Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French 20th-century philosopher and historian who spent his career forensically critiquing the power of the modern bourgeois capitalist state, including its police, law courts, prisons, doctors and psychiatrists. His goal was to work out nothing less than how power worked and then to change it in the direction of a Marxist-anarchist utopia. Though he spent most of his life in libraries and seminar rooms, he was a committedly revolutionary figure, who met with enormous popularity in elite Parisian intellectual circles (Jean Paul Sartre admired him deeply) and still maintains a wide following among young people studying at university in the prosperous corners of the world.

His background, which he was extremely reluctant ever to talk about – and tried to prevent journalists from investigating at all costs – was extremely privileged. Both his parents were very rich, coming from a long line of successful surgeons in Poitiers in west-central France. His father, Dr Paul Foucault, came to represent all that Michel would hate about bourgeois France.

Michel had a standard upper-class education, he went to elite Jesuit institutions, was an altar boy and his parents hoped he would become a doctor.

But Michel wasn’t quite like other boys. He started self-harming and thinking constantly of suicide. At university, he decorated his bedroom with images of torture by Goya. When he was 22, he tried to commit suicide and was forced by his father, against his will, to see France’s most famous psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris.

The doctor wisely diagnosed that a lot of Michel’s distress just came from having to keep his homosexuality and, in particular, his interest in extreme sadomasochism away from a censorious society.

Gradually, Foucault entered the underground gay scene in France, fell in love with a drug dealer, and then took up with a transvestite. For long periods in his 20s, he went to live abroad, in Sweden, Poland and Germany, where he felt his sexuality would be less constrained.

All the while, Foucault was progressing up the French academic ladder. The seismic event of his intellectual life came in the summer of 1953, when Foucault was 27 – and on holiday with a lover in Italy.

There he came across Nietzsche’s book, Untimely Meditations, which contains an essay called “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”.

In the essay, Nietzsche argued that academics had poisoned our sense of how history should be read and taught. They made it seem as if one should read history in some sort of disinterested way, in order to learn, how it all was in the past. But Nietzsche rejected this with sarcastic fury. There was no point learning about the past for its own sake. The only reason to read and study history is to dig out from the past ideas, concepts and examples which can help us to lead a better life in our own times.

This liberated Foucault intellectually as nothing else ever had until then. Immediately, he changed the direction of his work – and decided to become a particular kind of philosophical historian, someone who could look back into the past to help to sort out the urgent issues of his own time.

Eight years later, he was ready to publish what’s recognised as his first masterpiece:

Madness and Civilisation, 1961

The standard view is that we now treat people with mental illnesses in so much more of a humane way than we ever did in the past. After all, we put them in hospitals, give them drugs, and get them looked after by people with PhDs.

But this was exactly the attitude that Foucault wished to demolish in Madness and Civilisation. In the book, he argued that things way back in the Renaissance were actually far better for the mad than they had subsequently become.

In the Renaissance, the mad were felt to be different rather than crazy. They were thought to possess a kind of wisdom – because they demonstrated the limits of reason. They were revered in some circles, and were allowed to wander freely.

But then, as Foucault’s historical researches showed him, in the mid-17th century, a new attitude was born that relentlessly medicalised and institutionalised mentally ill people. No longer were they allowed to live alongside the so-called sane, they were taken away from their families, and locked up in asylums and seen as people one should try to ‘cure’ rather than tolerate for just being different.

You can recognise a very similar underlying philosophy in Foucault’s next great book:

The Birth of the Clinic, 1963

His target here was medicine more broadly. He systematically attacked the view that medicine had become more humane with time. He conceded that of course we have better drugs and treatments now, but he believed that in the 18th century, the professional doctor was born, and that he was a sinister figure who would look at the patient always with what Foucault called “the medical gaze,” denoting a dehumanising attitude that looked at a patient just as a set of organs not a person. One was, under the medical gaze, merely a malfunctioning kidney or liver, not a person to be considered as a whole entity.

Next in Foucault’s oeuvre came: 

Discipline and Punish, 1975

Here Foucault did his standard thing on state punishment. Again, the standard view is that the prison and punishing system of the modern world is much much more humane than it was in the days when people were hung in public squares. Not so, argued Foucault. The problem, he said, is that power now looks kind but isn’t, whereas in the past, it clearly wasn’t kind and therefore, could encourage open rebellion and protest.

Foucault noted that in the past, at an execution, a convict’s body could become a focus of sympathy and admiration, and the executioner rather than the convict could become the locus of shame; also, public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner. But with the invention of the modern prison, everything happened in private behind locked gates; one could no longer see and therefore resist state power. That’s what made the modern system of punishment so barbaric and properly primitive in Foucault’s eyes.

Foucault’s last work was the multivolume: 

The History of Sexuality, 1976-1984

The manoeuvres he performed in relation to sex are again very familiar. Foucault rebelled against the view that we are all now deeply liberated and at ease with sex. He argued that since the 18th century, we have relentlessly medicalised sex, handing it over to professional sex researchers and scientists. We live in an age of what Foucault called “scientia sexualis” – science of sexuality.

Foucault looked back in nostalgia to the cultures of Rome, China and Japan where he detected the rule of what he called an ars erotica (“erotic art”) where the whole focus was on how to increase the pleasure of sex rather than merely understand and label it. Once again, modernity was blamed for pretending there’d been progress, when there was just loss of spontaneity and imagination.

Foucault wrote the last volume of this work while dying of AIDS. He died in 1984, aged 58.

***

Foucault’s lasting contribution is to the way we look at history. There are lots of things in the modern world that we’re constantly being told are fantastic – and were apparently rather bad in the past. For example:

- Education

- The media

- Or our communication systems

© Flickr/Roel Wijnants

Foucault encourages us to break away from our optimistic smugness about now to see that, in many ways, there were good things lurking in earlier times.

Foucault wasn’t trying to get us to be nostalgic, he wanted us to pick up the lessons of way back in order to improve how we live now.

Academic historians have tended to hate Foucault’s work. They think it is inaccurate and keep pointing out things he hadn’t quite understood in some document or other. But Foucault didn’t care for total historical accuracy. History for him was just a storehouse of good ideas and he wanted to raid it, rather than keep it pristine, and untouched.

We should use Foucault as an inspiration to look at the dominant ideas and institutions of our times – and to question them by looking at their histories and evolutions.

Foucault did something remarkable: he made history life enhancing and philosophically rich again. He can be an inspiring figure for our own projects.

There’s nothing very natural about caring for nature. The standard impulse has often been to conquer and tame the natural world: to clear the forest, hunt the animals, drain the marshes and extract whatever materials we can from the depths of the earth. For a very long time this seemed heroic and benign.  Human efforts were on a puny scale in comparison with the apparently boundless abundance of the world. It’s only very recently that that we have become capable – collectively – of damaging the planet and exhausting some of its resources. 

We learn to care for nature when someone is on hand to guide our emotions: to point out the beauty and intricacy of the butterfly, the awesome force and purity of the sea, the economy and grace of the oak tree…

In the most destructive and polluting country mankind has ever known, that person was – for a generation – Rachel Carson. A scientist and writer, almost single-handedly, Carson taught her fellow Americans to respect nature and recognise that they were in the process of destroying it at a faster rate than any previous civilisation – and would be in dire trouble if they did not alter their arrogant ways at the earliest opportunity.

At first glance, Carson’s work seems to be a simple and urgent warning against the dangers of new agricultural technologies (especially noxious chemicals), but her writing is far from being a dry polemic against environmental degradation. Carson understood – like too few environmentalists before and after – that in order for her cause to gain traction in a democratic consumer society, she had to charm her audience into loving nature. It wasn’t enough to make them feel guilty about what their consumerism and greed were doing to the world; what she had to do was to make them fall in love with the seas, the forests and the prairies in order that they would stand any chance of wanting to alter their ways.

At the very end of her life, Carson wrote a book specifically for children, beautifully illustrated with photographs of nature. She called it The Sense of Wonder, and tried to guide parents to teach their children to feel close to the earth and its miraculous creations from the earliest age:

‘A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.’

Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) was born and raised on a small family farm in Pennsylvania, where she learned to love animals and nature from her earliest years. In a time when it was unusual for women to have further education, she went to Chatham University and studied a distinctive mixture of English and Biology. She then began a PhD at Johns Hopkins University, where, after some frustrating and fruitless studies involving pit vipers and squirrels, she finally published a Master’s dissertation on the excretory systems of fish. However, she had to leave this topic (and higher education altogether) in order to support her struggling family – after first her father, then her sister, and finally her niece all died tragically young in quick succession.

This was at the time of the Great Depression, when many United States government agencies were creating new jobs – some of them quite peculiar – to shorten unemployment lines. By chance, Carson secured a job writing radio broadcasts for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. The series was called “Romance under the Waters” and was designed to educate Americans about marine biology and the importance of the work of the bureau itself. Carson soon discovered an exceptional knack for making the lives of aquatic animals sound interesting to the general public. She wrote about eels, whelks and crabs, about the Atlantic stargazer, the gulf pipefish and the Remo flounder – and gripped her audiences. “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there,’ she wrote modestly, ‘but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

But poetry there certainly was – and it was her genius to know how to express it:

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor […] where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night.”

Eventually, Carson wrote three books about the sea. One was a particularly poetic meditation (Under the Sea Wind, 1941); a second (The Sea Around Us, 1951) looked at the migratory and seasonal patterns of sea creatures; another focused on coastal ecosystems and their resilience and importance (The Edge of the Sea, 1955). She had a talent for encouraging readers to abandon their normal myopic human points of view so as to learn to consider existence from the perspective of a painted goby or an ocean pout. She understood that scientific facts would never be enough to stir a population distracted by commercial television and demanding jobs, that she needed the gifts of a great writer to help to save the planet.

She wanted to promote identification with the whole of the earth: so that humans would learn to consider themselves a part of something unfathomable, beautiful and fragile, rather than merely the appointed masters and destroyers of ‘resources’. Her gifts reached their climax in her most subtle, impassioned and moving book, Silent Spring (1962).

The book’s main topic was – from a distance – rather unpromising: pesticides. Yet this was a book that would sell 20 million copies and change the course of history.

In the late 1950s, the United States Federal Government had begun mass-producing chemical pesticides developed in military-funded laboratories. The most popular was dichlorodiphenlytrichloroethane (DDT), originally designed to rid Pacific islands of malaria-carrying bugs during the Second World War. DDT was so effective and apparently so beneficial that its inventor, Paul Hermann Müller, was awarded a Nobel prize.

However, DDT turned out to be a Frankenstein-ian invention. It gradually emerged that it killed not only malaria-bearing insects, but also for months afterwards, any kind of insect whatsoever. Moreover, DDT ran off with rainwater, drained into streams and aquifers and poisoned fish, moles, rats, foxes, rabbits and pretty much anything else alive. Applications of DDT had the power to contaminate the world’s food supply, as well as collect in carcinogenic ways in the fatty tissues of humans.

The book caused outrage. Although Carson was an established author, magazines and newspapers shunned her arguments. Scientists who had helped develop DDT and the companies they worked for angrily disputed the dangers of the pesticide. Companies like Monsanto published polemics against the work and launched snide rumours about its author. The executive of one company raged, “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Ezra Taft Benson, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, wrote to President Eisenhower that, since Carson was physically attractive yet unmarried, she was “probably a communist.” (In fact, she may simply have been too busy writing scientific texts, or – possibly – had a romantic friendship with a close female friend).

Despite the efforts of corporations and their political allies, Silent Spring broke through. Expecting criticism from the chemical industry, Carson had prepared the book as though it were a lawsuit, and included 55 pages of notes at the end to prove her points. Her arguments were bullet-proof.

The title, Silent Spring, provided a terrifying image of a world without songbirds, or almost any kind of natural life whatsoever. It opened with a depiction of a nameless small American town, full of consumer conveniences, slick gadgets and cheap food outlets, but without robins or ladybirds, larks or squirrels. A world ostensibly altered for the convenience of human beings would end up being no world for humans at all.

Carson urged us to leave nature alone: when abandoned to its own devices, nature would itself fight against insect over-population. But if man intercepted, unwanted populations would eventually become resistant to all poisons and then balloon rapidly, because the insects that kept pests in check would unwittingly also have been killed.

Carson concluded that scientists (and modern human beings generally) are philosophically naive enough to assume that nature is a force to be controlled at will, rather than a fierce, complex and vast entity that responds unpredictably to any human action. She suggested that human beings should think more creatively about how to prevent insect damage, for example, by sterilising insects, or using the same chemical “lures” insects use to catch each other, or by using sound at a specific frequency to destroy larvae. Turning towards the larger issue of humans and their environment, she then reminded readers that dealing with nature would always require an appreciation, respect, and awe of nature, and an understanding that that it is a force largely beyond human control and full comprehension.

With her lyrical style of writing, her defence of the primitive and her love of nature, Carson was – for a scientific age – an heir to David Henry Thoreau. Like Thoreau, Carson’s work was guided by a sense of responsibility towards the earth, the seas and the skies. Like Thoreau, Carson saw them as sources of psychological health and wisdom. By learning to live more closely attuned to their cycles, to their subtle processes, and to their very simplicity, humans would have access to a nourishing wisdom and an inoculation against the psychological ills of modern life.

Carson died from breast cancer shortly after the publication of Silent Spring, yet her work has endured. The book quickly became a critical influence on the nascent environmental movement. Not only was DDT strictly controlled and eventually banned (both in the US and abroad), Carson’s views on nature became part of our common consciousness. We are, thanks in large part to her, now able to think of ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem that is sharply imperilled by our activities and needs to be treated with the utmost humility and care.

Carson revealed that what might have seemed like an arcane technical matter (getting rid of pests in midwestern corn fields) was ultimately a metaphysical and moral issue. At heart, good stewardship of the earth requires us to understand both our scientific strength and our distinctive moral stupidity and imaginative blindness.

In her posthumously published book for children, The Sense of Wonder, Carson shook off the mantle of the scientist to speak to us in the plainest, most moving terms about how to love the small blue mothership that sustains us:

“One stormy autumn night when my nephew Roger was about twenty months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, just at the eve of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy—he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me. But I think we felt the same spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.”

Winslow Homer, Moonlight, 1874

It is perhaps her most racial idea of all: that it is love, rather than guilt,  which is the key to transforming humanity’s relationship to nature.

We tend to get pretty nervous around the idea of political art. Some terrible things have been done in its name: it’s encouraged fanaticism, demonised vulnerable groups and pumped out delusional propaganda. But despite our misgivings, our collective existence is very much in need of help from art. And in the late twentieth century, the creative partnership of Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been the leading explorers of how this can happen.

One part of the duo, Christo was born Hristo Vladimirov Yavachev in northern Bulgaria in 1935. 

His businessman father ran a textiles factory. In his twenties, he smuggled himself out of the communist regime on a goods train and made his way, eventually, to Paris. He soon met his lifelong partner and collaborator, the well-connected, charismatic Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. They both knew at first hand all about what can go wrong when art gets involved in politics. 

Together, they created vast, short-lived – and sometimes very beautiful – works to focus our attention on tricky, but important – experiences. They pursued the essential task of political art: to stimulate collective enthusiasm and channel it in really good and helpful directions. 

It’s a bit of an accident of history that we’ve come to think of works of art as being mainly things you can fit through the front door and hang on a wall.  

It’s totally legitimate to wonder why someone would go to the immense trouble of erecting a flimsy, temporary fence running dozens of miles across the Californian desert or take such pains to ensure that several islands are all totally surrounded by pink fabric. They’re not marking the boundaries of someone’s property, preserving wildlife, enhancing agriculture or aquaculture. 

And surrounding an island with pink polypropylene or hammering tens of thousands of fence posts into the soil seems miles away from traditional artistic activities – such as carefully using oil paint and brushes to make a seven-inch-high depiction of a tree on a square of canvas. But, in fact, essentially the same goal is being pursued. It’s just that the strategy is different. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are making the traditional core artistic move. They are getting us to look more closely at some part of experience. Only, they are doing this through the medium of major real world interventions. Instead of making a picture of an island, framing it nicely and exhibiting it in a gallery, they draw attention to an actual island. Instead of carefully copying the gradations of light over the hills and fields, they get us to look more carefully and more intently at the landscape itself. 

