ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain de Botton is the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in Washington, D.C., and London, where he is an Associate Research Fellow of the Philosophy Programme of the University of London, School of Advanced Study.
The dedicated Web site for Alain de Botton and his work is www.alaindebotton.com.
ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON
On Love
The Romantic Movement
Kiss & Tell
How Proust Can Change Your Life
The Art of Travel
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Alain de Botton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton,
a division of Penguin Books, Ltd., London and subsequently in hardcover
by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permissions acknowledgments appear on this page–this page.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
De Botton, Alain.
The consolations of philosophy / Alain de Botton.
p. cm.
1. Philosophical counseling.
I. Title.
BJ595.5.D43 2000 101—DC21
99-052188
eISBN: 978-0-307-83350-1
Author photograph © Roderick Field
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
Consolation for
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
I Unpopularity
1
2
3
4
5
II Not Having Enough Money
1
2
3
4
5
6
III Frustration
1
2
3
IV Inadequacy
1
2: On Sexual Inadequacy
3: On Cultural Inadequacy
4: On Intellectual Inadequacy
V A Broken Heart
1
2: A Contemporary Love Story: With Schopenhauerian Notes
3
VI Difficulties
Notes
Acknowledgments
Copyright Acknowledgments
Picture Acknowledgments
I
Consolation for Unpopularity
1
A few years ago, during a bitter New York winter, with an afternoon to spare before catching a flight to London, I found myself in a deserted gallery on the upper level of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was brightly lit, and aside from the soothing hum of an under-floor heating system, entirely silent. Having reached a surfeit of paintings in the Impressionist galleries, I was looking for a sign for the cafeteria – where I hoped to buy a glass of a certain variety of American chocolate milk of which I was at that time extremely fond – when my eye was caught by a canvas which a caption explained had been painted in Paris in the autumn of 1786 by the thirty-eight-year-old Jacques-Louis David.
(Ill. 1.1)
Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens had brought legal proceedings against the philosopher. They had accused him of failing to worship the city’s gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens – and such was the severity of their charges, they had called for the death penalty.
(Ill. 1.2)
Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity. Though afforded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular. In Plato’s account he had defiantly told the jury:
So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practising philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet … And so gentlemen … whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.
And so he had been led to meet his end in an Athenian jail, his death marking a defining moment in the history of philosophy.
An indication of its significance may be the frequency with which it has been painted. In 1650 the French painter Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy produced a Death of Socrates, now hanging in the Galleria Palatina in Florence (which has no cafeteria).
(Ill. 1.3)
The eighteenth century witnessed the zenith of interest in Socrates’ death, particularly after Diderot drew attention to its painterly potential in a passage in his Treatise on Dramatic Poetry.
Étienne de Lavallée-Poussin, c. 1760 (Ill. 1.4)
Jacques Philippe Joseph de Saint-Quentin, 1762
Pierre Peyron, 1790 (Ill. 1.5)
Jacques-Louis David received his commission in the spring of 1786 from Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, a wealthy member of the Parlement and a gifted Greek scholar. The terms were generous, 6,000 livres upfront, with a further 3,000 on delivery (Louis XVI had paid only 6,000 livres for the larger Oath of the Horatii). When the picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1787, it was at once judged the finest of the Socratic ends. Sir Joshua Reynolds thought it ‘the most exquisite and admirable effort of art which has appeared since the Cappella Sistina, and the Stanze of Raphael. The picture would have done honour to Athens in the age of Pericles.’
I bought five postcard Davids in the museum gift-shop and later, flying over the ice fields of Newfoundland (turned a luminous green by a full moon and a cloudless sky), examined one while picking at a pale evening meal left on the table in front of me by a stewardess during a misjudged snooze.
Plato sits at the foot of the bed, a pen and a scroll beside him, silent witness to the injustice of the state. He had been twenty-nine at the time of Socrates’ death, but David turned him into an old man, grey-haired and grave. Through the passageway, Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, is escorted from the prison cell by warders. Seven friends are in various stages of lamentation. Socrates’ closest companion Crito, seated beside him, gazes at the master with devotion and concern. But the philosopher, bolt upright, with an athlete’s torso and biceps, shows neither apprehension nor regret. That a large number of Athenians have denounced him as foolish has not shaken him in his convictions. David had planned to paint Socrates in the act of swallowing poison, but the poet André Chenier suggested that there would be greater dramatic tension if he was shown finishing a philosophical point while at the same time reaching serenely for the hemlock that would end his life, symbolizing both obedience to the laws of Athens and allegiance to his calling. We are witnessing the last edifying moments of a transcendent being.
If the postcard struck me so forcefully, it was perhaps because the behaviour it depicted contrasted so sharply with my own. In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel – salival enthusiasm born of a morbid, indiscriminate desire for affection. I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed. I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.
But the philosopher had not buckled before unpopularity and the condemnation of the state. He had not retracted his thoughts because others had complained. Moreover, his confidence had sprung from a more profound source than hot-headedness or bull-like courage. It had been grounded in philosophy. Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
That night, above the ice lands, such independence of mind was a revelation and an incitement. It promised a counterweight to a supine tendency to follow socially sanctioned practices and ideas. In Socrates’ life and death lay an invitation to intelligent scepticism.
And more generally, the subject of which the Greek philosopher was the supreme symbol seemed to offer an invitation to take on a task at once profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy. In spite of the vast differences between the many thinkers described as philosophers across time (people in actuality so diverse that had they been gathered together at a giant cocktail party, they would not only have had nothing to say to one another, but would most probably have come to blows after a few drinks), it seemed possible to discern a small group of men, separated by centuries, sharing a loose allegiance to a vision of philosophy suggested by the Greek etymology of the word – philo, love; sophia, wisdom – a group bound by a common interest in saying a few consoling and practical things about the causes of our greatest griefs. It was to these men I would turn.
2
Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity. Some of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical and practical judgements described as ‘common sense’, which dictates what we should wear, which financial values we should adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow and what domestic life we should lead. To start questioning these conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgements are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny.
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
(Ill. 2.1)
Or to ask a recently married couple to explain in full the reasons behind their decision.
Or to question holiday-makers in detail about the assumptions behind their trip.
(Ill. 2.2)
(Ill. 2.3)
Ancient Greeks had as many common-sense conventions and would have held on to them as tenaciously. One weekend, while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury, I came upon a series of history books originally intended for children, containing a host of photographs and handsome illustrations. The series included See Inside an Egyptian Town, See Inside a Castle and a volume I acquired along with an encyclopedia of poisonous plants, See Inside an Ancient Greek Town.
There was information on how it had been considered normal to dress in the city states of Greece in the fifth century BC.
(Ill. 2.4)
The book explained that the Greeks had believed in many gods, gods of love, hunting and war, gods with power over the harvest, fire and sea. Before embarking on any venture they had prayed to them either in a temple or in a small shrine at home, and sacrificed animals in their honour. It had been expensive: Athena cost a cow; Artemis and Aphrodite a goat; Asclepius a hen or cock.
The Greeks had felt sanguine about owning slaves. In the fifth century BC, in Athens alone, there were, at any one time, 80–100,000 slaves, one slave to every three of the free population.
The Greeks had been highly militaristic, too, worshipping courage on the battlefield. To be considered an adequate male, one had to know how to scythe the heads off adversaries. The Athenian soldier ending the career of a Persian (painted on a plate at the time of the Second Persian War) indicated the appropriate behaviour.
(Ill. 2.5)
Women had been entirely under the thumb of their husbands and fathers. They had taken no part in politics or public life, and had been unable either to inherit property or to own money. They had normally married at thirteen, their husbands chosen for them by their fathers irrespective of emotional compatibility.
(Ill. 2.6)
None of which would have seemed remarkable to the contemporaries of Socrates. They would have been confounded and angered to be asked exactly why they sacrificed cocks to Asclepius or why men needed to kill to be virtuous. It would have appeared as obtuse as wondering why spring followed winter or why ice was cold.
But it is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truths.
It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we may turn to the philosopher.
3
1. The life
He was born in Athens in 469 BC, his father Sophroniscus was believed to have been a sculptor, his mother Phaenarete a midwife. In his youth, Socrates was a pupil of the philosopher Archelaus, and thereafter practised philosophy without ever writing any of it down. He did not charge for his lessons and so slid into poverty; though he had little concern for material possessions. He wore the same cloak throughout the year and almost always walked barefoot (it was said he had been born to spite shoemakers). By the time of his death he was married and the father of three sons. His wife, Xanthippe, was of notoriously foul temper (when asked why he had married her, he replied that horse-trainers needed to practise on the most spirited animals). He spent much time out of the house, conversing with friends in the public places of Athens. They appreciated his wisdom and sense of humour. Few can have appreciated his looks. He was short, bearded and bald, with a curious rolling gait, and a face variously likened by acquaintances to the head of a crab, a satyr or a grotesque. His nose was flat, his lips large, and his prominent swollen eyes sat beneath a pair of unruly brows.
(Ill. 3.1)
But his most curious feature was a habit of approaching Athenians of every class, age and occupation and bluntly asking them, without worrying whether they would think him eccentric or infuriating, to explain with precision why they held certain common-sense beliefs and what they took to be the meaning of life – as one surprised general reported:
Whenever anyone comes face to face with Socrates and has a conversation with him, what invariably happens is that, although he may have started on a completely different subject first, Socrates will keep heading him off as they’re talking until he has him trapped into giving an account of his present life-style and the way he has spent his life in the past. And once he has him trapped, Socrates won’t let him go before he has well and truly cross-examined him from every angle.
He was helped in his habit by climate and urban planning. Athens was warm for half the year, which increased opportunities for conversing without formal introduction with people outdoors. Activities which in northern lands unfolded behind the mud walls of sombre, smoke-filled huts needed no shelter from the benevolent Attic skies. It was common to linger in the agora, under the colonnades of the Painted Stoa or the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, and talk to strangers in the late afternoon, the privileged hours between the practicalities of high noon and the anxieties of night.
The size of the city ensured conviviality. Around 240,000 people lived within Athens and its port. No more than an hour was needed to walk from one end of the city to the other, from Piraeus to Aigeus gate. Inhabitants could feel connected like pupils at a school or guests at a wedding. It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
(Ill. 3.2)
If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right. The sandalless philosopher raised a plethora of questions to determine whether what was popular happened to make any sense.
2. The rule of common sense
Many found the questions maddening. Some teased him. A few would kill him. In The Clouds, performed for the first time at the theatre of Dionysus in the spring of 423 BC, Aristophanes offered Athenians a caricature of the philosopher in their midst who refused to accept common sense without investigating its logic at impudent length. The actor playing Socrates appeared on stage in a basket suspended from a crane, for he claimed his mind worked better at high altitude. He was immersed in such important thoughts that he had no time to wash or to perform household tasks, his cloak was therefore malodorous and his home infested with vermin, but at least he could consider life’s most vital questions. These included: how many of its own lengths can a flea jump? And do gnats hum through their mouths or their anuses? Though Aristophanes omitted to elaborate on the results of Socrates’ questions, the audience must have been left with an adequate sense of their relevance.
Aristophanes was articulating a familiar criticism of intellectuals: that through their questions they drift further from sensible views than those who have never ventured to analyse matters in a systematic way. Dividing the playwright and the philosopher was a contrasting assessment of the adequacy of ordinary explanations. Whereas sane people could in Aristophanes’ eyes rest in the knowledge that fleas jumped far given their size and that gnats made a noise from somewhere, Socrates stood accused of a manic suspicion of common sense and of harbouring a perverse hunger for complicated, inane alternatives.
To which Socrates would have replied that in certain cases, though perhaps not those involving fleas, common sense might warrant more profound inquiry. After brief conversations with many Athenians, popular views on how to lead a good life, views described as normal and so beyond question by the majority, revealed surprising inadequacies of which the confident manner of their proponents had given no indication. Contrary to what Aristophanes hoped, it seemed that those Socrates spoke to barely knew what they were talking about.
(Ill. 3.3)
3. Two conversations
One afternoon in Athens, to follow Plato’s Laches, the philosopher came upon two esteemed generals, Nicias and Laches. The generals had fought the Spartan armies in the battles of the Peloponnesian War, and had earned the respect of the city’s elders and the admiration of the young. Both were to die as soldiers: Laches in the battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, Nicias in the ill-fated expedition to Sicily in 413 BC. No portrait of them survives, though one imagines that in battle they might have resembled two horsemen on a section of the Parthenon frieze.
(Ill. 3.4)
The generals were attached to one common-sense idea. They believed that in order to be courageous, a person had to belong to an army, advance in battle and kill adversaries. But on encountering them under open skies, Socrates felt inclined to ask a few more questions:
SOCRATES
: Let’s try to say what courage is, Laches.
LACHES
: My word, Socrates, that’s not difficult! If a man is prepared to stand in the ranks, face up to the enemy and not run away, you can be sure that he’s courageous.
But Socrates remembered that at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, a Greek force under the Spartan regent Pausanias had initially retreated, then courageously defeated the Persian army under Mardonius:
SOCRATES
: At the battle of Plataea, so the story goes, the Spartans came up against [the Persians], but weren’t willing to stand and fight, and fell back. The Persians broke ranks in pursuit; but then the Spartans wheeled round fighting like cavalry and hence won that part of the battle.
