People have always had trouble pronouncing his name. The 19th-century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was once mocked in Parliament for getting it wrong. If you don’t speak German, it’s not at all obvious how you are supposed to say it. A safe bet is to start with a hard g on ‘Ger…’ and end with a ‘ter’: Ger-ter.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) has often been seen as one of Europe’s big cultural heroes – comparable to the likes of Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. He excelled in a wide range of areas: he wrote many poems, was a huge hit as a novelist and made scientific contributions in physiology, geology, botany and optics. He was also a diplomat, fashion guru, a senior civil servant, a pornographer, the head of a university, a fine artist, an adventurous traveller, the director of a theatre company and the head of a mining company. No wonder another polymath, Andy Warhol, appropriated him for his pantheon of heroes:

During his life, Goethe’s admirers were impressed by his literary works. But more than any of his books, what impressed people at the time was how he lived his life, the kind of person he was. The life was more significant than the books (which helps explain why, unlike Jane Austen or Marcel Proust, his literary works are relatively unknown).

Goethe was born in the city of Frankfurt in 1749. His family was comfortably off – it was new money, made from inn keeping.

The family house where Goethe grew up

The Goethe family: 14-year-old Johann Wolfgang and his younger sister Cornelia look after a pet sheep

Goethe’s parents took great care with his education: he was mainly educated at home; he wrote poetry for his friends, took art classes, learned Italian. He went to the theatre a lot and became friends with actresses. As a member of the upper class, he wore a sword in public from the age of twelve.

Goethe, Self-Portrait, aged about 15

He studied at the University of Leipzig and later did a master’s degree in Law at the University of Strasbourg.

He often skipped lectures and went to a viewing platform high up on a nearby cathedral tower. He was afraid of heights. But he made himself do it because he liked to overcome obstacles – and loved the view.

We can pick up some vital lessons from Goethe:

One: From Romanticism to Classicism in Love

Goethe’s first proper job, after law school, was as an assistant at a national tribunal judging cases between the many minor German states that, at that time, made up the Holy Roman Empire. While he was working, he fell in love with the fiancée of one his colleagues. He then committed a huge indiscretion and wrote up the love affair as a novel. He called it The Sorrows of Young Werther – the central character, Werther, is a lightly disguised self-portrait.

It tells the story of how Werther/Goethe falls in love with a young woman, Charlotte. It’s a very detailed description of all the tiny steps one takes on the road to infatuation: they dance together, at one point their feet accidentally touch under the table; they smile, they write each other flirtatious little notes. It makes being in love seem like the most important experience in life. Werther asks himself: “What is a life without romantic love? A magic lantern without a lamp.”

This deeply charming novel was a bestseller across Europe for the next 25 years. Napoleon boasted he had read it seven times. The story has a miserable ending. Charlotte doesn’t really love Werther and finally rejects him. In despair he kills himself. The tragic dénouement shows Goethe beginning to see the limitations of the romantic view of life. Romantic love is deeply attractive but it causes immense problems too.

The core problem – as Goethe sees it – is this: Romantic love hopes to ‘freeze’ a beautiful moment. It’s a summer’s evening, after dinner, Werther is walking in the woods with his beloved. He wants it to be always like this: so he feel they should get married, have a house together, have children. Though, in reality, marriage will be nothing at all like the lovely June night. There’ll be exhaustion, bills to pay, squabbles and a sense of confinement. By comparison with the extreme hopes of Romanticism, real love is always necessarily a terrible disappointment.

That’s why Goethe gradually moved away from Romanticism towards an ideology of love he termed Classicism – marked by a degree of pessimism, an acceptance of the troubles that afflict all couples over time, and of the need to abandon some of the heady hopes of the early days for the sake of tranquillity and administrative competence. Goethe was a critic of Romantic ideology not because he was cold hearted or lacking in imagination but because he so deeply and intimately understood its attractions – and therefore its dangers.

Goethe’s career shows us a journey away from the initial Romanticism of Werther towards a mature, classical view of life. His later play, Iphigenia, fully develops the Classical alternative to Romanticism.

Iphigenia is a Greek princess at the time of the Trojan wars, the daughter of the chief king of the Greeks, Agamemnon. She and her family are caught up in a horrific sequence of murders and feuds: a dramatic exaggeration of the traumas of ordinary family life.

Iphigenia, in white – with her difficult parents: Clytemnestra and Agamemnon 

Typically, the cycle of intense passion continues itself from one generation to the next. Goethe imagines Iphigenia as the person who finally brings forgiveness and peace.

Iphigenia persuades her brother to forgive their parents

Iphigenia sees her role in life as that of “making men mild.” She is always encouraging people to calm down and be merciful. She is committed to love, but a love marked not by wild passion, but by understanding, sympathy and a desire for harmony:

Remembering that we all must die

Should move the hardest heart to tenderness; 

Are we not required to show others

The best kindness we ourselves have known?

Goethe first audiences, brought up on Romanticism, were slow to get the message. Was Goethe turning his back on Romantic love? Where was all the passion? They described the story of Iphigenia as like “watching grey mist.”

Goethe, now in middle-age, was undaunted. He’d had enough of Werther and expressed his own view emphatically – “Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.” But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?

Two: The Dignity of Administration

In April, 1775, not long after his big success with Werther, Goethe took a job as a civil servant.

Carl August, the Duke of Weimar, appointed him as his chief adviser and senior administrator to help run his country.

Carl August, Goethe’s employer – for most of his life

Goethe continued in this employment for most of the rest of his life; his main jobs were as minister for roads – which was vital to trying to improve trade. He was the overseer of the state owned silver-mining operation. He undertook diplomatic missions and made major decisions around education and urban planning. He spent a lot of time in the twice-weekly cabinet meetings (which involved a lot of writing and reading of briefing papers). 

It can sound like a strange move for a very successful creative figure: as if the winner of the Booker prize became a civil servant at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We just assume that art and literature are at odds with an enthusiasm for government administration.

Goethe’s colleagues

But Goethe didn’t see it that way. Over the years, he spent a lot of his time drawing up reports and sitting in meetings about the pros and cons of purchasing specialist drainage equipment, the best material for resurfacing a highway and how to deal with with their overbearing neighbour, Prussia.

He felt that he needed responsibility, power and experience to become a more mature and wiser person – and a better poet and philosopher. But it did something else as well: it enabled him to put ideas in practice.

Goethe expanded from being a solitary writer of plays to being head of Germany’s leading cultural institution at that time – the Weimar State theatre

Later, he held the position of arts minister. He was able to establish the best theatre in Germany – and put on the first performances of many of the plays of the era. In modern terms, it was like setting up as a major film producer. The encounter with power, responsibility, budgets and money – with the mechanisms by which the world is run – enabled Goethe to purse a crucial developmental path. He moved from being a solitary creative thinker working essentially on his own to someone able to put his ideas into action. Instead of writing about how good it would be to have a national theatre, he was able to establish one; instead of just saying that cities should have green spaces, he was able to rev the governmental machinery into action and actually create a model urban park.

Goethe made the move from writing about the importance of nature to setting up a large park near the city centre

Three: Travel as Therapy

In September 1786, after ten years in the Weimar civil service, when his fortieth birthday was coming into view, Goethe was gripped by the fear that he was wasting his life. He was weary of the cold winters, the endless meetings, the work load that made it hard to find time for writing. He headed for Italy – first to Vicenza and Venice where he was especially impressed by the buildings of Andrea Palladio.

Goethe wanted his life to become like Palladio’s buildings: serene, ordered, sensuous and dignified

Then he went to Rome, which was his main base. He spent nearly two years in Italy. He had a very classical idea of the point of travel. The outer journey was intended to support an inner journey towards maturity. He felt that there was a part of himself that could only be discovered in Italy – “I am longing for grapes and figs.”

Piazza del Popolo – 18th-century Rome: Goethe’s flat was just a few steps from here – a few doors down the middle street between the two domes, on the left hand side

But like many visitors to Rome, when he got there he felt disappointed.

In a collection of poems he wrote about his experience - The Roman Elegies – he describes how the great city seemed to be filled with lifeless ruins that were famous but didn’t actually mean anything to him: “speak to me, you stones!” he pleads. It’s a feeling many later visitors have had.

He realised that what he needed was not a more elaborate guide book, but the right person to have an affair with – someone who would share their love of Rome with him and show him the real meaning of the place. In a poem, he describes the woman he meets – he calls her Faustina. They spend lazy afternoons in bed; she’s not a great intellectual, she tells him about her life, about the buildings she passes on her way to the market – the Pantheon, a Baroque Church designed by Bernini – which she hadn’t realised were famous; they were just the buildings that happened to be around, that she happens to like. In his bedroom next to Faustina, Goethe realises that he’s entering into the spirit of Classical culture: a simple, comfortable relationship to sex and beauty; and the idea that the classical poets were people like him.

For Goethe, the point of travel isn’t relaxation or just taking a break from routine. He’s got a bigger goal in mind: the aim of travel is to go to a place where we can find the missing ingredient of our own maturity.

The goal: maturity

Goethe didn’t stay in Italy. After nearly two years, he had developed enough to go back to Weimar and get on with his work political and creative work.

Four: Living Life to the Full: The Faustian Hero

One of the most striking things about Goethe is how much he did, how broad his horizons were, and how wide his interests were. He explored this particularly through his most famous work, Faust. Goethe worked on Faust all his life. The earliest sketches go back to his teens. And he only decided he’d done with it when he was in his early eighties. Faust comes in two parts and together the performance takes about thirteen hours. Goethe himself never saw the whole thing – and few people have since.

Faust is a medieval academic and scholar. He’s very learned but he doesn’t do very much: he is unfulfilled in love, he hasn’t made any money, and he has no power. His knowledge is sterile. His life feels pointless and he wishes he could die.

But then he is visited by a devil, called Mephistopheles – who offers him boundless energy, good looks and the ability to do whatever he wants. The question is: what will Faust want to  do? The first danger for Faust is to stay an academic who resists worldly impact.

‘Hemmed in by heaps of books,

Piled to the highest vault and higher:

Worm eaten, decked with dust’

With the Devil’s help he could be the ultimate bookworm: he could get his hands on the oldest, rarest manuscripts. But he gets weary of words and longs for action.

The second danger is that he will use his new powers to gratify every sensual appetite. He will become a pure hedonist. Faust goes some way down this path: he goes to a bar and gets everyone very drunk, he goes to a huge orgy – but then he realises that what he really seeks is beauty and love and this leads him on from sex and alcohol.

