A consolation prize, from Philosophy
[or, how one winters evening I found the cannon of philosophy lacking in what we really need]
This holiday season, I settled down to Alain de Botton’s Consolations Of Philosophy. It is a neat survey of what practical advice an array of philosophers offer on being happy. For example, what Socrates has to say about bad news (“Drink the hemlock with a smile”) and what Montaigne has to say about sexual inadequacy (“It’s fine, you’ll have an erection some other time”). I’ve always appreciated Alain’s straightforwardness, and he brings this to the writings of other philosophers too.
I’ve grown up in the late intellectual tradition he himself, and his writers, were part of. Both our words and ways of thinking have strong ties back to the Greeks: Logic, from logos, “the word”, its development attributed to Aristotle; Philosophy, from philosophia, “love of wisdom”, possibly coined by Pythagoras. Alain brings philosophy back to its roots: knowledge of how to live well and methods to develop more of such knowledge.
For example, within this intellectual framework is the Socratic method for determining truth: Take a statement, see if you can find a fact that contradicts it, if so revise first statement. Rinse, repeat, until the townsfolk have decided you’re an insufferable witch and put you to trial.
The stoic thinkers offer advice that seems almost helpful to me: “Like a dog tied to the cart of life, you must accept what comes your way” and “Don’t get too attached to what you have today, you’ll lose it all”. However, the exercises they offer to turn this advice into lived experience seem lacking to me: “Sit and imagine all the really terrible things that could happen to you, so they will not surprise you when they happen”.
This acceptance of both the daily minutia that buffet us (a driver cuts in dangerously close in your lane, your parents bicker about what to put on television) and also the larger swings of our lives (your marriage is headed to divorce, your swimwear highlights your waning interest in gymnasiums) seems crucial to our happiness, but no effective solutions (at least, no more effective than a British resolve to grin and bear it, which has yet to produce an island particularly known for its joyful inhabitants) were delivered by the classical thinkers summoned by Alain.
It seems that, having thought deeply about unhappiness, wrestling its deeper nature and writing treatises upon its solution, the writers themselves were trapped within the very system causing the unhappiness.
I believe one of the most useful things modern therapy and ancient spirituality has to offer is the practical means to rewire our responses to events (e.g. mindfulness, Vipassana): “My cat has died? I can see that provokes some sadness, I shall tidy the litter tray”. Highlighting our event-response pathways as the most critical component to how we act, we have a fundamental and powerful tool to reprogram, and therefore choose, how we act in aggregate.
Mindfulness focuses a lot on the space between thought. By demonstrating that thoughts arise and sink within the broader space of consciousness, it becomes clear you are not your thoughts. As you see your thoughts are a continuous, unrelenting production of a piece of your brain resembling a demented television, it begins to feel sensible and possible to pay them less heed, and even to mute them for a while. And in that silence, peace pervades.
I write this not as a scholar of philosophy, but as a recovering thinker. Western civilization, the Enlightenment and degrees in science launched me into this world with thought as my only weapon. With it, I was to pull apart the world around me, and figure out what to do with it. In so far as happiness is the (eventual?) goal of our education system, thought was the tool I was imbued with to seek it. And now, I question if that was the right foundation at all.