Forced to think again, Laches came forward with a second common-sense idea: that courage was a kind of endurance. But endurance could, Socrates pointed out, be directed towards rash ends. To distinguish true courage from delirium, another element would be required. Laches’ companion Nicias, guided by Socrates, proposed that courage would have to involve knowledge, an awareness of good and evil, and could not always be limited to warfare.
In only a brief outdoor conversation, great inadequacies had been discovered in the standard definition of a much-admired Athenian virtue. It had been shown not to take into account the possibility of courage off the battlefield or the importance of knowledge being combined with endurance. The issue might have seemed trifling but its implications were immense. If a general had previously been taught that ordering his army to retreat was cowardly, even when it seemed the only sensible manoeuvre, then the redefinition broadened his options and emboldened him against criticism.
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone supremely confident of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue. In order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an accident.
We lack a portrait of Meno, too, though on looking through a Greek men’s magazine in the lobby of an Athenian hotel, I imagined that he might have borne a resemblance to a man drinking champagne in an illuminated swimming pool.
(Ill. 3.5)
The virtuous man, Meno confidently informed Socrates, was someone of great wealth who could afford good things. Socrates asked a few more questions:
SOCRATES
: By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?
MENO
: I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable office in the state.
SOCRATES
: Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?
MENO
: Yes, I mean everything of that sort.
SOCRATES
: … Do you add ‘just and righteous’ to the word ‘acquisition’, or doesn’t it make any difference to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly acquired?
MENO
: Certainly not.
SOCRATES
: So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue must attach to the acquisition [of gold and silver] … In fact, lack of gold and silver, if it results from a failure to acquire them … in circumstances which would have made their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.
MENO
: It looks like it.
SOCRATES
: Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them …
MENO
: Your conclusion seems inescapable.
In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and influence were not in themselves necessary and sufficient features of virtue. Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.
4. Why others may not know
The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions, even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their beliefs logically.
Meno and the generals held unsound ideas because they had absorbed the prevailing norms without testing their logic. To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practising an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?
Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other, equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.
(Ill. 3.6)
Making it was clearly a formidable task. Clay first had to be brought to Athens, usually from a large pit at Cape Kolias 7 miles south of the city, and placed on a wheel, spun at between 50 and 150 rotations per minute, the speed inversely proportional to the diameter of the part being moulded (the narrower the pot, the faster the wheel). Then came sponging, scraping, brushing and handle-making.
(Ill. 3.7)
Next, the vase had to be coated with a black glaze made from fine compact clay mixed with potash. Once the glaze was dry, the vase was placed in a kiln, heated to 800 °C with the air vent open. It turned a deep red, the result of clay hardening into ferric oxide (Fe2O3). Thereafter, it was fired to 950 °C with the air vent closed and wet leaves added to the kiln for moisture, which turned the body of the vase a greyish black and the glaze a sintered black (magnetite, Fe3O4). After a few hours, the air vent was reopened, the leaves raked out and the temperature allowed to drop to 900 °C. While the glaze retained the black of the second firing, the body of the vase returned to the deep red of the first.
It isn’t surprising that few Athenians were drawn to spin their own vases without thinking. Pottery looks as difficult as it is. Unfortunately, arriving at good ethical ideas doesn’t, belonging instead to a troublesome class of superficially simple but inherently complex activities.
Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the confidence of people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views without at least as much rigour as a potter. What is declared obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
5. How to think for oneself
The philosopher does not only help us to conceive that others may be wrong, he offers us a simple method by which we can ourselves determine what is right. Few philosophers have had a more minimal sense of what is needed to begin a thinking life. We do not need years of formal education and a leisured existence. Anyone with a curious and well-ordered mind who seeks to evaluate a common-sense belief can start a conversation with a friend in a city street and, by following a Socratic method, may arrive at one or two ground-breaking ideas in under half an hour.
Socrates’ method of examining common sense is observable in all Plato’s early and middle dialogues and, because it follows consistent steps, may without injustice be presented in the language of a recipe book or manual, and applied to any belief one is asked to accept or feels inclined to rebel against. The correctness of a statement cannot, the method suggests, be determined by whether it is held by a majority or has been believed for a long time by important people. A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.
The Socratic method for thinking
1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.
Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle
.
Being virtuous requires money
.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.
Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle?
Could one ever stay firm in battle and yet not be courageous?
Could one ever have money and not be virtuous?
Could one ever have no money and be virtuous?
3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.
It is possible to be courageous and retreat
.
It is possible to stay firm in battle yet not be courageous
.
It is possible to have money and be a crook
.
It is possible to be poor and virtuous
.
4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
Acting courageously can involve both retreat and advance in battle
.
People who have money can be described as virtuous only if they have acquired it in a virtuous way, and some people with no money can be virtuous when they have lived through situations where it was impossible to be virtuous and make money
.
5. If one subsequently finds exceptions to the improved statements, the process should be repeated. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
6. The product of thought is, whatever Aristophanes insinuated, superior to the product of intuition.
It may of course be possible to arrive at truths without philosophizing. Without following a Socratic method, we may realize that people with no money may be called virtuous if they have lived through situations in which it was impossible to be virtuous and make money, or that acting courageously can involve retreat in battle. But we risk not knowing how to respond to people who don’t agree with us, unless we have first thought through the objections to our position logically. We may be silenced by impressive figures who tell us forcefully that money is essential to virtue and that only effeminates retreat in battle. Lacking counterarguments to lend us strength (the battle of Plataea and enrichment in a corrupt society), we will have to propose limply or petulantly that we feel we are right, without being able to explain why.
Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false. He likened the two versions of the truth to beautiful works by the great sculptor Daedalus. A truth produced by intuition was like a statue set down without support on an outdoor plinth.
(Ill. 3.8)
A strong wind could at any time knock it over. But a truth supported by reasons and an awareness of counterarguments was like a statue anchored to the ground by tethering cables.
Socrates’ method of thinking promised us a way to develop opinions in which we could, even if confronted with a storm, feel veritable confidence.
4
In his seventieth year, Socrates ran into a hurricane. Three Athenians – the poet Meletus, the politician Anytus and the orator Lycon – decided that he was a strange and evil man. They claimed that he had failed to worship the city’s gods, had corrupted the social fabric of Athens and had turned young men against their fathers. They believed it was right that he should be silenced, and perhaps even killed.
The city of Athens had established procedures for distinguishing right from wrong. On the south side of the agora stood the Court of the Heliasts, a large building with wooden benches for a jury at one end, and a prosecution and defendant’s platform at the other. Trials began with a speech from the prosecution, followed by a speech from the defence. Then a jury numbering between 200 and 2,500 people would indicate where the truth lay by a ballot or a show of hands. This method of deciding right from wrong by counting the number of people in favour of a proposition was used throughout Athenian political and legal life. Two or three times a month, all male citizens, some 30,000, were invited to gather on Pnyx hill south-west of the agora to decide on important questions of state by a show of hands. For the city, the opinion of the majority had been equated with the truth.
There were 500 citizens in the jury on the day of Socrates’ trial. The prosecution began by asking them to consider that the philosopher standing before them was a dishonest man. He had inquired into things below the earth and in the sky, he was a heretic, he had resorted to shifty rhetorical devices to make weaker arguments defeat stronger ones, and he had been a vicious influence on the young, intentionally corrupting them through his conversations.
Socrates tried to answer the charges. He explained that he had never held theories about the heavens nor investigated things below the earth, he was not a heretic and very much believed in divine activity; he had never corrupted the youth of Athens – it was just that some young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of free time had imitated his questioning method, and annoyed important people by showing them up as know-nothings. If he had corrupted anyone, it could only have been unintentionally, for there was no point in wilfully exerting a bad influence on companions, because one risked being harmed by them in turn. And if he had corrupted people only unintentionally, then the correct procedure was a quiet word to set him straight, not a court case.
He admitted that he had led what might seem a peculiar life:
I have neglected the things that concern most people – making money, managing an estate, gaining military or civic honours, or other positions of power, or joining political clubs and parties which have formed in our cities.
However, his pursuit of philosophy had been motivated by a simple desire to improve the lives of Athenians:
I tried to persuade each of you not to think more of practical advantages than of his mental and moral well-being.
Such was his commitment to philosophy, he explained, that he was unable to give up the activity even if the jury made it the condition for his acquittal:
I shall go on saying in my usual way, ‘My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?’ And should any of you dispute that, and profess that he does care about such things, I won’t let him go straight away nor leave him, but will question and examine and put him to the test … I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen.
It was the turn of the jury of 500 to make up their minds. After brief deliberation 220 decided Socrates wasn’t guilty; 280 that he was. The philosopher responded wryly: ‘I didn’t think the margin would be so narrow.’ But he did not lose confidence; there was no hesitation or alarm; he maintained faith in a philosophical project that had been declared conclusively misconceived by a majority 56 per cent of his audience.
If we cannot match such composure, if we are prone to burst into tears after only a few harsh words about our character or achievements, it may be because the approval of others forms an essential part of our capacity to believe that we are right. We feel justified in taking unpopularity seriously not only for pragmatic reasons, for reasons of promotion or survival, but more importantly because being jeered at can seem an unequivocal sign that we have gone astray.
Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth’s relation to unpopularity: errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval.
We seem afflicted by the opposite tendency: to listen to everyone, to be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. We fail to ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what basis has this dark censure been made? We treat with equal seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of misanthropy and envy.
We should take time to look behind the criticism. As Socrates had learned, the thinking at its basis, though carefully disguised, may be badly awry. Under the influence of passing moods, our critics may have fumbled towards conclusions. They may have acted from impulse and prejudice, and used their status to ennoble their hunches. They may have built up their thoughts like inebriated amateur potters.
(Ill. 4.1)
Unfortunately, unlike in pottery, it is initially extremely hard to tell a good product of thought from a poor one. It isn’t difficult to identify the pot made by the inebriated craftsman and the one by the sober colleague.
(Ill. 4.2)
It is harder immediately to identify the superior definition.
Courage is intelligent
endurance.
The man who stands in the ranks
and fights the enemy is courageous.
A bad thought delivered authoritatively, though without evidence of how it was put together, can for a time carry all the weight of a sound one. But we acquire a misplaced respect for others when we concentrate solely on their conclusions – which is why Socrates urged us to dwell on the logic they used to reach them. Even if we cannot escape the consequences of opposition, we will at least be spared the debilitating sense of standing in error.
The idea had first emerged some time before the trial, during a conversation between Socrates and Polus, a well-known teacher of rhetoric visiting Athens from Sicily. Polus had some chilling political views, of whose truth he wished ardently to convince Socrates. The teacher argued that there was at heart no happier life for a human being than to be a dictator, for dictatorship enabled one to act as one pleased, to throw enemies in prison, confiscate their property and execute them.
Socrates listened politely, then answered with a series of logical arguments attempting to show that happiness lay in doing good. But Polus dug in his heels and affirmed his position by pointing out that dictators were often revered by huge numbers of people. He mentioned Archelaus, the king of Macedon, who had murdered his uncle, his cousin and a seven-year-old legitimate heir and yet continued to enjoy great public support in Athens. The number of people who liked Archelaus was a sign, concluded Polus, that his theory on dictatorship was correct.
Socrates courteously admitted that it might be very easy to find people who liked Archelaus, and harder to find anyone to support the view that doing good brought one happiness: ‘If you feel like calling witnesses to claim that what I’m saying is wrong, you can count on your position being supported by almost everyone in Athens,’ explained Socrates, ‘whether they were born and bred here or elsewhere.’
You’d have the support of Nicias the son of Niceratus, if you wanted, along with his brothers, who between them have a whole row of tripods standing in the precinct of Dionysus. You’d have the support of Aristocrates the son of Scellius as well … You could call on the whole of Pericles’ household, if you felt like it, or any other Athenian family you care to choose.
But what Socrates zealously denied was that this widespread support for Polus’s argument could on its own in any way prove it correct:
The trouble is, Polus, you’re trying to use on me the kind of rhetorical refutation which people in lawcourts think is successful. There too people think they’re proving the other side wrong if they produce a large number of eminent witnesses in support of the points they’re making, when their opponent can only come up with a single witness or none at all. But this kind of reputation is completely worthless in the context of the truth, since it’s perfectly possible for someone to be defeated in court by a horde of witnesses who have no more than apparent respectability and who all happen to testify against him.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning. When we are making vases, we should listen to the advice of those who know about turning glaze into Fe3O4 at 800°C; when we are making a ship, it is the verdict of those who construct triremes that should worry us; and when we are considering ethical matters – how to be happy and courageous and just and good – we should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty generals and well-dressed aristocrats from Thessaly.
It sounded élitist, and it was. Not everyone is worth listening to. Yet Socrates’ élitism had no trace of snobbery or prejudice. He might have discriminated in the views he attended to, but the discrimination operated not on the basis of class or money, nor on the basis of military record or nationality, but on the basis of reason, which was – as he stressed – a faculty accessible to all.
To follow the Socratic example we should, when faced with criticism, behave like athletes training for the Olympic games. Information on sport was further supplied by See Inside an Ancient Greek Town.
