The Consolations of Philosophy

by Alain De Botton

  Where clever people should get their ideas from

  From people even cleverer than they are. They should spend their time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge. They should write treatises on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero.

  Montaigne owed much to the idea. There were frequent passages of commentary in the Essays, and hundreds of quotations from authors who Montaigne felt had captured points more elegantly and more acutely than he was able to. He quoted Plato 128 times, Lucretius 149 and Seneca 130.

  It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made – a congruence all the more striking if the work was written in an age of togas and animal sacrifices. We invite these words into our books as a homage for reminding us of who we are.

  But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits. Montaigne knew one man who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly:

  Whenever I ask [this] acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of

  scab

  and

  arse

  .

  Such reluctance to trust our own, extra-literary, experiences might not be grievous if books could be relied upon to express all our potentialities, if they knew all our scabs. But as Montaigne recognized, the great books are silent on too many themes, so that if we allow them to define the boundaries of our curiosity, they will hold back the development of our minds. A meeting in Italy crystallized the issue:

  In Pisa I met a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of each and every truth must lie in conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything.

  He had, of course, done and seen a lot. Of all the thinkers of antiquity, Aristotle was perhaps the most comprehensive, his works ranging over the landscape of knowledge (On Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Sophistical Refutations, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Politics).

  But the very scale of Aristotle’s achievement bequeathed a problematic legacy. There are authors too clever for our own good. Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word. Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an appreciation of their strengths. To act in a truly Aristotelian spirit, as Montaigne realized and the man from Pisa did not, may mean allowing for some intelligent departures from even the most accomplished authorities.

  Yet it is understandable to prefer to quote and write commentaries rather than speak and think for ourselves. A commentary on a book written by someone else, though technically laborious to produce, requiring hours of research and exegesis, is immune from the most cruel attacks that can befall original works. Commentators may be criticized for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers; they cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves – which was a reason why Montaigne included so many quotations and passages of commentary in the Essays:

  I sometimes get others to say what I cannot put so well myself because of the weakness of my language, and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect …

  [and] sometimes … to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive … I have to hide my weaknesses beneath those great reputations

  .

  It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries. Statements which might be acceptable when they issue from the quills of ancient authors are likely to attract ridicule when expressed by contemporaries. Critics are not inclined to bow before the grander pronouncements of those with whom they attended university. It is not these individuals who will be allowed to speak as though they were ancient philosophers. ‘No man has escaped paying the penalty for being born,’ wrote Seneca, but a man struck by a similar sentiment in later ages would not be advised to speak like this unless he manifested a particular appetite for humiliation. Montaigne, who did not, took shelter, and at the end of the Essays, made a confession, touching for its vulnerability:

  If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may.

  If he lacked confidence, it was because the closer one came to him in time and place, the less his thoughts were likely to be treated as though they might be as valid as those of Seneca and Plato:

  In my own climate of Gascony, they find it funny to see me in print.

  I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread.

  In the behaviour of his family and staff, those who heard him snoring or changed the bedlinen, there was none of the reverence of his Parisian reception, let alone his posthumous one:

  A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.

  We may take this in two ways: that no one is genuinely marvellous, but that only families and staff are close enough to discern the disappointing truth. Or that many people are interesting, but that if they are too close to us in age and place, we are likely not to take them too seriously, on account of a curious bias against what is at hand.

  Montaigne was not pitying himself; rather, he was using the criticism of more ambitious contemporary works as a symptom of a deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago. It is a question of whether access to genuinely valuable things is limited to a handful of geniuses born between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome, or whether, as Montaigne daringly proposed, they may be open to you and me as well.

  A highly peculiar source of wisdom was being pointed out, more peculiar still than Pyrrho’s seafaring pig, a Tupi Indian or a Gascon ploughman: the reader. If we attend properly to our experiences and learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for an intellectual life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive at insights no less profound than those in the great ancient books.

  The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to textual authorities, rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves:

  We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the

  ipsissima verba

  of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.

  Parroting wouldn’t be the scholar’s way of describing what it takes to write a commentary. A range of arguments could show the value of producing an exegesis on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero. Montaigne emphasized the cowardice a
nd tedium in the activity instead. There is little skill in secondary works (‘Invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation’), the difficulty is technical, a matter of patience and a quiet library. Furthermore, many of the books which academic tradition encourages us to parrot are not fascinating in themselves. They are accorded a central place in the syllabus because they are the work of prestigious authors, while many equally or far more valid themes languish because no grand intellectual authority ever elucidated them. The relation of art to reality has long been considered a serious philosophical topic, in part because Plato first raised it; the relation of shyness to personal appearance has not, in part because it did not attract the attention of any ancient philosopher.