The third danger is that Faust will become a confident but shallow political leader. But in the second part of the play, Faust pursues a grand purpose: eventually he organises the development of a new country – along the lines of the Dutch Republic – which at that time was the most Enlightened and successful society in the world.

The final wisdom: space for millions,

free to work on fertile fields, where men and herds

can settle and gain comfort from the new-made earth:

a paradise, where hard working people win their freedom every day

Faust is a morality tale for all of us: he shows us both the pitfalls of life and how we might avoid them. Faust knows a great deal – but he resists being an academic; he loves sex, but he doesn’t give way to debauchery. He likes power but he doesn’t use it for megalomania: he puts it to work in the service of noble ends.

Faust’s career path is not unlike Goethe’s. Faust is essentially tracing for us a theory of how to live a full life. He is very interested in ideas, but not a scholar. He visits Italy, but doesn’t stay there. He goes back to work. He tries out administration and learns how to wield power, but once he has mastered this side of himself he moves on. The Faustian idea is that in order to develop fully, we have to flirt with things that are quite dangerous, but hold on to a sense of higher purpose.

In 1807 the Emperor Napoleon tried to persuade Goethe to come and work for him – Goethe refused, but was glad to have the offer

Five: Science for Artsy People

Goethe was the last European to do a certain kind of remarkable thing -  to write great novels and plays and also play a significant role in science. His interests ranged through geology, meteorology, physiology and chemistry. But his most important work was in botany – in 1790 he produced his study, Metamorphosis of Plants, and on optics and colour, where his research was summed up in the Theory of Colours which was published in 1810.

Thereafter, this combination of very significant work in the arts and in the sciences disappears from European civilisation completely. Goethe gives us some guidance as to why this has happened. Goethe is a hero for people of a more literary and artistic sensibility who are attracted from a distance to the broad subject matter of science – but who find the details of science less appealing.

Goethe likes science that you can do yourself, by looking carefully at the world around you.

Goethe did a lot of his research on plants in his own back garden in Weimar

He did a lot of his research on optics with candles and coloured pieces of paper in his study. He liked the training this gave in asking oneself: what do I actually see? This could combat our tendency to see only what we expect. And also, it usefully turned our attention outwards, as a relief from preoccupation with ourselves.

Goethe was very interested in the psychological aspect of our relationship to the sort of things that science investigates: plants, light, stones. Rather than exclude the issues of personal meaning, Goethe sees these as central to the proper and full investigation of nature.

Why do the colours of her dress work well together

He wants to understand why green and russet silk make a great design combination – as an aid to couturiers and artists.

He was struck that different kinds of rock have a different character. And he chose granite – the hardest stone – for a monument to good fortune, which he put in his garden.

Why is granite good for a monument to luck?

What does an elephant jawbone (Goethe found it in a quarry near Weimar) mean to me? 

And he was very moved by the continuity between human life and the life of plants and animals. The point of studying an elephant’s jaw was to understand the traces of our evolution. Goethe thought of human nature as being a gradual refinement of animal nature.

Goethe was very worried by the direction that science was taking – which he particularly associated with the work of Isaac Newton. As Goethe saw it, the academic, profession scientist wasn’t interested in the personal meaning of the things they investigated.

Goethe thought Newton had ‘tortured’ light – breaking it up to extract its hidden secrets

Goethe’s point isn’t that Newton is technically wrong. It’s that he dislikes the direction of effort.

CONCLUSION

As he aged, Goethe kept on working. 

He often dictated his ideas

And he kept on seeking love – and sex. 

In his 70s, Goethe fell in love with Ulrike – his passion was unrequited

Goethe died at his house in Weimar in 1832. He was 83.

We have so much to learn from him. We don’t often hear people declaring a wish to be a little more like ‘Goethe’. But if we did, the world would be a more vibrant and humane place.

In Europe and the US, the average person spends 84% of their life indoors: that is, inside architecture. Much of the rest of the time we are around buildings, even if we’re not paying them a great deal of attention. Despite this massive exposure, on the whole we’re not – as a culture – very ambitious about what buildings look like. We tend to assume that mostly the buildings we live around won’t be anything special and that there’s nothing to be done about this. We’ve come to imagine that great buildings are the unique and very expensive creations of genius-architects. You might travel to see great architecture on holiday perhaps but it’s hardly to be expected as standard at home. Vicenza, 25 miles inland from Venice, is one of the leading sites of global architectural tourism and for one reason: many of the works of Andrea Palladio are located in and around that town.

Andrea Palladio was born at the end of November in 1508 in Padua. He was an apprentice stone mason and later a stone carver. His real name was Andrea di Pietro della Gondola (i.e. Andrew, son of Peter the Gondolier). And it was only when he was around thirty years of age that he got involved in designing buildings himself – and his first important patron suggested a stylish name change, to Palladio.

[It’s not intuitively obvious how to say his name. A safe bet is to start with ‘pa’ (as in dad); then ‘lad’ as in ‘a bit of a lad’; and finish up with with a brisk ‘ay-oh’: pa-lad-ayoh.]

Over the next forty years of his working life, Palladio designed forty or so villas, a couple of town houses and a handful of churches. Not a huge list, given the amount of building that was going on at the time. For most of his career he had a mix of professional successes and setbacks; though during his sixties he finally emerged as the top architect  in Venice – about the richest and most powerful city in the world at that time. He was a devoted father, but his two elder sons – who worked alongside him – died young. Palladio himself died in the summer of 1580. He was 71.

Palladio himself held views on architecture almost entirely opposite to those which are current today. His attitude can be summarised by two central ideas. First, architecture has a clear purpose, which is to help us be better people. And, second, there are rules for good building. Great architecture (he was convinced) is more of a craft than an art: it isn’t necessarily expensive and it is for everyday life, for farms, barns and offices, not only for the occasional glamorous project.

One: The Purpose of Architecture

We tend not to ask this question, it can easily sound naive or pretentious. Either you are supposed to know already or someone is about to launch into a complicated disquisition. 

Palladio held that architecture has an important purpose – above and beyond the provision of floors, walls and ceilings. He thought that we should build in order to encourage good states of mind in ourselves and others. In particular, he thought architecture could help us with three psychological virtues: calm, harmony and dignity.

Encouragement for our better nature

Calm

He reduces what’s going on; all the elements in a room are centred, balanced, symmetrical. He only uses simple geometrical shapes. Generally, the walls are plain and neutral. There’s not meant to be much furniture. The serenity of the space is designed to calm us down; they are not trying to surprise or excite us. They invite us to focus and concentrate, to be less distracted.

Encouragement to be serene

Harmony

Palladio was obsessed with making sure that every element of a building fitted perfectly with every other.

‘A fine building ought to appear as an entire and perfect body, wherein every member agrees with its fellow, and each so well with the whole, that it may seem absolutely necessary.’

The design of a window is related to that of a door; every opening is aligned with every other; every room is a clear, simple shape; the doors always line up.

One door leads to another – Villa Barbaro

Powerfully coherent buildings are moving because they counter the natural tendency of life for things to get muddled, confused and compromised. They work against our anxiety that many of our concerns won’t line up neatly: that work and home life, sex and love, desire and duty will all be continually fighting one another. The building creates an environment in which we are provided with a limited – but real – sense of everything important coming elegantly together.

A portion of the world in which elements work harmoniously together

Dignity

One of the ambitions of Palladio’s architecture was to give greater dignity to parts of life that had been, unfairly, regarded as unworthy. And which, in his eyes, lacked the prestige they properly deserved.

At the Villa Barbaro – a farmhouse in the countryside about forty miles north of Venice – the barns and stables and grain stores are just as grand as the owner’s not especially large house. Rather than being hidden away or set at a distance, these working buildings are presented as honourable and important.

Villa Barbaro – the workers lived in the elegant wings

He wasn’t disguising the utilitarian reality of the farm, rather he was demonstrating its genuine (though generally underappreciated) dignity.

In directing architecture towards these psychological states, Palladio wasn’t flattering us. He wasn’t pretending that his buildings were reflecting what we’re normally like. He knew perfectly well that people tend to be (then as now) irate and agitated; that dignity is a mask that slips; that we get despondent. He wasn’t trying to give expression to ordinary human nature. In keeping with the long classical tradition, he believed that buildings should try to compensate for our weaknesses: encouraging us to be more collected, poised and measured than we manage to be day to day. We need serene, harmonious and confident buildings precisely because we’re not reliably like that. Ideally, architecture embodies our better selves. The ideal building is like the ideal person.

Palladio is classically pessimistic about our ability to hold onto ideas; the mind is leaky: we very easily lose contact with our own better nature; we’re very likely to forget, under pressure, what is important to us. The task of architecture is to provides us with the environment that continuously reminds about – and encourages us to become – who we really want to be.

Two: Rules

Of course, we accept that there are lots of useful rules – for airline safety, accounting practices or card games. But we’re generally suspicious of the idea that rules might be important around anything deemed cultural, intimate or creative: the idea that there might be beneficial rules of conversation, art, relationships or indeed of architecture. We tend to see rules as secondary, lacking originality. Like Aristotle, Palladio took the view that many creative undertakings (like writing tragedies, having conversations or cultivating friendships) should be understood as skills or crafts. They are learnable. According to a classical outlook, good outcomes in such areas are not simply to do with luck or chance. And rules ideally capture what it is we need to do in order to do them well.

In 1570, Palladio published his Four Books on Architecture.

It’s an early, and very distinguished, example of the ‘how to’ genre. It gives instruction on how to build. There’s a practical guide to digging foundations and how to judge the quality of cement and the various reliable ways of constructing walls and laying floors.

He also develops rules of proportion, based on simple mathematical ratios. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras had famously discovered that two taught strings, one half the length of the other, sound harmonious when vibrated at the same time. The pleasing quality of the sound, he discovered, was governed by a simple mathematical principle. Palladio and others developed a visual equivalent of this. 

The fancy surrounds are not the crucial thing. Without them, the window opening will still look lovely, because it is the proportions and not the decoration that make it harmonious. This meant that an equally beautiful building could be produced more cheaply (always one of Palladio’s chief concerns). Because the same proportions are beautiful irrespective of whether the building is made of marble, brick, concrete or wood.

And he went on to provide a wide range of simple rules for making buildings attractive: they should be symmetrical; there should be three, five or seven openings on a side – not an even number; rooms should have a simple geometrical shape, the length should be three-fifths of the width and the height three-fifths of the width.