(Ill. 4.3)
Imagine we’re athletes. Our trainer has suggested an exercise to strengthen our calves for the javelin. It requires us to stand on one leg and lift weights. It looks peculiar to outsiders, who mock and complain that we are throwing away our chances of success. In the baths, we overhear a man explain to another that we are 
(More interested in showing off a set of calf muscles than helping the city win the games.) Cruel, but no grounds for alarm if we listen to Socrates in conversation with his friend Crito:
SOCRATES
: When a man is … taking [his training] seriously, does he pay attention to all praise and criticism and opinion indiscriminately, or only when it comes from the one qualified person, the actual doctor or trainer?
CRITO
: Only when it comes from the one qualified person.
SOCRATES
: Then he should be afraid of the criticism and welcome the praise of the one qualified person, but not those of the general public.
CRITO
: Obviously.
SOCRATES
: He ought to regulate his actions and exercises and eating and drinking by the judgement of his instructor, who has expert knowledge, not by the opinions of the rest of the public.
The value of criticism will depend on the thought processes of critics, not on their number or rank:
Don’t you think it a good principle that one shouldn’t respect all human opinions, but only some and not others … that one should respect the good ones, but not the bad ones?… And good ones are those of people with understanding, whereas bad ones are those of people without it …
So my good friend, we shouldn’t care all that much about what the populace will say of us, but about what the expert on matters of justice and injustice will say.
The jurors on the benches of the Court of the Heliasts were no experts. They included an unusual number of the old and the war-wounded, who looked to jury work as an easy source of additional income. The salary was three obols a day, less than a manual labourer’s, but helpful if one was sixty-three and bored at home. The only qualifications were citizenship, a sound mind and an absence of debts – though soundness of mind was not judged by Socratic criteria, more the ability to walk in a straight line and produce one’s name when asked. Members of the jury fell asleep during trials, rarely had experience of similar cases or relevant laws, and were given no guidance on how to reach verdicts.
Socrates’ own jury had arrived with violent prejudices. They had been influenced by Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates, and felt that the philosopher had played a role in the disasters that had befallen the once-mighty city at the end of the century. The Peloponnesian War had finished in catastrophe, a Spartan–Persian alliance had brought Athens to her knees, the city had been blockaded, her fleet destroyed and her empire dismembered. Plagues had broken out in poorer districts, and democracy had been suppressed by a dictatorship guilty of executing a thousand citizens. For Socrates’ enemies, it was more than coincidence that many of the dictators had once spent time with the philosopher. Critias and Charmides had discussed ethical matters with Socrates, and it seemed all they had acquired as a result was a lust for murder.
What could have accounted for Athens’s spectacular fall from grace? Why had the greatest city in Hellas, which seventy-five years before had defeated the Persians on land at Plataea and at sea at Mycale, been forced to endure a succession of humiliations? The man in the dirty cloak who wandered the streets asking the obvious seemed one ready, entirely flawed explanation.
Socrates understood that he had no chance. He lacked even the time to make a case. Defendants had only minutes to address a jury, until the water had run from one jar to another in the court clock:
(Ill. 4.4)
I am convinced that I never wronged anyone intentionally, but I cannot convince you of this, because we have so little time for discussion. If it was your practice, as it is with other nations, to give not one day but several to the hearing of capital trials, I believe that you might have been convinced; but under present conditions it is not so easy to dispose of grave allegations in a short space of time.
An Athenian courtroom was no forum for the discovery of the truth. It was a rapid encounter with a collection of the aged and one-legged who had not submitted their beliefs to rational examination and were waiting for the water to run from one jar to the other.
It must have been difficult to hold this in mind, it must have required the kind of strength accrued during years in conversation with ordinary Athenians: the strength, under certain circumstances, not to take the views of others seriously. Socrates was not wilful, he did not dismiss these views out of misanthropy, which would have contravened his faith in the potential for rationality in every human being. But he had been up at dawn for most of his life talking to Athenians; he knew how their minds worked and had seen that unfortunately they frequently didn’t, even if he hoped they would some day. He had observed their tendency to take positions on a whim and to follow accepted opinions without questioning them. It wasn’t arrogance to keep this before him at a moment of supreme opposition. He possessed the self-belief of a rational man who understands that his enemies are liable not to be thinking properly, even if he is far from claiming that his own thoughts are invariably sound. Their disapproval could kill him; it did not have to make him wrong.
Of course, he might have renounced his philosophy and saved his life. Even after he had been found guilty, he could have escaped the death penalty, but wasted the opportunity through intransigence. We should not look to Socrates for advice on escaping a death sentence; we should look to him as an extreme example of how to maintain confidence in an intelligent position which has met with illogical opposition.
The philosopher’s speech rose to an emotional finale:
If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place. The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gadfly … If you take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus’s advice and finish me off with a single slap; and then you will go on sleeping.
He was not mistaken. When the magistrate called for a second, final verdict, 360 members of the jury voted for the philosopher to be put to death. The jurors went home; the condemned man was escorted to prison.
5
It must have been dark and close, and the sounds coming up from the street would have included jeers from Athenians anticipating the end of the satyr-faced thinker. He would have been killed at once had the sentence not coincided with the annual Athenian mission to Delos, during which, tradition decreed, the city could not put anyone to death. Socrates’ good nature attracted the sympathy of the prison warder, who alleviated his last days by allowing him to receive visitors. A stream of them came: Phaedo, Crito, Crito’s son Critobulus, Apollodorus, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes, Ctesippus, Menexenus, Simmias, Cebes, Phaedondas, Euclides and Terpsion. They could not disguise their distress at seeing a man who had only ever displayed great kindness and curiosity towards others waiting to meet his end like a criminal.
(Ill. 5.1)
Though David’s canvas presented Socrates surrounded by devastated friends, we should remember that their devotion stood out in a sea of misunderstanding and hatred.
To counterpoint the mood in the prison cell and introduce variety, Diderot might have urged a few of the many prospective hemlock painters to capture the mood of other Athenians at the idea of Socrates’ death – which might have resulted in paintings with titles like Five Jurors Playing Cards after a Day in Court or The Accusers Finishing Dinner and Looking Forward to Bed. A painter with a taste for pathos could more plainly have chosen to title these scenes The Death of Socrates.
When the appointed day came, Socrates was alone in remaining calm. His wife and three children were brought to see him, but Xanthippe’s cries were so hysterical, Socrates asked that she be ushered away. His friends were quieter though no less tearful. Even the prison warder, who had seen many go to their deaths, was moved to address an awkward farewell:
‘In your time here, I’ve known you to be the most generous and gentlest and best of men who have ever come to this place … You know the message I’ve come to bring: goodbye, then, and try to bear the inevitable as easily as you can.’ And with this he turned away in tears and went off.
Then came the executioner, bearing a cup of crushed hemlock:
When he saw the man Socrates said: ‘Well, my friend, you’re an expert in these things: what must one do?’ ‘Simply drink it,’ he said, ‘and walk about till a heaviness comes over your legs; then lie down, and it will act by itself.’ And with this he held out the cup to Socrates. He took it perfectly calmly … without a tremor or any change of colour or countenance … He pressed the cup to his lips, and drank it off with good humour and without the least distaste. Till then most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well [narrated by Phaedo]; but when we saw he was drinking, that he’d actually drunk it, we could do so no longer. In my own case, the tears came pouring out in spite of myself … Even before me, Crito had moved away when he was unable to restrain his tears. And Apollodorus, who even earlier had been continuously in tears, now burst forth into such a storm of weeping and grieving, that he made everyone present break down except Socrates himself.
The philosopher implored his companions to calm themselves – ‘What a way to behave, my strange friends!’ he mocked – then stood up and walked around the prison cell so the poison could take effect. When his legs began to feel heavy, he lay down on his back and the sensation left his feet and legs; as the poison moved upwards and reached his chest, he gradually lost consciousness. His breathing became slow. Once he saw that his best friend’s eyes had grown fixed, Crito reached over and closed them:
And that [said Phaedo] … was the end of our companion, who was, we can fairly say, of all those of his time whom we knew, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.
It is hard not to start crying oneself. Perhaps because Socrates is said to have had a bulbous head and peculiar widely-spaced eyes, the scene of his death made me think of an afternoon on which I had wept while watching a tape of The Elephant Man.
(Ill. 5.2)
It seemed that both men had suffered one of the saddest of fates – to be good and yet judged evil.
We might never have been jeered at for a physical deformity, nor condemned to death for our life’s work, but there is something universal in the scenario of being misunderstood of which these stories are tragic, consummate examples. Social life is beset with disparities between others’ perceptions of us and our reality. We are accused of stupidity when we are being cautious. Our shyness is taken for arrogance and our desire to please for sycophancy. We struggle to clear up a misunderstanding, but our throat goes dry and the words found are not the ones meant. Bitter enemies are appointed to positions of power over us, and denounce us to others. In the hatred unfairly directed towards an innocent philosopher we recognize an echo of the hurt we ourselves encounter at the hands of those who are either unable or unwilling to do us justice.
But there is redemption in the story, too. Soon after the philosopher’s death the mood began to change. Isocrates reported that the audience watching Euripides’ Palamedes burst into tears when Socrates’ name was mentioned; Diodorus said that his accusers were eventually lynched by the people of Athens. Plutarch tells us that the Athenians developed such hatred for the accusers that they refused to bathe with them and ostracized them socially until, in despair, they hanged themselves. Diogenes Laertius recounts that only a short while after Socrates’ death the city condemned Meletus to death, banished Anytus and Lycon and erected a costly bronze statue of Socrates crafted by the great Lysippus.
The philosopher had predicted that Athens would eventually see things his way, and it did. Such redemption can be hard to believe in. We forget that time may be needed for prejudices to fall away and envy to recede. The story encourages us to interpret our own unpopularity other than through the mocking eyes of local juries. Socrates was judged by 500 men of limited intelligence who harboured irrational suspicions because Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War and the defendant looked strange. And yet he maintained faith in the judgement of wider courts. Though we inhabit one place at one time, through this example, we may imaginatively project ourselves into other lands and eras which promise to judge us with greater objectivity. We may not convince local juries in time to help ourselves, but we can be consoled by the prospect of posterity’s verdict.
Yet there is a danger that Socrates’ death will seduce us for the wrong reasons. It may foster a sentimental belief in a secure connection between being hated by the majority and being right. It can seem the destiny of geniuses and saints to suffer early misunderstanding, then to be accorded bronze statues by Lysippus. We may be neither geniuses nor saints. We may simply be privileging the stance of defiance over good reasons for it, childishly trusting that we are never so right as when others tell us we are wrong.
This was not Socrates’ intention. It would be as naïve to hold that unpopularity is synonymous with truth as to believe that it is synonymous with error. The validity of an idea or action is determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled but by whether it obeys the rules of logic. It is not because an argument is denounced by a majority that it is wrong nor, for those drawn to heroic defiance, that it is right.
The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion.
To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen always to the dictates of reason.
(Ill. 5.3)
II
Consolation for Not Having Enough Money
1
Happiness, an acquisition list
1. A neoclassical Georgian house in the centre of London. Chelsea (Paradise Walk, Markham Square), Kensington (the southern part of Campden Hill Road, Hornton Street), Holland Park (Aubrey Road). In appearance, similar to the front elevation of the Royal Society of Arts designed by the Adam brothers (1772–4). To catch the pale light of late London afternoons, large Venetian windows offset by Ionic columns (and an arched tympanum with anthemions).
(
Ill. 6.1
)
In the first-floor drawing room, a ceiling and a chimney-piece like Robert Adam’s design for the library at Kenwood House.
2. A jet stationed at Farnborough or Biggin Hill (a Dassault Falcon 900c or Gulfstream IV) with avionics for the nervous flyer, ground-proximity warning system, turbulence-detecting radar and CAT II autopilot. On the tail-fin, to replace the standard stripes, a detail from a still life, a fish by Velázquez or three lemons by Sánchez Cotán from the
Fruit and Vegetables
in the Prado.
(Ill. 6.2)
(Ill. 6.3)
3. The Villa Orsetti in Marlia near Lucca. From the bedroom, views over water, and the sound of fountains. At the back of the house, a magnolia Delavayi growing along the wall, a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games. Sheltered gardens indulgent to fig and nectarine. Squares of cypresses, rows of lavender, orange trees and an olive orchard.
(Ill. 6.4)
4. A library with a large desk, a fireplace and a view on to a garden. Early editions with the comforting smell of old books, pages yellowed and rough to the touch. On top of shelves, busts of great thinkers and astrological globes. Like the design of the library for a house for William
III
of Holland.
(Ill. 6.5)
5. A dining room like that at Belton House in Lincolnshire. A long oak table seating twelve. Frequent dinners with the same friends. The conversation intelligent but playful. Always affectionate. A thoughtful chef and considerate staff to remove any administrative difficulties (the chef adept at zucchini pancakes, tagliatelle with white truffles, fish soup, risotto, quail, John Dory and roast chicken). A small drawing room to retire to for tea and chocolates.
6. A bed built into a niche in the wall (like one by Jean-François Blondel in Paris). Starched linen changed every day, cold to the cheek. The bed huge; toes do not touch the end of the bed; one
wallows
. Recessed cabinets for water and biscuits, and another for a television.