Art ideally sets out to compensate for our frailties. And a very basic thing we have trouble with is paying enough attention in the right directions. We continually overlook things (and people) that have something to offer us. We get into ruts: we look only where we’ve looked before.  

When Jeanne-Claude and Christo draped the Pont Neuf in Paris, suddenly a lot of people got excited about the bridge. For many, it had been a bridge they’d crossed regularly all their lives, they’d maybe admired it, in a low-level, back-of-the-mind sort of way. Covering it in fabric is like one’s partner getting dressing up a bit for a special occasion. It refocuses attention. It gets us to see what is marvellous about something we have taken for granted.

Their key work was done in 1995 when they enveloped the entire federal parliament in Berlin in huge fabric draperies. 

The rebirth of national pride. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped Riechstag, June-July 1995

Although a nineteenth-century building, the Reichstag had a particularly painful memory attached to it. The Nazi party rose to power in 1933 on the back not of force (as it might be convenient to believe), but of popular electoral success: the party occupied many seats in this very building. This painful fact has traumatic resonances even today in modern Germany. Still, a vote cast in 1933 hardly entails agreement with every element of party policy up to 1945, let alone the actions of the government over the massacre of European Jewry or the behaviour of its armies on the Eastern front. Nevertheless, the election results are a fraught reminder of collective responsibility. 

Jeanne-Claude and Christo did not change the Reichstag; but by covering and then unveiling it, they set up a grand public opportunity for renewal of the nation’s relationship to its foremost political building. It allowed Germany to give its parliament back to itself. 

Political art can help by giving expression to a collective experience of confession, atonement, grief and renewed good will. It creates a momentous public ritual in which a place associated with horrific events is transformed. 

We might think of their work as intensely modern and cutting edge. But it is, in fact, aligned with a classic conception of what art is for: to seductively edge a society a little closer to collective wisdom and maturity. 

Albert Camus was an extremely handsome mid-20th century French-Algerian philosopher and writer, whose claim to our attention is based on three novels, The Outsider (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956), and two philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951).

Camus won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957 – and died at the age of 46, inadvertently killed by his publisher Michel Gallimard, when his Facel Vega sports car they were were in crashed into a tree. In his pocket was a train ticket he had decided not to use at the last minute.

Camus’s fame began with and still largely rests upon his novel, The Outsider. Set in Camus’s native Algiers, it follows the story of a laconic, detached, ironic hero called Mersault – a man who can’t see the point of love, or work, or friendship – and who one day – somewhat by mistake – shoots dead an Arab man without knowing his own motivations and ends up being put to death – partly because he doesn’t show any remorse, but not really caring for his fate one way or the other.

The novel captures the state of mind defined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim as anomie, a listless, affectless alienated condition where one feels entirely cut off from others and can’t find a way to share any of their sympathies or values.

Emile Durkheim

Reading The Outsider has long been an adolescent right of passage among French and many other teenagers – which isn’t a way of doing it down, for a lot of the greatest themes are first tackled at 17 or so.

The hero of The Outsider, Meursault cannot accept any of the standard answers for why things are the way they are. He sees hypocrisy and sentimentality everywhere – and can’t overlook it. He is a man who cannot accept the normal explanations given to explain things like the education system, the workplace, relationships and the mechanisms of government. He stands outside normal bourgeois life, highly critical of its pinched morality and narrow concerns for money and family.

As Camus put it in an afterword he wrote for the American edition of the book: “Meursault doesn’t play the game. He refuses to lie… he says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings – and so society immediately feels threatened.”

Much of the unusual mesmerising quality of the book comes from the coolly-distant voice in which Meursault speaks to us, his readers.

© Flickr/Han Cheng Yeh

The opening is one of the most legendary in 20th-century literature and sets the tone: “Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

The ending is as stark and as defiant. Meursault, condemned to death for a murder committed almost off-hand, because it can be interesting to know what it’s like to press the trigger, rejects all consolations and heroically accepts the universe’s total indifference to humankind: “My last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”

Even if we are not killers and will ourselves be really quite sad when our mother dies, the mood of The Outsider is one we are all liable to have some experience of… when we have enough freedom to realise we’re in a cage, but not quite enough freedom to escape it… when no one seems to understand… and everything appears a bit hopeless…perhaps in the summer before we go to college.

© Flickr/Joan Sebastián Araújo Arena

Aside from The Outsider, Camus’s fame rests on an essay, published the same year as the novel, called The Myth of Sisyphus.

This book too has a bold beginning:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living, that is the fundamental question of philosophy.”

The reason for this stark choice is, in Camus’s eyes, because as soon as we start to think seriously, as philosophers do, we will see that life has no meaning – and therefore we will be compelled to wonder whether or not we should just be done with it all.

To make sense of this rather extreme claim and thesis, we have to situate Camus in the history of thought. His dramatic announcement that we have to consider killing ourselves because life might be meaningless is premised on a previous notion that life could actually be rich in God-given meaning – a concept which would sound remote to many of us today.

And yet, we have to bear in mind that for the last 2,000 years in the west, a sense that life was meaningful was a given, accorded by one institution above any other: the Christian Church.

Camus stands in a long line of thinkers, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre who wrestle with the chilling realisation that there is in fact no preordained meaning in life. We are just biological matter spinning senselessly on a tiny rock in a corner of an indifferent universe. We were not put here by a benevolent deity and asked to work towards salvation in the shape of 10 commandments or the dictates of the holy gospels. There’s no road map and no bigger point. And it’s this realisation that lies at the heart of so many of the crises reported by the thinkers we now know as Existentialists. 

A child of despairing modernity, Albert Camus accepts that all our lives are absurd in the grander scheme, but – unlike some philosophers – he ends up resisting utter hopelessness or nihilism. He argues that we have to live with the knowledge that our efforts will be largely futile, our lives soon forgotten and our species irredeemably corrupt and violent – and yet should endure nevertheless.

We are like Sisyphus, the Greek figure ordered by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain and to watch it fall back down again – in perpetuity.

But ultimately, Camus suggests, we should cope as well as we can at whatever we have to do. We have to acknowledge the absurd background to existence – and then triumph over the constant possibility of hopelessness. In his famous formulation:

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This brings us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus: the Camus who wants to remind himself and us of the reasons why life can be worth enduring – and who in the process writes with exceptional intensity and wisdom about relationships, nature, the summer, food and friendship.

As a guide to the reasons to live, Camus is delightful. Many philosophers have been ugly and cut off from their bodies.

Think of sickly Pascal

Crippled Leopardi

Sexually-unsuccessful Schopenhauer

Or poor peculiar Nietzsche

Camus was by contrast

- Very good looking

- Extremely successful with women: for the last 10 years of his life, he never had fewer than three girlfriends on the go, and wives as well

- And he had a great dress sense, influenced by James Dean and Humphrey Bogart. It isn’t surprising he was asked to pose by American Vogue

These weren’t all just stylistic quirks. Once you properly realise that life is absurd, you are on the verge of despair perhaps – but also, compelled to live life more intensely. Accordingly, Camus grew committed to, and deeply serious about, the pleasures of ordinary life. He said he saw his philosophy as “a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”

He was a great champion of the ordinary – which generally has a hard time finding champions in philosophy – and after pages and pages of his denser philosophy, one turns with relief to moments when Camus writes in praise of sunshine, kissing and dancing.

Camus was an outstanding athlete as a young man. Once asked by his friend Charles Poncet which he preferred, football or the theatre, Camus is said to have replied, “Football, without hesitation.”

Camus played as goalkeeper for the junior local Algiers team, Racing Universitaire d’Alger (which won both the North African Champions Cup and the North African Cup in the 1930s).

The sense of team spirit, fraternity, and common purpose appealed to Camus enormously. When Camus was asked in the 1950s by a sports magazine for a few words regarding his time with the RUA, he said: “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.” Camus was referring to the morality he defends in his essays: sticking up for your friends and valuing bravery and fair-play.

© Flickr/Don

Camus was a great advocate of the sun. His beautiful essay “Summer in Algiers” celebrates: “the warmth of the water and the brown bodies of women.” He writes: “For the first time in 2,000 years, the body has appeared naked on beaches… For 20 centuries, men have striven to give decency to Greek insolence and naivety, to diminish the flesh and complicate dress. Today, young men running on Mediterranean beaches repeat the gestures of the athletes of Delos.”

He spoke up for a new paganism, based on the immediate pleasures of the body: “I recall a magnificent tall girl who had danced all afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her tight blue dress, wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs. She was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head. As she passed the tables, she left behind her a mingled scent of flowers and flesh…”

© Flickr/Marrickville Library

Camus railed against those who would dismiss such things as trivial and long for something higher, better, purer:

“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the grandeur of this one.”

In a letter he remarked: “People attract me in so far as they are impassioned about life and avid for happiness…”

“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”

Camus achieved huge acclaim in his lifetime, but the Parisian intellectual community was deeply suspicious of him. He never was a Parisian sophisticate. He was a working-class pied-noir (that is, someone born in Algeria but of European origin), whose father had died of war wounds when he was an infant and whose mother was a cleaning lady.

It isn’t a coincidence that Camus’s favourite philosopher was Montaigne – another very down-to-earth Frenchman, and someone one can love as much for what he wrote as for what he was like.

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905. His father, a navy captain, died when he was a baby – and he grew up extremely close to his mother until she remarried, much to his regret, when he was twelve. Sartre spent most of his life in Paris, where he often went to cafes on the Left Bank and sat on benches in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had a strabismus, a wandering eye, and wore distinctive, heavy glasses. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature, but refused it on the grounds that the award was capitalist and bourgeois. He was very short (five feet three inches) and frequently described himself as ugly. He wore his hair vigorously brushed back. When he died in 1980 (aged 74), 50,000 people accompanied his coffin through the streets of Paris.

Sartre became famous as the key figure in the philosophical movement known as Existentialism. He made thinking and philosophy glamorous. He wrote a dense, hard-to-follow book called Being and Nothingness, which enhanced his reputation not so much because people could understand his ideas but because they couldn’t quite. Sartre was the beneficiary of a desire, which became widespread in the second half of the twentieth century, to revere books for the mystery they appeared to touch, rather than for the clarity of their claims.

Existentialism was built around a number of key insights:

One: Things are weirder than we think

Sartre is acutely attentive to moments when the world reveals itself as far stranger and more uncanny than we normally admit; moments when the logic we ascribe to it day-to-day becomes unavailable, showing things to be highly contingent and even absurd and frightening.

Sartre’s first novel – Nausea, published in 1938 – is full of evocations of such moments. At one point, the hero, Roquentin, a 30-year-old writer living in a fictional French seaside town, is on a tram. He puts his hand on the seat, but then pulls it back rapidly. Instead of being the most basic and obvious piece of design, scarcely worth a moment’s notice, the seat promptly strikes him as deeply strange; the word ‘seat’ comes loose from its moorings, the object it refers to shines forth in all its primordial oddity, as if he’s never seen one before – and its material and slight swell makes him think of the repulsive bloated belly of a dead donkey. Roquentin has to force himself to remember that this thing beside him is something for people to sit on. For a terrifying moment, Roquentin has peered into what Sartre calls the ‘absurdity of the world.’

Such a moment goes to the heart of Sartre’s philosophy. To be Sartrean is to be aware of existence as it is when it has been stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines. We can try out a Sartrean perspective on many aspects of our own lives. Think of what you know as ‘the evening meal with your partner’. Under such a description, it all seems fairly logical, but a Sartrean would strip away the surface normality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath. Dinner really means that when your part of the planet has spun away from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion, you slide your knees under strips of a chopped-up tree and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew, while next to you, another mammal whose genitals you sometimes touch is doing the same. Or think of your job through Sartrean eyes: you and many others swathe your bodies in cloth and congregate in a large box where you make agitated sounds at one another; you press many plastic buttons with great rapidity in exchange for pieces of paper. Then you stop and go away. The next time the sky gets light, you come back.

Two: We are free

These weird moments are certainly disorienting and rather scary, but Sartre wants to draw our attention to them for one central reason: because of their liberating dimensions. Life is a lot odder than we think (going to the office, having dinner with a friend, visiting our parents – none of this is obvious or remotely normal), but it’s also as a consequence far richer in possibilities. Things don’t have to be quite the way they are. We’re freer than we allow ourselves to imagine amidst the ordinary press of commitments and obligations. It’s only late at night, or perhaps when we’re ill in bed or taking a long train journey somewhere unfamiliar that we give our minds license to daydream in less conventional directions. These moments are at once unsettling and freeing. We could get out of the house, break off a relationship and never see the person we live with again. We might throw in our jobs, move to another country and reinvent ourselves as someone entirely different.

We are usually full of reasons why none of that would be possible. But through his descriptions of moments of disorientation, Sartre wants to give us access to a different way of thinking. He wants to push us away from the normal, settled perspective to liberate our imaginations: we might not have to keep taking the bus to work, saying things we don’t mean to people we don’t like or sacrificing our vitality for false notions of security.

In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls the ‘anguish’ of existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because nothing has any pre-ordained, God-given sense or purpose. Humans are just making it up as they go along, and are free to cast aside the shackles at any moment. There is nothing in the non-human order of the world called ‘marriage’ or ‘job’. These are just labels we have put on things and are – as proper existentialists – free to take them off again.

This is frightening, hence the term ‘anguish’, but Sartre sees anguish as a mark of maturity, a sign that we are fully alive and properly aware of reality, with its freedom, its possibilities and its weighty choices.

Three: We shouldn’t live in ‘Bad faith’

Sartre gave a term to the phenomenon of living without taking freedom properly on board. He called it ‘bad faith.’

We are in bad faith whenever we tell ourselves that things have to be a certain way and shut our eyes to other options. It is bad faith to insist that we have to do a particular kind of work or live with a specific person or make our home in a given place.

The most famous description of ‘bad faith’ comes in Being and Nothingness, when Sartre notices a waiter who strikes him as overly devoted to his role, as if he were first and foremost a waiter rather than a free human being: ‘His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step that is a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly: his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer…’

Sartre diagnoses him as suffering from bad faith. The man (he was probably modelled on someone in Saint-Germain’s Café de Flore) has convinced himself that he is essentially, necessarily a waiter rather than a free creature who could be a jazz pianist or a fisherman on a North Sea trawler. The same attitude of ingrained, option-less servitude might today be observed in an IT manager or a parent collecting their child from school. Each of these might also feel: I have to do what I am doing, I have no choice, I am not free, my role makes me do what I do.

Realising one’s freedom in an existential sense should not be confused with the American self-help idea that we’re all free to be or do anything without suffering pain or sacrifice. Sartre is far gloomier and more tragic than this. He merely wants to point out that we have more options than we normally believe – even if in some cases the leading option (which Sartre defended vigorously) might be to commit suicide.

Four: We’re free to dismantle Capitalism

The one factor that most discourages people to experience themselves as free is money. Most of us will shut down a range of possible options (moving abroad, trying out a new career, leaving a partner) by saying, ‘that’s if I didn’t have to worry about money.’

This passivity in the face of money enraged Sartre at a political level. He thought of capitalism as a giant machine designed to create a sense of necessity which doesn’t in fact exist in reality: it makes us tell ourselves we have to work a certain number of hours, buy a particular product or service, pay people a specific low fee for their work. But in this, there is only the denial of freedom – and a refusal to take as seriously as we should the possibility of living in other ways.

It was because of these views that Sartre had a life long interest in Marxism (although he was a critic of the USSR and the French Communist Party). Marxism seemed in theory to allow people to explore their freedom, by reducing the role played in their lives by material considerations, money and property.

All this remains a tantalising thought: could we change politics to regain contact with our fundamental freedoms? How could our attitudes to capital change? How many hours a week should one work? How could what’s on TV or where people go on holiday or the school curriculum be better? How could our toxic, propaganda-soaked media be changed?

Despite writing a great deal (he was estimated to have written at least five pages every day of his adult life), Sartre did not pursue these lines of thoughts. He opened up possibilities, but the tasks remain ours to undertake.

Conclusion

Sartre is inspiring in his insistence that things do not have to be the way they are. He is hugely alive to our unfulfilled potential, as individuals and as a species.

