The Consolations of Philosophy

by Alain De Botton

  .

  (ii) animate objects

  A similarly acute pain arising from the impression that other people are silently ridiculing one’s character

  .

  On arrival at a hotel in Sweden I am accompanied to my room by an employee who offers to carry my luggage. ‘It will be far too heavy for a man like you,’ he smiles, emphasizing ‘man’ to imply its opposite. He has Nordic blond hair (perhaps a skier, a hunter of elk; in past centuries, a warrior) and a determined expression. ‘Monsieur will enjoy the room,’ he says. It is unclear why he has called me ‘Monsieur’, knowing that I have come from London, and the use of ‘will’ smacks of an order. The suggestion becomes plainly incongruous, and evidence of conspiracy, when the room turns out to suffer from traffic noise, a faulty shower and a broken television

  .

  In otherwise shy, quiet people, feelings of being slyly mocked may boil over into sudden shouting and acts of cruelty – even murder

  .

  1. It is tempting, when we are hurt, to believe that the thing which hurt us

  intended

  to do so. It is tempting to move from a sentence with clauses connected by ‘and’ to one with clauses connected by ‘in order to’; to move from thinking that ‘The pencil fell off the table

  and

  now I am annoyed’ to the view that ‘The pencil fell off the table

  in order to

  annoy me.’

  2. Seneca collected examples of such feelings of persecution by inanimate objects. Herodotus’s

  Histories

  provided one. Cyrus,

  the king of Persia and the founder of its great empire, owned a beautiful white horse which he always rode into battle. In the spring of 539

  BC

  King Cyrus declared war on the Assyrians in hope of expanding his territory, and set off with a large army for their capital, Babylon, on the banks of the Euphrates river. The march went well, until the army reached the river Gyndes, which flowed down from the Matienian mountains into the Tigris. The Gyndes was known to be perilous even in the summer, and at this time of year was brown and foaming, swollen with the winter rains. The king’s generals counselled delay, but Cyrus was not daunted and gave orders for an immediate crossing. Yet as the boats were being readied, Cyrus’s horse slipped away unnoticed and attempted to swim across the river. The current seized the beast, toppled it and swept it downstream to its death.

  Cyrus was livid. The river had dared to make away with his sacred white horse, the horse of the warrior who had ground Croesus into the dust and terrified the Greeks. He screamed and cursed, and at the height of his fury decided to pay back the Gyndes for its insolence. He vowed to punish the river by making it so weak that a woman would in future be able to cross it without so much as wetting her knees.

  Setting aside plans for the expansion of his empire, Cyrus divided his army into two parts, marked out 180 small canals running off from each bank of the river in various directions and ordered his men to start digging, which they did for an entire summer, their morale broken, all hope of a quick defeat of the Assyrians gone. And when they were finished, the once-rapid Gyndes was split into 360 separate channels through which water flowed so languidly that astonished local women could indeed wander across the trickling stream without hoisting their skirts. His anger assuaged, the King of Persia instructed his exhausted army to resume the march to Babylon.

  3. Seneca collected similar examples of feelings of persecution at the hands of animate objects. One concerned the Roman governor of Syria, Gnaeus Piso, a brave general but a troubled soul. When a soldier returned from a period of leave without the friend he had set out with and claimed to have no idea where he had gone, Piso judged that the soldier was lying; he had killed his friend, and would have to pay with his life.

  The condemned man swore he hadn’t murdered anyone and begged for time for an inquiry to be made, but Piso knew better and had the soldier escorted to his death without delay.

  However, as the centurion in charge was preparing to cut off the soldier’s head, the missing companion arrived at the gates of the camp. The army broke into spontaneous applause and the relieved centurion called off the execution.

  Piso took the news less well. Hearing the cheers, he felt them to be mocking his judgement. He grew red and angry, so angry that he summoned his guards and ordered both men to be executed, the soldier who hadn’t committed murder and the one who hadn’t been murdered. And because he was by this point feeling very persecuted, Piso also sent the centurion off to his death for good measure.

  4. The governor of Syria had at once interpreted the applause of his soldiers as a wish to undermine his authority and to question his judgement. Cyrus had at once interpreted the river’s manslaughter of his horse as murder.