(Ill. 6.6)
7. An immense bathroom with a tub in the middle on a raised platform, made of marble with cobalt-blue seashell designs. Taps that can be operated with the sole of the foot and release water in a broad, gentle stream. A skylight visible from the bath. Heated limestone floors. On the walls, reproductions of the frescos on the precinct of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii.
(Ill. 6.7)
8. Money sufficient to allow one to live on the interest of the interest.
9. For weekends, a penthouse apartment at the tip of the Ile de la Cité decorated with pieces from the noblest period of French furniture (and the weakest of government), the reign of Louis
XVI
. A half-moon commode by Grevenich, a console by Saunier, a bonheur-du-jour by Vandercruse-La Croix. Lazy mornings reading
Pariscope
in bed, eating
pain au chocolat
on Sèvres china and chatting about existence with, and occasionally teasing, a reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s
Madonna
(from the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice), whose melancholy
expression would belie a dry sense of humour and spontaneity – and who would dress in Agnès B and Max Mara for walks around the Marais.
(Ill. 6.8)
(Ill. 6.9)
2
An anomaly among an often pleasure-hating and austere fraternity, there was one philosopher who seemed to understand and want to help. ‘I don’t know how I shall conceive of the good,’ he wrote, ‘if I take away the pleasures of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of beautiful forms.’
Epicurus was born in 341 BC on the verdant island of Samos, a few miles off the coast of Western Asia Minor. He took early to philosophy, travelling from the age of fourteen to hear lessons from the Platonist Pamphilus and the atomic philosopher Nausiphanes. But he found he could not agree with much of what they taught and by his late twenties had decided to arrange his thoughts into his own philosophy of life. He was said to have written 300 books on almost everything, including On Love, On Music, On Just Dealing, On Human Life (in four books) and On Nature (in thirty-seven books), though by a catastrophic series of mishaps, almost all were lost over the centuries, leaving his philosophy to be reconstructed from a few surviving fragments and the testimony of later Epicureans.
What immediately distinguished his philosophy was an emphasis on the importance of sensual pleasure: ‘Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life,’ asserted Epicurus, confirming what many had long thought but philosophy had rarely accepted. The philosopher confessed his love of excellent food: ‘The beginning and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.’ Philosophy properly performed was to be nothing less than a guide to pleasure:
The man who alleges that he is not yet ready for philosophy or that the time for it has passed him by, is like the man who says that he is either too young or too old for happiness.
Few philosophers had ever made such frank admissions of their interest in a pleasurable lifestyle. It shocked many, especially when they heard that Epicurus had attracted the support of some wealthy people, first in Lampsacus in the Dardanelles, and then in Athens, and had used their money to set up a philosophical establishment to promote happiness. The school admitted both men and women, and encouraged them to live and study pleasure together. The idea of what was going on inside the school appeared at once titillating and morally reprehensible.
(Ill. 7.1)
There were frequent leaks from disgruntled Epicureans detailing activities between lectures. Timocrates, the brother of Epicurus’s associate Metrodorus, spread a rumour that Epicurus had to vomit twice a day because he ate so much. And Diotimus the Stoic took the unkind step of publishing fifty lewd letters which he said had been written by Epicurus when he’d been drunk and sexually frenzied.
Despite these criticisms, Epicurus’s teachings continued to attract support. They spread across the Mediterranean world; schools for pleasure were founded in Syria, Judaea, Egypt, Italy and Gaul; and the philosophy remained influential for the next 500 years, only gradually to be extinguished by the hostility of forbidding barbarians and Christians during the decline of the Roman Empire in the West. Even then, Epicurus’s name entered many languages in adjectival form as a tribute to his interests (Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Epicurean: devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; hence, luxurious, sensual, gluttonous’).
Browsing in a newsagent in London 2,340 years after the philosopher’s birth, I came upon copies of Epicurean Life, a quarterly magazine with articles on hotels, yachts and restaurants, printed on paper with the sheen of a well-polished apple.
(Ill. 7.2)
The tenor of Epicurus’s interests was further suggested by The Epicurean, a restaurant in a small Worcestershire town, which offered its clientele, seated on high-backed chairs in a hushed dining room, dinners of seared sea scallops and cep risotto with truffles.
(Ill. 7.3)
3
The consistency of the associations provoked by Epicurus’s philosophy throughout the ages, from Diotimus the Stoic to the editors of Epicurean Life, testifies to the way in which, once the word ‘pleasure’ has been mentioned, it seems obvious what is entailed. ‘What do I need for a happy life?’ is far from a challenging question when money is no object.
Yet ‘What do I need for a healthy life?’ can be more difficult to answer when, for example, we are afflicted by bizarre recurring headaches or an acute throb in the stomach area after evening meals. We know there is a problem; it can be hard to know the solution.
In pain, the mind is prone to consider some strange cures: leeches, bleeding, nettle stews, trepanning. An atrocious pain pulses in the temples and at the base of the head, as though the whole cranium had been placed in a clamp and tightened. The head feels as if it may soon explode. What seems intuitively most necessary is to let some air into the skull. The sufferer requests that a friend place his head on a table and drill a small hole in the side. He dies hours later of a brain haemorrhage.
(Ill. 8.1)
If consulting a good doctor is generally thought advisable despite the sombre atmosphere of many surgery waiting rooms, it is because someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the lay person will be in about what is wrong with them, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. Doctors are required to compensate for their patients’ lack, at times fatal, of bodily self-knowledge.
At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at intuitively answering ‘What will make me happy?’ as ‘What will make me healthy?’ The answer which most rapidly comes to mind is liable to be as faulty. Our souls do not spell out their troubles more clearly than our bodies, and our intuitive diagnoses are rarely any more accurate. Trepanning might serve as a symbol of the difficulties of understanding our psychological as much as our physiological selves.
A man feels dissatisfied. He has trouble rising in the morning and is surly and distracted with his family. Intuitively, he places the blame on his choice of occupation and begins searching for an alternative, despite the high costs of doing so. It was the last time I would turn to See Inside an Ancient Greek Town.
a blacksmith; a shoemaker; a fishmonger (Ill. 8.2)
Deciding rapidly that he would be happy in the fish business, the man acquires a net and an expensive stall in the market-place. And yet his melancholy does not abate.
We are often, in the words of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, like ‘a sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady’.
It is because they understand bodily maladies better than we can that we seek doctors. We should turn to philosophers for the same reason when our soul is unwell – and judge them according to a similar criterion:
Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind.
The task of philosophy was, for Epicurus, to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire and thereby save us from mistaken schemes for happiness. We were to cease acting on first impulses, and instead investigate the rationality of our desires according to a method of questioning close to that used by Socrates in evaluating ethical definitions over a hundred years earlier. And by providing what might at times feel like counter-intuitive diagnoses of our ailments, philosophy would – Epicurus promised – guide us to superior cures and true happiness.
Epicurus 341 BC–270 BC (Ill. 8.3)
4
Those who had heard the rumours must have been surprised to discover the real tastes of the philosopher of pleasure. There was no grand house. The food was simple, Epicurus drank water rather than wine, and was happy with a dinner of bread, vegetables and a palmful of olives. ‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast whenever I like,’ he asked a friend. Such were the tastes of a man who had described pleasure as the purpose of life.
He had not meant to deceive. His devotion to pleasure was far greater than even the orgy accusers could have imagined. It was just that after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable – and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive.
Happiness, an Epicurean acquisition list
1. Friendship
On returning to Athens in 306 BC at the age of thirty-five, Epicurus settled on an unusual domestic arrangement. He located a large house a few miles from the centre of Athens, in the Melite district between the market-place and the harbour at Piraeus, and moved in with a group of friends. He was joined by Metrodorus and his sister, the mathematician Polyaenus, Hermarchus, Leonteus and his wife Themista, and a merchant called Idomeneus (who soon married Metrodorus’s sister). There was enough space in the house for the friends to have their own quarters, and there were common rooms for meals and conversations.
Epicurus observed that:
Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
Such was his attachment to congenial company, Epicurus recommended that one try never to eat alone:
Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.
The household of Epicurus resembled a large family, but there was seemingly no sullenness nor sense of confinement, only sympathy and gentleness.
We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and accept them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world. We can ask them ‘Isn’t he frightening?’ or ‘Do you ever feel that …?’ and be understood, rather than encounter the puzzled ‘No, not particularly’ – which can make us feel, even when in company, as lonely as polar explorers.
True friends do not evaluate us according to worldly criteria, it is the core self they are interested in; like ideal parents, their love for us remains unaffected by our appearance or position in the social hierarchy, and so we have no qualms in dressing in old clothes and revealing that we have made little money this year. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognized that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.
2. Freedom
Epicurus and his friends made a second radical innovation. In order not to have to work for people they didn’t like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens (‘We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics’), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors.
So they bought a garden near their house, a little outside the old Dipylon gate, and grew a range of vegetables for the kitchen, probably bliton (cabbage), krommyon (onion) and kinara (ancestor of the modern artichoke, of which the bottom was edible but not the scales). Their diet was neither luxurious nor abundant, but it was flavoursome and nutritious. As Epicurus explained to his friend Menoeceus, ‘[The wise man] chooses not the greatest quantity of food but the most pleasant.’
Simplicity did not affect the friends’ sense of status because, by distancing themselves from the values of Athens, they had ceased to judge themselves on a material basis. There was no need to be embarrassed by bare walls, and no benefit in showing off gold. Among a group of friends living outside the political and economic centre of the city, there was – in the financial sense – nothing to prove.
3. Thought
There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.
There was much encouragement to think in the Garden, as Epicurus’s community became known. Many of the friends were writers. According to Diogenes Laertius, Metrodorus, for one, wrote twelve works, among them the lost Way of Wisdom and Of Epicurus’s Weak Health. In the common rooms of the house in Melite and in the vegetable garden, there must have been unbroken opportunities to examine problems with people as intelligent as they were sympathetic.
Epicurus was especially concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. If one thought rationally about mortality, one would, Epicurus argued, realize that there was nothing but oblivion after death, and that ‘what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation.’ It was senseless to alarm oneself in advance about a state which one would never experience:
There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
Sober analysis calmed the mind; it spared Epicurus’s friends the furtive glimpses of difficulties that would have haunted them in the unreflective environment beyond the Garden.
Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
To highlight what is essential for happiness and what may, if one is denied prosperity through social injustice or economic turmoil, be forgone without great regrets, Epicurus divided our needs into three categories:
Of the desires, some are natural and necessary. Others are natural but unnecessary. And there are desires that are neither natural nor necessary.
WHAT IS AND IS NOT ESSENTIAL FOR HAPPINESS
Natural and
Natural but
Neither natural
necessary
unnecessary
nor necessary
Friends
Grand house
Fame
Freedom
Private baths
Power
Thought (about main
Banquets
sources of anxiety:
Servants
death, illness,
Fish, meat
poverty, superstition)
Food, shelter, clothes
Crucially for those unable to make or afraid of losing money, Epicurus’s tripartite division suggested that happiness was dependent on some complex psychological goods but relatively independent of material ones, beyond the means required to purchase some warm clothes, somewhere to live and something to eat – a set of priorities designed to provoke thought in those who had equated happiness with the fruition of grand financial schemes, and misery with a modest income.
To plot the Epicurean relation between money and happiness on a graph, money’s capacity to deliver happiness is already present in small salaries and will not rise with the largest. We will not cease being happy with greater outlay, but we will not, Epicurus insisted, surpass levels of happiness already available to those on a limited income.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR SOMEONE WITH FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC
.
The analysis depended on a particular understanding of happiness. For Epicurus, we are happy if we are not in active pain. Because we suffer active pain if we lack nutrients and clothes, we must have enough money to buy them. But suffering is too strong a word to describe what will occur if we are obliged to wear an ordinary cardigan rather than a cashmere one or to eat a sandwich rather than sea scallops. Hence the argument that:
Plain dishes offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table, when the pain that comes from want is taken away.
Whether we regularly eat meals like the one on the right or like the one on the left cannot be the decisive factor in our state of mind.
(Ill. 9.1)
(Ill. 9.2)
As for eating meat, it relieves neither any of our nature’s stress nor a desire whose non-satisfaction would give rise to pain … What it contributes to is not life’s maintenance but variation of pleasures … like drinking of exotic wines, all of which our nature is quite capable of doing without.
It may be tempting to attribute this disparagement of luxury to the primitive range of products available to the rich in the undeveloped economy of Hellenistic Greece. Yet the argument may still be defended by pointing to an imbalance in the ratio of price to happiness in products of later ages.
(Ill. 9.3)
We would not be happy with the vehicle on the left but no friends; with a villa but no freedom; with linen sheets but too much anxiety to sleep. So long as essential non-material needs are unattended, the line on the graph of happiness will remain stubbornly low.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR SOMEONE WITHOUT FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC
.
Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
To avoid acquiring what we do not need or regretting what we cannot afford, we should ask rigorously the moment we desire an expensive object whether we are right to do so. We should undertake a series of thought experiments in which we imagine ourselves projected in time to the moment when our desires have been realized, in order to gauge our likely degree of happiness:
The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?