He urges us to accept the fluidity of existence and to create new institutions, habits, outlooks and ideas. The admission that life doesn’t have some preordained logic and is not inherently meaningful can be a source of immense relief when we feel oppressed by the weight of tradition and the status quo. Sartre is especially useful to us in adolescence, when parental and social expectations can crush us – and in the darker moments of mid-life, when we recognise there is still a little time to make a change, but no longer quite so much.

A lot of unhappiness comes about in this world because we can’t let other people know what we mean clearly enough. One of the philosophers who can help us with this is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was a philosopher, obsessed with the difficulties of language, who wanted to help us find a way out of some of the muddles we get into with words.

Dieter Rams is one of the world’s greatest designers of everyday objects. His mind, which might in other eras have been employed making sculptures for altarpieces or precision scales for diamond traders, is devoted to producing carefully – and beautifully – made calculators, shelving, office chairs, TVs, radios, watches, shavers, record players, egg-beaters, fruit juicers, video cameras, and electric shavers.

His career has been extraordinarily successful. The company he made famous, Braun, was – when he joined – a medium-sized manufacturer of radios in Germany and grew to become a global titan of consumer goods production. As head of design, Rams’s work ended up in hundreds of millions of homes. Apple took up his work with enthusiasm, finding inspiration in his T3 pocket radio for the first iPod.

Why is design important? Partly because poorly designed things slow us down and sadden us – the stapler that doesn’t work, the bag of walnuts that doesn’t open, the TV remote control that is impossible to figure out. All are symbols of miscommunication and lack of empathy. Bad design is also depressing given the price it exacts on the planet. Modern capitalism can seem to be stuck filling the world with junk, much of which ends up floating around the Pacific Ocean choking sea turtles and albatrosses.

Rams shows us that capitalism need not produce poor-quality products. His life and work are a guide to the values that we might make more central to our lives and our businesses. There are five underlying lessons to be taken from his work:

1. The value of simplicity

Rams wanted to reduce everything back to just a few things that matter most. You can see this in one of his early products, the PC3SV radio.

There are many more things which could be done with a radio: one could add in bass and tenor controls, separate AM and FM dials, an alarm clock, an output cord for larger speakers, and so on. Rams pushed in the opposite direction. He sacrificed things that were valuable, but not top-priority in order to achieve simplicity. He made the on-off switch a part of the volume control, which hadn’t been done before, and which people argued against. But the end result is satisfying.

Simplicity is so satisfying because our lives are cluttered, and the experience of having too many options is a constant drag on us. When we see simplicity, we know that we value it. But in many other contexts in our lives we find it difficult, even embarrassing, to be simple. If we get promoted to manager we might find ourselves feeling a bit awkward around still using a biro. Or we might feel the need to beef up a report a little, even though all we really wanted to say could be said in one paragraph.

Our true selves might secretly yearn for something basic, but we might have lost touch with ourselves so much that it feels weird to seek it out. For example, in an expensive restaurant, there is a pressure to order something elaborate, even though deep down we might actually just feel like ordering cheese on toast.

Being simple can make you feel vulnerable. But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.

2. The value of modesty

When designing a toothbrush, Rams spent weeks thinking about and experimenting with the ratio of the handle to the bristles, the width of the handle, the number of ridges for the thumb to grip onto. But this large amount of work is not obvious in the final product. This follows from a principle of modesty which Rams lives by, and which goes back to the Roman poet Horace: “the art lies in concealing the art.”

Rams had modesty as a person. Although he originally trained as an architect (and a carpenter), he wanted to make products that improved people’s lives, rather than design spectacular one-off buildings to promote his own glory. And the products he designed are also imbued with modesty: they don’t try to attract your attention for no reason. They are happy to sit in the background and do the work.

He spent 18 weeks agonising over the placement of the buttons

Modesty is the opposite of being showy. It is part of a broader ideal of service – which is a central ideal of good capitalism. One is not there to attract attention; one is there to help the customer to live a better life – like a discrete waiter. There can be few more quietly helpful tools out there than the 606 Universal Shelving System which Rams designed for the company Vitsoe, and which has been in continuous production since 1960.

The shelves stay in the background, modestly helping to maintain some order in the life of their owner

True modesty comes from confidence. Modesty is a lack of anxiety about being ignored.

3. Empathy with the customer

One of Rams’s principles is that an object should be easy to live with, and easy to encounter for the first time. Rams was the first product designer to get rid of instruction manuals. The object should be obvious from the beginning.

The ability to create a welcoming experience for another person is a great skill. Not many people can do it well, however, because it derives from an unusual source. That is, Rams’s user-experience is guided by remembering what it is like to be distressed. He is in touch with what it is like to be lost – to feel abandoned, frustrated. Although his work looks serene, it comes from knowing how easily we get angry and muddled and ashamedly confused by instructions which any normal adult should be able to understand.

We are more like simpletons than we pretend to be. We actually want things to be easy and user-friendly. But we don’t readily tell other people that we are a bit stupid – although everyone is in many ways. Which is why it is the job of the designer (or the hotelier, or the customer feedback agent) to remember with tenderness the fact that we are all childlike and a little bit lost. Rams is like a parent: he is making the world friendlier for us. 

Rams is not making things for actual 6-year-olds. Rather, he mixes insights about our childlike nature with a context of elegance and dignity. For example, this calculator with colour buttons to show you where the main functions are.

Remembering that everyone is more easily confused than they pretend to be should be a basis for the reform of architecture, hotels, street design, websites, car manufacturing, phone companies, and writing books.

4. Being classic

Rams was classic, which means he tapped into things that don’t change. This means we don’t have to buy new things all the time. A classic book, for instance, is La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. It is a classic because the essential lessons in it are still useful for us to hear, many hundreds of years after it was written.

Overall, the global economy needs to be more classic. The fashion industry, to take what is currently the least classic business, could play more to our need to have items of clothing that are versatile and dignified in many contexts and less to our drive to set ourselves apart.

We have a Romantic ideology, which tends to emphasise what is new. Rams, in contrast, is interested in what is permanent. His goal was to create a product that wouldn’t go out of date, so we would never have to throw it away.

5. Art and product design

If you cared about bringing more attention and care to the little things of everyday life in 1650, you might have gone into painting. The Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was an advocate for paying more attention to the humble objects in daily life. In The Little Street (valued at £100 million) he portrays a life governed by simplicity and modesty.

Vermeer notices the details: the lived-in neatness and order, the sturdy seats outside, the basic broom. Rams values the same things that Vermeer does, but he has turned these values into products we can use in our own lives.

There is no dividing line between art and product design. Paintings were originally meant to be part of daily life, to hang in your kitchen or the hallway, so they would seep into your life. Nowadays, we might only see Vermeer’s work once or twice every few years. Whereas Rams’s work we can buy and live with every day.

Vermeer loved the precision of the scales. Rams loved this too, but his work reached many more people

Rams raises product design to new heights. The true artist of our age designs phones and alarm clocks, rather than pieces of canvas. All the intensity, focus, high-standards, and the pursuit of integrity that is found in art can be brought into the realm of everyday design. And this is where it stands more chance of affecting people, as they check the time, or press the snooze button on their alarm.

Conclusion

Rams shows us what good business could be: elegant, long-lasting, dignified. All capitalism should be like this. Ideally, entrepreneurs would study his work and devote themselves to the values of simplicity and modesty at the heart of his worldview. Rams’s mindset is currently unique, but it should become mainstream and widespread.

Andy Warhol was the most glamorous figure of 20th-century American art. He is famous for making prints of tins of Campbell’s soup and brightly-coloured portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson. Much about his life was eccentric – he wore a silver wig; he liked to peel potatoes while lying in bed; he liked to go to the dry cleaners and stand in the corner, to enjoy the smells and sounds of the chemicals and cleaning machines. He loved airports, and used to go through airport security multiple times because he said he found it fascinating and inspiring.

Andy Warhol’s great achievement was to develop a generous and helpful view of two major forces in modern society: commerce and celebrity. He spent most of his life as an international celebrity, but he was also keen on business. Warhol was born in Pennsylvania in 1928 to Czechoslovakian parents and lived most of his life in New York. Today his name is one of the most commercially-successful artistic brands on the planet (his pictures of Elvis sell for 50 to 100 million dollars).

There are four big ideas behind Andy Warhol’s work, which can teach us a more inspired way of looking at the world, and prompts us to build a better society.

Appreciating everyday life

We spend much of our life working to reach some kind of better place: to have a nicer house, to buy better things, perhaps to move to a different country. We are often down on average things and positive about the exotic: a meal from Panama with Japanese infusions, a holiday in Tbilisi. It is normal to feel that the exciting things are not where we are.

Andy Warhol aims to remedy this by getting us to look again at things in everyday life. The soup can is an intriguing object.

Putting them on the wall and looking at them helps us to see their beauty, to notice their appealing labels, their strong but elegant form, perfectly fitted to their job. When they are in a picture, we look at them with the same interest we might bestow on a candlestick holder or a spoon dug up from Roman times. Art can put us in the mindset of appreciation, which is hard to hold onto when we are busy using or consuming the objects around us.

In the same spirit of re-directing our attention, Andy Warhol made a video of himself eating a hamburger.

He is trying to get us to practice a mental habit: feeling that the things we do in our daily life are interesting and worthy of note. Warhol wants us to realise that we are already living an appealing life – to stop being down on ourselves, and ignoring ordinary experiences – filling up a car with petrol, dropping something off at the dry cleaners, microwaving a pre-made meal… We don’t need to fantasise about other places. We just need to see that the things we do all the time and the objects around us have their own merits and are enchanting in their own ways.

Creating celebrities

During the 1960s, Warhol groomed a retinue of bohemian and countercultural eccentrics to whom he gave the title ‘Superstars’, including Nico, Joe Dallesando, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling.

Warhol understood that celebrities have an important power: they can distribute glamour and prestige. He thought that glamour needed to be distributed in the right way for society to work well.

For example, Warhol believed that the job of being a maid had too little status. He wrote: ‘They should have a college course now for maids and call it something glamorous, I think. People don’t want to work at something unless there’s a glamorous name tagged to it. The idea of America is theoretically so great because we’ve gotten rid of maids and janitors, but then, somebody still has to do it. I always think that even very intelligent people could get a lot out of being maids because they’d see so many interesting people and be working in the most beautiful houses. I mean, everybody does something for everybody else – your shoemaker does your shoes for you, and you do entertainment for him – it’s always an exchange, and if it weren’t for the stigma we give certain jobs, the exchange would always be equal. A mother is always doing things for her child, so what’s wrong with a person off the street doing things for you?’

Warhol suggested that the President could use his status to shift perceptions. ‘If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV cameras film him cleaning the toilets and saying “Why not? Somebody’s got to do it!” then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean.’

Warhol saw that celebrity culture has great potential. But he wants us to get the right celebrities. If we were to anoint some ‘Superstars’ today we might choose, for example, a nurse, a janitor, an airport security manager, an engineer in a logistics warehouse, a philosophy student, an economist, or an 11-year-old who has just started drawing classes.

Combining art and business

He didn’t call his place in New York a studio – the prestigious term used by artists since the Renaissance to describe their place of work. Instead he called it ‘The Factory’.

Warhol in the Factory, 1965

We tend to feel that the idea of art and the idea of a factory don’t mix. But Warhol’s point was that business and art actually do very much belong together: ‘Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business – they’d say, “Money is bad,” and “Working is bad,” but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’

He began to like business when he made an agreement with a local theatre to make them one film per week. This moved his filmmaking from being something done on the side, to an organised production. He learnt more skills, and moved from short movies into longer movies and feature films (he also tried to learn the logistics of distributing movies, but decided he needed a partnership after all).

The lesson of The Factory is that we can organise ourselves to produce good things more reliably and cheaply. One example of this for Warhol was Coke. He pointed out that wherever you go, Coke is always the same. Whether you’re the President or a cleaner, you still drink the same Coke – and it’s a good drink. Art has generally not been able to live up to this ideal of being good and widely distributed. Artists make a few things, and only a few people get to own them. Andy Warhol tried to counteract this. One day after reading that Picasso had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime, Warhol set out to make four thousand prints in one day. As it turned out, it took him a month to make five hundred. But he believed that art should be mass-produced and widely distributed. ‘If the one ‘master painting’ is good, they’re all good’.

Andy Warhol with ‘The American Man (Portrait of Watson Powell)’ at The Factory, 1964

The lesson we can draw from Warhol is that mass production needs to apply beyond making prints and other kinds of ‘high art’. We need the organising, commoditising and branding powers of business to reliably produce and distribute good clothing, high-quality childcare, psychotherapy, careers advice, and good architecture – to start the list.

Brand extension

Most art does not have an impact on the world. But Warhol was keen to do so. He mastered many genres – from drawing, painting and printing, to photography, audio recording, sculpture and theatre; he started a magazine, designed clothes, managed a band, made 60 films and had plans to start his own TV chat show. What held all this together was his approach to life, which came through in everything he did. He was sensitive: he noticed details, he was aware of how he felt, he was moved by the surfaces of the world. He was also kind: he was unbullying. He was not vindictive against the world. He was untroubled by people’s strangeness. This openness and lack of vindictiveness gave him freedom to play and enjoy the world.

Ethel Scull 36 Times

All these values together make up his ‘brand’. ‘Brand extension’ means taking the values which have been realised in one thing, and making them real in another thing. For example, if we looked at the values embodied in the VW Golf car – we might say that it is a car which is unaware of class distinctions, practical, elegant, affordable. These qualities are needed in many places elsewhere in the world. Brand extension might take VW from making cars, to designing clothes, or setting up a school.

Warhol was able to extend his work into different channels partly because of his populism. Being populist means he was unafraid to reach people where they started. The chat show is populist because it plays to what masses of people find funny or interesting. Warhol was populist out of generosity. He wanted to translate the things he cared about (sensitivity, love of glamour and spectacle, playfulness) into objects and experiences that touched many people.

The only pity is that he finished where he did. He could have founded his planned TV chat show, then gone on – in ever broader and broader partnerships – to start a fashion label, design a hotel, a chain of schools, a financial advisory service, a medical centre, a supermarket chain and an airport…

This is the task still open to people who are drawn to art, but also want to change the world.

He died in 1987 when he was only 58, after complications following routine gallbladder surgery in New York Hospital. He is buried at a small cemetery near where he was born, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Andy Warhol shopping in Gristede’s supermarket in New York, 1965

The field is not without other distinguished contestants, but in the competitive history of incomprehensible German philosophers, Martin Heidegger must, by any reckoning, emerge as the overall victor. Nothing quite rivals the prose of his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) in terms of contortions and the sheer number of complex compound German words which the author coined, among them ‘Seinsvergessenheit’ (Forgetfulness of Being), ‘Bodenständigkeit’ (Rootedness-in-soil) and ‘Wesensverfassung’ (Essential Constitution).

At first, it is likely to be puzzling and perhaps irritating, but gradually, one may warm to the style and understand that beneath its vaporous surface, Heidegger is telling us some simple, even at times homespun truths about the meaning of our lives, the sicknesses of our time and the routes to freedom. We should bother.

He was born, and in many ways remained, a rural provincial German, who loved picking mushrooms, walking in the countryside and going to bed early. He hated television, aeroplanes, pop music and processed food. Born in 1889 to a poor Catholic family, he became an academic star after the publication of Being and Time – but made the fatal misstep of taking Hitler at his word in the mid 1930s (he wasn’t alone). He hoped that the Nazis would restore order and dignity to Germany and, to fit in with the mood of the times, he made a few fiery speeches and tried to ban Jewish academics from Freiburg University, where he was rector. One can almost forgive him this period of lunacy, for which he paid dearly and repented for over decades – in his own way. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, he was hauled in front of a Denazification Commission and was forbidden to teach until the end of the decade. Amazingly (it was a testimony to the appeal of his ideas), his career gradually revived, though he spent more and more time in a hut he owned in the woods, away from modern civilisation, until his death in 1976.

Throughout his career, he sought to help us live more wisely. He wanted us to be braver about facing up to certain truths, and to lead richer, more thoughtful, happier lives. Philosophy was no academic exercise. It was – as it had been for the Ancient Greeks – a spiritual vocation and a form of therapy. He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of new diseases of the soul:

One: We have forgotten to notice we’re alive

We know it in theory, of course, but we aren’t day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called ‘das Sein’ or ‘Being’. Much of his philosophy is devoted to trying to wake us up to the strangeness of existing on a planet spinning in an otherwise seemingly silent, alien and uninhabited universe.