Palladio saw himself as a craftsman. He was simply following a set of rules, which others could follow too. He was working against the idea that architecture requires special genius. The ideal of a pattern book is that visually elegant buildings can be put up as standard, as happened (to a significant extent under the influence of Palladio) in London and in many cities in the 18th century.

A central concern of the Four Books is to educate the potential client or the consumer of architecture. Often, we’re not very sure why we like or dislike buildings. We might have quite positive or negative reactions and say something is great or rather horrible. But if pressed for an explanation, we often find ourselves struggling. We find it difficult to say what it is about about one building that makes it attractive and what makes another unappealing. We’re tempted to say that it’s a purely personal matter, that taste in architecture is purely subjective. It’s a well-intended sentiment. But it’s also unfortunate. It plays into the hands of developers who have no concerns whatever for beauty – who are safe in the knowledge that they will never be taken to task for what they do.

Conclusion

Palladio’s ideas have resonated down the ages. But it isn’t when buildings have columns or make nods to ancient temples that they are necessarily at their most authentically ‘Palladian’. Buildings are Palladian when they are devoted to calm, harmony and dignity on the basis of rules which can (and should be) widely re-used. It’s then they display the same underlying ambition of which Palladio is a central exponent and advocate: that it should be normal for buildings to present us with a seductive portrait of our calmest and most dignified selves.

Some great modern ‘Palladian’ buildings:

Le Corbusier, The Villa Savoye.

Louis Kahn, Korman House

 James Gorst, Leaf House

This is a section of The Book of Life that gathers together our canon: our selection of the greatest thinkers from the fields of philosophy, political theory, sociology, art, architecture and literature whom we believe have the most to offer to us today.

The idea of assembling a ‘canon’ can feel a bit awkward – maybe even oppressive. It can feel unfair to leave out so many people. And anyway, who decides? Surely the people making the canon are bringing some bias to their task?

We happily admit to bias. We’re sometimes taught to think ill of bias, as if the only good kind of information was that which carried absolutely no intention or design, and left everything up to the audience instead. This emphasis on neutrality is understandable; there has historically – especially in the 20th century – been a lot of bad bias around. But we ultimately believe that the goal isn’t to have no bias at all but to put forward ‘good’ bias; by which we mean, bias in favour of a selection of thinkers who point us to valuable and important ideas. At The School of Life, we are heavily biased towards emotional intelligence and the use of culture as a tool for consolation and enlightenment.

We have some quite specific views about what makes a thinker ‘great’. Typically, great thinkers are included in encyclopedic works on the basis of reputation: a list is drawn up asking what names have been most influential, and what ideas have most memorably shaped the intellectual world. However, we’ve got our sights on a different aim: we want to work out what ideas offer help with some of the leading problems of our own times. For us, a ‘great’ thinker is someone whose ideas stand the very highest chance of being helpful in our lives now.

Because a canon is necessarily so selective, it is always vulnerable to attack. We have a sanguine view of selection; selection is simply an inescapable feature of living in an information-rich world. The ideal isn’t to avoid being selective, the challenge is to try to select as well as possible. In our eyes, this means picking out thinkers who can unpick some of the greatest difficulties in our political, professional and personal lives. We aren’t historians recovering ideas for their own sakes; we are applied philosophers seeking intellectual concepts that can be put to work in the here and now.

We’ve worked hard to make the thinkers in The Book of Life sound simple, easy and (hopefully) quite charming. In the past, many of these thinkers have been caught in a fiendish trap. What they have had to say has been hugely relevant and important. But how they have said it has guaranteed that they went unheard: because their books were a little too dense, some of their ideas sounded odd and many of their most crucial concepts were prone to get lost amidst a welter of subsidiary information. We’ve recovered what we see as the important ideas in our chosen thinkers by following a number of principles:

• Only a few things that any mind, however great, has ever said are likely to be of central lasting importance.
• These key points are detachable from the full body of a thinker’s work.
• We are forgetful, time-pressured creatures. We are liable to forget every intricacy of a complex sustained argument. So we need central messages spelt out memorably and simply.
• Whatever academic culture tells us, context is not decisive. Important truths get lodged in odd places and can be extricated from them; they may lie in 3rd century China, in an aristocratic salon in 18th century Paris or in a small house in an alpine village in the 19th century. Yet what always matters in the end is what they can do for us now.
• It’s a tragic paradox that there are ways of showing reverence for the great thinkers that ends up preventing them having an impact in the world – the opposite result which reverence initially hoped for. Being a little casual with a great thinker is the biggest homage one could pay to him or her.
• Our guiding concern is that great ideas should be widely known and that they should be active in our lives.

That said, we recognise that there are proper worries around ‘simplification’. There is a concern – fed by the academic world – that if you simplify, you inevitably betray: you omit the stuff that really matters. We understand the anxiety, but don’t want to let it triumph, for we are equally aware of the dangers of listening to it too closely: needless complexity can lead to good ideas being ignored altogether. We think that the important truths about how we might live are capable of popular formulation. We’re against the tragic view that what is important is condemned always to be unpopular or incomprehensible to most citizens.

Popularising is, from our perspective, a great and noble task, especially in a democratic consumer-led world where elite culture has (more or less) lost its sway. It’s what makes ideas real in the life of a society. In any case, our lives are never entirely bookish or intellectual. We’re always driven by, and to an extent reliant on straightforward thoughts that guide our conduct. Those ideas are the ones that matter to the day to day flourishing of a community. Preciousness can be the downfall of the best concepts.

The modern world has to date left the study and transmission of cultural ideas largely to university departments in the humanities. Their main focus has been on trying to understand what great thinkers were about in and of themselves. Here, somewhat heretically, we’re doing something very different: we want to know what they can do for us.

We’ve mined history to bring you the ideas we believe to be of the greatest relevance to our own times. We will have succeeded if, in the days and years ahead, you find yourself turning to them to illuminate the multiple dilemmas and griefs of daily life.

Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who tried to work out how human beings could be good and kind – outside of the exhortations and blandishments of traditional religion.

He was born in 1724 in the Baltic city of Königsberg, which at that time was part of Prussia, and now belongs to Russia (renamed Kaliningrad).

Kant’s parents were very modest; his father was a saddle maker. Kant never had much money – which he dealt with cheerfully by living very modestly. It wasn’t until he was in his fifties that he became a fully salaried professor and attained a moderate degree of prosperity.

His family were deeply religious and very strict. Later in life, Kant did not have any conventional religious belief, but he was acutely aware of how much religion had contributed to his parents’ ability to cope with all the hardships of their existence – and how useful religion could be in fostering social cohesion and community.

Kant was physically very slight, frail and anything but good looking. But he was very sociable and some of his colleagues used to criticise him for going to too many parties.

When – eventually – he was able to entertain, he had rules about conversation; at the start of a dinner party, he decreed that people should swap stories about what had been happening recently. Then there should be a major phase of reflective discourse, in which those present attempted to clarify an important topic; and finally there should be a closing period of hilarity so that everyone left in a good mood.

He died in 1804, in his eightieth year, in Königsberg – having rarely felt the need to spend any time outside the city in which he was born.

**

Kant was writing at a highly interesting period in history we now know as The Enlightenment. In an essay called What is Enlightenment (published in 1784), Kant proposed that the identifying feature of his age was its growing secularism. Intellectually, Kant welcomed the declining belief in Christianity, but in a practical sense, he was also alarmed by it. He was a pessimist about human character and believed that we are by nature intensely prone to corruption.

It was this awareness that led him to what would be his life’s project: the desire to replace religious authority with the authority of reason; that is, human intelligence. Kant pursued this grand project in a major series of books with fearsome titles, including:

The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)

The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

The Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

The Critique of Judgment (1793)

In a book on religion titled, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793), Kant argued that although historical religions had all been wrong in the content of what they had believed, they had latched onto a great need to promote ethical behaviour, which still remained.

It was in this context that Kant came up with the idea for which he is perhaps still most famous: what he called the Categorical Imperative. This strange sounding term first appeared in a horrendously named work, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It states:  

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

What did Kant mean by this? This was only a very formal restatement of an idea that had been around for a long time – something we meet with in all the main religions: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Kant was offering a handy way of testing the morality of an action or pattern of behaviour by imagining how it would be if it were generally practiced and you were the victim of it.

It might be tempting to flitch a few pads of paper from the stationery cupboard at work. It seems like a small thing. But if everyone did this, the cupboard and society at large would need a lot of guards.

Similarly, if you have an affair and keep it quiet from your partner you might feel it’s OK. But the Categorical Imperative comes down against this, because you would have to embrace the idea that it would be equally OK for your partner to have affairs and not tell you.

The Categorical Imperative is designed to shift our perspective: to get us to see our own behaviour in less immediately personal terms and thereby recognise some of its limitations.

Kant went on to argue that the core idea of the Categorical Imperative could be stated in another way: “Act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means.”

This was intended as a replacement for the Christian injunction for universal love: the command to “love one’s neighbour”. To treat a person as an ‘end’ meant keeping in view that they had a life of their own in which they were seeking happiness and fulfilment, and deserved justice and fair treatment.

The Categorical Imperative – Kant argued – is the voice of our own rational selves, it’s what we all truly believe when we are thinking rationally. It’s the rule our own intelligence gives us.

Kant extended his thinking about the Categorical Imperative into the political sphere. He believed that the central duty of government was to ensure liberty. But he sensed that there was something wrong with the ordinary definition of freedom. It should not be thought of in libertarian terms: as the ability to do whatever we want. We are free only when we act in accordance with our own best natures; we are slaves whenever we are under the rule of our own passions or those of others. As he put it, ‘a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same.’

So freedom isn’t an absence of government: a free society isn’t one that allows people more and more opportunity to do whatever they happen to fancy. It’s one that helps everyone become more reasonable. The good state represents the rational element in everyone, it rules according to ‘a universally valid will under which everyone can be free.’ Government, ideally, is the external, institutionalised version of the best part of ourselves.

It might be a bit surprising – at first – to discover that in 1793, Kant published a major work on beauty and art: The Critique of Judgment. It might seem like a bit of a sideline for a thinker otherwise concerned with politics and ethics. But Kant held that his ideas about art and beauty were the cornerstones of his entire philosophy.