A method which, though no examples of it survive, must have followed at least five steps – which may without injustice be sketched in the language of an instruction manual or recipe book.
1. Identify a project for happiness.
In order to be happy on holiday, I must live in a villa
.
2. Imagine that the project may be false. Look for exceptions to the supposed link between the desired object and happiness. Could one possess the desired object but not be happy? Could one be happy but not have the desired object?
Could I spend money on a villa and still not be happy?
Could I be happy on holiday and not spend as much money as on a villa?
3. If an exception is found, the desired object cannot be a necessary and sufficient cause of happiness.
It is possible to have a miserable time in a villa if, for example, I feel friendless and isolated
.
It is possible for me to be happy in a tent if, for example, I am with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
4. In order to be accurate about producing happiness, the initial project must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
In so far as I can be happy in an expensive villa, this depends on being with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
I can be happy without spending money on a villa, as long as I am with someone I love and feel appreciated by
.
5. True needs may now seem very different from the confused initial desire.
Happiness depends more on the possession of a congenial companion than a well-decorated villa
.
The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to remarkable joy. (Ill. 9.4)
5
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? Because of an error similar to that of the migraine sufferer who drills a hole in the side of his skull: because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends.
We are not solely to blame for our confusions. Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed the ‘idle opinions’ of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches, seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interests of commercial enterprises to skew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a material vision of the good and downplay an unsaleable one.
And the way we are enticed is through the sly association of superfluous objects with our other, forgotten needs.
(Ill. 10.1)
It may be a jeep we end up buying, but it was – for Epicurus – freedom we were looking for.
(Ill. 10.2)
It may be the aperitif we purchase, but it was – for Epicurus – friendship we were after.
(Ill. 10.3)
It may be fine bathing accoutrements we acquire, but it was – for Epicurus – thought that would have brought us calm.
To counteract the power of luxurious images Epicureans appreciated the importance of advertising.
In the AD 120s, in the central market-place of Oinoanda, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, an enormous stone colonnade 80 metres long and nearly 4 metres high was erected and inscribed with Epicurean slogans for the attention of shoppers:
Luxurious foods and drinks … in no way produce freedom from harm and a healthy condition in the flesh.
One must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is full to overflowing.
Real value is generated not by theatres and baths and perfumes and ointments … but by natural science.
The wall had been paid for by Diogenes, one of Oinoanda’s wealthiest citizens, who had sought, 400 years after Epicurus and his friends had opened the Garden in Athens, to share with his fellow inhabitants the secrets of happiness he had discovered in Epicurus’s philosophy. As he explained on one corner of the wall:
Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure and so to help now those who are well-constituted. Now, if only one person, or two or three or four or five or six … were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually … but as the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and as their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from each other, like sheep) … I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly medicines that bring salvation.
The massive limestone wall contained some 25,000 words advertising all aspects of Epicurus’s thought, mentioning the importance of friendship and of the analysis of anxieties. Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques of Oinoanda had been warned in detail that they could expect little happiness from the activity.
(Ill. 10.4)
Advertising would not be so prevalent if we were not such suggestible creatures. We want things when they are beautifully presented on walls, and lose interest when they are ignored or not well spoken of. Lucretius lamented the way in which what we want is ‘chosen by hearsay rather than by the evidence of [our] own senses’.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary settings and individuals. We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications – playing with a child, conversations with a friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across fresh bread (‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast whenever I like’). It is not these elements which are celebrated in the pages of Epicurean Life.
Art may help to correct the bias. Lucretius lent force to Epicurus’s intellectual defence of simplicity by helping us, in superlative Latin verse, to feel the pleasures of inexpensive things:
We find that the requirements of our bodily nature are few indeed, no more than is necessary to banish pain, and also to spread out many pleasures for ourselves. Nature does not periodically seek anything more gratifying than this, not complaining if there are no golden images of youths about the house who are holding flaming torches in their right hands to illuminate banquets that go on long into the night. What does it matter if the hall doesn’t sparkle with silver and gleam with gold, and no carved and gilded rafters ring to the music of the lute? Nature doesn’t miss these luxuries when people can recline in company on the soft grass by a running stream under the branches of a tall tree and refresh their bodies pleasurably at small expense. Better still if the weather smiles on them, and the season of the year stipples the green grass with flowers.
Ergo corpoream ad naturam pauca videmus
esse opus omnino, quae demant cumque dolorem
.
delicias quoque uti multas substernere possint
gratius interdum, neque natura ipsa requirit
,
si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris
,
lumina nocturnis epulis ut suppeditentur
,
nec domus argento fulget auroque renidet
nec citharae reboant laqueata aurataque templa
,
cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli
propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae
non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant
,
praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni
tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas
.
It is hard to measure the effect on commercial activity in the Greco-Roman world of Lucretius’s poem. It is hard to know whether shoppers in Oinoanda discovered what they needed and ceased buying what they didn’t because of the giant advertisement in their midst. But it is possible that a well-mounted Epicurean advertising campaign would have the power to precipitate global economic collapse. Because, for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-awareness and appreciation of simplicity. Epicurus would not have been perturbed:
When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth; limitless wealth, great poverty.
It points us to a choice: on the one hand, societies which stimulate unnecessary desires but achieve enormous economic strengths as a result; and on the other, Epicurean societies which would provide for essential material needs but could never raise living standards beyond subsistence level. There would be no mighty monuments in an Epicurean world, no technological advances and little incentive to trade with distant continents. A society in which people were more limited in their needs would also be one of few resources. And yet – if we are to believe the philosopher – such a society would not be unhappy. Lucretius articulated the choice. In a world without Epicurean values:
Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure.
But at the same time:
It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas …
We can imagine Epicurus’s response. However impressive our ventures on to the high seas, the only way to evaluate their merits is according to the pleasure they inspire:
It is to pleasure that we have recourse, using the feeling as our standard for judging every good.
And because an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to guarantee an increase in happiness, Epicurus would have suggested that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on which our happiness depends.
6
Happiness, an acquisition list
1. A hut.
2.
(Ill. 11.1)
3. To avoid superiors, patronization, infighting and competition:
(Ill. 11.2)
4. Thought.
(Ill. 11.3)
5. A reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s
Madonna
(from the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice), whose melancholy expression would belie a dry sense of humour and spontaneity – and who would dress in manmade fibres from the sales racks of modest department stores.
(Ill. 11.4)
Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
III
Consolation for Frustration
1
Thirteen years before painting the Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David attended to another ancient philosopher who met his end with extraordinary calm, amidst the hysterical tears of friends and family.
(Ill. 12.1)
The Death of Seneca, painted in 1773 by the twenty-five-year-old David, depicted the Stoic philosopher’s last moments in a villa outside Rome in April AD 65. A centurion had arrived at the house a few hours before with instructions from the emperor that Seneca should take his own life forthwith. A conspiracy had been discovered to remove the twenty-eight-year-old Nero from the throne, and the emperor, maniacal and unbridled, was seeking indiscriminate revenge. Though there was no evidence to link Seneca to the conspiracy, though he had worked as the imperial tutor for five years and as a loyal aide for a decade, Nero ordered the death for good measure. He had by this point already murdered his half-brother Britannicus, his mother Agrippina and his wife Octavia; he had disposed of a large number of senators and equestrians by feeding them to crocodiles and lions; and he had sung while Rome burned to the ground in the great fire of 64.
When they learned of Nero’s command, Seneca’s companions blanched and began to weep, but the philosopher, in the account provided by Tacitus and read by David, remained unperturbed, and strived to check their tears and revive their courage:
Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had encouraged in each other over so many years? ‘Surely nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel!’ he added. ‘After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor.’
He turned to his wife Paulina, embraced her tenderly (‘very different from his philosophical imperturbability’ – Tacitus) and asked her to take consolation in his well-spent life. But she could not countenance an existence without him, and asked to be allowed to cut her veins in turn. Seneca did not deny her wish:
I will not grudge your setting so fine an example. We can die with equal fortitude, though yours will be the nobler end.
But because the emperor had no desire to increase his reputation for cruelty, when his guards noticed that Paulina had taken a knife to her veins, they seized it against her will and bandaged up her wrists.
Her husband’s suicide began to falter. Blood did not flow fast enough from his aged body, even after he had cut the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. So in a self-conscious echo of the death in Athens 464 years previously, Seneca asked his doctor to prepare a cup of hemlock. He had long considered Socrates the exemplar of how one might, through philosophy, rise above external circumstance (and in a letter written a few years before Nero’s command, had explained his admiration):
He was much tried at home, whether we think of his wife, a woman of rough manners and shrewish tongue, or of the children … He lived either in time of war or under tyrants … but all these measures changed the soul of Socrates so little that they did not even change his features. What wonderful and rare distinction! He maintained this attitude up to the very end … amid all the disturbances of Fortune, he was undisturbed.
But Seneca’s desire to follow the Athenian was in vain. He drank the hemlock and it had no effect. After two fruitless attempts, he finally asked to be placed in a vapour-bath, where he suffocated to death slowly, in torment but with equanimity, undisturbed by the disturbances of Fortune.
David’s rococo version of the scene was not the first, nor the finest. Seneca appeared more like a reclining pasha than a dying philosopher. Paulina, thrusting her bared right breast forward, was dressed for grand opera rather than Imperial Rome. Yet David’s rendering of the moment fitted, however clumsily, into a lengthy history of admiration for the manner in which the Roman endured his appalling fate.
Loyset Liedet, 1462 (Ill. 12.2)
Rubens, 1608 (Ill. 12.3)
Ribera (Jusepe), 1632 (Ill. 12.4)
Luca Giordano, c. 1680
Though his wishes had come into sudden, extreme conflict with reality, Seneca had not succumbed to ordinary frailties; reality’s shocking demands had been met with dignity. Through his death, Seneca had helped to create an enduring association, together with other Stoic thinkers, between the very word ‘philosophical’ and a temperate, self-possessed approach to disaster. He had from the first conceived of philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality. As Tacitus had reported, Seneca’s response to his weeping companions had been to ask, as though the two were essentially one, where their philosophy had gone, and where their resolution against impending misfortunes.
Throughout his life, Seneca had faced and witnessed around him exceptional disasters. Earthquakes had shattered Pompeii; Rome and Lugdunum had burnt to the ground; the people of Rome and her empire had been subjected to Nero, and before him Caligula, or as Suetonius more accurately termed him, ‘the Monster’, who had ‘on one occasion … cried angrily, “I wish all you Romans had only one neck!” ’
Seneca had suffered personal losses, too. He had trained for a career in politics, but in his early twenties had succumbed to suspected tuberculosis, which had lasted six years and led to suicidal depression. His late entry into politics had coincided with Caligula’s rise to power. Even after the Monster’s murder in 41, his position had been precarious. A plot by the Empress Messalina had, through no fault of Seneca’s, resulted in his disgrace and eight years of exile on the island of Corsica. When he had finally been recalled to Rome, it had been to take on against his will the most fateful job in the imperial administration – tutor to Agrippina’s twelve-year-old son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would fifteen years later order him to kill himself in front of his wife and family.
Seneca knew why he had been able to withstand the anxieties:
I owe my life to [philosophy], and that is the least of my obligations to it.
His experiences had taught him a comprehensive dictionary of frustration, his intellect a series of responses to them. Years of philosophy had prepared him for the catastrophic day Nero’s centurion had struck at the villa door.
Double herm of Seneca and Socrates (Ill. 12.5)
2
A Senecan dictionary of frustration
Introduction
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast – from a stubbed toe to an untimely death – at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
The collisions begin in earliest infancy, with the discovery that the sources of our satisfaction lie beyond our control and that the world does not reliably conform to our desires.
(Ill. 13.1)
And yet, for Seneca, in so far as we can ever attain wisdom, it is by learning not to aggravate the world’s obstinacy through our own responses, through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness, self-righteousness and paranoia.
A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.
Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible on the adamantine wall of reality.
Anger
The ultimate infantile collision. We cannot find the remote control or the keys, the road is blocked, the restaurant full – and so we slam doors, deracinate plants and howl.
(Ill. 13.2)
1. The philosopher held it to be a kind of madness:
There is no swifter way to insanity. Many [angry people] … call down death on their children, poverty on themselves, ruin on their home, denying that they are angry, just as the mad deny their insanity. Enemies to their closest friends … heedless of the law … they do everything by force … The greatest of ills has seized them, one that surpasses all other vices.
2. In calmer moments, the angry may apologize and explain that they were overwhelmed by a power stronger than themselves, that is, stronger than their reason. ‘They’, their rational selves, did not mean the insults and regret the shouting; ‘they’ lost control to darker forces within. The angry hereby appeal to a predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty, the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by passionate feelings which reason neither identifies with nor can be held responsible for.
This account runs directly counter to Seneca’s view of the mind, according to which anger results not from an uncontrollable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and correctable) error of reasoning. Reason does not always govern our actions, he conceded: if we are sprinkled with cold water, our body gives us no choice but to shiver; if fingers are flicked over our eyes, we have to blink. But anger does not belong in the category of involuntary physical movement, it can only break out on the back of certain rationally held
ideas
; if we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger.