It’s only at a few odd moments, perhaps late at night, or when we’re ill and have been alone all day, or are on a walk through the countryside, that we come up against the uncanny strangeness of everything: why things exist as they do, why we are here rather than there, why the world is like this, why that tree or this house are the way they are. To capture these rare moments when the normal state of things wobbles a little, Heidegger talks, with capital letters, of the Mystery of Being. His entire philosophy is devoted to getting us to appreciate, and respond appropriately to, this rather abstract but crucial concept.

For Heidegger, the modern world is an infernal machine dedicated to distracting us from the basic wondrous nature of Being. It constantly pulls towards practical tasks, it overwhelms us with information, it kills silence, it doesn’t want to leave us alone – partly because realising the mystery of Being has its frightening dimensions. Doing so, we may be seized by fear (‘Angst’) as we become conscious that everything that had seemed rooted, necessary and oh-so-important may be contingent, senseless and without true purpose. We may ask why we have this job rather than that one, are in a relationship with one person rather than another, are alive when we might so easily be dead… Much of daily life is designed to keep these odd, unnerving but crucial questions at bay.

What we’re really running away from is a confrontation with – and even non-German speakers might respond to the sonorous depth of this key Heideggerian term – ‘das Nichts’ (The Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being.

The Nothing is everywhere, it stalks us, it will swallow us up eventually, but – Heidegger insists – a life is only well lived when one has taken Nothingness and the brief nature of Being on board – as we might do when, for example, a gentle evening light gives way to darkness at the end of a warm summer’s day in the foothills of the Bavarian alps.

Two: We have forgotten that all Being is connected

We look at the world through the prism of our own narrow interests. Our professional needs colour what we pay attention to and bother with. We treat others and nature as means and not as ends.

But occasionally (and again walks in the country are particularly conducive to this realisation), we may be able to step outside our narrow orbit and take a more generous view of our connection with the rest of existence. We may sense what Heidegger termed the Unity of Being, noticing – in a way we hadn’t previously – that we, and that ladybird on the bark, and that rock, and that cloud are all in existence right now and are fundamentally united by the basic fact of Being.

Heidegger values these moments – and wants us to use them as the springboard to a deeper form of generosity, an overcoming of alienation and egoism and a more profound appreciation of the brief time that remains to us before ‘das Nichts’ claims us in turn.

Three: We forget to be free and to live for ourselves

Much about us isn’t, of course, very free. We are – in Heidegger’s unusual formulation – ‘thrown into the world’ at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical necessities not of our own making.

The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this ‘Thrownness’ (this ‘Geworfenheit’) by understanding its multiple features. We should aim to grasp our psychological, social and professional provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal perspective.

In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from ‘Uneigentlichkeit’ to ‘Eigentlichkeit’ (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.

And yet most of the time, for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender to a socialised, superficial mode of being he called ‘they-self’ (as opposed to ‘our-selves’). We follow The Chatter (‘das Gerede’), which we hear about in the newspapers, on TV and in the large cities Heidegger hated to spend time in.

What will help us to pull away from the ‘they-self’ is an appropriately intense focus on our own upcoming death. It’s only when we realise that other people cannot save us from ‘das Nichts’ that we’re likely to stop living for them; to stop worrying so much about what others think, and to cease giving up the lion’s share of our lives and energies to impress people who never really liked us in the first place. ‘Angst’ about ‘The Nothing’, though uncomfortable, can save us: awareness of our ‘Sein-zum-Tode’ (our ‘Being-toward-death’) is the road to life. When in a lecture, in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we might recover authenticity, he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time ‘in graveyards’.

Four: We treat others as objects

Most of the time, without quite meaning to, we treat people as what Heidegger terms ‘Equipment’: ‘das Zeug’ – as if they were tools, rather than Beings in Themselves.

The cure for this selfishness lies in exposure to great art. It is works of art that will help us to step back from ourselves and appreciate the independent existence of other people and things.

Heidegger elaborated this idea in the course of a discussion of a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes. Normally, we don’t pay much attention to shoes, they are merely another bit of ‘equipment’ that we need to get by. But when they are presented to us on a canvas, we’re liable to notice them – as if for the first time – for their own sakes.

The same might happen to us when confronted by other bits of the natural and the man-made world represented by great artists. Thanks to art, we’ll feel a new kind of ‘Care’ (‘Sorge’) for Being that lies beyond our selves.

Conclusion

It would be lying to say that Heidegger’s meaning and moral is ever very clear. Nevertheless, what he tells us is intermittently fascinating, wise and surprisingly useful. Despite the extraordinary words and language, in a sense, we know a lot of it already. We merely need reminding and emboldening to take it seriously, which the odd prose style helps us to do. We know in our hearts that it is time to overcome our ‘Geworfenheit’, that we should become more conscious of ‘das Nichts’ day-to-day, and that we owe it to ourselves to escape the clutches of ‘das Gerede’ for the sake of ‘Eigentlichkeit’ – with a little help from the graveyard.

Few philosophers have achieved fame as cooks. However, many of their theories can be perfectly explained through the medium of food. Here we inaugurate a new series, Philosophy in the Kitchen, by considering the work of Martin Heidegger, with the help of shrimp, jelly babies and other foods.

The challenge begins with how to pronounce his name. The first bit should sound like ‘Knee’, the second like ‘cher’: Knee – cher.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a quiet village in the eastern part of Germany, where – for generations – his forefathers had been pastors. He did exceptionally well at school and university; and so excelled at ancient Greek (a very prestigious subject, at the time) that he was made a professor at the University of Basel when still only in his mid-twenties.

But his official career didn’t work out. He got fed up with his fellow academics, gave up his job and moved to Switzerland and Italy where he lived modestly and often alone. He was rejected by a succession of women, causing him much grief (‘My lack of confidence is immense’). He didn’t get on with his family (‘I don’t like my mother and it’s painful even for me to hear my sister’s voice’) and in response to his isolation, grew a huge moustache and took long country walks every day. For many years, his books hardly sold at all. When he was forty-four, his mental health broke down entirely. He never recovered and died eleven years later.

Nietzsche believed that the central task of philosophy was to teach us how to ‘become who we are’, in other words, how to discover and be loyal to our highest potential.

To this end, he developed four helpful lines of thought:

1. Own up to envy

Envy is – Nietzsche recognised – a big part of life. Yet we’re generally taught to be feel ashamed of of our envious feelings. They seem an indication of evil. So we hide them from ourselves and others, so much so that there are people who will sometimes say, with all sincerity, that they don’t envy anyone.

This is logically impossible, insisted Nietzsche, especially if we live in the modern world (which he defined as any time after the French Revolution). Mass democracy and the end of the old feudal-aristocratic age had, in Nietzsche’s eyes, created a perfect breeding ground for envious feelings, because everyone was now encouraged to feel that they were equal to everyone else. In feudal times, it would never have occurred to the serf to feel envious of the prince. But now everyone compared themselves to everyone else and was exposed to a volatile mixture of ambition and inadequacy as a result.

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877

However, there is nothing wrong with envy, maintained the philosopher. What matters is how we handle it. Greatness comes from being able to learn from our envious crises. Nietzsche thought of envy as a confused but important signal from our deeper selves about what we really want. Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential, which we disown at our peril. We should learn to study our envy forensically, keeping a diary of envious moments, and then sift through episodes to discern the shape of a future, better self.

The envy we don’t own up to will otherwise end up emitting what Nietzsche called ‘sulfurous odours.’ Bitterness is envy that doesn’t understand itself. It is not that Nietzsche believed we always end up getting what we want (his own life had taught him this well enough). He simply insisted that we must become conscious of our true potential, put up a heroic fight to honour it, and only then mourn failure with solemn frankness and dignified honesty.

2. Don’t be a Christian

Nietzsche had some extreme things to say about Christianity: ‘I call Christianity the one great curse, the one intrinsic depravity… In the entire New Testament, there is only person worth respecting: Pilate, the Roman governor.’

This was knockabout stuff, but his true target was more subtle and more interesting: he resented Christianity for protecting people from their envy.

Carl Bloch, The Sermon on the Mount, 1877

Christianity had in Nietzsche’s account emerged in the late Roman Empire in the minds of timid slaves, who had lacked the stomach to get hold of what they really wanted (or admit they had failed), and so had clung to a philosophy that made a virtue of their cowardice. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but had been too inept to get them. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for – while praising what they did not want but happened to have. So, in the Christian value system, sexlessness turned into ‘purity’, weakness became “goodness,” submission to people one hated “obedience” and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “not-being-able-to-take-revenge” turned into “forgiveness.”

Christianity amounted to a giant justification for passivity and a mechanism for draining life of its potential.

3. Never drink alcohol

Nietzsche himself drank only water – and as a special treat, milk. And he thought we should do likewise. He wasn’t making a small, eccentric dietary point. The idea went to the heart of his philosophy, as contained in his declaration: ‘There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.’

Eduoard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882

He hated alcohol for the very same reasons that he scorned Christianity: because both numb pain, and both reassure us that things are just fine as they are, sapping us of the will to change our lives for the better. A few drinks usher in a transient feeling of satisfaction that can get fatally in the way of taking the steps necessary to improve our lives. It’s not that Nietzsche admired suffering for its own sake. But he recognised the unfortunate – but crucial – truth that growth and accomplishment have irrevocably painful aspects: “What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys.”

Nietzsche’s thought recalibrates the meaning of suffering. If we are finding things difficult, it is not necessarily a sign of failure, it may just be evidence of the nobility and arduousness of the tasks we’ve undertaken.

4. “God is Dead”

Nietzsche’s dramatic assertion about the demise of God is not, as it’s often taken to be, some kind of a celebratory statement. Despite his reservations about Christianity, Nietzsche did not think that the end of belief was anything to celebrate.

Religious beliefs were false, he knew; but he observed that they were in some areas very beneficial to the sound functioning of society. Giving up on religion would mean that humans would be left to find new ways of supplying themselves with guidance, consolation, ethical ideas and spiritual ambition. This would be tricky, he predicted.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Nietzsche proposed that the gap left by religion should ideally be filled with Culture (philosophy, art, music, literature): Culture should replace Scripture.

However, Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of the way his own era handled culture. He believed the universities were killing the humanities, turning them into dry academic exercises, rather than using them for what they were always meant to be: guides to life. He particularly admired the way the Greeks had used tragedy in a practical, therapeutic way, as an occasion for catharsis and moral education – and wished his own age to be comparably ambitious.

He accused university and museum-based culture of retreating from the life-guiding, morality-giving potential of culture, at precisely the time when the Death of God had made these aspects ever more necessary.

Edvard Munch, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906

He called for a reformation, in which people – newly conscious of the crisis brought on by the end of faith – would fill the gaps created by the disappearance of religion with the wisdom and healing beauty of Culture.

Conclusion

Every era faces particular psychological challenges, thought Nietzsche, and it is the task of the philosopher to identify, and help solve, these.

For Nietzsche, the 19th century was reeling under the impact of two developments: Mass Democracy and Atheism. The first threatened to unleash torrents of undigested envy and venomous resentment; the second to leave humans without guidance or morality.

In relation to both challenges, Nietzsche worked up some fascinating solutions – from which our own times have some highly practical things to learn, as he would dearly have wished.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. He had a very middle-class existence: he was obsessed by his career path and his income. He was a newspaper editor and then a headmaster before becoming an academic professor. He never quite got his hair under control. When he was older, he liked going to the opera. He was very fond of champagne. Intellectually he was adventurous but in externals he was respectable, conventional – and proud of it. He ascended the academic tree, and reached the topmost branch – head of the University of Berlin – in 1830 (when he was 60 years old). He died the following year.

Hegel has had a terrible influence on philosophy. He writes horribly. He is confusing and complicated when he should be clear and direct. He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-sounding, incomprehensible prose. He made it seem as if the mark of reading deep thought is that one cannot quite understand what is going on. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it should be. And the world has paid another heavy price for Hegel’s problems with communication. It has made it much harder to hear the valuable things he has to say to us. Amongst which a small number of lessons stand out:

Important parts of ourselves can be found in history

Hegel was rare among philosophers in taking history seriously. In his day, a standard European way of looking at the past was to consider it as ‘primitive’ – and to feel proud of how much progress had been made to get us to the modern age.

But Hegel preferred to believe that every era can be looked at as a repository of a particular kind of wisdom. It will manifest with rare clarity certain very useful attitudes and ideas which then become submerged, unavailable or more muddled in later periods. We need to go back in time to rescue things which have gone missing even in a so-called advanced era.

So, for example, we might need to mine the history of Ancient Greece to grasp fully the idea of what community could be; the Middle Ages can teach us – as no other era can – about the role of honour; an inspiring vision of how money can pay for art is to be found in the Florence of the 14th century, even if this period featured appalling attitudes to children and the rights of women.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Zachariah in the Temple, 1486-9

Hegel held that progress is never linear. The present may be better in some respects,  but is likely to be worse than the past in others. There is wisdom at every stage – which points us to the task of the historian: to rescue those ideas most needed to counterbalance the blind spots of the present.

It means that what we might be tempted to call nostalgia may have a tinge of wisdom to it.If people say that life was better in the 1950s or say that they admire Victorian values of thrift, self-reliance and hard work it’s tempting to tell them that the clock can’t be turned back and that anyway there was so much wrong with those times that it would be appalling to return to them. But there’s a more sympathetic attitude that Hegel explored in The Phenomenology of Spirit which he finished in 1807. That’s the view that each era contains an important insight which is (unfortunately) mired in a confused set of errors. So, of course, it would be terrible to go back in total. but the nostalgia is latching onto what was good. And that good aspect is something wee still need to pay attention to in the present. Hegel imagined an ideal history in which gradually all the good aspects of the past would be liberated from the unfortunate things that accompanied them. And that the best future would gradually amalgamate them all. We need to learn something from the 19th  Century industrialist and form the 1968 hippy, from the medieval bishop and from the 18th century French peasant.

‘World history ‘ he says ‘is the record of the mind’s efforts to understand itself.’  At different points in history, different aspects of the mind are more prominent. The same happens on a micro scale in our own lives. In childhood, wonder or trust may be more to the fore; in late childhood, it might be conformity and the desire to please those thought to be superior; in adolescence, the theme of doubt might get played out conspicuously. later there might be episodes of pragmatism, or the experience of authority or the fear of death. At each of these stages variable we are gradually learning about ourselves and we need to go through them all to fully grasp who we are. The ideal picture of maturity would be accumulated wisdom of what is learn from all of them.

Learn from ideas you dislike

Hegel was a great believer in learning from one’s intellectual enemies, from points of view we disagree with or that feel alien. That’s because he held that bits of the truth are likely to be scattered even in unappealing or peculiar places – and that we should dig them out by asking always, ‘What sliver of sense and reason might be contained in otherwise frightening or foreign phenomena?’

Nationalism, for instance, has had many terrible manifestations (even in Hegel’s day). So, the temptation of thoughtful people is to give up entirely on this field. But Hegel’s move was to ask what underlying good idea or important need might be hiding within the bloody history of nationalism – a need waiting for recognition and interpretation. He proposed that it’s the need for people to feel proud of where they come from, to identify with something beyond merely their own achievements, to anchor their identities beyond the ego. This is an unavoidable and fruitful requirement, he suggested – something which remains valuable even when some particularly awful movements and politicians have exploited this need and driven it in catastrophic directions.

Hegel is a hero of the thought that really important ideas may be in the hands of people you regard as beneath contempt.

Progress is messy

Hegel believed that the world makes progress but only by lurching from one extreme to another, as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake. He proposed that it generally takes three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found, a process that he named the ‘dialectic’.