As we’ve been seeing, Kant thought that life involved a constant struggle between our better selves and our passions, between duty and pleasure. Beauty – Kant especially liked roses, vines, apple trees and birds – delights us in a very special and important way. It is a reminder of, and goad to, our better selves. Unlike so much else in our lives, our love of beauty is ‘disinterested’. It takes us out of narrow selfish concerns, but in a charming, delightful way – without being stern or demanding. The beauty of nature is a continual, quiet and insistent reminder of our common universal being. A pretty flower is just as attractive to the tired farmworker as to the prince; the graceful flight of a swallow is as lovely to a child as to the most learned professor.

For Kant, the role of art is to embody the most important ethical ideas. It’s an extension of philosophy. He held we needed to have art continually before us so as benefit from vivid illustrations and memorable symbols of good behaviour, and thereby keep the wayward parts of ourselves in check.

Conclusion

Kant’s books were dense, abstract and highly intellectual. But in them he sketched a highly important project that remains crucial to this day. He wanted to understand how the better, more reasonable parts of our nature could be strengthened so as to reliably win out over our inbuilt weaknesses and selfishness. As he saw it, he was engaged in the task of developing a secular, rational version of what religions had (very imperfectly) always attempted to do: help us to be good.

A quiet life sounds like an option that only the defeated would ever be inclined to praise. Our age is overwhelmingly alive to the benefits of active, dynamic, ‘noisy’ ways of living. If someone offered us a bigger salary for a job elsewhere, we’d move. If someone showed us a route to fame, we’d take it. If someone invited us to a party, we’d go. These seem like pure, unambiguous gains. Lauding a quiet life has some of the eccentricity of praising rain.

It’s hard for most of us to contemplate any potential in the idea because the defenders of quiet lives have tended to come from the most implausible sections of the community: slackers, hippies, the work-shy, the fired…; people who seem like they have never had a choice about how to arrange their affairs. A quiet life seems like something imposed upon them by their own ineptitude. It is a pitiable consolation prize.

And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers. We become plausible targets for disappointment and spite; it can seem like it may be our fault that certain others have not succeeded. Winning higher status makes us increasingly sensitive to its loss; we start to note every possible new snub. A slight decrease in sales, attention or adulation can feel like a catastrophe. Our health suffers. We fall prey to scared, paranoid thoughts; we see possible plots everywhere, and we may not be wrong. The threat of vindictive scandal haunts us. Alongside our privileges, we grow impoverished in curious ways. We have very limited control over our time.

We may be able to shut down a factory in India and our every word is listened to with trembling respect within the organisation, but what we absolutely cannot do is admit that we are also extremely tired and just want to spend the afternoon reading on the sofa. We can no longer express our more spontaneous, imaginative, vulnerable sides. Our words are so consequential, we have to be guarded at all times; others are looking to us for guidance and authority. Along the way, we grow strangers to those who love us outside of our wealth and status – while depending ever more on the fickle attention of those for whom we are our achievements alone. Our children see ever less of us. Our spouses grow bitter. We may own the wealth of continents; but it has been ten years at least since we last had the chance to do nothing for a day.

The most famous cultural figure in the history of the West was very interested in the benefits that can attend quiet lives. In Mark 6: 8-9, Jesus tells his disciples ‘to take nothing for their journey except a staff – no bread, no bag, no money in their belts – but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.’ Christianity opens up vital space in our imaginations by making a distinction between two kinds of poverty: what it terms voluntary poverty on the one hand and involuntary poverty on the other. We are at this point in history so deeply fixated on the idea that poverty must always be involuntary and therefore the result of lack of talent and indigence, we can’t even imagine that it might be the result of an intelligent and skilled person’s free choice based on a rational evaluation of costs and benefits. It might sincerely be possible for someone to decide not to take the better paid job, not to publish another book, not to seek high office – and to do so not because they had no chance, but because – having surveyed the externalities involved – they chose not to fight for them.

One of the central moments in Christian history came in 1204 when a wealthy young man we know today as St Francis of Assisi willingly renounced his worldly goods, of which he had quite a few (a couple of houses, a farm and a ship at least). He did so not through any external compulsion. He just felt they would interfere with other things he really wanted rather more of: a chance to contemplate Jesus’s teachings, to honour the creator of the earth, to admire the flowers and the trees – and to help the poorest in society.

He did have other options: St Francis of Assisi renounces worldly goods, painting attributed to Giotto di Bondone 

Chinese culture has also been reverent towards the yinshi (recluse), someone who chooses to leave behind the busy political and commercial world and live more simply, usually up the side of a mountain – in a hut. The tradition begins in the 4th century AD, when a high-ranking government official named Tao Yuanming surrendered his position at court and moved to the countryside to farm the land, make wine, and write. In his poem, ‘On Drinking Wine’, he recounts the riches that poverty have brought him:

Plucking chrysanthemums from the eastern hedge

I gaze into the distance at the southern mountain.

The mountain air is refreshing at sunset

As the flocking birds are returning home.

In such things we find true meaning,

But when I try to explain, I can’t find the words.

Tao Yuanming taking time to smell flowers – by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Portraits of Tao Yuanming became a major theme in Chinese art and literature. His hut near Mount Lushan (‘Hut Mountain’) gave others encouragement to see the advantages of cheaper, simpler dwellings. A number of poets of the Tang dynasty went through periods of seclusion. Bai Juyi (772-846) wrote a poem lovingly describing the hut he’d bought himself on the edge of a forest, listing its plain and natural materials (a thatched roof with ‘stone steps, cassia pillars, and a fence of plaited bamboo’). The poet Du Fu, living in Chengdu in the Sichuan province, wrote a poem titled ‘My Thatched Hut Ruined by the Autumn Wind’. It wasn’t a lament, more a celebration of the freedom that came with living so simply, a storm might blow over your house.

Reconstruction of Du Fu’s hut at Chengdu

There are for many of us plenty of options to take up certain career paths that carry high prestige with them. We could have something deeply impressive to answer those who ask us what we do. But this does not necessarily mean we must or should follow these possibilities. When we come to know the true price some careers exact, we may slowly realise we are not willing to pay for the ensuing envy, fear, deceit and anxiety. Our days are limited on the earth. We may – for the sake of true riches – willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little poorer and more obscure.

Though we may keep a little quiet about this, especially when we’re young, we tend deep down to be rather hopeful that we will – eventually – manage to find perfection in a number of areas. We dream of one day securing an ideally harmonious relationship, deeply fulfilling work, a happy family life and the respect of others. But life has a habit of dealing us a range of blows – and leaving nothing much of this array of fine dreams save some shattered and worthless fragments.

It’s at moments of disillusion that we might turn our minds to a concept drawn from Japanese philosophy, and in particular, from the Zen Buddhist approach to ceramics. Over the centuries, Zen masters developed an argument that pots, cups and bowls that had become damaged shouldn’t simply be neglected or thrown away. They should continue to attract our respect and attention and be repaired with enormous care – this process symbolising a reconciliation with the flaws and accidents of time, reinforcing some big underlying themes of Zen. The word given to this tradition of ceramic repair is kintsugi:

Kin = golden

tsugi = joinery

It means, literally, ‘to join with gold’. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with a very luxuriant gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a philosophically-rich merit all of their own.

The origins of Kintsugi are said to date to the Muromachi period, when the Shogon of Japan, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408) broke his favourite tea bowl and, distraught, sent it to be repaired in China. But on its return, he was horrified by the ugly metal staples that had been used to join the broken pieces, and charged his craftsmen with devising a more appropriate solution. What they came up with was a method that didn’t disguise the damage, but made something properly artful out of it.

Kintsugi belongs to the Zen ideals of wabi sabi, which cherishes what is simple, unpretentious and aged – especially if it has a rustic or weathered quality. A story is told of one of the great proponents of wabi sabi, Sen no Rikyu (1522-99). On a journey through southern Japan, he was once invited to a dinner by a host who thought he would be impressed by an elaborate and expensive antique tea jar that he had bought from China. But Rikyu didn’t even seem to notice this item and instead spent his time chatting and admiring a branch swaying in the breeze outside. In despair at this lack of interest, once Rikyu had left, the devastated host smashed the jar to pieces and retired to his room. But the other guests more wisely gathered the fragments and stuck them together through kintsugi. When Rikyu next came to visit, the philosopher turned to the repaired jar and, with a knowing smile, exclaimed: ‘Now it is magnificent’.  

In an age that worships youth, perfection and the new, the art of kintsugi retains a particular wisdom – as applicable to our own lives as it is to a broken tea cup. The care and love expended on the shattered pots should lend us the confidence to respect what is damaged and scarred, vulnerable and imperfect – starting with ourselves and those around us.

Wu wei means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’. It sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of wu wei. It doesn’t meant not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency. Something of the meaning of wu wei is captured when we talk of being ‘in the zone’ – at one with what we are doing, in a state of profound concentration and flow.

Wu Wei

Wu wei is closely connected to the Daoist reverence for the natural world, for it means striving to make our behaviour as spontaneous and inevitable as certain natural processes, and to ensure that we are swimming with rather than against currents. We are to be like the bamboo that bends in the wind or the plant that adjusts itself to the shape of a tree. Wu wei involves letting go of ideals that we may otherwise try to force too violently onto things; it invites us instead to respond to the true demands of situations, which tend only to be noticed when we put our own ego-driven plans aside. What can follow is a loss of self-consciousness, a new unity between the self and its environment, which releases an energy that is normally held back by an overly aggressive, wilful style of thinking.

But none of this means we won’t be able to change or affect things if we strive for wu wei. The Dao De Jing points out that we should be like water, which is ‘submissive and weak’ and ‘yet which can’t be surpassed for attacking what is hard and strong’. Through gentle persistence and a compliance with the specific shape of a problem, an obstacle can be worked round and gradually eroded.  

The idea of achieving the greatest effects by a wise strategic passivity has been central to Chinese notions of politics, diplomacy and business. In the manuals on wisdom produced by Daoists, we are repeatedly told that rather than impose a plan or model on a situation, we should let others act frantically, and then lightly adjust ourselves as we see the direction that matters have evolved in.

In China’s Tang dynasty, many poets likened wu wei to the best aspects of being drunk. It wasn’t alcoholism they were promoting, but the decline in rigidity and anxiety that sometimes comes with being a little drunk, and which can help us to accomplish certain tasks. One poet compared someone inspired by wu wei to a drunk man who falls uninjured from a moving cart – such is their spiritual momentum that they are unaffected by accidents and misfortunes that might break those of a more controlled and controlling mindset.