  Seneca had an explanation for such errors of judgement; it lay with ‘a certain abjectness of spirit’ in men like Cyrus and Piso. Behind their readiness to anticipate insult lay a fear of deserving ridicule. When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us:

  ‘So and so did not give me an audience today, though he gave it to others’; ‘he haughtily repulsed or openly laughed at my conversation’; ‘he did not give me the seat of honour, but placed me at the foot of the table.’

  There may be innocent grounds. He didn’t give me an audience today, because he would prefer to see me next week. It seemed like he was laughing at me, but it was a facial tic. These are not the first explanations to come into our minds when we are abject of spirit.

  5. So we must endeavour to surround our initial impressions with a fireguard and refuse to act at once on their precepts. We must ask ourselves if someone who has not answered a letter is

  necessarily

  being tardy to annoy us, and if the missing keys have

  necessarily

  been stolen:

  [The wise do] not put a wrong construction upon everything.

  6. And the reason why they are able not to was indirectly explained by Seneca in a letter to Lucilius, the day he came upon a sentence in one of the works of the philosopher Hecato:

  I shall tell you what I liked today in [his writings]; it is these words: ‘What progress, you ask, have I made?

  I have begun to be a friend to myself

  .’ That was indeed a great benefit;… you may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

  7. There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we respond to noise. Seneca lived near a gymnasium. The walls were thin and the racket was continuous. He described the problem to Lucilius:

  Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates around my ears!… For example, when a strenuous gentleman is exercising himself by swinging lead weights, when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunting; and whenever he releases his pent-up breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy, high-pitched tones. When my attention turns to a less active type who is happy with an ordinary, inexpensive massage, I can hear the smack of a hand pummelling his shoulders … One should add to this the arresting of an occasional reveller or pickpocket, the racket of the man who always likes to hear his own voice in the bathroom … the hair-plucker with his shrill, penetrating cry … then the cake seller with his varied cries, the sausage man, the confectioner and everyone hawking for the catering shops.

  8. Those who are unfriendly with themselves find it hard to imagine that the cake seller is shouting

  in order to sell cakes

  . The builder on the ground floor of a hotel in Rome (1) may be pretending to repair a wall, but his real intention is to tease the man trying to read a book in a room on the upper level (2).

  (Ill. 13.14)

  Abject interpretation: The builder is hammering

  in order to

  annoy me. Friendly interpretation: The builder is hammering
/>
  and

  I am annoyed.

  9. To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. We should place a fireguard between the noise outside and an internal sense of deserving punishment. We should not import into scenarios where they don’t belong pessimistic interpretations of others’ motives. Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious:

  All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no disturbance within.

  3

  Of course, there would be few great human achievements if we accepted all frustrations. The motor of our ingenuity is the question ‘Does it have to be like this?’, from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books. The Romans were consummate at refusing frustration. They hated winter cold and developed under-floor heating. They didn’t wish to walk on muddy roads and so paved them. In the middle of the first century AD the Roman inhabitants of Nîmes in Provence decided they wanted more water for their city than nature had granted them, and so spent a hundred million sesterces building an extraordinary symbol of human resistance to the status quo. To the north of Nîmes, near Uzès, Roman engineers found a water source strong enough to irrigate the baths and fountains of their city, and drew up plans to divert the water 50 miles through mountains and across valleys in a system of aqueducts and underground pipes. When the engineers confronted the cavernous gorge of the river Gard, they did not despair at nature’s obstacle but erected a massive three-tiered aqueduct, 360 metres long and 48 metres high, capable of carrying 35,000 cubic metres of water a day – so that the inhabitants of Nîmes would never be forced to suffer the frustration of a shallow bath.

  (Ill. 14.1)

  Unfortunately, the mental faculties which search so assiduously for alternatives are hard to arrest. They continue to play out scenarios of change and progress even when there is no hope of altering reality. To generate the energy required to spur us to action, we are reminded by jolts of discomfort – anxiety, pain, outrage, offence – that reality is not as we would wish it. Yet these jolts have served no purpose if we cannot subsequently effect improvement, if we lose our peace of mind but are unable to divert rivers; which is why, for Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity.

  The Stoics had another image with which to evoke our condition as creatures at times able to effect change yet always subject to external necessities. We are like dogs who have been tied to an unpredictable cart. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of leeway, but not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we please.

  The metaphor had been formulated by the Stoic philosophers Zeno and Chrysippus and reported by the Roman Bishop Hippolytus:

  When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled

  and

  follows, making its spontaneous act

  coincide with

  necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.