In his own lifetime, he pointed out that governments had improved, but far from directly. The flawed, stifling, unfair 18th-century system of inherited traditional monarchy had been abolished by the French Revolution – whose founding fathers had wanted to give proper voice to the majority of people.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

But what should have been the peaceful birth of representative government had ended up in the anarchy and chaos of the Terror. This in turn had lead to the emergence of Napoleon, who had restored order and ensured opportunity for talent and ability – but who had also overreached himself and had become a military brute, tyrannising the rest of Europe and trampling on the liberty he had professed to love. Eventually, the modern ‘balanced constitution’ emerged, an arrangement which more sensibly balanced up popular representation with the rights of minorities and a decent centralised authority. But this resolution had taken at least forty years and incalculable bloodshed to reach.

In our own time, think of the slow path towards sensible attitudes to sex. The Victorians had imposed too much repression. Yet the 1960s may have turned out to be too liberal. It might only be by the 2020s that we will find the right balance between extremes.

Hegel takes some of the weight off our backs by insisting that progress will always be slow and troubled. He adds that what happens in history will occur in individuals as well. We too learn slowly and with massive over-corrections. Take the development of our emotional lives. We might, in our 20s, have been with someone so emotionally intense we felt suffocated; we therefore freed ourselves and took up with someone cooler and more reserved; but they might eventually also have become oppressive in their distance. We may be 52 before we get this aspect more or less right.

This can seem the most appalling waste of time. But Hegel insists the painful stepping from error to error is inevitable, something we must expect and reconcile ourselves to when planning our lives or contemplating the mess in history books or on the nightly news.

Art has a purpose

Hegel rejects the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. In his most impressive work – the Introductory lectures on Aesthetics – he argues that painting, music, architecture, literature and design all have a major job to do. We need them so that important insights become powerful and helpful in our lives. Art is ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’.

Just knowing a fact often leaves us cold. In theory we believe conflict in Syria is important; in practice we switch off. In principle we know we should be more forgiving to our partners. But this abstract conviction gets forgotten at the least provocation (a crumpled newspaper in the hall, imperfect parking technique).

The point of art, Hegel, realises is not so much to come up with startlingly new or strange ideas; but to make the good, important, helpful thoughts we often already know and make them stick in our minds.

We need new institutions

Hegel took a very positive view of institutions and of the power they can wield. The insight of an individual might be profound. But it will be ineffective and transient unless it gets embodied in an institution. Jesus’s ideas about suffering and compassion needed the Catholic Church to take them to the world. Freud’s ideas about the complexity of childhood didn’t become a properly constructive force until they got organised, extended and institutionalised at the Tavistock Clinic in London.

The point is for ideas to be active and effective in the world a lot more is needed than that they are correct. This was a point Hegel made again and again in different ways. In order for an idea to be important in a society it needs employees and buildings, training programmes and legal advisors, Institutions allow for the scale of time that big projects need – much longer than the maturity of one individual.

The essential function of an institution is to make the major truths powerful in society. (And an institution loses its way when it stops having a profound mission). So, as new needs of a society get recognised they should, ideally, lead to the formation of new institutions.

Nowadays, we might say we need major new institutions to focus on relationships, consumer education, career choice, mood management and how to bring up less damaged children.

Conclusion

Hegel put his finger on a crucial feature of modern life: we long for progress and improvement yet we are continually confronted by conflict and evidence of setbacks.

His insight is that growth requires the clash of divergent ideas and therefore will be painful and slow. But at least once we know this, we don’t have to compound our troubles by thinking them abnormal. Hegel gives us a more accurate and hence more manageable view of ourselves, our difficulties and where we are in history.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German 19th century philosopher, who deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his great work: The World as Will and Representation.

Schopenhauer was the first serious Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism – and his thought can best be read as a Western interpretation of, and response to, the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought.

‘In my 17th year,’ he wrote in an autobiographical text, ‘I was gripped by the misery of life, as Buddha had been in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth was that this world could not have been the work of an all loving Being, but rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in their sufferings.’ And like the Buddha, it was his goal to dissect and then come up with a solution to this suffering.

It is chiefly the fault of universities that Schopenhauer is taught in such an academic way that it has stopped him from being widely known, read and followed. And yet in truth, this is a man who – no less than the Buddha – deserves disciples, schools, art-works and monasteries to put his ideas into practice.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy starts by giving a name to a primary force within us which he says is more powerful than anything else – our reason, logic or moral sense: and which he terms The Will-to-Life. The Will-to-Life is a constant force which makes us thrust ourselves forward, cling to existence and look to our own advantage. It’s blind, dumb and very insistent. What the Will-to-Life makes us focus on most of all is sex. From adolescence onwards, this Will thrums within us, turns our heads constantly to erotic scenarios and makes us do very odd things – the oddest of which is fall in love.

Schopenhauer was very respectful of love, as one might be towards a hurricane or a tiger. He deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations – or what we’d call crushes – but he refused to conceive of these as either disproportionate or accidental. In his eyes, love is connected to the most important (and miserable) underlying project of the Will-to-Life and hence of all our lives: having children.

“Why all this noise and fuss about love? Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion?” he asked. “Because the ultimate aim of all love-affairs… is actually more important than all other aims in anyone’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.”

The romantic dominates life because “what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation….the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come.”

Of course, we rarely think of future children when we are asking someone out on a date. But in Schopenhauer’s view, this is simply because the intellect “remains much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.”

Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would never reliably to reproduce unless we first had – quite literally – lost our minds. This was a man deeply opposed to the boredom, routine, expense and sheer sacrifice of having children.

Furthermore, he argued that most of the time, if our intellect were properly in charge of choosing who to fall in love with, we would pick radically different people to the ones we end up with.

An illustration from The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about the perils of love by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a much-admired acquaintance of Schopenhauer.

But we’re ultimately driven to fall in love not with people we’ll get on with, but with people whom the the Will-to-Life recognises as ideal partners for producing what Schopenhauer bluntly called ‘balanced children.’ All of us are in any case a bit unbalanced, he thought: we’re a bit too masculine, or too feminine, too tall or too short, too rational or too impulsive. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, in the next generation, the human race would, within a short time, sink into oddity.

The Will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their compensating imbalances, cancel out our own issues – a large nose combined with a button nose promise a perfect nose. He argued that short people often fall in love with tall people, and more feminine men with more assertive and masculine women.

Unfortunately, this theory of attraction led Schopenhauer to a very bleak conclusion: namely, that a person who is highly suitable for producing a balanced child is almost never (though we cannot realise it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life) very suitable for us. “We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends:  “Love…casts itself on people who, apart from sex, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to us. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of individuals, that lovers overlook everything, misjudge everything, and bind themselves forever to an object of misery.”

The Will-to-life’s ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer’s theory implies, be sensed with particular clarity in that rather scary, lonely moment just after orgasm: “Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard”.

Watching the human spectacle, Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us. We are just like animals – except, because of our greater self-awareness, even more unhappy.

There are some poignant passages where he discusses different animals but dwells especially on the mole: a stunted monstrosity that dwells in damp narrow corridors, rarely sees the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms – but who still does everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself.

We’re just like them and just as pitiful: we are driven frantically to push ourselves forward, get good jobs to impress prospective partners, wonder endlessly about finding The One (imagining they’ll make us happy), and are eventually briefly seduced by someone  long enough to produce a child, and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery to atone for our error.

Schopenhauer is beautifully and comically gloomy about human nature: “There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error… the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of being content. That’s why the faces of almost all elderly people are etched with such disappointment.”

Schopenhauer offers two solutions to deal with the problems of existence. The first is for rather rare individuals that he called ‘sages’.

Sages are able, by heroic efforts, to rise above the demands of the Will-to-life: they see the natural drives within themselves towards selfishness, sex and vanity… and override them. They overcome their desires, live alone (often away from big cities), never marry and quell their appetites for fame and status.

In Buddhism, Schopenhauer points out, this person is known as a monk – but he recognizes that only a tiny number of us can go in for such a life.

The second and more easily available and realistic option is to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the Will-to-Life. We may not be able to quell the Will-to-Life very often, but in the evenings at the theater, or on a walk with a book of poetry, we can step back from the day to day and look at life without illusion.

The art Schopenhauer loved best is the opposite of sentimental: Greek tragedies, the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and the political theory of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Such works speak frankly about egoism, suffering, selfishness and the horrors of married life – and extend a tragic, dignified, melancholy sympathy to the human race.

It’s fitting that Schopenhauer’s own work fitted his own description of what philosophy and art should do perfectly. It too is deeply consoling in its morbid bitter pessimism. For example, he tells us:

To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.

Every life history is the history of suffering.

Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.

After spending a lot of time trying, yet failing to be famous, and trying, yet failing to have a good relationships, towards the end of his life, Schopenhauer eventually found an audience who adored his writings. He lived quietly in an apartment in Frankfurt with his dog, a white poodle whom he called Atman after the world soul of the Buddhists – but whom the neighbouring children called Mrs Schopenhauer. Shortly before his death, a sculptor made a famous bust of him. He died in 1860 at the age of 72, having achieved calm and serenity.

He is a sage for our own times, someone whose bust should be no less widespread and no less revered than that of the Buddha he so loved.

In the West, we have a vague sense that poetry is good for our ‘souls’, making us sensitive and wiser. Yet we don’t always know how this should work. Poetry has a hard time finding its way into our lives in any practical sense. In the East, however, some poets—like the 17th-century Buddhist monk and poet Matsuo Bashō—knew precisely what effect their poetry was meant to produce: it was a medium designed to guide us to wisdom and calm, as these terms are defined in Zen Buddhist philosophy.

Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644 in Uego, in the Iga province of Japan. As a child he became a servant of the nobleman Tōdō Yoshitada, who taught him to compose poems in the ‘haiku’ style. Traditionally, haikus contain three parts, two images and a concluding line which helps to juxtapose them. The best known haiku in Japanese literature is called ‘Old Pond’, by Bashō himself:

Old pond . . .
A frog leaps in
Water’s sound

It is all (deceptively) simple – and, when one is in the right, generous frame of mind, very beautiful.

After Yoshitada died in 1666, Bashō left home and wandered for many years before moving to the city of Edo, where he became famous and widely published. However, Bashō grew melancholy and often shunned company, and so until his death in 1694 he alternated between travelling widely on foot and living in a small hut on the outskirts of the city.

Bashō under the banana tree after which he is named, and which stood by his small hut

Bashō was an exceptional poet, but he did not believe in the modern idea of “art for art’s sake.” Instead, he hoped that his poetry would bring his readers into special mental states valued by Zen. His poetry reflects two of the most important Zen ideals: wabi and sabi. Wabi, for Bashō, meant satisfaction with simplicity and austerity, while sabi refers to a contented solitude. (These are the same mindsets sought in the well-known Zen tea ceremony defined by Rikyu). It was nature, more than anything else, that was thought to foster wabi and sabi, and it is therefore unsurprisingly one of Bashō’s most frequent topics. Take this spring scene, which appears to ask so little of the world, and is attuned to an appreciation of the everyday:

First cherry
budding
by peach blossoms

Bashō’s poetry is of an almost shocking simplicity at the level of theme. There are no analyses of politics or love triangles or family dramas. The point is to remind readers that what really matters is to be able to be content with our own company, to appreciate the moment we are in and to be attuned to the very simplest things life has to offer: the changing of the seasons, the sound of our neighbours laughing across the street, the little surprises we encounter when we travel. Take this gem:

Violets—
how precious on
a mountain path

Bashō also used natural scenes to remind his readers that flowers, weather, and other natural elements are—like our own lives—ever-changing and fleeting. Time and the changing of weathers and scenes need to be attended to, as harbingers of our own deaths:

Yellow rose petals
thunder—
a waterfall

This transience of life may sometimes be heartbreaking, but it is also what makes every moment valuable.

Bashō liked to paint as well as write, and many of his works still exist, usually with the related haikus written alongside them. This one depicts the above haiku. (“Yellow rose petals…”)

In literature, Bashō valued “karumi,” or “lightness”. He wanted it to seem as if children had written it. He abhorred pretension and elaboration. As he told his disciples, “in my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.”

The ultimate goal of this “lightness” was to allow readers to escape the burdens of the self —one’s petty peculiarities and circumstances—in order to experience unity with the world beyond. Bashō believed that poetry could, at its best, allow one to feel a brief sensation of merging with the natural world. One may become – through language – the rock, the water, the stars, leading one to an enlightened frame of mind known as muga, or a loss-of-awareness-of-oneself.

“Hibiscus with Haiku” by Bashō

We can see Bashō’s concept of muga or self-forgetting at work in the way he invites us almost to inhabit his subjects, even if they are some rather un-poetic dead fish:

Fish shop
how cold the lips
of salted bream

In a world full of social media profiles and crafted resumes, it might seem odd to want to escape our individuality—after all, we carefully groom ourselves to stand out from the rest of the world. Bashō reminds us that muga or self-forgetting is valuable because it allows us to break free from the incessant thrum of desire and incompleteness which otherwise haunts all human lives.

Bashō suffered for long periods from deep melancholy; he travelled the dangerous back roads of the Japanese countryside with little more than writing supplies, and he spent some truly unglamorous nights:

Fleas and lice biting;
awake all night
a horse pissing close to my ear

Yet muga freed Bashō—and it can also free us—from the tyranny of glum moments of individual circumstance. His poetry constantly invites us to appreciate what we have, and to see how infinitesimal and unimportant our personal difficulties are in the vast scheme of the universe.

“Bashō riding a horse” by his follower Sugiyama Sanpu

Bashō’s poetry was a clever tool for enlightenment and revelation – through the artfully simple arrangement of words. The poems are valuable not because they are beautiful (though they are this too) but because they can serve as a catalyst for some of the most important states of the soul. They remind both the writer and the reader that contentment relies on knowing how to derive pleasure from simplicity, and how to escape (even if only for a while) the tyranny of being ourselves.

In the West, philosophers write long non-fiction books, often using incomprehensible words and limit their involvement with the world to lectures and committee meetings. In the East, and especially in the Zen tradition, philosophers write poems, rake gravel, go on pilgrimages, practice archery, write aphorisms on scrolls, chant and, in the case of one of the very greatest Zen thinkers, Sen no Rikyū, involve themselves in teaching people how to drink tea in consoling and therapeutic ways.

Sen no Rikyū was born in 1522 in the wealthy seaport of Sakai, near present day Osaka. His father, Tanaka Yohyoue, was a warehouse owner who worked in the fish trade and wished his son to join him in business. But Rikyū turned away from commercial life and went in search of wisdom and self-understanding instead. He became fascinated by Zen Buddhism, apprenticed himself to a few Masters and took to a life of wandering the countryside, with few possessions. We remember him today because of the contributions he made to the reform and appreciation of the chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony.

The Japanese had been drinking tea since the 9th century, the practice having been imported from China by merchants and monks. The drink was considered healthy as well as calming and spiritual. But it was Rikyū’s achievement to put the tea ceremony on a more rigorous and profound philosophical footing. Thanks to his efforts, which were both practical and intellectual, drinking tea in highly ritualised and thoughtful ways, in particular buildings which he helped to design, became an integral part of Zen Buddhist practice; as central to this spiritual philosophy as poetry or meditation.

The Japan of his era had grown image-conscious and money-focused. Rikyū promoted an alternative set of values which he termed wabi-sabi — a compound word combining wabi, or simplicity, with sabi, an appreciation of the imperfect. Across fields ranging from architecture to interior design, philosophy to literature, Rikyū awakened in the Japanese a taste for the pared down and the authentic, for the undecorated and the humble.

His particular focus was the tea ceremony, which Rikyū believed to hold a superlative potential to promote wabi-sabi. He made a number of changes to the rituals and aesthetics of the ceremony. He began by revolutionising the space in which the tea ceremony was held. It had grown common for wealthy people to build extremely elaborate teahouses in prominent public places, where they served as venues for worldly gatherings and displays of status. Rikyū now argued that the teahouse should be shrunk to a mere two metres square, that it should be tucked away in secluded gardens and that its door should be made deliberately a little too small, so that all who came into it, even the mightiest, would have to bow and feel equal to others. The idea was to create a barrier between the teahouse and the world outside. The very path to the teahouse was to pass around trees and stones, to create a meander that would help break ties with the ordinary realm. 