Theories of painting from the Tang period onwards made wu wei central to artistic practice. Rather than laboriously attempting to reproduce nature faithfully, the artist should find nature within themselves and surrender to its calls. The painter’s task is not to imitate the external surface of things, but to present the qi or ‘spirit’ of things like mountains, trees, birds and rivers by feeling some of this spirit in themselves  – and then letting it flow out through the brush onto silk or paper.

It followed that Daoist thinkers revered not just the finished work of art, but the act of painting itself – and considered artist’s studios as places of applied philosophy. The Tang dynasty poet, Fu Zai, described a big party that had been thrown to witness the painter Zhang Zao in action:

Right in the middle of the room he sat down with his legs spread out, took a deep breath, and his inspiration began to issue forth. Those present were as startled as if lightning were shooting across the heavens or a whirlwind was sweeping up into the sky. The ink seemed to spitting from his flying brush. He clapped his hands with a cracking sound. Suddenly strange shapes were born. When he had finished, there stood pine trees, scaly and riven, crags steep and precipitous, clear water and turbulent clouds. He threw down his brush, got up, and looked around in every direction. It seemed as if the sky had cleared after a storm, to reveal the true essence of ten thousand things.

Fu Zai added of Zhang (whose works are sadly now lost) that, ‘he had left mere skill behind’ and that his art ‘was not painting, but the very Dao itself’. Zhang Zao would often fling his ink and spread it with his hands on a silk scroll, to create spontaneous forms that he then worked up into expressive images of nature. Splodges were incorporated and ingeniously made to flow back into the work. All this was wu wei.

A good life could not be attained by wu wei alone – but this Daoist concept captures a distinctive wisdom we may at times be in desperate need of, when we are in danger of damaging ourselves through an overly stern and unyielding adherence to ideas which simply cannot fit the demands of the world as it is.

In the West, we expect philosophy to come from books. In the East, more wisely, there’s an awareness that it may legitimately come from rocks as well. In China, in the middle period of the Tang dynasty, at some point in the first half of the 9th century CE, an enthusiasm for rocks developed in Chinese culture which gradually spread to Japan and Korea – and has continued to the modern age. Rocks mounted on wooden stands have become well-known and prestigious objects of contemplation.

In East Asia, rocks are venerated with all the respect that we would accord to a work of art; except that what is really being honoured is the power of nature rather than the human hand. The more eroded and irregularly contorted the rock, the better.

Collectors seek out rocks with passion. Scholarly essays and whole treatises are dedicated to the subtleties and nuances of rocks. Rocks from different locations are catalogued, and their particular aesthetic qualities inventoried and graded. Smaller rocks are placed on desks; gardens are built around the larger ones.

What follows is a brief history of petrophilia (love of rocks):

826 CE, Tang Dynasty

Lake Tai, Jiangsu Province, China

A middle-aged gentleman is taking a stroll around a large lake on the Yangtze Delta Plain in eastern China, when something on its shore catches his eye. It is an apparently trivial yet momentous discovery: a pair of oddly shaped rocks.

This is perhaps no less than the founding moment in Chinese petrophilia. This cultivated pedestrian is someone special. After numerous ups and downs in his career as a state official, including periods of imperial disfavour and exile, Bai Juyi has finally made it: he has been appointed Prefect of the nearby city of Suzhou. He also happens to be one of China’s major poets.

It is not a chance combination of talents. Examinations to enter the state administration test the candidate’s knowledge of poetry as well as the classics of Chinese philosophy. Culture is believed to inculcate moral virtues of sensitivity, rectitude and wisdom that are essential to judicious decision-making. The ideal administrator doesn’t just know maths and time-keeping, he is meant to be a man of learning and the arts. Many of China’s leading poets and painters have careers in public service.

So struck is Bai Juyi by these rocks, with their twisted angles and perforations, that he has them taken back home to Suzhou. Soon after his return, he sits down and writes a poem about them.

Poetry for Bai Juyi is often a kind of a diary writing, in which he recounts interesting experiences and powerful feelings that affect him during the day. The title for this particular poem is ‘A Pair of Rocks’. Bai Juyi admits that the rocks are somewhat unconventional in their aesthetic appeal:

        Dark sallow, two slates of rocks,

        Their appearance is grotesque and ugly.

They are also covered in dirt and begrimed with smoke, their cavities thick with green moss. He describes himself washing and scrubbing them:

        Of vulgar use they are incapable;

        People of the time detest and abandon them.

So just what is the value of these unprepossessing specimens? Daoism, which began as a philosophy in ancient China before turning into a popular religion, cherishes nature – and it is evidence of its force that Bai Juyi welcomes in the rocks. The holes, perforations and indentations signal the patient, mighty forces of the universe – which we should respect and attempt to find harmony with.

The ancient rocks offer a consolation for an ageing Bai, who feels excluded from ‘the world of youngsters’:

Turning my head around, I ask the pair of rocks:

‘Can you keep company with an old man like myself?’

Although the rocks cannot speak,

They promise that we will be three friends.

Through rocks we can learn to respect the dignity of what has been marked by ageing and time. Thanks to Bai Juyi’s enthusiasm, the unusual limestone rocks at Lake Taihu soon become sought after by sensitive, creative people in the Tang dynasty.

12th century CE, Northern Song dynasty

Wuwei district, Anhui Province, China

It is early in the first decade of the twelfth century. Mi Fu, the most legendarily eccentric of scholar-officials in China, has just been appointed as a magistrate in Wuwei County. On arrival, he has to pay an important social visit. He has been invited to meet-and-greet all the other important administrators with whom he will be working. They stand waiting for him in the front garden of the official residence. But as he walks towards them, they are shocked at his sudden breach of protocol.

For he has been stopped in his tracks by an unusually large rock in the garden. Instead of offering his respects to his hosts, Mi Fu turns and bows ceremoniously to the extraordinary looking rock. He calls out and addresses it as ‘Elder Brother Rock’, making an elaborate speech. He performs all the rites and obeisances that were prescribed for an older brother according to the principles of ‘filial piety’ in Confucianism – which believed that harmony in the family was the nucleus of social order in the state at large.

Only after fully expressing his devotion to this amazing rock does Mi finally turn to his flabbergasted hosts. It was this story that earned Mi Fu his soubriquet, ‘Crazy Mi’ – and captured the imagination of East Asia’s painters, for whom ‘Mi Fu and Elder Brother Rock’ remained a favourite image for centuries to come.  

In Confucianism, natural objects were perceived to have moral qualities analogous to human virtues – the uprightness of the bamboo or pine tree, for example, withstanding the buffeting wind, was a model for the rectitude and probity an official should display in government. Mi Fu takes this to an extreme – the natural is not just a paradigm of official virtue, but is of equal, even superior, importance to social responsibilities.

Mi Fu writes a treatise on rocks that enumerates their four main aesthetic qualities: shou, an elegant and upright stature; zhou, a wrinkled and furrowed texture; lou or cracks that are like channels or paths through the rock; and tou, the holes in the rock that allow air and light to pass through.

In the 11th and 12th century, during the Chinese Northern Song dynasty, the passion for collecting rocks among scholar-officials like Mi Fu takes off in earnest. Stones are mounted on wooden bases and placed on desks as constant sources of inspiration.

These decorative stones become known as gongshi – spirit stones (popularly mistranslated as ‘scholars’ rocks’ in English). Their peculiarly twisted shapes are admired as evidence of the qi energy that is believed to animate nature and the human body alike.

Any cultivated person is expected to have an appreciation of rocks. They are valued as highly as any painting or calligraphic scroll. The well-known Song dynasty scholar-statesman, Su Shi, for example, is said to have offered a set of stones as a fair and equal exchange for a set of great paintings.

During the Song dynasty, the most favoured rocks are quarried from the limestone of Lingbi, in the northern Anhui province. Lingbi rocks are dark black and glossy in texture. They are esteemed as much for the bell-like sound they produce when tapped as for their striking appearance.

Lingbi Rock

January, 1127 CE, end of the Northern Song dynasty

Kaifeng, Northern China

The imperial capital of China, Kaifeng, is under siege and about to fall to the Jurchens, a nomadic people from Manchuria. Soon the Song emperor, Huizong, will be taken captive and forced to abdicate, while his son, Qinzong, will flee to the south to establish a new court and the Southern Song dynasty. China will be split in two. In these desperate final days of the Northern Song, the order is given for the trees in Huizong’s spectacular imperial garden at Kaifeng, the ‘Northeast Marchmount’, to be cut down for firewood, and for its incredible array of fabulous rocks to be pulled out of the ground and used in catapults against the invading Jurchens. It is a sad end to what must have been one of the most remarkable gardens in world history.

The royal park is said to have been teeming with striking rocks. The most prominent have been given names by Huizong, and commemorated in verses by him, incised into the rocks in golden ink. There is one rock called ‘Divine Conveyance Rock’, another ‘Auspicious Dragon Rock’.

Emperor Huizong’s passion for rocks has clearly rather got out of hand – and explains his neglect of security issues. Huizong had in previous years appointed a royal official to explore the whole of China in search of precious rocks for his garden. Apocryphal tales abound of this official’s abuses – such as robbing homes for the sake of rocks, and dismantling important bridges to let boats with huge rocks pass by on canals and rivers. A love of rocks appears to have hastened the collapse of the Northern Song empire.

1450-1550, Muromachi Period, Japan

Ryoanji Temple, northwest Kyoto

In fifteenth-century Japan, a new type of rock garden develops. As with so much of Chinese culture, the obsession with rocks has crossed over to Japan in the latter part of the first millennium – while also being adapted in special ways. In Japan, the spirit rocks are called suiseki, and the Japanese favour much more subdued, smooth rocks than the Chinese. In Japan, rocks are treasured for their yoseki, a weathered and ‘ancient’ appearance that is similar to the ‘aged’ simplicity of the aesthetic of wabi sabi. The rocks are not so much placed on wooden stands, as positioned in trays surrounded by sand or water – evoking mountains and lakes.

At several Zen Buddhist temples, and most remarkably at Ryoanji in Kyoto, the stones start to be set in very more minimal settings, so as to bring out their qualities all the more.

Here landscape is reduced to its barest essence – scattered rocks that recall mountains surrounded by the stone fragments of raked gravel in symmetrical wave-like patterns that suggest flowing water. The only greenery is the bed of moss in which each rock is set.

