a projection of the imagination. · Everything in the traditional liturgical calendar is pure superstition and mumbo-jumbo.

Spinoza’s God is wholly impersonal and indistinguishable from what we might variously call nature, or existence, or a world soul: God is the universe, and its laws; God is reason and truth; God is the animating force in everything that is and can be.

Spinoza failed to understand – like so many philosophers before and since – that what leads people to religion isn’t just reason, but, far more importantly, emotion, belief, fear and tradition. People stick with their beliefs because they like the rituals, the communal meals, the yearly traditions, the beautiful architecture, the music and the sonorous language read out in synagogue or church.

We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends: ‘Love … casts itself on people who, apart from sex, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to us. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of individuals, that lovers overlook everything, misjudge everything, and bind themselves forever to an object of misery.’

Watching the human spectacle, Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us. We are just like animals – except, because of our greater self-awareness, even more unhappy.

Sages are able, by heroic efforts, to rise above the demands of the Will-to-Life: they see the natural drives within themselves towards selfishness, sex and vanity… and override them. They overcome their desires, live alone (often away from big cities), never marry and quell their appetites for fame and status. In Buddhism, Schopenhauer points out, this person is known as a monk – but he recognises that only a tiny number of us can go in for such a life.

The second and more easily available and realistic option is to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the Will-to-Life.

‘To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.’

Hegel believed that the world makes progress, but only by lurching from one extreme to another as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake.

Art is ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’.

The point of art, Hegel realises, is not so much to come up with startlingly new or strange ideas, but to make the good, important, helpful thoughts we often already know and make them stick in our minds.

there is nothing wrong with envy, maintained the philosopher. What matters is how we handle it. Greatness comes from being able to learn from our envious crises. Nietzsche thought of envy as a confused but important signal from our deeper selves about what we really want. Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential, which we disown at our peril.

What we’re really running away from is a confrontation with – and even non-German speakers might respond to the sonorous depth of this key Heideggerian term – das Nichts (The Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being. The Nothing is everywhere; it stalks us, it will swallow us up eventually, but – Heidegger insists – a life is only well lived when one has taken Nothingness and the brief nature of Being on board – as we might do when, for example, a gentle evening light gives way to darkness at the end of a warm summer’s day in the foothills of the Bavarian alps.

Most of the time, without quite meaning to, we treat people as what Heidegger terms das Zeug (Equipment) – as if they were tools, rather than Beings in Themselves. The cure for this selfishness lies in exposure to great art. It is works of art that will help us to step back from ourselves and appreciate the independent existence of other people and things.

Thanks to art, we’ll feel a new kind of Sorge (Care) for Being that lies beyond our selves.

Realising one’s freedom in an existential sense should not be confused with the American self-help idea that we’re all free to be or do anything without suffering pain or sacrifice. Sartre is far gloomier and more tragic than this. He merely wants to point out that we have more options than we normally believe – even if in some cases the leading option (which Sartre defended vigorously) might be to commit suicide.

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.

Camus stands in a long line of thinkers, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre, who wrestle with the chilling realisation that there is in fact no preordained meaning in life. We are just biological matter spinning senselessly on a tiny rock in a corner of an indifferent universe. We were not put here by a benevolent deity and asked to work towards salvation in the shape of Ten Commandments or the dictates of the holy Gospels. There’s no road map and no bigger point. And it’s this realisation that lies at the heart of so many of the crises reported by the thinkers we now know as existentialists.

But ultimately, Camus suggests, we should cope as well as we can at whatever we have to do. We have to acknowledge the absurd background to existence – and then triumph over the constant possibility of hopelessness. In his famous formulation: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’