Properly performed, a tea ceremony was meant to promote what Rikyū termed “wa” or harmony, which would emerge as participants rediscovered their connections to nature: in their garden hut, smelling of unvarnished wood, moss and tea leaves, they would be able to feel the wind and hear birds outside – and feel at one with the non-human sphere. Then might come an emotion known as “kei” or ‘sympathy’, the fruit of sitting in a confined space with others, and being able to converse with them free of the pressures and artifice of the social world. A successful ceremony was to leave its participants with a feeling of “jaku” or ‘tranquillity’, one of the most central concepts in Rikyū’s gentle, calming philosophy.

The Tai-an tearoom in Kyoto, designed by Rikyū

Rikyū’s prescriptions for the ceremony extended to the instruments employed. He argued that tea ceremonies shouldn’t henceforth rely on expensive or conventionally beautiful cups or teapots. He liked worn bamboo tea scoops that made a virtue of their age. Because in Zen philosophy, everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, objects which are themselves marked by time and haphazard marks can, suggested Rikyū, embody a distinct wisdom and promote it in their users. 

Bamboo glass made by Rikyū himself

A wabi-sabi style tea bowl, 16th century

It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the West is one of the most routine and unremarkable activities and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to a Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of green tea powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets about the importance of humility, the need to sympathise with and respect nature and the sense of the importance of the transient nature of existence.

It’s open ended where this approach to everyday life might go. It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits might, with sufficient creative imagination, become similarly elevated, important and rewarding in our lives. The point isn’t so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies, rather that we should make aspects of our everyday spiritual lives more tangible by allying certain materials and sensuous rituals.

Rikyū reminds us that there is a latent sympathy between big ideas about life and the little everyday things, such as certain drinks, cups, implements and smells. These are not cut off from the big themes; they can make those themes more alive for us. It is the task of philosophy not just to formulate ideas, but also to work out mechanisms by which they may stick more firmly and viscerally in our minds.

Abstract art continues to provoke annoyance and confusion in equal measure. You know the kind of thing: a large empty white canvas, with a solitary deep black line down the middle. A splodge of purple paint against a yellow background. Ten steel beams arranged in a random pile. What does it mean? Is someone making fun of us? A child could have…

To adopt a more sympathetic approach (which can be useful and fair), we need to go back to first principles and ask: what’s so good about not showing what things look like? The central intention in abstract art is to get directly to emotion and to bypass representation. Like music, abstract art is best interpreted as echoing, or giving a form to, certain of our inner states or moods. Some might be relatively straightforward, like ‘calm’ or ‘anger’, and others will defy easy definition in language. It is therefore not very helpful to say: this painting doesn’t look like anything. It is true that it doesn’t look like anything in the outer world, but that’s because the intention is to represent the inner one. We should be asking: what does this work feel like? Does it evoke any of my emotional states? What piece of mankind’s inner landscape is being summoned? 

The great abstract artist, Cy Twombly, was born in 1928 in the pretty, ultraconservative town of Lexington, Virginia. His father had been a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox –  in UK terms today the equivalent of being a premier league footballer. The artist was actually christened Edwin Parker Twombly but became known as ‘Cy’ in honour of one of the most prominent figures in the history of baseball, Cy Young. He went to Darlington School – a smart, expensive private school. Eventually he made his way to study art in New York in the early 1950s and then spent a year touring round the Mediterranean. The journey changed his life. He found himself an aristocratic girlfriend, moved to Rome and inaugurated his trademark abstract style.

Cy Twombly, Rome, 1962, Werner Schloske

He hadn’t left reason behind. He was deeply alive to the lessons of Roman and Renaissance art. What he wanted to do was give form to the inner states of humankind, just as the ancient masters had represented our outer ones.

Cy in Rome, with aristocratic girlfriend

Take his Panorama of 1955, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We can’t see the marks precisely, but they fill the canvas, like mysterious script on a blackboard. We are held at the moment of being on the cusp of something. We are about to understand, but have not yet understood. 

Cy Twombly, Panorama, 1955

Twombly’s work is like a specially designed mirror of a part of our inner lives, deliberately constructed to draw attention to it and to make it clearer and easier to identify. This work homes in on what it is like when you almost know what you think about something but not quite. It pictorialises a moment in reflective life, suggestive of ambition and confusion.

It shouldn’t surprise us in any way that Twombly loved figurative, representational art. His favourite artist was the 17th-century painter Poussin (who also lived in Rome). But he wanted to do something else in his own work:

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe) [Rome], 1985

The title of this painting, Hero and Leander, makes reference to a tragic couple in Classical Greece. Leander used to swim three kilometres each night across the Hellespont to meet his lover (Lord Byron tried it too and now there’s a club). But Twombly hasn’t tried to show us the dripping torso or the treacherous moonlit waves, as Poussin would have done. Instead he has made a picture of what a certain feeling of love is like – the feeling, perhaps, of knowing that the person you love is making great efforts to get to you, or the sense that someone you love is desperately longing to make contact with you. It is a work of drama and passion, showing without representing. Gazing at the intricate, soft, swirling surface, one is drawn into a precious sense of the price of love.

Twombly’s career was devoted to making portraits of inner life so that we might learn to communicate its fruits to other people. Getting others to share our experiences is notoriously difficult. Words can feel clumsy. This is more elegant:

Cy Twombly, Naples, 1961

One might simply say to a close friend: ‘Inside, it feels a little like this.’ And they would understand. Apart from abstraction, Twombly had a tendency to go in for some very simple looking bits of writing.

Cy Twombly, Goethe in Italy, 1978

It’s a bit like a note to oneself – half-doodled on the back of a company report – a phrase, an idea, that’s come into one’s head, but doesn’t yet have a definite meaning.

It looks like graffiti – something scrawled on a neighbour’s wall to give offence, to express anti-social aggression. But in Twombly’s hands, that urgency, the excitement and daring, the risk taking, the readiness to cause offence and upset people’s comfortable expectations – are being deployed in the name of wise cultivation, of true self-development of the enlargement and refinement of the spirit (all things for which ‘Goethe in Italy’ is shorthand). It’s a reminder of what we should think about, and pay attention to, far more than the slogans and brand names we are otherwise continually exposed to.  

Cy Twombly died in 2011 in his beloved Rome. He was 83 – and had lived to see his works gain immense prestige and appreciation among those whose opinions he respected. 

His paintings are simultaneously about nothing – and about everything that is most powerful, private and hitherto incommunicable but important within us. He will last – as long as some of those great Romans he so deeply admired.

Untitled I, 2005, (Bacchus)

There is something compelling and exciting about cities that makes many of us love (and some of us dread) them. They are full of bright attractions, intriguing strangers and endless, unimaginable possibilities. Yet despite a great migration towards city living in the modern era, we haven’t quite got cities figured out. Some parts of them are full of delightful surprises, and others are dreadfully boring; or worse, dangerous. One of the most instrumental people in understanding how urban areas work was a woman who spent her life explaining just how complex and vital cities really are. 

Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania to a doctor and a nurse. As a young girl, she disliked school, which bored her, but liked telling her imaginary friend, Benjamin Franklin, about the world around her and why it was built the way it was. As she explained it, Franklin “was interested in lofty things, but also in nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details, such as why the alley we were walking through wasn’t paved, and who would pave it if it were paved.” This kind of thinking would later make her a great writer about practical ideas for a less imaginary audience. 

After graduating from high school and briefly working as an unpaid assistant at a newspaper, she moved with her sister to New York City during the height of the Great Depression. Looking for jobs, Jacobs liked to choose a different subway stop to get off at each day, and thus she discovered a new neighbourhood each time. One day she got off at the Christopher Street stop in Greenwich Village and fell in love with the tree-lined, winding streets. The sisters decided to move there.

In New York, Jacobs worked first as a secretary for a candy factory and later as a freelance writer and journalist for several magazines. She also took classes in various topics at the School of General Education at Columbia University, refusing to conform to any undergraduate curriculum. (Fortunately, she would always explain, her grades were too low for the undergraduate colleges to accept her, and so she was left alone to get an education.) 

During the Second World War, Jacobs worked for the Office of War Information and then the Department of Defence’s magazine, Amerika. There she met her husband, Robert, an architect, and married him a month later. They would have three children. 

After the war, Jacobs switched to working for another magazine, Architectural Forum. She was assigned to write about a new housing development in Philadelphia designed by Edmund Bacon. Bacon, like many architects at the time, wanted to make American cities hubs of modernity, encircled with freeways that would bring thousands of automobiles and trucks through the city, and crowned with impressive, towering skyscrapers. Such projects were very well funded by the government and considered enormously important (Bacon himself would grace the covers of Time Magazine for his contributions). 

Bacon with models of some of his high-rises around 1960

Yet when Jacobs went to see the developments in Philadelphia and interview Bacon, she decided she didn’t like his vision much at all. She found, for example, that the projects looked sleek and modern, but the streets around them were empty compared to older streets. People didn’t actually want to be around the housing projects, much less live in them. Jacobs decided that the problem with much of modern architecture, and particularly designs like Bacon’s, was that they bore no relation to what people actually needed. Instead, too many projects were simply the result of government funding and overzealous “reformers” who really sought to line their pockets or build giant, impressive, but ultimately useless, structures. Cities, in short, were being ruined by top-down planning. 

Jacobs surprised her editors with a negative story about the Philadelphia housing project. Nevertheless, her criticism was well received, and in 1956 she was invited to lecture at Harvard University. There she spoke about the foolish and even ridiculous plans for urban renewal underway in American cities, urging famous architects to “respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.” Later, she wrote a related piece, ‘Downtown is for People’, for Fortune magazine, emphasising the flaws of many redevelopment plans. “They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery,” she warned.

Impressed by her work, The New School, a research institute in New York City, gave Jacobs a position, while the Rockefeller Foundation gave her a grant to write a critical study of urban planning in America, which would result in The Death And Life of Great American Cities (1961). The book was an extended criticism of modernist, rationalist planners and of one architect in particular, Robert Moses (1888-1981). Moses had worked his way up through elite connections to become one of the biggest urban planners of the New York City area, cleverly using money from toll roads to fund parks, pools, bridges and highways. His designs can still be seen throughout the city.

Jacobs wrote that Moses and his fellow designers were like children playing with blocks. They made large towers and then cried: “look what I made!”, not realising that what they had made was a social mess. In Jacob’s view, their urban planning theories about the necessity of open space were simply pseudoscience.

The Patterson Houses in New York City, a housing development designed by Robert Moses

Why, then were such terrible projects built? Because they were the result of giant, theoretically efficient government projects that can be easily and simply financed. Such projects are top-down, or designed by a few elite people, speculating on the needs of those who will actually use them. Most of all, they lack charm and originality, which Jacobs believed was good for the soul. Of one building in San Francisco she wrote, “A look at this Buddhist Temple is better than a trip to the psychoanalyst.”

Finally, all this was a self-perpetuating social problem in Jacob’s view because the idea that certain areas with old buildings or crowded streets are slums had been absorbed by bankers, who then didn’t invest money in these areas for the minor restorations that might actually improve city life. 

Jacobs was upset that bankers wouldn’t lend to districts like Boston’s North End, which was clearly full of promise

In her book, Jacobs offered an alternative to the gigantic and unfriendly designs of architects like Moses. She wrote that the best way to see what a city needs is to look at the way people actually use it. “If you get out and walk,” she wrote, “you see all sorts of other clues. Why is the hub of downtown such a mixture of things? Why do office workers on New York’s handsome Park Avenue turn off to Lexington or Madison Avenue at the first corner they reach? Why is a good steak house usually in an old building? Why are short blocks apt to be busier than long ones?”

Jacobs suggested that what ultimately makes cities successful is their ‘diversity’, their varied resources and the closeness with which these very different people, businesses, and communities are knit together. Ultimately, Jacobs argued for a city that was meant for people, one that protected their social and economic needs, one that made them happy and comfortable, and one that brought out what people really like about cities. “In short,” she insisted on asking, “will the city be any fun?” A “fun” city, in Jacob’s view, needs all of the four “generators of diversity.” These can be rephrased as guidelines for city planning:

1. Cities should be like ecosystems

A glance at Stockholm reminds us of the many ways in which city dwellers are connected

Jacobs described the ideal city as having “mixed primary uses,” meaning that it was both residential and commercial in any given area, and ideally that each block had activity throughout the day. This is because movement and involvement is what makes cities dynamic, desirable places to live. Cities are almost like the lunch hour of life on earth: they are where all the busy, frenzied, social exchanges take place and new relationships are formed. (And indeed, one of Jacob’s main arguments for why areas need multiple kinds of uses is that an area with, say, both office buildings and theatres supplies restaurants with both lunch and dinner business.) In order for cities to appropriately capitalise on their potential, different kinds of businesses and people need to be living in close proximity, so that exchanges can happen at all hours of the day.

2. City blocks should be small

Shorter blocks give people more opportunities to turn corners. This is good because it allows them more paths between one point and another, and more opportunities to discover new places and meet people. Shorter blocks also mean more ground-floor spaces for businesses. 

Jacobs thought highly of San Francisco’s Maiden Lane for its short blocks and diverse shops and businesses

3. There should be a mix of old and new buildings 

Because old buildings have already paid off the costs of construction, their rent is lower. This allows poorer people and companies to have places to live and work, rather than forcing them out as in a neighbourhood-wide renovation. A few newer buildings can then be permitted in order to draw in wealthier people and businesses. Jacobs believed that each neighbourhood should have both, preventing areas from simply being “rich” or “poor,” and encouraging people of very different backgrounds to live together. 

4. Cities should be dense 

Architects like Moses and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who was better known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965), argued for the benefits of wide open parks and boulevards. But Jacobs disagreed profoundly. In her view, streets should be places for people to encounter one another, to literally and metaphorically run into new things. Enormous plazas or business districts ruin this possibility. Jacobs insisted that in redesigning cities “the whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before – not less so.” 

Jacobs also loved San Francisco’s Union Square because it was designed to encourage continual activity

Moreover, Jacobs believed that density was part of how cities remained safe spaces. In dense neighbourhoods with relatively short buildings, she argued, everyone knows each other and they know what is and isn’t normal (this knowledge is a form of what she called “social capital”). As a result, the neighbourhood has what Jacobs termed “eyes on the street,” an innate communal awareness and safety mechanism. In a city with giant skyscrapers, Jacobs wrote, “nobody was going to have to be his brother’s keeper anymore.” Such urban designs would destroy the very nature of cities, their real lifeblood of sociability and interdependence. 

Jacobs was not the first person to have such ideas, but she was one of the people who expressed them most clearly and succinctly. She was an especially fierce opponent of urban development in her own area of New York City, Greenwich Village, during the 1950s and 1960s. Robert Moses and his plans had made their way there, hoping to tear down much of the neighbourhood and convert it to a new highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The project included “slum clearance,” which meant the removal of hundreds of small business and family homes, all to be replaced with high rises. Jacob’s own home, which she had carefully renovated with her husband (even adding a small garden) was also slated for destruction. Consequently, Jacobs recruited a number of high profile figures like Margaret Mead and Eleanor Roosevelt to resist this change. With the support of the community and the media, Moses’s plans were eventually scrapped. 

Jacobs holds up documentary evidence at a press conference about West Greenwich Village

Jacobs, who had become a local hero, was arrested in April 1968, after being charged with inciting a riot at a public hearing about the project. Though she was largely exonerated of her charges, she moved shortly thereafter to Canada. Her decision to leave the US was based partly on her growing frustration contending with the City of New York, and partly to avoid her teenage sons being conscripted during the Vietnam War. Jacobs quickly assumed a similar role in Toronto, becoming a vociferous figure in blocking projects for an expressway (one of her common themes was to ask whether cities were built for people or cars), and campaigning for the regeneration of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, which has been widely acclaimed as a great success in city planning. 

Jacobs, on her bike, fought against designing cities for cars 

Jacobs was a woman of strong political convictions. During her lifetime she not only advocated for better urban planning, but also for equal pay for women and the right to unionise. She turned down honorary degrees from almost 30 institutions, always giving credit to the people working the protest lines instead. Dark Age Ahead, her final book, published shortly before she died in 2006, is a pessimistic treatise on the decline of North American civilisation, which she saw as endangered by excessive capitalism and too little emphasis on education and community. She was, in short, always working to defend modern life from ‘reforms’ that actually made life worse. Her work serves to remind us of the vital role that cities play in promoting economic innovation, and of the importance of urban design in fostering inclusive and adaptable communities.