The raking of the gravel around the rocks by temple monks is a careful and precise art. There are various patterns including the ‘water pattern’ of concentric rings or ripples, like those produced when a stone is dropped in a lake; the ‘stormy water pattern’ of haphazardly overlapping semi-circles, and the continuous wave-effect of parallel or gently undulating lines.

Marked off by a wall, the garden of Ryoanji is to be viewed while seated from outside rather than physically explored.

Conclusion

The originator of the East Asian reverence for rocks, Bai Juyi, was well aware of how powerful a love of rocks can become. In his essay, ‘Account of the Lake Tai Rock’, he speaks of an ‘addiction’ that some rocks can bring about. Truly wise people should restrict their rock worship to a few hours a day, he counsels.

At a time, when few of us spend more than a few minutes a year looking at a rock, the advice seems less than urgent. Indeed, the tradition of rock reverence has a lot to teach us: that wisdom can hang off bits of the natural world just as well as issuing from books; that we need to surround ourselves with objects that embody certain values we’re in danger of losing sight of day-to-day – and that some of our most precious moments can be spent in the presence of nothing more chatty, prestigious or costly than a rock.

There’s a small building in the centre of Nanjing, sandwiched between an electronics shop and a scooter garage, painted ox-blood red, with a traditional green tiled roof, in the middle of which stands an almost life-sized carved stone statue of a young woman. She is crossed-legged, looking at us with compassionate, kindly eyes. She seems the sort of person one might approach with a shameful confession or to receive sympathy after a rebuff from the world, when one is feeling defeated and without energy to put up the normal guard and pretences. She has a shawl across her fragile shoulders, a finely-sculpted chain around her neck and a lotus flower in the left hand. It’s early evening and a group of people have gathered around her, of varied ages and backgrounds, construction workers and business people, schoolgirls and bureaucrats. Some are mumbling, others smiling as one might at the sight of an old friend. A few have brought gifts, sticks of incense, sweets and little pancakes wrapped in brightly coloured paper.

This is Guan Yin, a woman who Buddhist legend tells us was born more than a thousand years ago into a wealthy royal family in southwest China. Like the Buddha, she was at a young age struck by the prevalence of suffering and, in rebellion against the expectations of her parents, ran away from home in order to join a monastery and devote herself to the needy. Her cruel and self-righteous father was furious at what he took to be her ingratitude and ordered her agents to track her down and behead her without mercy. But the princess found shelter among those she helped, changed her identity and was able to carry out good works for many years undisturbed. Then one night, news reached her that her father had fallen gravely ill. She immediately returned to the royal palace, brewed a dose of special medicine and slowly nursed her father back to health. Grateful at her exceptional benevolence and lack of rancour, the king begged for his daughter’s forgiveness and in a gesture of atonement, ordered statues to be made of her and placed across his kingdom.

Now Guan Yin is all over China and southeast Asia. She has an alcove dedicated to her besides the Dior store in the international departure area of Beijing airport and a ten metre granite version of her overlooks Hong Kong harbour. She is also available on a more domestic scale, eight centimetre tall Guan Yins for the hallway and, of course, plastic self-adhesive ones for the dashboard.

One goes to Guan Yin for relief from feelings of self-hatred. She is a little like an ideal friend or family member, an imaginary sister or mother. She suggests alternatives to despising oneself. She knows that benevolence towards others has to begin with self-acceptance. Her kindly eyes and smile have a habit of making one cry – for as we know from films, the moment one breaks down isn’t always or even mostly when one is facing overt hostility, rather when, after a period of hardship, one finally encounters kindness and space to admit to the difficulties one has been labouring with in stoic lonely silence for too long. One can be weak with Guan Yin, she isn’t impressed by the normal worldly criteria of success, there is no shame in crying in front of her and admitting the scale of one’s distress. She has the measure of the difficulties involved in trying to lead a halfway decent ordinary life.

Guan Yin is what Buddhists call a bodhisattva, and what Christians would call a saint. The Mayana branch of Buddhism to which Guan Yin belongs recognises many hundreds of bodhisattvas, usually historical figures, born in a variety of locations across Asia, whose qualities of character have earnt them a divine status. The bodhisattvas are mentioned in books and appear in paintings, but primarily, they feature as sculptures, three dimensional beings ranging in size from small dolls to light-housed sized giants and made in anything from rubber to wood to jade. The figures attract reverential ceremonies, one gives them presents, talks to them, puts them in temples, keeps them clean and celebrates their birthdays (Guan Yin’s is on the 19th day of the second lunar month).

Just as Christian saints will approximate the goodness of Jesus, so the boddhisattvas are said to have a compassion and calm akin to the Buddha himself. And yet, like saints, individual bodhisattvas are revered for their talents in particular areas, there are bodhisattvas who care especially about animals, others who have an affinity for coping with physical pain, others still who understand the challenges of bringing up children.

Guanyin is the Buddhist counterpart to the Virgin Mary and she fulfills a similar role: that of hearing us in our distress, meeting us with tenderness and strengthening us to face the tasks of life. The centrality of these maternal figures in both Buddhism and Christianity suggests that mature adult lives share moments of deep self-doubt – and longings to recover some of the security of childhood. We need to be reassured that these wishes are not a sign that we have failed as human beings.

Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instil in us. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious colour of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.

Japanese art and literature has been especially concerned with the moods of pathos around mono no aware: falling blossoms, the changes of the moon, the passing of the seasons, the plaintive cries of birds or insects, and the absence of friends or lovers.

The word ‘aware’ was first used, in the Heian period of Japan (794-1185), as an exclamatory particle to express a spontaneous and inarticulate feeling – as with the particles that we use like ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ or ‘wow’. Mono no aware has hence also been translated as ‘the “ahness” of things’. It is the way in which something affects us immediately and involuntarily, before we are able to put that feeling into words – and Japanese art has often sought to present objects and experiences whose emotional impact is both powerful and obscure to us.    

Mono no aware is in deep sympathy with Japanese Buddhism, which stresses the impermanence of life and states that we should willingly and gracefully let go of our attachments to transient things. Zeami Motokiyo (c.1363-c.1443), the major theoretician, actor and writer of the Noh drama wrote that ‘the flower is marvellous because it blooms, and singular because it falls’.

For the eighteenth-century scholar of the Edo period, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), mono no aware is more than just a subjective feeling – it is also a form of knowledge. He wrote: ‘To know mono no aware is to discern the power and essence, not just of the moon and the cherry blossoms, but of every single thing existing in this world, and to be stirred by each of them’. While science or abstract philosophy may give us a knowledge of things in their generality, mono no aware is a more immediate and direct knowledge of the distinctive qualities that characterize a unique phenomenon – what cannot be generalised, but can only be felt by the ‘heart-mind’ (the Japanese word kokoro means both the heart and mind) as it experiences something singular. Norinaga claimed that the whole task of literature was to represent mono no aware. The writing of poetry (uta or ‘song’), he suggested, was an act that turned sighing into singing. The breath that sighed in exclamations of wonder, pain or relief – the original meaning of aware as a word – was converted by the poet into articulate patterns of language, images, and sound. Norinage believed that this sharing of feeling between the poet and reader – the way in which we can all be moved, for example, by the sad beauty of falling petals – was the basis of human community itself.

Norinaga hailed the classic Japanese novel of the Heian period, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c.973-c.1014), often considered the first real novel in world literature, for being particularly saturated in mono no aware. The word ‘aware’ appears over 1000 times in the novel, roughly once on every page. The episode that is most celebrated for its quality of mono no aware in the novel is the parting of two lovers in chapter 10, ‘The Sacred Tree’. Here, the novel’s main character, the prince Genji, travels to a shrine to seek a meeting with the ‘Rokujo lady’ – a former lover of Genji’s who has renounced her love for him on account of his waning feelings. As Genji walks to the temple, the natural setting is richly evocative of mono no aware. It is autumn, the time of year most suffused with ‘aware’ according to a famous Japanese poem of antiquity. ‘The autumn flowers are gone’, we are told, as Genji walks across a stark ‘reed plain’ and listens to melancholy hum of insects and the wind sighing in the pine trees.

The prince seeks to win her back, but she will not be moved from her decision to withdraw from human affairs into temple life, and so the scene of their final encounter becomes filled with an exquisite pathos. Genji stands on the veranda and talks through the blind to his former lover. He passes through a branch from a sacred tree to symbolise his love and they talk until dawn through brief exchanges of poetry. The setting moon epitomizes the melancholy farewell, and Genji exclaims: ‘A dawn farewell is always drenched in dew, but sad is the autumn sky as never before’. The Rokujo lady observes that the song of a cricket is making the ‘autumn farewell’ even sadder. Not wishing to be seen in full daylight, Genji decides to leave: ‘His sleeves were made wet along the way with dew and with tears’.  

Album leaf illustration, with calligraphic excerpts, of ‘The Sacred Tree’ chapter of The Tale of Genji, by Tosa Mitsunobu (active c. 1469-1522)

Norinaga believed that art like The Tale of Genji can train us to become sensitive to the manifestations of ‘aware’. He believed that Japanese culture needed to go back to the values of sensibility enshrined in the court-based society of the Heian period, which in the subsequent samurai-dominated periods, with their prevailing masculine and warrior ethos, had fallen into partial neglect. In the ‘Yugiri’ (Evening Mist) chapter of The Tale of Genji, Murasaki had complained about the constricted life that women were forced to lead even in Heian society, in which they were denied self-expression: ‘How can we enjoy prosperity in life or dispel the tedium of the ephemeral world when we must hide within ourselves our understanding of things that are deeply moving (mono no aware)?’ Murasaki was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. Literature was the one way in which lettered women like Murasaki and Sei Shonagon, another Heian court lady and author of the famous Pillow Book of her personal observations and reflections (completed in 1002), could give vent to their pent-up feelings.

Woodcut illustration of a scene from the Yugiri chapter of The Tale of Genji, by Kunisada II (1857)

Norinaga’s essays on mono no aware also provided copious quotations from the anthologies of early Japanese poetry. He singled out poems that contained the phrase ‘mono no aware’ such as this:

How much I would like to ask

The person who knows the moving power of things (mono no aware)

The feelings he has through an autumn night

As he gazes at the moon.

He also selected poems in which the word ‘aware’ was used as a sigh or exclamation:

The wild pinks

At dusk

When the crickets cry.

I keep thinking, saying, ‘ah!’ (aware)

Time and time again.