3. And in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like.
4. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal. We may be frustrated that it is raining, but our familiarity with showers means we are unlikely ever to respond to one with anger. Our frustrations are tempered by what we understand we can expect from the world, by our experience of what it is normal to hope for. We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it. Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground rules of existence.
5. With money, one could have expected to lead a very comfortable life in Ancient Rome. Many of Seneca’s friends had large houses in the capital and villas in the countryside. There were baths, colonnaded gardens, fountains, mosaics, frescos and gilded couches. There were retinues of slaves to prepare the food, look after the children and tend the garden.
(Ill. 13.3)
6. Nevertheless, there seemed an unusual level of rage among the privileged. ‘Prosperity fosters bad tempers,’ wrote Seneca, after observing his wealthy friends ranting around him because life had not turned out as they had hoped.
Seneca knew of a wealthy man, Vedius Pollio, a friend of the Emperor Augustus, whose slave once dropped a tray of crystal glasses during a party. Vedius hated the sound of breaking glass and grew so furious that he ordered the slave to be thrown into a pool of lampreys.
7. Such rages are never beyond explanation. Vedius Pollio was angry for an identifiable reason: because he believed in a world in which glasses do not get broken at parties. We shout when we can’t find the remote control because of an implicit belief in a world in which remote controls do not get mislaid. Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
(Ill. 13.4)
8. We should be more careful. Seneca tried to adjust the scale of our expectations so that we would not bellow so loudly when these were dashed:
When dinner comes a few minutes late
:
What need is there to kick the table over? To smash the goblets?
To bang yourself against columns?
When there’s a buzzing sound
:
Why should a fly infuriate you which no one has taken enough trouble to drive off, or a dog which gets in your way, or a key dropped by a careless servant?
When something disturbs the calm of the dining room
:
Why go and fetch the whip in the middle of dinner, just because the slaves are talking?
We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectibility of existence:
Is it surprising that the wicked should do wicked deeds, or unprecedented that your enemy should harm or your friend annoy you, that your son should fall into error or your servant misbehave?
We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
(Ill. 13.5)
Shock
An aeroplane belonging to the Swiss national airline, carrying 229 people, takes off on a scheduled flight from New York to Geneva. Fifty minutes out of Kennedy Airport, as the stewardesses roll their trolleys down the aisles of the McDonald Douglas MD-11, the captain reports smoke in the cockpit. Ten minutes later, the plane disappears off the radar. The gigantic machine, each of its wings 52 metres long, crashes into the placid seas off Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing all on board. Rescue workers speak of the difficulty of identifying what were, only hours before, humans with lives and plans. Briefcases are found floating in the sea
.
(Ill. 13.6)
(Ill. 13.7)
1. If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden disaster and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across generations; on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter that Seneca invoked a goddess.
2. She was to be found on the back of many Roman coins, holding a cornucopia in one hand and a rudder in the other. She was beautiful and usually wore a light tunic and a coy smile. Her name was Fortune. She had originated as a fertility goddess, the firstborn of Jupiter, and was honoured with a festival on the 25th of May and with temples throughout Italy, visited by the barren and farmers in search of rain. But gradually her remit had widened, she had become associated with money, advancement, love and health. The cornucopia was a symbol of her power to bestow favours, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies. She could scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed shift the rudder’s course, maintaining an imperturbable smile as she watched us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear in a landslide.
(Ill. 13.8)
3. Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, proposed Seneca, hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs, or say goodbye to a friend, without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.
Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen
. (
Ill. 13.9
)
4. For evidence of how little is needed for all to come to nought, we have only to hold up our wrists and study for a moment the pulses of blood through our fragile, greenish veins:
What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break … A body weak and fragile, naked, in its natural state defenceless, dependent upon another’s help and exposed to all the affronts of Fortune.
5. Lugdunum had been one of the most prosperous Roman settlements in Gaul. At the junction of the Arar and Rhone rivers, it enjoyed a privileged position as a crossroads of trade and military routes. The city contained elegant baths and theatres and a government mint. Then in August 64 a spark slipped out of hand and grew into a fire that spread through the narrow streets, terrified inhabitants levering themselves from windows at its approach. Flames licked from house to house and by the time the sun had risen the whole of Lugdunum, from suburb to market, from temple to baths, had burnt to cinders. The survivors were left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings roasted beyond recognition. The
blaze was so rapid, it took longer for news of the disaster to reach Rome than for the city to burn:
You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened …?
6. On the fifth of February 62, similar disaster struck the province of Campania. The earth trembled, and large sections of Pompeii collapsed. In the months that followed, many inhabitants decided to leave Campania for other parts of the peninsula. Their move suggested to Seneca that they believed there was somewhere on earth, in Liguria or Calabria, where they might be wholly safe, out of reach of Fortune’s will. To which he replied with an argument, persuasive in spite of its geological dubiousness:
Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can none the less have quakes. Perhaps tonight or before tonight, today will split open the spot where you stand securely. How do you know whether conditions will henceforth be better in those places against which Fortune has already exhausted her strength or in those places which are supported on their own ruins? We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe … Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile.
7. At the time of Caligula’s accession to the throne, away from high politics in a household in Rome, a mother lost her son. Metilius had been short of his twenty-fifth birthday and a young man of exceptional promise. He had been close to his mother Marcia, and his death devastated her. She withdrew from social life and sank into mourning. Her friends watched with compassion and hoped for a day when she would regain a measure of composure. She didn’t. A year passed, then another and a third, and still Marcia came no closer to overcoming her grief.
After three years she was as tearful as she had been on the very day of his funeral. Seneca sent her a letter. He expressed enormous sympathies, but gently continued, ‘the question at issue between us [is] whether grief ought to be
deep
or
never-ending
.’
Marcia was rebelling against what seemed like an occurrence at once dreadful and rare – and all the more dreadful because it was rare. Around her were mothers who still had their sons, young men beginning their careers, serving in the army or entering politics. Why had hers been taken from her?
8. The death was unusual and terrible, but it was not – Seneca ventured – abnormal. If Marcia looked beyond a restricted circle, she would come upon a woefully long list of sons whom Fortune had killed. Octavia had lost her son, Livia her son, Cornelia hers; so had Xenophon, Paulus, Lucius Bibulus, Lucius Sulla, Augustus and Scipio. By averting her gaze from early deaths, Marcia had, understandably but perilously, denied them a place in her conception of the normal:
We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive … So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army, and succeed to their father’s property.
The children might live, but how ingenuous to believe that they were guaranteed to survive to maturity – even to dinner-time:
No promise has been given you for this night – no, I have suggested too long a respite – no promise has been given even for this
hour
.
There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time, is a possibility we must ready ourselves for.
9. Because Fortune’s long benevolent periods risk seducing us into somnolence, Seneca entreated us to spare a little time each day to think of her. We do not know what will happen next: we must expect something. In the early morning, we should undertake what Seneca termed a
praemeditatio
, a meditation in advance, on all the sorrows of mind and body to which the goddess may subsequently subject us.
A SENECAN PRAEMEDITATIO
[The wise] will start each day with the thought …
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men,
no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.
10. The same could naturally have been conveyed in other ways. In more sober philosophical language, one could say that a subject’s agency is only one of the causal factors determining events in the course of his or her life. Seneca resorted instead to continual hyperbole:
Whenever anyone falls at your side or behind you, cry out: ‘Fortune, you will not deceive me, you will not fall upon me confident and heedless. I know what you are planning. It is true that you struck someone else, but you aimed at me.’
(The original ends with a final, more rousing alliteration:
Quotiens aliquis ad latus aut pone tergum ceciderit, exclama: ‘Non decipies me, fortuna, nec securum aut neglegentem opprimes. Scio quid pares; alium quidem percussisti, sed me petisti.’)
11. If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in which it is presented to the reader will not determine its effectiveness. Seneca believed in a different picture of the mind. Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.
The goddess of Fortune, in spite of her unphilosophical, religious roots, was the perfect image to keep our exposure to accident continually within our minds, conflating a range of threats to our security into one ghastly anthropomorphic enemy.
Sense of injustice
A feeling that the rules of justice have been violated, rules which dictate that if we are honourable, we will be rewarded, and that if we are bad, we will be punished – a sense of justice inculcated in the earliest education of children, and found in most religious texts, for example, in the book of Deuteronomy, which explains that the godly person ‘shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water … and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are like chaff which the wind driveth away.’
Goodness → Reward
Evil → Punishment
In cases where one acts correctly but still suffers disaster, one is left bewildered and unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. The world seems absurd. One alternates between a feeling that one may after all have been bad and this is why one was punished, and the feeling that one truly was not bad and therefore must have fallen victim to a catastrophic failure in the administration of justice. The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an
in
justice
.
1. Justice was not an ideology that had helped Marcia.
2. It had forced her to oscillate between a debilitating feeling that her son Metilius had been taken away from her because she was bad, and at other moments, a feeling of outrage with the world that Metilius had died given that she had always been essentially good.
3. But we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our moral worth; we may be cursed and blessed without justice behind either. Not everything which happens
to
us occurs with reference to something
about
us.
Metilius hadn’t died because his mother was bad, nor was the world unfair because his mother was good and yet he had died. His death was, in Seneca’s image, the work of Fortune, and the goddess was no moral judge. She did not evaluate her victims like the god of Deuteronomy and reward them according to merit. She inflicted harm with the moral blindness of a hurricane.
(Ill. 13.10)
4. Seneca knew in himself the sapping impulse to interpret failures according to a misguided model of justice. Upon the accession of Claudius in early 41, he became a pawn in a plan by the Empress Messalina to rid herself of Caligula’s sister, Julia Livilla. The empress accused Julia of having an adulterous affair and falsely named Seneca as her lover. He was in an instant stripped of family, money, friends, reputation and his political career, and sent into exile on the island of Corsica, one of the most desolate parts of Rome’s vast empire.
He would have endured periods of self-blame alternating with feelings of bitterness. He would have reproached himself for misreading the political situation with regard to Messalina, and resented the way his loyalty and talents had been rewarded by Claudius.
Both moods were based on a picture of a moral universe where external circumstances reflected internal qualities. It was a relief from this punitive schema to remember Fortune:
I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.
Seneca’s political failure did not have to be read as retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress. Seneca was not only distancing himself from disgrace. The imperial official he had been had not deserved all the credit for his status either.
The interventions of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical, introduced a random element into human destinies.
(Ill. 13.11)
Anxiety
A condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the worst. Typically leaves sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social
.
(Ill. 13.12)
Even in sublime settings the anxious will remain preoccupied by private anticipations of ruin and may prefer to be left alone in a room
.
1. The traditional form of comfort is reassurance. One explains to the anxious that their fears are exaggerated and that events are sure to unfold in a desired direction.
2. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass. Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear.
3. In February 63, Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a civil servant working in Sicily, learned of a lawsuit against him which threatened to end his career and disgrace his name for ever. He wrote to Seneca.
‘You may expect that I will advise you to picture a happy outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope,’ replied the philosopher, but ‘I am going to conduct you to peace of mind through another route’ – which culminated in the advice:
If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear
may
happen is certainly
going
to happen.
Seneca wagered that once we look rationally at what will occur if our desires are not fulfilled, we will almost certainly find that the underlying problems are more modest than the anxieties they have bred. Lucilius had grounds for sadness but not hysteria:
If you lose this case, can anything more severe happen to you than being sent into exile or led to prison?… ‘I may become a poor man’; I shall then be one among many. ‘I may be exiled’; I shall then regard myself as though I had been born in the place to which I’ll be sent. ‘They may put me in chains.’ What then? Am I free from bonds now?
Prison and exile were bad, but – the linchpin of the argument – not as bad as the desperate Lucilius might have feared before scrutinizing the anxiety.
4. It follows that wealthy individuals fearing the loss of their fortune should never be reassured with remarks about the improbability of their ruin. They should spend a few days in a draughty room on a diet of thin soup and stale bread. Seneca had taken the counsel from one of his favourite philosophers:
The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be niggardly in satisfying hunger, with the object of seeing … whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.
The wealthy would, Seneca promised, soon come to an important realization:
‘Is this really the condition that I feared?’ … Endure [this poverty] for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more … and I assure you … you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune.
5. Many Romans found it surprising, even ridiculous, to discover that the philosopher proffering such advice lived in considerable luxury himself. By his early forties, Seneca had accumulated enough money through his political career to acquire villas and farms. He ate well, and developed a love of expensive furniture, in particular, citrus-wood tables with ivory legs.
He resented suggestions that there was something unphilosophical in his behaviour:
Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty.
And with touching pragmatism:
I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half.
6. It wasn’t hypocrisy. Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a
productum
, a preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime. Stoics may live with as many gifts of Fortune as the foolish. Their houses can be as grand, their furniture as beautiful. They are identified as wise by only one detail: how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair.
7. The idea that a wise person should be able to walk away from
all
Fortune’s gifts calmly was Stoicism’s most extreme, peculiar claim, given that Fortune grants us not only houses and money but also our friends, our family, even our bodies:
The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.
The wise man is self-sufficient … if he loses a hand through disease or war, or if some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satisfied with what is left.