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy and cultured family. His father, a wine merchant, was of Jewish origin but had converted to Protestantism at university. Teddy (as his closest friends called him) was an extremely fine pianist from a young age. Until his twenties, he planned for a career as a composer, but eventually focused on philosophy. In 1934, he was barred, on racial grounds, from teaching in Germany. So he moved to Oxford and later to New York and then Los Angeles. He was both fascinated and repelled by Californian consumer culture – and thought with unusual depth about suntans and drive-ins. After the war, he returned to West Germany, where he died in 1969, at the age of 64.

Adorno believed that intellectuals should band together to change society, and he was closely connected with the pioneering Institute of Social Research, which had been founded and funded by his friend Felix Weil (whose father was a hugely successful commodities trader). The Institute aimed to develop a psychological understanding of the problems thrown up by modern capitalism. It focused not so much on the hard economic aspects of life so much as on the culture and mindset of capitalism.

Adorno drew attention to three significant ways in which capitalism corrupts and degrades us:

1. Leisure time becomes toxic

Although Adorno didn’t overlook issues like working legislation and the revision of the taxation system, he believed that the primary focus for progressive philosophers should be the study of how the working and middle classes of developed nations think and feel – and in particular, the manner in which they spend their evenings and weekends.

Adorno had a highly ambitious view of what leisure time should be for. It was not to relax and take one’s mind off things. Adorno argued that leisure had a great purpose to serve: free time – and the cultural activities we might pursue in it – was our prime opportunity to expand and develop ourselves, to reach after our own better nature, and to acquire the tools with which to change society. It was a time when we might see certain specific films that would help us to understand our relationships with new clarity, or to read philosophy and history books that could give us fresh insights into politics or to listen to the kinds of music that would give us courage to reform ourselves and collective life.

But, in the modern world, Adorno bemoaned that leisure had fallen into the hands of an omnipresent and deeply malevolent entertainment machine he called ‘the culture industry,’ which occupied the same demonic place in his philosophy as religion had occupied in Marx’s. Modern films, TV, radio, magazines and now social media seemed for Adorno to be designed to keep us distracted, unable to understand ourselves and without the will to alter political reality. This was a new and catastrophically dangerous opium for the masses.

For example, the news, while ostensibly updating us on everything that is ‘important’, is – in Adorno’s view – simply there to feed us a mixture of salacious nonsense and political stories that scramble any possibility of understanding the open prison within which we exist. Journalists will self-righteously claim that they are giving us ‘the truth’ but they are themselves too busy, too scared of their bosses and too thoughtless to be in any position to offer such an elixir. Films for their part excite fears and desires wholly disconnected from the real challenges we face. We might spend two hours of our lives following the adventures of an alien invasion – while the real calamities of our world go unattended. Museums display works of art without allowing them to speak to the needs and aspirations of their audiences. We wander through galleries, silently admiring so-called ‘masterpieces’, while privately unsure what they really mean and why we should care. The culture industry likes to keep us like that: distracted, pliant, confused and intimidated. As for pop music, this focuses relentlessly on the emotions around Romantic love, selfishly suggesting to us that happiness can only come from meeting one very special person, rather than awakening us to the pleasures of community and of a more broadly distributed human sympathy.

Adorno was so strict on the cultural output of his age because he believed in the highest possibilities for culture. It wasn’t there to help us pass the time, impress the neighbours or drug us into momentary cheerfulness. It was to be nothing less than a therapeutic tool to deliver consolation, insight and social transformation. No wonder he perceptively described Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in America.

2. Capitalism doesn’t sell us the things we really need

Because of the huge range of consumer goods available in modern capitalism, we naturally suppose that everything we could possibly want is available. The only problem, if there is one, is that we can’t afford it.

But Adorno pointed out that our real wants are carefully shielded from us by capitalist industry, so that we end up forgetting what it is we truly need and settle instead for desires manufactured for us by corporations without any interest in our true welfare. Though we think we live in a world of plenty, what we really require to thrive – tenderness, understanding, calm, insight – is in painfully short supply and utterly disconnected from the economy.

© Flickr/Hernán Piñera

Instead, capitalism’s tool of mass manipulation, advertising, exploits our genuine longings to sell us items that will leave us both poorer and psychologically more depleted. An advert will show a group of friends walking along a beach chatting amiably; or a family having a picnic and laughing warmly together. It does this because it knows we crave community and connection. But the industrial economy is not geared to helping us get these things; it would indeed prefer to keep us lonely and consuming. So at the end of the advert, we’ll be urged to buy some 25-year-old whisky or a car so powerful, no road would ever let us legally drive it at top speed.

3. There are proto-fascists everywhere

Adorno was writing at the dawn of the age of the psychological questionnaire. These were widely in use in the United States where they measured consumer attitudes and commercial behaviour.

© Flickr/Drew Leavy

Adorno was intrigued by the underlying concept of the questionnaire, and together with colleagues, devoted himself to designing a rather different kind questionnaire: one designed to spot fascists – rather than possible purchasers of new washing powders.

The questionnaire asked contributors to assess their level of agreement with statements like:

- Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.

- A person who has bad manners, habits, and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people.

-  If people would talk less and work more, everybody would be better off.

- When a person has a problem or worry, it is best for him not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things.

After a battery of such enquiries, Adorno felt confident that he would be able to detect the fascists lingering in the new generation. Given the traumas Germany had just been through, it is no surprise that Adorno gave his questionnaire – and what he called ‘the F scale’ – such attention.

But a more widely applicable lesson to be drawn from this experiment concerns the need to change politics not just through legislation and agitation, but also through psychology. Psychology precedes politics. Long before someone is racist, homophobic or authoritarian, they are – Adorno skilfully suggested – likely to be suffering from psychological fragilities and immaturities which it is the task of society as a whole to get better at spotting and responding to.

Rather than leaving problems to fester so long that there is eventually no way to deal with them other than through force (exerted by the police or the military), we should learn to understand the psychology of everyday insanity from the earliest moments. Adorno and his team sent the F-scale to every school in West Germany. Freud should have been able to get to Hitler before the Red Army and General Patton did. Psychotherapy wasn’t a rarified, private, middle-class indulgence. For Adorno, it should rightly take its place at the vanguard of progressive social transformation.

Conclusion

Adorno recognised, very unusually, that the primary obstacles to social progress are cultural and psychological rather than narrowly political and economic. In truth, we already have the money, the resources, the time and the skills to make sure everyone sleeps in an attractive house, stops destroying the planet, is given a fulfilling job and feels supported by the community. The reason why we continue to suffer and hurt one another is first and foremost because our minds are sick. This is the continuing provocation offered by the beguiling and calmly furious work of Theodor Adorno.

Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who tried to reinvent religion – moving it away from something based on superstition and ideas of direct divine intervention to being a discipline that was far more impersonal, quasi-scientific and yet also, at all times, serenely consoling.

Baruch – the word means ‘Blessed’ in Hebrew – was born in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam in 1632, a thriving centre of Jewish commerce and thought.

His ancestors were Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Iberian peninsula following the Catholic-inspired expulsion of 1492. Baruch, a studious highly intelligent child, received an intensely traditional Jewish education: he went to the local Jewish school, the yeshiva and followed all the Jewish High holidays and rituals.

But gradually, he began to distance himself from the faith of his ancestors: “Although I have been educated from boyhood in the accepted beliefs concerning Scripture,” he later wrote with characteristic caution, “I have felt bound in the end to embrace other views.”

His fully fleshed out views were to be expressed in his great work, the Ethics, written entirely in Latin and published in 1677. In the Ethics, Spinoza directly challenged the main tenets of Judaism in particular and organised religion in general:

- God is not a person who stands outside of nature

- There is no one to hear our prayers

- Or to create miracles

- Or to punish us for misdeeds

- There is no afterlife

- Man is not God’s chosen creature

- The Bible was only written by ordinary people

- God is not a craftsman or an architect. Nor is he a king or a military strategist who calls for believers to take up the Holy Sword. God does not see anything, nor does he expect anything. He does not judge. He does not even reward the virtuous person with a life after death. Every representation of God as a person is a projection of the imagination.

- Everything in the traditional liturgical calendar is pure superstition and mumbo-jumbo

However, despite all this, remarkably, Spinoza did not declare himself an atheist. He insisted that he remained a staunch defender of God.

God plays an absolutely central role in Spinoza’s Ethics, but it isn’t anything like the God who haunts the pages of the Old Testament.

Spinoza’s God is wholly impersonal and indistinguishable from what we might call variously call nature or existence or a world soul: God is the universe, and its laws; God is reason and truth; God is the animating force in everything that is and can be. God is the cause of everything, but he is the eternal cause. He doesn’t participate in change. He is not in time. He cannot be individuated

Spinoza writes:

“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.”

Throughout his text, Spinoza was keen to undermine the idea of prayer. In prayer, an individual appeals to God to change the way the universe works.

But Spinoza argues that this is entirely the wrong way around. The task of human beings is to try to understand how and why things are the way they are – and then accept it, rather than protest at the workings of existence by sending little messages up into the sky.

As Spinoza put it, beautifully but rather caustically:

“Whosoever loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.”

In other words, only naive (but perhaps rather touching)  narcissism would lead someone at once to believe in a God who made the eternal laws of physics and then to imagine that this same God would take an interest in bending the rules of existence to improve his or her life in some way. 

Spinoza was deeply influenced by the philosophy of the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome. They had argued that wisdom lies not in protest against how things are, but in continuous attempts to understand the ways of the world – and then bow down peacefully to necessity.

Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation (1632)

Seneca, Spinoza’s favourite philosopher, had compared human beings to dogs on a leash being led by the necessities of life in a range of directions. The more one pulls against what is necessary, the more one is strangled – and therefore the wise must always endeavour to understand ahead of time how things are – for example, what love is like, or how politics works – and then change their direction accordingly so as not to be strangled unnecessarily. It is this kind of Stoic attitude that constantly pervades Spinoza’s philosophy.

To understand God traditionally meant studying the Bible and other holy texts. But Spinoza now introduces another idea.

The best way to know God is to understand how life and the universe work: it is through a knowledge of psychology, philosophy and the natural sciences that one comes to understand God.

In traditional religion, believers will ask special favours of God. Spinoza proposes instead that we should understand what God wants and we can do so in one way above all: by studying everything that is. By reasoning, we can accede to a divine eternal perspective.

Spinoza makes a famous distinction between two ways of looking at life, we can either see it egoistically, from our limited point of view, as he put it:

Sub specie durationis – under the aspect of time

Or we can look at things globally and eternally:

Sub specie aeternitatis – under the aspect of eternity

Our nature means that we’ll always be divided between the two. Sensual life pulls us towards a time-bound, partial view. But our reasoned intelligence can give us unique access to another perspective – it can quite literally allow us – here Spinoza becomes beautifully lyrical – to participate in eternal totality.

Normally, we call ‘bad’ whatever is bad for us, and good whatever increases our power and advantage, but to be truly ethical means rising above these local concerns. It might all sound forbidding, but Spinoza envisaged his philosophy as a route to a life based on freedom from guilt, from sorrow, from pity or from shame.

Happiness involves aligning our will with that of the universe. The universe – God – has its own projects and its our task to understand rather than rail against these. The free person is one conscious of the necessities that compel us all.

Spinoza writes, the wise man, the person who understands how and why things are, “possesses eternally true complacency (acquiescentia) of spirit.”

Needless to say, these ideas got Spinoza into very deep trouble. He was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656. The rabbis issued a writ known as a cherem against the philosopher:

“By the decree of the angels” – it went – “and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up…”

Spinoza was forced to flee Amsterdam and eventually settled in the Hague, where he lived quietly and peacefully as a lens grinder and private tutor till his death in 1677.

Spinoza being forced out of the community

Spinoza’s work was largely ignored. In the 19th century, Hegel took an interest, as did Wittgenstein – and some 20th-century scholars. 

But on the whole Spinoza offers us a warning about the failures of philosophy.

The Ethics is one of the world’s most beautiful books. It contains a calming, perspective-restoring take on life. It replaces the God of superstition with a wise and consoling pantheism.

And yet Spinoza’s work failed utterly to convince any but a few to abandon traditional religion and to move towards a rationalist, wise system of belief.

The reasons are in a way simple and banal.

Spinoza failed to understand – like so many philosophers before and since – that what leads people to religion isn’t just reason, but far more importantly, emotion, belief, fear and tradition.

Spinoza’s grave

People stick with their beliefs because they like the rituals, the communal meals, the yearly traditions, the beautiful architecture, the music and the sonorous language read out in synagogue or church.

Spinoza’s Ethics arguably contains a whole lot more wisdom than the Bible – but because it comes without any of the Bible’s supporting structure, it remains a marginal work, studied here and there at universities in the west – while the traditional religion that he thought outmoded in the 1670s continues to thrive and convince people.

If we’re ever to replace traditional beliefs, we must remember just how much religion is helped along by ritual, tradition, art and a desire to belong: all things that Spinoza, despite his great wisdom, ignored at his peril in his bold attempt to replace the Bible.

Among our deepest and seemingly most natural aspirations is the longing to form stable, satisfying relationships: to thrive in partnerships that are good for both people. It doesn’t seem much to ask. A lot of people are looking for roughly the same thing. But the painful fact is that very large numbers of relationships have one difficult episode after another, or seemingly intractable miserable conflicts running through them; relationships feel like a struggle, rather than a support. It’s one of the biggest questions: why is it so hard for us to have the happy, constructive relationships we all want?

The huge – and not yet fully digested – insight of psychoanalysis is that the challenges of relationships do not start over dinner in an interesting restaurant or a college bar. They start, in fact, when we are children. There is no more important period of our lives than childhood; a good childhood is the bedrock of a happy life and a bad one just about dooms us to enduring misery. It was the contribution of the great psychoanalyst John Bowlby to trace the tensions and conflicts we have with our partners back to our early experience of maternal care. 

His ideas are sound in part because he drew so deeply and honestly on his own experiences in order to formulate them. Born in 1907, Edward John Mostyn Bowlby had a quintessentially upper class British childhood. His father was a famous and highly successful doctor, with a knighthood and royal connections. Young Bowlby hardly saw his parents and was looked after by a lovely nanny, Minnie. But Minnie was an employee, and when John was four, she was sent away. His parents weren’t being deliberately callous. They (like pretty much everyone else at the time) didn’t realise how wounding her departure could be. At seven, Bowlby went off – in line with the conventions of his class – to boarding school, to a realm from which maternal warmth was rigorously excluded. 

Bowlby was a brilliant medical student and an imaginative researcher. In 1952 he made a film, A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, which showed the suffering a child went through when they were institutionally separated from their parents. In the wards mothers were not allowed to hold their sick children, for instance, for fear of spreading germs. Visiting times were punitively restricted.  

When he was a consultant to the World Health Organisation in the early 1950s, Bowlby wrote a report, ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’. He attacked prevalent assumptions (including those vigorously maintained by his own mother), arguing that kindness does not smother and spoil children. And he asserted the importance to both child and mother of developing an intimate and enjoyable relationship. This initiated a wave of reform: the visitation rules of many health institutions were reformed – a dry, bureaucratic move that ended countless afternoons of quiet sorrow and evenings of solitary anguish. 

Bowlby poignantly invokes loving care that a little boy needs: ‘all the cuddling and playing, the intimacies of suckling by which a child learns the comfort of his mother’s body, the rituals of washing and dressing by which through her pride and tenderness towards his little limbs he learns the values of his own…’ Such experiences teach a basic trust: that difficulties can be managed; that slip-ups are only that and can be put right, that we are naturally entitled to be treated warmly and considerately, without having to do anything to earn this and without having to make special pleas or demands. ‘’It is as if maternal care were as necessary for the proper development of personality as vitamin D for the proper development of bones.’

The ideal parent is there when child needs it. They are good at actually listening to what the child is saying. They help the child work out for itself what it is feeling. The ideal parent is not anxiously hanging around trying to micromanage everything. The ideal parent makes it feel that problems, difficulties and dangers don’t always have to be avoided: they can be coped with, solved or skillfully overcome. Such a parent makes the child secure. Not just that the child feels secure at particular moments. but that they take this security with them into the tasks of life: they become secure people, so that they are less urgently in need of external validation, less devastated by failure, less in need of markers of status to reassure themselves of their own worth – because they carry within them a stable, reasonable, secure sense of who they are. 