The later haiku verse of the Edo period, at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to express mono no aware in its imagery of the changing seasons, such as the plaintive cry of the short-lived cicadas that is resonant of the end of summer. As Basho wrote:

        A cicada’s shell

        It sang itself

        Utterly away

        (trans. R. H. Blyth)

Haiku poems often convey a sense of the ‘aware’ of things in their focus on the transitory and the fleeting moment.

The most celebrated example of a natural phenomenon rich in mono no aware is the spectacle of cherry blossoms (sakura). A chapter of The Tale of Genji is centred around a Festival of the Cherry Blossom. Norinaga went so far as to claim that ‘the soul of Japan’ is embodied in the sight of cherry blossoms in the morning sun. He went on a pilgrimage to observe the cherry blossoms by Mount Yoshino, whose white flowers are famous for matching the snow on the mountain peak, and requested that a cherry tree be planted on his grave. Cherry blossom is the most revered of all natural phenomena in Japan. To this day, excited crowds of families and young people gather to picnic under the cherry blossoms each spring. The custom is known as hanami or ‘flower viewing’. Cherry blossom is not more beautiful, say, than that of the plum or apple tree. What makes it so cherished is the special quality of mono no aware that is imparted by its brevity – the blossom falls within a week. The delicate beauty of its white and pink flowers, so fragile that they are easily carried away by the mildest breeze, is given a heightened poignancy by this transience.

Hanami or cherry blossom picnic

Japanese painting has often depicted cherry blossom, seasonal images, and the sights associated with mono no aware. The famous Genji Monogatari Emaki (Tale of Genji Scroll) of the twelfth century, an illustrated handscroll of the novel, began a tradition of painting evocative scenes from Murasaki’s masterpiece alongside calligraphic renderings of the text. Often these exquisite picture scrolls, painted in colour, look down upon Genji (or his son in the latter part of the novel) at an emotional moment with one of his lovers. They are viewed from an elevated ‘bird’s-eye’ view, with the roof and ceiling omitted.

Scene from the ‘Oak Tree’ chapter of Genji, from a handscroll circa 1130, at the Tokugawa Museum, Japan

The Rimpa school of artists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, which painted on screens, fans, scrolls, ceramics and textiles, often focused on the transitory phenomena of mono no aware such as blossom or birds in flight against a background of gold leaf. The most influential painting of this school is a remarkably delicate and fine depiction of the blossom of ‘Red and White Plum Trees’ (rather than the cherry) by Ogata Korin (1558-1716). The trees in bloom are set against a stream depicted in abstract and oily spirals, which convey a strong sense of movement and heighten the sense or ‘aware’ of passing time.   

Portion of ‘Red and White Plum Trees’ (Kohakubai-zu), circa 1714, by Ogata Korin

The mono no aware or pathos of things in art and nature can not only train us to become more sensitive to beauty, as Norinaga suggested. It can help us to reach more of an acceptance of the mortality and transience that make life seem so painful at times. As the Buddhist priest, Yoshida Kenko (c.1283-c.1350), observed in his classic Essays on Idleness: ‘If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us!’. The great source of sadness, the perishable nature of things, is also what gives them such a singular beauty and moving power. And Norinaga believed that art and writing can be therapeutic in their channelling of ‘aware’. Our deepest emotions seek an outlet and expression – and art helps to prevent such feelings from overwhelming us. It gives to mono no aware what Norinaga called the ‘pattern’ of art, such as the rhythm of a verse and its play of rhyme and imagery. The greatest relief, for Norinaga, comes when someone else appreciates our art and shares in its feeling. In this small moment of collective ‘aware’ is the potential for a more profound sense of community.       

Jacques Lacan was the greatest French psychoanalyst of the 20th century. He was also something that has come to feel rather odd: an intellectual celebrity, as much of a focus of gossip and curiosity as a pop star. He hung out with famous artists and writers; he had a fabulous head of hair, he attracted beautiful women.

Lacan (far left) with Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Camus

Lacan saw no conflict between attractiveness and intelligence

Lacan’s second wife

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born in Paris in 1901. His father was a successful business man, a major figure in the emerging soap industry. His mother was a pious Catholic. His elder brother became a Benedictine monk, but Lacan stopped believing in God at a young age. He became obsessed with philosophy and mathematics. At the age of 15 he wallpapered his room with pages torn from Spinoza’s Ethics. At university he studied medicine and specialised in psychiatry.  

Lacan wrote many essays and published transcripts of the seminars he gave. He liked to present his ideas in highly complex ways and often deployed mathematical equations and diagrams.  

He didn’t write very clearly:

The enigmas that desire seems to pose for a natural philosophy – its frenzied mocking of the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with jouissance, these amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails – eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else – of metonymy.

But beneath the complex surface, Lacan made some extremely useful additions to our understanding of ourselves.

ONE: IDENTITY

Lacan was deeply interested in an event that occurs in the life of every child: the first time that they recognise themselves in a mirror. They have the hugely distinctive and strange experience (which no dog or chicken has ever had) of looking at their own reflection and thinking ‘that is me’.

Crucially, the moment – which Lacan called ‘the mirror phase’ – can feel very unsettling, because the face in the mirror doesn’t necessarily look as we feel.

Inside we are a formless continuous stream of consciousness, made up of speeding thoughts, desires and images. We are polysexual, chaotic, ever changing and ambivalent to the core. But on the outside, we seem like a more or less stable entity with composed and symmetrical features that betray almost nothing of what is going on within. We have only words to try to transcend the gap, and all the time, they fail to do justice to our real intentions. Not knowing how to say what we feel isn’t a personal failing, it’s an existential truth. The image in the mirror is by necessity far more one dimensional than the entity that beholds it.

This leads to a problem that follows us throughout life. As adults we long for others to understand us in the deepest way. But Lacan is preparing us to face a darker possibility that, in fact, other people will be resolutely stuck on the outside of us, assuming us to be pretty much as we seem, but heavily caricaturing us without meaning to.

We’re understandably reluctant to accept this loneliness – and are, consequently, very concerned to control the external appearances that we present. That’s what fashion trades on. We hope that if we could tinker sufficiently with what other people see externally of us (perhaps our hair or design of collar), we may eventually be properly understood.

Lacan suggests a more difficult, mature move: that we accept that other people simply won’t ever experience us the way we experience ourselves; that we will be almost entirely misunderstood – and will in turn deeply misunderstand.

TWO: LOVE

Lacan was famous for his extremely negative statements about romantic love:

‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’

‘Men and women don’t exist’

And – most dramatically:

‘Man knows nothing of woman, and woman nothing of man.’

Lacan was trying to get at an unpopular, yet critical fact about romantic relationships: the extent to which we don’t truly comprehend our lovers and simply peg a range of fantasies drawn from childhood experiences to their physical forms.

It is a dark but liberating idea. It invites us not to be upset when we don’t feel a perfect rapport with someone who initially seemed a soulmate – and it recommends that we certainly don’t rush off in search of some more ideal partner if we are feeling less than perfectly understood. The connection we worry that we’ve lost is something we never actually had. Our relationship hasn’t gone wrong through folly, error or bad luck – it’s following the ordinary path of love, which is to come to an awareness of its own fundamentally illusory nature.

With Lacan’s help we can hold on to a more accurate picture of what is normal: to be more or less always alone. It’s a foundation upon which we can build more mature and less frustrated relationships.  

THREE: POLITICS

Lacan was very active in intellectual life the late 1960s. It was, of course, a time of great excitement around social change. There was the sexual revolution, great interest in communism, and lots of protests. His friends were extremely excited.

Lacan sympathised. And yet when he saw increasing numbers of student protesters, he told them “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”

Lacan suggested that though we believe ourselves to be democrats, most of us are remarkably interested in finding (and then worshipping) authority figures who will promise us the earth.

We desire to have someone else in charge who can make everything OK, someone who is, in a sense, an ideal parent – and we bring this peculiar-sounding bit of our psychological fantasies into the way we navigate politics.

For Lacan, the truly talented politician isn’t the one who knows how to whip up the crowd and ignites their semi-conscious childlike dreams of perfection. It’s the one who dares to be an adult: someone who has the skill to persuade people of the disappointing nature of reality, and the tact to do so without provoking unbearable rage and tantrums.

**

Lacan never stopped trying to communicate a very difficult fact: what odd, immature and lonely creatures we are. It is because we refuse to recognise this, and don’t budget enough time to absorb the grief that we are more miserable than we need to be.

Lacan constantly tested new and often unconventional methods to try to make psychoanalysis a greater part of our lives. He saw it as the natural place to wrestle with the conundrums of being human. He didn’t call his clients patients, because he didn’t want them to think of themselves as ‘sick’ or unusual. The only qualification for coming to analysis was to be human.

He thought a session could be quite short – sometimes just five minutes, if that’s how one happened to be feeling. He even allowed his barber and pedicurist to visit while he was conducting analytic sessions.

He wasn’t doing this to be provocative, but rather because he was interested in exploring how insights might be delivered in more relaxed ways – so that they could reach many more people.

Lacan was unafraid of mixing intellectual truth with worldly success, and thought it was just as important to influence politicians, artists and everyday people as it was to teach philosophers or psychoanalysts. He continued to lecture around the world right up until his death at age 80. Though an atheist, Lacan had occasionally spoken of a wish to have a grand Catholic funeral, ideally either in Venice or Rome. But it wasn’t to be. He was buried quietly near his country house in the modest village of Guitrancourt, not far beyond the northeastern suburbs of Paris.

Lacan had big ambitions for psychoanalysis. He hoped that it might transform the most powerful collective bodies of the era (like the Catholic Church and the Communist party) and liberate them from their errors. He believed that in the future psychoanalysis would become widespread and normal, ingrained in the way people think, a part of the business of ordinary life.

It’s an important project we’re still at today.

If the idea of being a ‘modern’ person and leading a ‘modern’ life still has an exciting ring to it, it’s at least in part down to the influence of an extraordinary Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who in the first half of the twentieth century wrote books, put up buildings and designed bits of furniture that conveyed the excitement, sleekness and glamour of the modern technological world.

Le Corbusier began his career by attacking the architecture of the Victorian age – and contrasting it with what he saw as the beauty and intelligence of engineering. ‘Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work,’ he exclaimed in his polemical book, Towards a New Architecture (1923), while ‘our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.’