Which sounds absurd, unless we refine our notion of what Seneca meant by ‘satisfied’. We should not be happy to lose an eye, but life would be possible even if we did so. The right number of eyes and hands is a
productum
. Two examples of the position:
The wise man will not despise himself even if he has the stature of a dwarf, but he nevertheless wishes to be tall.
The wise man is self-sufficient in that he
can
do without friends, not that he
desires
to do without them.
8. Seneca’s wisdom was more than theoretical. Exiled to Corsica, he found himself abruptly stripped of all luxuries. The island had been a Roman possession since 238
BC
, but it had not enjoyed the benefits of civilization. The few Romans on the island rarely settled outside two colonies on the east coast, Aleria and Mariana, and it was unlikely that Seneca was allowed to inhabit them, for he complained of hearing only ‘barbaric speech’ around him, and was associated with a forbidding building near Luri at the northern tip of the island known since ancient times as ‘Seneca’s Tower’.
Conditions must have contrasted painfully with life in Rome. But in a letter to his mother, the former wealthy statesman explained that he had managed to accommodate himself to his circumstances, thanks to years of morning premeditations and periods of thin soup:
Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely
taken
them, not
torn
them from me.
(Ill. 13.13)
Feelings of being mocked by
(i) inanimate objects
A sense that one’s wishes are being purposefully frustrated by a pencil which drops off a table or a drawer that refuses to open. The frustration caused by the inanimate object is compounded by a sense that it holds one in contempt. It is acting in a frustrating way in order to signal that it does not share the view of one’s intelligence or status to which one is attached and to which others subscribe
.
(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.
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 –
– but Seneca had learned to follow the cart obediently, and slit his veins without protest. As he had reminded Marcia on the loss of her son Metilius:
What need is there to weep over parts of life?
The whole of it calls for tears.
(Ill. 14.3)
IV
Consolation for Inadequacy
1
After centuries of neglect, at times hostility, after being scattered and burnt and surviving only in partial forms in the vaults and libraries of monasteries, the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome returned triumphantly to favour in the sixteenth century. Among the intellectual élites of Europe, a consensus emerged that the finest thinking the world had yet known had occurred in the minds of a handful of geniuses in the city states of Greece and the Italian peninsula between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome – and that there was no greater imperative for the educated than to familiarize themselves with the richness of these works. Major new editions were prepared of, among others, Plato, Lucretius, Seneca, Aristotle, Catullus, Longinus and Cicero, and selections from the classics – Erasmus’s Apophthegmata and Adages, Stobeus’s Sententiae, Antonio de Guevara’s Golden Epistles and Petrus Crinitus’s Honorable Learning – spread into libraries across Europe.
In south-western France, on the summit of a wooded hill 30 miles east of Bordeaux, sat a handsome castle made of yellow stone with dark-red roofs.
(Ill. 15.4)
It was home to a middle-aged nobleman, his wife Françoise, his daughter Léonor, their staff and their animals (chickens, goats, dogs and horses). Michel de Montaigne’s grandfather had bought the property in 1477 from the proceeds of the family salt-fish business, his father had added some wings and extended the land under cultivation, and the son had been looking after it since the age of thirty-five, though he had little interest in household management and knew almost nothing about farming (‘I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces’).
He preferred to pass his time in a circular library on the third floor of a tower at one corner of the castle: ‘I spend most days of my life there, and most hours of each day.’
(Ill. 15.5)
The library had three windows (with what Montaigne described as ‘splendid and unhampered views’), a desk, a chair and, arranged on five tiers of shelves in a semicircle, about a thousand volumes of philosophy, history, poetry and religion. It was here that Montaigne read Socrates’ (‘the wisest man that ever was’) steadfast address to the impatient jurors of Athens in a Latin edition of Plato translated by Marsilio Ficino; here that he read Epicurus’s vision of happiness in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, edited by Denys Lambin in 1563; and here that he read and re-read Seneca (an author ‘strikingly suited to my humour’) in a new set of his works printed in Basle in 1557.
He had been initiated in the classics at an early age. He had been taught Latin as a first language. By seven or eight, he had read Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Before he was sixteen, he had bought a set of Virgil and knew intimately the Aeneid, as well as Terence, Plautus and the Commentaries of Caesar. And such was his devotion to books that, after working as a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux for thirteen years, he retired with the idea of devoting himself entirely to them. Reading was the solace of his life:
It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.
But the library shelves, with their implication of an unbounded admiration for the life of the mind, did not tell the full story. One had to look more closely around the library, stand in the middle of the room and tilt one’s head to the ceiling: in the mid-1570s Montaigne had a set of fifty-seven short inscriptions culled from the Bible and the classics painted across the wooden beams, and these suggested some profound reservations about the benefits of having a mind:
(Ill. 15.6)
The happiest life is to be without thought. – Sophocles
Have you seen a man who thinks he is wise? You have more to hope for from a madman than from him. – Proverbs
There is nothing certain but uncertainty, nothing more miserable and more proud than man. – Pliny
Everything is too complicated for men to be able to understand. – Ecclesiastes
Ancient philosophers had believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. Reason allowed us to control our passions and to correct the false notions prompted by our instincts. Reason tempered the wild demands of our bodies and led us to a balanced relationship with our appetites for food and sex. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves.
In the Tusculan Disputations, of which there was a copy in the round library, Cicero had heaped praise upon the benefits of intellectual work:
There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity of matter, the immense grandeur of Nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety, moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything in between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation.
Though he owned a thousand books and had benefited from a fine classical education, this laudation so infuriated Montaigne, it ran so contrary to the spirit of the library beams, that he expressed his indignation with uncharacteristic ferocity:
Man is a wretched creature … just listen to him bragging … Is this fellow describing the properties of almighty and everlasting God! In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].
The Roman philosopher had overlooked how violently unhappy most scholars were; he had arrogantly disregarded the appalling troubles for which human beings, alone among all other creatures, had been singled out – troubles which might in dark moments leave us regretting that we had not been born ants or tortoises.
Or goats. I found her in the yard of a farm a few kilometres from Montaigne’s château, in the hamlet of Les Gauchers.
(Ill. 15.7)
She had never read the Tusculan Disputations nor Cicero’s On the Laws. And yet she seemed content, nibbling at stray pieces of lettuce, occasionally shaking her head like an elderly woman expressing quiet disagreement. It was not an unenviable existence.
Montaigne was himself struck by, and elaborated upon the advantages of living as an animal rather than as a reasoning human with a large library. Animals knew instinctively how to help themselves when they were sick: goats could pick out dittany from a thousand other plants if they were wounded, tortoises automatically looked for origanum when they were bitten by vipers, and storks could give themselves salt-water enemas. By contrast, humans were forced to rely on expensive, misguided doctors (medicine chests were filled with absurd prescriptions: ‘the urine of a lizard, the droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon, and for those of us with colic paroxysms, triturated rat shit’).
Animals also instinctively understood complex ideas without suffering long periods of study. Tunny-fish were spontaneous experts in astrology. ‘Wherever they may be when they are surprised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the following equinox,’ reported Montaigne. They understood geometry and arithmetic, too, for they swam together in groups in the shape of a perfect cube: ‘If you count one line of them you have the count of the whole school, since the same figure applies to their depth, breadth and length.’ Dogs had an innate grasp of dialectical logic. Montaigne mentioned one who, looking for his master, came upon a three-pronged fork in the road. He first looked down one road, then another, and then ran down the third after concluding that his master must have chosen it:
Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and copulative propositions and adequately enumerated the parts. Does it matter whether he learned all this from himself or from the
Dialectica
of George of Trebizond?
Animals frequently had the upper hand in love as well. Montaigne read enviously of an elephant who had fallen in love with a flower-seller in Alexandria. When being led through the market, he knew how to slip his wrinkled trunk through her neckband and would massage her breasts with a dexterity no human could match.
And without trying, the humblest farm animal could exceed the philosophical detachment of the wisest sages of antiquity. The Greek philosopher Pyrrho once travelled on a ship which ran into a fierce storm. All around him passengers began to panic, afraid that the mutinous waves would shatter their fragile craft. But one passenger did not lose his composure and sat quietly in a corner, wearing a tranquil expression. He was a pig:
Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we should enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig?
It was questionable whether the mind gave us anything to be grateful for:
We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive.
If offered a choice, Montaigne would in the end perhaps not have opted to live as a goat – but only just. Cicero had presented the benevolent picture of reason. Sixteen centuries later, it was for Montaigne to introduce the adverse:
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
.
– the biggest blockheads of all being philosophers like Cicero who had never suspected they might even be such things. Misplaced confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy – and, indirectly, also of inadequacy.
Beneath his painted beams, Montaigne had outlined a new kind of philosophy, one which acknowledged how far we were from the rational, serene creatures whom most of the ancient thinkers had taken us to be. We were for the most part hysterical and demented, gross and agitated souls beside whom animals were in many respects paragons of health and virtue – an unfortunate reality which philosophy was obliged to reflect, but rarely did:
Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.
And yet if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery we did not have, we stood to find – in Montaigne’s generous, redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate in our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way.
2
On Sexual Inadequacy
How problematic to have both a body and a mind, for the former stands in almost monstrous contrast to the latter’s dignity and intelligence. Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of hyenas calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms. Our whole perspective on life can be altered by the digestion of a heavy lunch. ‘I feel quite a different person before and after a meal,’ concurred Montaigne:
When good health and a fine sunny day smile at me, I am quite debonair; give me an ingrowing toe-nail, and I am touchy, bad-tempered and unapproachable.
Even the greatest philosophers have not been spared bodily humiliation. ‘Imagine Plato struck down by epilepsy or apoplexy,’ proposed Montaigne, ‘then challenge him to get any help from all those noble and splendid faculties of his soul.’ Or imagine that in the middle of a symposium, Plato had been struck by a need to fart:
That sphincter which serves to discharge our stomachs has dilations and contractions proper to itself, independent of our wishes or even opposed to them.
Montaigne heard of a man who knew how to fart at will, and on occasion arranged a sequence of farts in a metrical accompaniment to poetry, but such mastery did not contravene his general observation that our bodies have the upper hand over our minds, and that the sphincter is ‘most indiscreet and disorderly’. Montaigne even heard a tragic case of one behind ‘so stormy and churlish that it has obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and unremittingly for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.’
No wonder we may be tempted to deny our uncomfortable, insulting coexistence with these vessels. Montaigne met a woman who, acutely aware of how repulsive her digestive organs were, tried to live as though she didn’t have any:
[This] lady (amongst the greatest) … shares the opinion that chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; so when hungry, she avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he fills his belly than when he empties it.
Montaigne knew men so overwhelmed by their sexual longings that they ended their torment through castration. Others tried to suppress their lust by applying snow-and-vinegar compresses to their overactive testicles. The Emperor Maximilian, conscious of a conflict between being regal and having a body, ordered that no one should see him naked, particularly below the waist. He expressly requested in his will that he be buried in a set of linen underpants. ‘He should have added a codicil,’ noted Montaigne, ‘saying that the man who pulled them on ought to be blindfolded.’
However drawn we may be towards such radical measures, Montaigne’s philosophy is one of reconciliation: ‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.’ Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition, neither so terrible nor so humiliating.
In the summer of 1993, L. and I travelled to northern Portugal for a holiday. We drove along the villages of the Minho, then spent a few days south of Viana do Castelo. It was here, on the last night of our holiday, in a small hotel overlooking the sea, that I realized – quite without warning – that I could no longer make love. It would hardly have been possible to surmount, let alone mention the experience, if I had not, a few months before going to Portugal, come across the twenty-first chapter of the first volume of Montaigne’s Essays.
The author recounted therein that a friend of his had heard a man explain how he had lost his erection just as he prepared to enter a woman. The embarrassment of the detumescence struck Montaigne’s friend with such force, that the next time he was in bed with a woman, he could not banish it from his mind, and the fear of the same catastrophe befalling him grew so overwhelming that it prevented his own penis from stiffening. From then on, however much he desired a woman, he could not attain an erection, and the ignoble memory of every misadventure taunted and tyrannized him with increasing force.
Montaigne’s friend had grown impotent after failing to achieve the unwavering rational command over his penis that he assumed to be an indispensable feature of normal manhood. Montaigne did not blame the penis: ‘Except for genuine impotence, never again are you incapable if you are capable of doing it once.’ It was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform. The solution was to redraw the portrait; it was by accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless possibility in love-making that one could preempt its occurrence – as the stricken man eventually discovered. In bed with a woman, he learnt to:
admit beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity and spoke openly about it, so relieving the tensions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be expected, his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily on him.
Montaigne’s frankness allowed the tensions in the reader’s own soul to be relieved. The penis’s abrupt moods were removed from the Cimmerian recesses of wordless shame and reconsidered with the unshockable, worldly eye of a philosopher whom nothing bodily could repulse. A sense of personal culpability was lessened by what Montaigne described as:
[The universal] disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it.
A man who failed with his mistress and was unable to do any more than mumble an apology could regain his forces and soothe the anxieties of his beloved by accepting that his impotence belonged to a broad realm of sexual mishaps, neither very rare nor very peculiar. Montaigne knew a Gascon nobleman who, after failing to maintain an erection with a woman, fled home, cut off his penis and sent it to the lady ‘to atone for his offence’. Montaigne proposed instead that:
If [couples] are not ready, they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better … to wait for an opportune moment … a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all.