But the fact is that we often don’t quite get the maternal care we need. Parents – without meaning to let anyone down – go wrong in endless ways. They are inconsistent: at one point they are hugely available, happy to play and do things; then suddenly they are sternly busy and remote. Or they might be sweet and tender – but equally they might be angry or grumpy. They are around, then they disappear. They might be busy almost all the time, or very much preoccupied by work or social life. Their own fears, anxieties or troubles may keep them from providing the wise, generous attention the child needs.

In a book published in 1959 called Separation Anxiety Bowlby looks at what happens when there isn’t enough maternal care. He described the behaviour of children he had observed who had been separated from their parents. They went through three stages: protest, despair and detachment. The first phase began as soon as the parent left, and it would last between a few hours and a week. Protesting children would cry, roll around and react to any movement as the possibility of their mother returning. 

If something like this is frequently experienced, then the child craves the attention, love and interest of the parents but feels that anything good may disappear at any moment. They look for a lot of reassurance – and get upset if it is not forthcoming. They are volatile: they take heart, then they despair, then they are filled with hope again. This is the pattern of what Bowlby called ‘anxious attachment’. 

But the degree of separation from the parents may be greater. the child could feel so helpless, they become detached: they enter their own world. To protect themselves they become remote and cold. They are, Bowlby says, ‘attachment avoidant’: that is, they see tenderness, closeness, emotional investment as dangerous and to be shunned. They may, in truth, be desperate for a cuddle or for reassurance, but such things look far too treacherous. 

The focus of Bowlby’s thinking was about what happens to a child if there are too many difficulties in forming secure attachments. But the consequences don’t magically get restricted only to the age of 8 or 12 or 17. They are life long. The pattern of relating that we develop in childhood gets deployed in our adult lives.  

Our attachment style is fed by early experiences: it defines our individual way of being with others. It’s how we sense what other people are up to, how we frame our own needs, how we expect things to go. It’s a pre-existing script that gets written into our adult relationships – usually without us even realising that this happens. It all feels obvious and familiar (even when it is uncomfortable). We take this with us, from partner to partner. 

In line with Bowlby’s views about how children relate to their parents, there are three basic kinds of attachment we have to other adults. 

Secure attachment is the (rare) ideal. If there is a problem, you work it out. You are not appalled by the weakness of your partner. You can take it in your stride, because you can look after yourself when you have to. So if your partner is a bit down, confused or just plain annoying, you don’t have to react too wildly. Because even if they can’t be nice to you, you can take care of yourself and have, hopefully, a little left over to meet some of the needs of your partner. You give the other the benefit of the doubt when interpreting behaviour. You realise that maybe they were just busy, when they didn’t show any interest in your new haircut, or insights into the news. Maybe they had a tricky time at work, that’s why they are not interested in your day. The explanations are accommodating, generous – and usually more accurate. You are slow to anger, quick to forgive and forget. 

Anxious attachment is marked by clinginess: calling just to check where the other is and keeping tabs on what they are up to. You need to make sure that they haven’t left you – or the country. Anxious attachment involves a lot of anger because the stakes feel very high. A minor slight, a hasty word, a tiny oversight can look – to the very anxious person – like huge threats. They seem to announce the imminent breakup of the whole relationship. Anxiously attached people quickly become coercive and demanding and focus on their own needs – not their partner’s. 

Avoidant attachment means that you would rather withdraw, and go away, than get angry with or admit you need the other person. If there is a problem, you don’t talk. Your instinct is to say you don’t really like the other person who has hurt you. Avoidant spouses often team up with anxious ones. It’s a risky combination. The avoidant one doesn’t give the anxious one much support. And the anxious one is always invading the delicate privacy of the avoidant one. 

Bowlby helps us towards more generous – and more constructive – ways of seeing what our partners are doing, when they upset or disappoint us. Almost no one in truth is purely anxious or avoidant. They are just a bit like that, some of the time. So, alerted by Bowlby, we can see that a partner’s apparent coldness and indifference is not caused by their loathing of us, but by the fact that a long time ago they were too badly hurt by intimacy. They are protecting themselves out of fear. They deserve compassion, not a character assassination. 

And it opens possibilities of self-knowledge which can help one reform (if only a little) one’s own behaviour. Perhaps I work so hard because I can’t trust anyone and because a long time ago, I felt that work might help me to secure the fleeting unreliable love of my parents. 

Bowlby died in September 1990 in his early eighties, at his summer home on the Island of Skye.

There’s a powerful, modest but very real principle of hope at work in his theories. It took a long time for Bowlby’s ideas about the importance of the early bond between the mother and child to get broader recognition and support. But it did happen, eventually. There was no single dramatic revolutionary moment. Many thousands of people changed their minds in small ways: an idea that sounded stupid, came to seem mildly interesting. The slow revolution took place at dinner tables and at school gates, at conferences in out of the way places and in careful cost-benefit analyses worked out by civil servants. It is a process of social evolution in which there are few obvious heroes and many necessary participants who can never know exactly what contribution they made: so that today a child facing a frightening operation is surrounded by love and kindness and her parents get to sleep in a bed beside her.

How long it took in history for this need to be taken seriously – and so touching it should have been by this particular man, whose family background, childhood, and education could have been expected to close off any such sympathetic insights.

Research shows that in the UK population:

56 per cent are securely attached

24 per cent are avoidantly attached

20 per cent are anxiously attached

When we use ‘modern’ to describe something, it’s usually a positive. We are very appreciative and even a little smug about the miracles of modern science, the benefits of modern technology, and even the superiority of modern viewpoints. But what if, in speeding towards a new and ever-better future, we’ve left some important truths about ourselves behind? One of the people who best helped us explore this problem was Margaret Mead, perhaps the most famous anthropologist of the 20th century. 

Margaret Mead in 1942

Margaret Mead was born in 1901, the oldest of five children. Her father was a professor of finance, and her mother was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. When Margaret was little, her family moved frequently, and she alternated between attending traditional schools and homeschooling. She also shopped different religions (because her family members had different faiths) and eventually chose Episcopalian Christianity. Her experience sampling different beliefs and navigating new schools may have influenced her decision to study the wildly different ways people think and interact.

After studying psychology as an undergraduate at DePauw University and then Barnard College (at a time where higher education was very unusual for a woman), Mead began a PhD at Columbia University in the relatively new field of anthropology. Her supervisor, Franz Boas, was essentially the founder of the discipline in the United States. Unlike earlier anthropologists, who had imagined that civilisation was progressing in a linear fashion from ‘barbarism’ to ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’, Boas argued that the world was teeming with separate cultures, each with their own unique perspectives, insights, and deficiencies. The modern western world was not the pinnacle of human achievement, but simply one specific example of what humans could achieve.

View of Falefa Valley, Samoa

Boas suggested that Mead travel to Samoa, a few tiny volcanic, tropical islands in the centre of the Pacific Ocean, for her fieldwork. At the time Samoa was governed by America in the East and New Zealand in the West, and was slowly being converted to Christianity. Boas hoped the trip would allow her to study a ‘primitive’ culture that was still relatively undisrupted by the technologically developed world, and to show that it had its own insights and a highly developed culture. Much in line with Boas’s concerns, Mead was particularly interested in primitive communities because she believed that such isolated cultures could serve as ‘laboratories’ that would reveal which cultural norms were most helpful and healthy. She also believed it was critical to do this quickly; she feared that primitive cultures were slipping away, soon to be lost forever.

Starting in 1925 and lasting until the beginning of the Second World War, Mead travelled to Samoa and then to other islands in the south seas of the Pacific Ocean. She lived among native people there as an anthropologist, recording their ways of life. The groups Mead studied included many fishermen and farmers, and few literate people. Mead learned to carry babies around by having them cling to her neck and to dress in native dress. She had no access to recording devices other than still cameras, so she mostly relied on her memory and written notes—and, of course, her ability to quickly learn native languages and become popular with native people. On one island, she lived on the front porch of the Navy pharmacist’s dispensary (which had more privacy than a native house). People came to visit her at all hours of the day and night, often just to chat. She learned to be a foreigner locals didn’t mind confiding in.

Ruth Benedict in 1937

Mead’s work demonstrated a particular weakness in modern society related to sexual life. Mead herself led an unconventional life, simultaneously involved with successive husbands and her ever-present female lover—another famous anthropologist named Ruth Benedict. She believed that “one can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationships.” Perhaps because Mead’s own life was neither heterosexual nor monogamous, she emphasised the ease with which other cultures allowed such practices, and the healthy relationship towards love and sex that could be maintained with these behaviours.

In her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead described Samoan culture as more open and comfortable with sex. The book was her first and most famous research project, for which she studied girls only a bit younger than herself: adolescents navigating their transition to adulthood. She wanted to understand whether their experiences were very different than those of American teenagers, and, if so, whether their experiences could be learned from. Most of all she wanted to test whether “societies could be changed by changing the way children were brought up.” What she found was that little children knew all about masturbation and learned about intercourse and other acts through firsthand observation, but thought of it as no more scandalous or worthy of comment than death or birth. Homosexuality was incidental but also not a matter of shame, and people’s orientations fluctuated naturally throughout their lives without defining them.

Samoan girls, c. 1902

Many of the differences Mead found were not simply curiosities, but replicable practices. Divorce was common and not shameful—a relationship was simply said to have ‘passed away’. Loving more than one person was accepted and understood to be common. Adultery might lead to divorce, but it wouldn’t have to; Mead describes how, in Samoan culture, the lover of a person’s husband or wife might gain the forgiveness of the wronged spouse:

“He goes to the house of the man he has injured, accompanied by all the men of his household…the suppliants seat themselves outside the house, fine mats spread over their heads, bent in attitude of deepest dejection and humiliation….Then towards the evening [the betrayed husband] will say at last: ‘Come, it is enough. Enter the house and drink the Kava. Eat the food which I will set before you and we will cast our trouble into the sea.’”

A Samoan family bathing c. 1950

Mead argued that because Samoan culture had an understanding of sex and all of its complexities and difficulties as part of the natural life cycle, and because their culture had developed useful, meaningful responses to address these difficulties, their personal sexual lives were much easier. For example, she found that such norms made adolescence much less difficult for Samoan girls than for American girls, because Samoan girls had relatively few responsibilities and there was little pressure for them to conform to a particular kind of sexual life. They were neither pressured to abstain from sex or to achieve particular milestones like having boyfriends or getting married. The converse of this situation meant that being an American teenager was stressful largely because of the nature of being American, rather than being teenaged.

Here Mead tapped into a deeper criticism of her own culture. She saw life for Americans of her time as one in which people are brought up “denied all firsthand knowledge of birth and love and death, harried by a society which will not let adolescents grow up at their own pace, imprisoned in the small, fragile, nuclear family from which there is no escape and in which there is little security.” Although much has changed in America and in the Western world since this time, her insights still apply in many ways. Our adolescents are still pressured to conform to particular models of human sexual behaviour, and these pressures, along with the pressures that we experience long into adulthood, make our lives more difficult and empty than they would otherwise be. Our modern life does not allow us to be as freely loving and sexual, as complex and full of change, as other cultures allow.

American teenagers at a dance c. 1950

Mead also discovered that human behaviour in relation to gender varied widely from culture to culture, far more than Americans at the time could imagine. For example, Americans thought of men as productive, sensible, and more aggressive, while women were more frivolous, peaceful, and nurturing. But in her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead studied tribes in Papua New Guinea and found radically different results. She recorded that in the Arapesh tribe both men and women were peaceful and nurturing, while among Mundugumor, men and women were both ruthless and aggressive. Perhaps most striking was Mead’s description of the people of the Chambri region, where the women were dominant and far more aggressive than men, while the men were dependents and in need of emotional support. In short, Mead suggested that none of these traits were ‘human nature’: they were all instead simply possibilities, which were either taught, encouraged, or shunned by native culture.

Mead’s striking conclusion was, of course, that culture determined an individual’s personality far more than people had previously expected. It was not sex that made women curl their hair or listen to people’s feelings, or ‘race’ that made some nations regularly attack their neighbours. Rather, it was the social expectations and norms that had developed slowly for centuries, and which laid the groundwork for each individual’s psychological makeup. “We must recognise,” she reminded her readers, “that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.”

Group of women aviation workers sitting under hair dryers in a beauty salon, c. 1950

Modern American culture also had no place for certain potentialities—in this it was no more successful than any primitive culture. We might think, for example, that men like football because they are the more warlike sex, but in fact they have been the more warlike sex because (for some arbitrary reasons or matter of convenience) they have been the sex at war. Similarly, we may believe that women have tended to children because they are nurturing, but actually they have been guided to be nurturing because they were assigned the task of raising children. In making these assumptions, we forget about human potential for gentleness and roughness that other cultures have forgotten.

In making this criticism, Mead followed in a long line of thinkers who recognised that modern civilisation, with all of its technological advantages and rapid developments, had left some aspects of human experience behind—either unrecognised, misunderstood, or poorly tended to. In this sense, she was much like the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who had described human beings as originally having a very different, and far more solitary nature. Rousseau suggested that as civilisation developed, human nature was moulded by society—often for the worse; this artificial construction of social order (often through violence and oppression), he argued, limits human potential.

Mead’s point, in turn, was that even now we wrongly assume the conventions that Rousseau describes as unnatural, and in doing so we miss out on greater possibilities, both for how to behave as individuals and how to reorganise societies. She believed that by studying other cultures, especially primitive ones that had developed apart from our own, we could better explore these possibilities. Perhaps, for example, we can choose when to be loving and when to be aggressive, when to demand a certain standard of sexual behaviour and when to learn how to gracefully and conscientiously accommodate our differing needs.

American women doing men’s work in the arsenals of war in the US, c. 1940

Mead strongly believed that it was important to consider cultural norms because people needed their culture to help guide them towards healthier emotional lives. She imagined that each culture, like a tribe cast out from the Tower of Babel and given a unique language, had something unique to contribute culturally as well: “Each primitive people has selected one set of human gifts, one set of human values, and fashioned for themselves an art, a social organisation, which is their unique contribution to the history of the human spirit.” The beauty of these differences was not that the people she studied always had it better figured out than Americans (sometimes she could be very critical of the people she studied), but rather that both groups could learn from each other: “from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children.”

Indeed, Mead herself had learned much from her anthropological subjects. For example, she brought up her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, on some of the parenting of the primitive people she worked with. Mead enlisted a new physician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, as the child’s doctor, in part because he allowed unconventional practices like breast feeding on demand, which Mead had learned from her research subjects (and which is now commonplace in western culture, thanks in part to Dr. Spock).

Benjamin Spock with his niece Susannah in 1967

During World War II access to the South Pacific was impossible, so Mead began to study more ‘complex’ cultures like her own. She was also asked to turn her research to war purposes, first by studying how to maintain morale during wartime, and then by studying the social complexities of food distribution. She even wrote a book on American national character entitled And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942). With the help of her husband Gregory Bateson, she founded the Institute for Intercultural Studies in order to establish further study of other cultures.

After the war, Mead also worked for the US Military, studying Russian responses to authority in order to try to predict what the Soviets might do during the cold war. She grew increasingly famous, travelling widely, giving lectures, and teaching at universities. For 50 years, from 1928 until her death in 1978, she worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as a curator for their projects. She wrote 20 books, was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was awarded 28 honorary degrees, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mead studying Tzantzas brought back from a trip to New Guinea, 1934

Mead was a supporter of many political causes, fighting against poverty and racism and supporting women’s rights. She wrote a book showing how many of the differences in intelligence between ‘races’ that psychologists had measured were instead the result of cultural knowledge and convention. She encouraged her readers and listeners to also think of social problems as culturally conditioned, issues that could be overcome by new efforts and ideas. She is famous for having (probably) said, “never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Mead’s own committed work helped generations of Americans and people everywhere see greater possibilities for individuals and for modern values. She suggested that we see human nature less as a singular and universal fact and more as an ever-changing landscape, one through which we should travel in order to become wiser. “As the traveller who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep,” she suggested, “so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.” In doing so, she suggested, we could uncover and support undeveloped human potential forgotten in our rush towards ‘modernity’.