  In light of this unnatural respect for tradition, Montaigne thought it worth while to admit to his readers that, in truth, he thought Plato could be limited and dull:

  Will the licence of our age excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that [his]

  Dialogues

  drag slowly along stifling his matter, and in lamenting the time spent on those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things to say?

  (A relief to come upon this thought in Montaigne, one prestigious writer lending credence to timid, silent suspicions of another.) As for Cicero, there was no need even to apologize before attacking:

  His introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work … If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind.

  If scholars paid such attention to the classics, it was, suggested Montaigne, from a vainglorious wish to be thought intelligent through association with prestigious names. The result for the reading public was a mountain of very learned, very unwise books:

  There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

  But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old:

  Were I a good scholar, I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger … sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.

  Only an intimidating scholarly culture makes us think otherwise:

  We are richer than we think, each one of us.

  We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren’t 2,000 years old, aren’t interested in Plato’s dialogues and live quietly in the country:

  You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff.

  It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne offered so much information on exactly how commonplace and private his own life had been – why he wanted to tell us:

  That he didn’t like apples

  :

  I am not overfond … of any fruit except melons.

  That he had a complex relationship with radishes

  :

  I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again.

  That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene

  :

  My teeth … have always been exceedingly good … Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals.

  That he ate too fast

  :

  In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my fingers.

  And liked wiping his mouth

  :

  I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin … I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course.

  Trivia, perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking ‘I’ behind his book, that a moral philosophy had issued – and so could issue again – from an ordinary, fruit-resistant soul.

  There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look nothing like those who have ruminated in the past.

  Cicero 106–43 BC (Ill. 18.3)

  In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios.

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

  (Ill. 18.4)

  V

  Consolation for a Broken Heart

  1

  For the griefs of love, he may be the finest among philosophers:

  The Life, 1788–1860 (Ill. 19.1)

  1788 Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig. In later years, he looks back on the event with regret: ‘We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’ ‘Human existence must be a kind of error,’ he specifies, ‘it may be said of it, “It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” ’ Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy merchant, and his mother Johanna, a dizzy socialite twenty years her husband’s junior, take little interest in their son, who grows into one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy: ‘Even as a child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found me in deep despair.’

  Heinrich Schopenhauer (Ill. 19.2)

  Johanna Schopenhauer

  1803–5 After the apparent suicide of his father (discovered floating in a canal beside the family warehouse), the seventeen-year-old Schopenhauer is left with a fortune that ensures he will never have to work. The thought affords no comfort. He later recalls: ‘In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth … was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings; to this the data pointed, and the belief that it is so won the upper hand.’

  Schopenhauer is sent to London to learn English at a boarding-school, Eagle House in Wimbledon. After receiving a letter from him, his friend Lorenz Meyer replies, ‘I am sorry that your stay in England has induced you to hate the entire nation.’ Despite the hatred, he acquires an almost perfect command of the language, and is often mistaken for an Englishman in conversation.

  Eagle House School, Wimbledon (Ill. 19.3)

  Schopenhauer travels through France, he visits the city of Nîmes, to which, 1,800 or so years before, Roman engineers had piped water across the majestic Pont du Gard to ensure that citizens would always have enough water to bathe in. Schopenhauer is unimpressed by what he sees of the Roman remains: ‘These traces soon lead one’s thoughts to the thousands of long-decomposed humans.’

  (Ill. 19.4)

  Schopenhauer’s mother complains of her son’s passion for ‘pondering on human misery’.

  1809–1811 Schopenhauer studies at the university of Göttingen and decides to become a philosopher: ‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’

  On an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggests they should attempt to meet women. Schopenhauer quashes the plan, arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.’

  Schopenhauer as a young man (Ill. 19.5)
>
  1813 He visits his mother in Weimar. Johanna Schopenhauer has befriended the town’s most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visits her regularly (and likes talking with Sophie, Johanna’s housemaid, and Adele, Arthur’s younger sister). After an initial meeting, Schopenhauer describes Goethe as ‘serene, sociable, obliging, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever!’ Goethe reports, ‘Young Schopenhauer appeared to me to be a strange and interesting young man.’ Arthur’s feelings for the writer are never wholly reciprocated. When the philosopher leaves Weimar, Goethe composes a couplet for him:

  Willst du dich des Lebens freuen

  ,

  So musst der Welt du Werth verleihen

  .

  If you wish to draw pleasure out of life,

  You must attach value to the world.

  Schopenhauer is unimpressed, and in his notebook beside Goethe’s tip, appends a quotation from Chamfort: ‘Il vaut mieux laisser les hommes pour ce qu’ils sont, que les prendre pour ce qu’ils ne sont pas.’ (Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be what they are not.)

  1814–15 Schopenhauer moves to Dresden and writes a thesis (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). He has few friends and enters into conversations with reduced expectations: ‘Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.’ He becomes a regular in an Italian tavern, which serves his favourite meats – Venetian salami, truffled sausage and Parma ham.