It was a new language, unsensational and intimate, with which to articulate the loneliest moments of our sexuality. Cutting a path into the private sorrows of the bedchamber, Montaigne drained them of their ignominy, attempting all the while to reconcile us to our bodily selves. His courage in mentioning what is secretly lived but rarely heard expands the range of what we can dare to express to our lovers and to ourselves – a courage founded on Montaigne’s conviction that nothing that can happen to man is inhuman, that ‘every man bears the whole Form of the human condition,’ a condition which includes – we do not need to blush nor hate ourselves for it – the risk of an occasional rebellious flaccidity in the penis.
Montaigne attributed our problems with our bodies in part to an absence of honest discussion about them in polite circles. Representative stories and images do not tend to identify feminine grace with a strong interest in love-making, nor authority with the possession of a sphincter or penis. Pictures of kings and ladies do not encourage us to think of these eminent souls breaking wind or making love. Montaigne filled out the picture in blunt, beautiful French:
Au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul
.
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Les Roys et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi
.
Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.
King Henri III (Ill. 16.1)
Catherine de’ Medici (Ill. 16.2)
He could have put it otherwise. Instead of ‘cul’, ‘derrière’ or ‘fesses’. Instead of ‘fienter’, ‘aller au cabinet’. Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (for the furtherance of young Learners, and the advantage of all others that endeavour to arrive at the most exactly knowledge of the French language), printed in London in 1611, explained that ‘fienter’ referred particularly to the excretions of vermin and badgers. If Montaigne felt the need for such strong language, it was to correct an equally strong denial of the body in works of philosophy and in drawing rooms. The view that ladies never had to wash their hands and kings had no behinds had made it timely to remind the world that they shat and had arses:
The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words
kill
,
thieve
, or
betray
; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.
In the vicinity of Montaigne’s château were several beech-tree forests, one to the north near the village of Castillon-la-Bataille, another to the east near St Vivien. Montaigne’s daughter Léonor must have known their silences and their grandeur. She was not encouraged to know their name: the French for ‘beech tree’ is ‘fouteau’. The French for ‘fuck’ is ‘foutre’.
‘My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry,’ Montaigne explained of Léonor, then about fourteen:
She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw off her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when she came across the name of that well-known tree
fouteau
. The woman she has for governess pulled her up short rather rudely and made her jump over that awkward ditch.
Twenty coarse lackeys could not, Montaigne wryly remarked, have taught Léonor more about what lurked beneath ‘fouteau’ than a stern injunction to longjump over the word. But for the governess, or the ‘old crone’ as her employer more bluntly termed her, the leap was essential because a young woman could not easily combine dignity with a knowledge of what might occur if in a few years’ time she found herself in a bedroom with a man.
Montaigne was faulting our conventional portraits for leaving out so much of what we are. It was in part in order to correct this that he wrote his own book. When he retired at the age of thirty-eight, he wished to write, but was unsure what his theme should be. Only gradually did an idea form in his mind for a book so unusual as to be unlike any of the thousand volumes on the semicircular shelves.
He abandoned millennia of authorial coyness to write about himself. He set out to describe as explicitly as possible the workings of his own mind and body – declaring his intention in the preface to the Essays, two volumes of which were published in Bordeaux in 1580, with a third added in a Paris edition eight years later:
Had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked.
No author had hitherto aspired to present himself to his readers without any clothes on. There was no shortage of official, fully clothed portraits, accounts of the lives of saints and popes, Roman emperors and Greek statesmen. There was even an official portrait of Montaigne by Thomas de Leu (1562–c. 1620), which showed him dressed in the mayoral robes of the city, with the chain of the order of Saint-Michel offered to him by Charles IX in 1571, wearing an inscrutable, somewhat severe expression.
(Ill. 16.3)
But this robed, Ciceronian self was not what Montaigne wished his Essays to reveal. He was concerned with the whole man, with the creation of an alternative to the portraits which had left out most of what man was. It was why his book came to include discussions of his meals, his penis, his stools, his sexual conquests and his farts – details which had seldom featured in a serious book before, so gravely did they flout man’s image of himself as a rational creature. Montaigne informed his readers:
That the behaviour of his penis constituted an essential part of his identity
:
Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait complete.
That he found sex noisy and messy
:
Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as flawed or ridiculous. Just try and find a wise and discreet way of doing it!
That he liked quiet when sitting on the toilet
:
Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being disrupted.
And that he was very regular about going
:
My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous, which is (unless some urgent business or illness disturbs us) when I jump out of bed.
If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.
When I picture to myself the most reflective and the most wise of men in [sexual] postures, I hold it as an effrontery that he should claim to be reflective and wise.
It is not that wisdom is impossible, rather it is the definition of wisdom that Montaigne was seeking to nuance. True wisdom must involve an accommodation with our baser selves, it must adopt a modest view about the role that intelligence and high culture can play in any life and accept the urgent and at times deeply un-edifying demands of our mortal frame. Epicurean and Stoic philosophies had suggested that we could achieve mastery over our bodies, and never be swept away by our physical and passionate selves. It is noble advice that taps into our highest aspirations. It is also impossible, and therefore counter-productive:
What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power?
It is not very clever of [man] to tailor his obligations to the standards of a different kind of being.
The body cannot be denied nor overcome, but there is at least, as Montaigne wished to remind the ‘old crone’, no need to choose between our dignity and an interest in fouteau:
May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart?
3
On Cultural Inadequacy
Another cause of a sense of inadequacy is the speed and arrogance with which people seem to divide the world into two camps, the camp of the normal and that of the abnormal. Our experiences and beliefs are liable frequently to be dismissed with a quizzical, slightly alarmed, ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow, amounting in a small way to a denial of our legitimacy and humanity.
In the summer of 1580, Montaigne acted on the desire of a lifetime, and made his first journey outside France, setting off on horseback to Rome via Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He travelled in the company of four young noblemen, including his brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, and a dozen servants. They were to be away from home for seventeen months, covering 3,000 miles. Among other towns, the party rode through Basle, Baden, Schaffhausen, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence and Siena – finally reaching Rome towards evening on the last day of November 1580.
As the party travelled, Montaigne observed how people’s ideas of what was normal altered sharply from province to province. In inns in the Swiss cantons, they thought it normal that beds should be raised high off the ground, so that one needed steps to climb into them, that there should be pretty curtains around them and that travellers should have rooms to themselves. A few miles away, in Germany, it was thought normal that beds should be low on the ground, have no curtains around them and that travellers should sleep four to a room. Innkeepers there offered feather quilts rather than the sheets one found in French inns. In Basle, people didn’t mix water with their wine and had six or seven courses for dinner, and in Baden they ate only fish on Wednesdays. The smallest Swiss village was guarded by at least two policemen; the Germans rang their bells every quarter of an hour, in certain towns, every minute. In Lindau, they served soup made of quinces, the meat dish came before the soup, and the bread was made with fennel.
French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne watched them from his table:
Once out of their villages, they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-countryman … they celebrate the event … With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, in the southern German states, a new method of heating homes had been developed: the Kastenofen, a freestanding box-shaped iron stove made up of rectangular plates bolted together, in which coal or wood could be burnt. In the long winters, the advantages were great. Closed stoves could dispense four times the heat of an open fire, yet demanded less fuel and no chimney-sweeps. The heat was absorbed by the casing and spread slowly and evenly through the air. Poles were fixed around the stoves for airing and drying laundry, and families could use their stoves as seating areas throughout the winter.
(Ill. 17.1)
But the French were not impressed. They found open fires cheaper to build; they accused German stoves of not providing a source of light and of withdrawing too much moisture from the air, lending an oppressive feeling to a room.
(Ill. 17.2)
The subject was a matter of regional incomprehension. In Augsburg in October 1580, Montaigne met a German who delivered a lengthy critique of the way French people heated their houses with open fires, and who then went on to adumbrate the advantages of the iron stove. On hearing that Montaigne would be spending only a few days in the town (he had arrived on the 15th and was to leave on the 19th), he expressed pity for him, citing among the chief inconveniences of leaving Augsburg the ‘heavy-headedness’ he would suffer on returning to open fires – the very same ‘heavy-headedness’ which the French had long condemned iron stoves for provoking.
Montaigne examined the issue at close quarters. In Baden, he was assigned a room with an iron stove, and once he had grown used to a certain smell it released, spent a comfortable night. He noted that the stove enabled him to dress without putting on a furred gown, and months later, on a cold night in Italy, expressed regret at the absence of stoves in his inn.
On his return home, he weighed up the respective qualities of each heating system:
It is true that the stoves give out an oppressive heat and that the materials of which they are built produce a smell when hot which causes headaches in those who are not used to them … On the other hand, since the heat they give out is even, constant and spread all-over, without the visible flame, smoke and the draught produced by our chimneys, it has plenty of grounds for standing comparison with ours.
So what annoyed Montaigne were the firm, unexamined convictions of both the Augsburg gentleman and the French that their own system of heating was superior. Had Montaigne returned from Germany and installed in his library an iron stove from Augsburg, his countrymen would have greeted the object with the suspicion they accorded anything new:
Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.
When there was of course nothing barbarous nor wondrous about either a stove or a fireplace. The definition of normality proposed by any given society seems to capture only a fraction of what is in fact reasonable, unfairly condemning vast areas of experience to an alien status. By pointing out to the man from Augsburg and his Gascon neighbours that an iron stove and an open fireplace had a legitimate place in the vast realm of acceptable heating systems, Montaigne was attempting to broaden his readers’ provincial conception of the normal – and following in the footsteps of his favourite philosopher:
When they asked Socrates where he came from, he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world.’
This world had recently revealed itself to be far more peculiar than anyone in Europe had ever expected. On Friday 12 October 1492, forty-one years before Montaigne’s birth, Christopher Columbus reached one of the islands on the archipelago of the Bahamas at the entrance of the gulf of Florida, and made contact with some Guanahani Indians, who had never heard of Jesus and walked about without any clothes on.
Montaigne took an avid interest. In the round library were several books on the life of the Indian tribes of America, among them Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s L’histoire générale des Indes, Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia de mondo novo and Jean de Léry’s Le voyage au Brésil. He read that in South America, people liked to eat spiders, grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: ‘They cook them and serve them up in various sauces.’ There were American tribes in which virgins openly displayed their private parts, brides had orgies on their wedding day, men were allowed to marry each other, and the dead were boiled, pounded into a gruel, mixed with wine and drunk by their relatives at spirited parties. There were countries in which women stood up to pee and men squatted down, in which men let their hair grow on the front of their body, but shaved their back. There were countries in which men were circumcised, while in others, they had a horror of the tip of the penis ever seeing the light of day and so ‘scrupulously stretched the foreskin right over it and tied it together with little cords’. There were nations in which you greeted people by turning your back to them, in which when the king spat, the court favourite held out a hand, and when he discharged his bowels, attendants ‘gathered up his faeces in a linen cloth’. Every country seemed to have a different conception of beauty:
In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, artificially. A man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in their lobes. Elsewhere there are whole nations which carefully blacken their teeth and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red … The women of Mexico count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck the hair from the rest of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it artificially. They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they affect giving suck to their children over their shoulders.
From Jean de Léry, Montaigne learned that the Tupi tribes of Brazil walked around in Edenic nudity, and showed no trace of shame (indeed, when Europeans tried to offer the Tupi women clothes, they giggled and turned them down, puzzled why anyone would burden themselves with anything so uncomfortable).
Tant les hommes que la femme étaient aussi entièrement nus que quand ils sortirent du ventre de leur mère. Jean de Léry, Voyage au Brésil (1578) (Ill. 17.3)
De Léry’s engraver (who had spent eight years with the tribes) took care to correct the rumour rife in Europe that the Tupis were as hairy as animals (de Léry: ‘Ils ne sont point naturellement poilus que nous ne sommes en ce pays’). The men shaved their heads, and the women grew their hair long, and tied it together with pretty red braids. The Tupi Indians loved to wash; any time they saw a river, they would jump into it and rub each other down. They might wash as many as twelve times a day.
They lived in long barn-like structures which slept 200 people. Their beds were woven from cotton and slung between pillars like hammocks (when they went hunting, the Tupis took their beds with them, and had afternoon naps suspended between trees). Every six months, a village would move to a new location, because the inhabitants felt a change of scene would do them good (‘Ils n’ont d’autre réponse, sinon de dire que changeant l’air, ils se portent mieux’ – de Léry). The Tupis’ existence was so well ordered, they frequently lived to be a hundred and never had white or grey hair in old age. They were also extremely hospitable. When a newcomer arrived in a village, the women would cover their faces, start crying, and exclaim, ‘How are you? You’ve taken such trouble to come and visit us!’ Visitors would immediately be offered the favourite Tupi drink, made from the root of a plant and coloured like claret, which tasted sharp but was good for the stomach.
Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said to be devoted to them all. ‘Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love of their wives,’ reported Montaigne. And the wives were apparently happy with the arrangement, showing no jealousy (sexual relations were relaxed, the only prohibition being that one should never sleep with close relatives). Montaigne, with his wife downstairs in the castle, relished the detail:
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