The Consolations of Philosophy

by Alain De Botton

  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.