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Philosopher |
Who were they? |
How can they help? |
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Born 469 BC. Short, bald and spectacularly
ugly, Socrates wandered around Athens barefoot,asking probing questions-
notably forcing generals to retreat on their definition of courage and making
an aristocrat acknowledge the bankruptcy of equating wealth with virtue.
Accused of undermining society, he was instructed to recant his teachings
or face death. Socrates calmly downed poisonous hemlock, but his conversations
and ideas were immortalised by his star pupil, Plato.
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Believe in yourself Socrates refused
to be swayed by convention, popular opinion or even the threat of death,
and continued backing what he believed. Having such self-belief does not
mean you're right, but neither does everyone else thinking you're off-beam
make you wrong. No matter how unpopular an idea is, if it cannot be logically
disproved then it is true.Not much consolation, though, if, like Socrates,
you end up right but dead.
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Born 341 BC. A cool head
advocating hot hedonism, Epicurus taught that "Pleasure is the beginning
and goal of a happy life." Associates claimed that this led him to such over
indulgences that he vomited twice a day. But friendship, freedom and plain
food and water were what Epicurus considered life's truest pleasures. In
a precursor to The Good Life, he and his friends quit the rat race of Athens
to set up a commune, growing their own food and bypassing the material world
outside.
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Get back to basics
De Botton gets an unhappy shopaholic to apply
Epicurus's principle of sifting what is "natural and necessary" for happiness
from what merely appears to be. Wealth, fame, power and designer clothes
may seem appealing, but Epicurus argued that the only "happiness essentials"
besides basic food and shelter are friends, freedom and an analysed life.
Possess them and you will never be unhappy....anything else is an optional
extra.
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Born 4 BC. Tuberculosis almost killed him in
his twenties; (false) accusations of adultery later led to a long exile and
the loss of his wealth and status; and having survived tutoring the teenage
Nero, he was eventually condemned to death by his former pupil after(again
false) charges that he had plotted against the nutty emperor. Even taking
his own life went badly: he slit his wrists, but they bled too slowly, swigged
hemlock that had no effect, and finally perished in the suffocating fumes
of a vapour bath.
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Go with the flow Long-suffering Seneca
believed: "It better befits a man to laugh at life than lament over it."
He saw anger as the worst of vices, stemming from a maladjusted sense of
normality. Hold-ups, cock-ups and lost socks are part of the natural (dis)order
of things-and by grasping this in Sunday's series opener, De Botton shows
White Van Man how to avoid becoming purple Face Man, and the rest of us how
to cope with whatever life hurls our way. Don't get mad, get reason.
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Born AD 1533. French nobleman
who spent much of his life in his castle's circular library and wrote unflinching
essays about himself. Included his sexual habits, bowel movements and farts,
in order to show the folly of analysing some aspects of our nature while
ignoring others. Or, as he bluntly put it, "Kings and philosophers shit,
and so do ladies." After travelling to Rome, Montaigne cautioned against
assuming one's own notions of normality are superior to those of others.
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Be realistic Rather
than trumpet our nobility and powers of reasoning, Montaigne maintained that
if you take the whole human package - our capacity for doubt, superstition,
self delusion, arrogance etc- it leads to one irresistible conclusion: "We
are but blockheads." Accept this, he argued, and stop measuring yourself
against loftily superhuman standards, and you will better appreciate both
your achievements and your failings.
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Born AD 1788. German misery guts prone to despair
even before his father's apparent suicide. Inheriting a fortune at 17, he
chronicled "the misery of life". Shunned most company besides poodles, arguing:
"A genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could be so intelligent
and entertaining as his own monologues?" Somehow managed a ten-year, on off
relationship, but never wed, as "To marry means to do everything possible
to become an object of disgust to each other."
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It's not your fault De Botton mischievously
makes Schopenhauer his agony aunt, twisting his gloomy ruminations into comfort
for the lovelorn. Schopenhauer saw attraction not as reflecting how suited
people are for life together, but as down to an unconscious sexual urge to
produce "balanced" offspring. So rejection is no indication that we are flawed
or unloveable, and attraction is no sign that a couple are compatible. ..except
as baby-makers.
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Born AD 1844. Walrus-moustached
self-publicist who-only partly humorously- labelled most philosophers "cabbage
heads" and himself "the first decent human being. Declared:
"God is dead", and speculated that around AD 2000
he would fill the gap by being declared holy. Hasn't happened yet. His ideas
of a world of strong-willed "supermen" later proved popular with Nazis, although
during his lifetime Nietzsche made few friends and had a breakdown 11 years
before his death in 1900.
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No pain, no gain Nietzsche
wished for those he knew "suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment,
indignities". He saw such experiences as character forming, insisting you
cannot know real joy without also knowing suffering. Having used this logic
to console a bankrupt businessman, De Botton admits that Nietzsche lambasted
such "so called consolations", arguing they are often "paid for with a general
and profound worsening of the complaint".
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