  A dog will naturally hope to go wherever it pleases. But as Zeno and Chrysippus’s metaphor implies, if it cannot, then it is better for the animal to be trotting behind the cart rather than dragged and strangled by it. Though the dog’s first impulse may be to fight against the sudden swerve of the cart in an awful direction, his sorrows will only be compounded by his resistance.

  (Ill. 14.2)

  As Seneca put it:

  An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it … there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls

  with

  it than if it fights

  against

  it. The one alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.

  To reduce the violence of our mutiny against events which veer away from our intentions, we should reflect that we, too, are never without a leash around our neck. The wise will learn to identify what is necessary and follow it at once, rather than exhaust themselves in protest. When a wise man is told that his suitcase has been lost in transit, he will resign himself in seconds to the fact. Seneca reported how the founder of Stoicism had behaved upon the loss of his possessions:

  When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, ‘Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’

  It may sound like a recipe for passivity and quietude, encouragement to resign ourselves to frustrations that might have been overcome. It could leave us without heart to build even a diminutive aqueduct like that in Bornègre, in a valley a few kilometres north of the Pont du Gard, a modest 17 metres long and 4 metres high.

  But Seneca’s point is more subtle. It is no less unreasonable to accept something as necessary when it isn’t as to rebel against something when it is. We can as easily go astray by accepting the unnecessary and denying the possible, as by denying the necessary and wishing for the impossible. It is for reason to make the distinction.

  Whatever the similarities between ourselves and a dog on a leash, we have a critical advantage: we have reason and the dog doesn’t. So the animal does not at first grasp that he is even tied to a leash, nor understand the connection between the swerves of the cart and the pain in his neck. He will be confused by the changes in direction, it will be hard for him to calculate the cart’s trajectory, and so he will suffer constant painful jolts. But reason enables us to theorize with accuracy about the path of our cart, which offers us a chance, unique among living beings, to increase our sense of freedom by ensuring a good slack between ourselves and necessity. Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

  In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers. Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his villa outside Rome. Twice he offered his resignation; twice Nero refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience could allow him to believe such promises.

  He turned to philosophy. He could not escape Nero, and what he could not change, reason asked him to accept. During what might have been intolerably anxious years, Seneca devoted himself to the study of nature. He began writing a book about the earth and the planets. He looked at the vast sky and the constellation of the heavens, he studied the unbounded sea and the high mountains. He observed flashes of lightning and speculated on their origins:

  A lightning bolt is fire that has been compressed and hurled violently. Sometimes we take up water in our two clasped hands and pressing our palms together squirt out water the way a pump does. Suppose something like this occurs in the clouds. The constricted space of the compressed clouds forces out the air that is between them and by means of this pressure sets the air afire and hurls it the way a catapult does.

&
nbsp; He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence:

  Among the arguments that prove earthquakes occur because of moving air, this is one you shouldn’t hesitate to put forward: when a great tremor has exhausted its rage against cities and countries, another equal to it cannot follow. After the largest shock, there are only gentle quakes because the first tremor, acting with greater vehemence, has created an exit for the struggling air.

  It hardly mattered that Seneca’s science was faulty; it was more significant that a man whose life could at any time have been cut short by the caprice of a murderous emperor appeared to gain immense relief from the spectacle of nature – perhaps because in mighty natural phenomena lie reminders of all that we are powerless to change, of all that we must accept. Glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes stand as impressive symbols of what exceeds us. In the human world, we grow to believe that we may always alter our destinies, and hope and worry accordingly. It is apparent from the heedless pounding of the oceans or the flight of comets across the night sky that there are forces entirely indifferent to our desires. The indifference is not nature’s alone; humans can wield equally blind powers over their fellows, but it is nature which gives us a most elegant lesson in the necessities to which we are subject:

  Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its heat; and we must sweat. Unseasonable weather upsets the health; and we must fall ill. In certain places we may meet with wild beasts, or with men who are more destructive than any beasts … And we cannot change this order of things … it is to this law [of Nature] that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey … That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.

  Seneca began his book on nature as soon as he had first offered Nero his resignation. He was granted three years. Then in April 65, Piso’s plot against the emperor was uncovered, and a centurion dispatched to the philosopher’s villa. He was ready. Topless Paulina and her maids might have collapsed into tears –