Le Corbusier recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal. His hatred of any kind of decoration extended to a pity for the British Royal Family and the ornate, golden carriage in which they travelled to open Parliament every year. He suggested that they push the carved monstrosity off the cliffs of Dover and instead learn to travel around their realm in a Hispano Suiza 1911 racing car. He even mocked Rome, the traditional destination for the education and edification of young architects, and renamed it the ‘city of horrors’, ‘the damnation of the half-educated’ and ‘the cancer of French architecture’ – on account of its violation of functional principles through an abundance of baroque detailing, wall-painting and statuary.

For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture – meaning, architecture motivated by the quest for efficiency – was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

Once asked by a magazine editor to name his favourite chair, Le Corbusier cited the seat of a cockpit, and described the first time he ever saw an aeroplane, in the spring of 1909, in the sky above Paris – it was the aviator the Comte de Lambert taking a turn around the Eiffel Tower – as the most significant moment of his life. He observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid aeroplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest. ‘L’avion accuse,’ he concluded.

But if the function of a plane was to fly, what was the function of a house? Le Corbusier arrived (‘scientifically’ he assured his readers) at a simple list of requirements, beyond which all other ambitions were no more than ‘romantic cobwebs’. The function of a house was, he wrote, to provide: ‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life’.

‘What [modern man] wants is a monk’s cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which he can look at the stars,’ Le Corbusier had written.

Le Corbusier’s private houses which he built in and around Paris in the 1920s and 30s were unlike anything that people had ever witnessed, both inside and out. Le Corbusier took an interest in their smallest details, always with an eye to increasing efficiency.

Le Corbusier built much of the furniture himself, and was often to earn more money from it than from his architecture. His inspiration was drawn from the built-in furniture found in the cabins of ocean liners. On a trip back to Europe from Argentina, he made extensive sketches of the cupboards of his own cabin. He marvelled at how many things could be made to fit neatly into a small space, once a designer had taken care to study ergonomics instead of wasting time engraving heraldic motifs. One year, he spent many hours working out how to fit the largest number of pants and socks into the smallest possible space.

Le Corbusier was evidently one of the world’s greatest architects. But he was one of the world’s most disastrous urban designer. His manifesto on cities, contained in two books, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1925) and The Radiant City (1933), called for a dramatic break from the past: ‘The existing centres must come down. To save itself every great city must rebuild its centre’.

He wanted ever taller towers, some housing as many as 40,000 people. When he visited New York for the first time, he came away disappointed by the scale of the buildings. ‘Your skyscrapers are too small,’ he told a surprised journalist from the Herald Tribune.

By building upwards, two problems would be resolved at a stroke: overcrowding and urban sprawl. With room enough for everyone in towers, there would be no need for cities to spread outwards and devour the countryside in the process. ‘We must eliminate the suburbs,’ recommended Le Corbusier.

Simultaneously, Le Corbusier planned to abolish the city street. In his vision of the future city, people would have footpaths all to themselves, winding through woods and forests (‘No pedestrian will ever meet an automobile, ever!’), while cars would enjoy massive and dedicated motorways, with smooth, curving interchanges, thus guaranteeing that no driver would ever have to slow down for the sake of a pedestrian.

Even more than Paris, New York was for Le Corbusier the epitome of an illogical city, because it had managed to graft skyscrapers, the buildings of the future, onto a tight street plan better suited to a medieval settlement. On his trip around the United States, he advised his increasingly bemused American hosts that Manhattan ought to be demolished to make way for a fresh and more ‘Cartesian’ attempt at urban design.

Le Corbusier hated mixed use: all functions would now be untangled. There would no longer be factories, for example, in the middle of residential areas, thus no more forging of iron while children were trying to sleep nearby. The new city would be an arena of green space, clean air, ample accommodation, and flowers – and not just for the few but, as a caption in The Radiant City promised, ‘for all of us!!!’

Ironically, what Le Corbusier’s dreams helped to generate were the dystopian housing estates that now ring historic Paris, the wastelands from which tourists avert their eyes in confused horror and disbelief on their way into the city. To take an overland train to the most violent and degraded of these places is to realise all that Le Corbusier forgot about architecture, and in a wider sense, about human nature.

For example, he forgot how tricky it is when just a few of one’s 2,699 neighbours decide to throw a party or buy a handgun. He forgot how drab reinforced concrete can seem under a grey sky. He forgot how awkward it is when someone lights a fire in the lift and home is on the forty-fourth floor. He forgot, too, that while there is much to hate about slums, one thing we don’t mind about them is their street plan. We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room.

In his haste to distinguish cars from pedestrians, Le Corbusier also lost sight of the curious co-dependence of these two apparently antithetical forces. He forgot that without pedestrians to slow them down, cars are apt to go too fast and kill their drivers, and that without the eyes of cars on them, pedestrians can feel vulnerable and isolated. We admire New York, precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

When Le Corbusier died in 1965, having had a heart attack in the South of France where he’d gone for a swim, he was responsible for building some of the most beautiful private houses of all time. His ideas had also destroyed some of the great cities of Europe and the United States. For a man whose ambition was to change the world, we can revere him – paradoxically – for the more modest things about him: his beautiful white washed villas, door handles and armchairs.

Though we tend to think of atheists as not only unbelieving but also hostile to religion, we should remember a tradition of atheistic thinkers who have tried to reconcile a suspicion of the supra-natural side of religion with a deep sympathy for its ritualistic aspects. The most important and inspirational of these was the visionary, eccentric French nineteenth-century sociologist Auguste Comte.

August Comte

Comte was born into a strict Catholic family in Montpellier in Southern France in 1798. As a young man, he received a highly progressive education, and became obsessed with the idea of building a new kind of France based around science and republicanism. His family violently disagreed and broke off relations with him – so he went to live in Paris where he became a student of and later secretary to the utopian thinker Henri de Saint-Simon. But Comte had a quarrelsome nature and fell out with Saint-Simon, failed to get a university post and for the rest of his life maintained a precarious existence writing dense, often unreadable works about the reform of humanity. He was only intermittently sane, spending long periods in asylums and in 1827, attempted suicide by jumping off the Pont des Arts. In 1844, he fell deeply in love with a married woman called Clotilde de Vaux, though the relationship was never consummated. After her premature death, Comte made his love for Clotilde into one of the centrepieces of his thinking on religion. Though a deeply eccentric man, he did manage to gain the trust and interest of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who admired his efforts around religion – and helped Comte to be better known in Britain.

John Stuart Mill

Comte’s thinking on religion had, as its starting point, a characteristically blunt observation that in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases. At the same time, Comte recognised, as many of his more rational contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to financial accumulation and romantic love and devoid of any sources of consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity would be prey to untenable social and emotional ills.

Comte’s solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to pick out their more relevant and secular aspects and fuse them together with certain insights drawn from philosophy, art and science. The result, the outcome of decades of thought and the summit of Comte’s intellectual achievement, was a new religion, a religion for atheists or, as Comte termed it, a religion of humanity, an original creed expressly tailored to the emotional and intellectual demands of modern man, rather than the inhabitants of Judea or northern India in 400 B.C.

Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, the Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion and the Theory of the Future of Man. He observed that traditional faiths tended to cement their authority by providing people with daily, and even hourly schedules of who or what to think about, rotas typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy individual or supernatural incident. So he announced a calendar of his own, animated by a pantheon of secular heroes and ideas. In the religion of humanity, every month would be devoted to the honouring of an important field of endeavour – for example, marriage, parenthood, art, science, agriculture – and every day to an individual who had made a valuable contribution within these categories.

Comte was impressed by the way that traditional religions had disseminated moral guidance, for example, dictating principles for how to conduct oneself in a marriage or fulfill one’s duties to the community – and he lamented that modern liberal governments, in their desire to prove inoffensive to all constituencies, had settled on merely offering factual instruction before letting people out into the world to destroy themselves and others through their egoism and self-ignorance. Therefore, in Comte’s religion of humanity, there would be classes and sermons to help inspire one to be kind to spouses, patient with one’s colleagues and compassionate towards the unfortunate.

He also recognised how badly we all need consolation and proposed that his girlfriend, Clotidle, take the function previously accorded to the Virgin Mary in Catholicism. Portraits of Clotidle were to be placed everywhere in the new religion, and – when one was down – one was invited to share one’s sorrows and weep in front of this vision of kindness and sympathy.

Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of traditional religion, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches or as he called them, temples for humanity. He suggested that each one be paid for by a banker, whose bust would appear above the door in recognition of his generosity (rather than resenting bankers, Comte thought it wiser to coax them into supporting good causes, as medieval merchants had successfully been inveighed upon to help fund cathedrals). Inside the temples of humanity, there would be lectures, singing, celebrations and public discussions while around the walls, sumptuous works of art would commemorate the greatest moments and finest men and women of history. Finally, above the west-facing stage, there would be a large aphorism, written in golden letters, invoking the congregation to adopt the essence of Comte’s philosophico-religious world-view: ‘Connais toi pour t’améliorer,’ ‘Know yourself to improve yourself’.

Regrettably, Comte’s complex, thought-provoking and often deranged project was felled by a host of practical obstacles. Ridiculed by both atheists and believers, ignored by public opinion, devoid of funds, Comte fell into despair and self-pity. He took to writing long and frightening letters in defence of his scheme to monarchs and industrialists across Europe, including Louis Napoleon, Queen Victoria, the Crown Prince of Denmark, the Emperor of Austria, three hundred bankers and the head of the Paris sewage system – but few offered money, let alone replies. Without seeing any of his proposals take hold, Comte died at the age of fifty-nine in 1857.

Nevertheless, like Jesus, Comte was well served by his followers and in the decades after his death, his religion made some notable advances. La Chapelle de l’Humanité was opened at 5 rue de Payenne in Paris where it still stands today and became a well-known venue for secular baptisms, funeral services, weddings and sermons. The religion crossed the Channel, where it acquired five thousand adherents, led with rare energy by a former Oxford don, Richard Congreve. In 1878, with the help of a legacy from an aunt, Congreve opened the Church of Humanity in Lamb Conduit’s Street in London, where secular services were held every Sunday morning. ‘We gratefully commemorate the beauty of mother earth,’ began one example, which Congreve delivered in a white tunic with a chain around his neck bearing Comte’s image on one side, Plato’s on the other, ‘We meet as believers in Humanity. We use all that the past can offer us by way of wise utterances – poems or music, the religious writings of the east or west – but we admit of no revelation and no being outside of man. We consider all to have been written or spoken to men like ourselves by men like ourselves’. Services ended with a prayer to Comte: ‘Great teacher and Master, revealer of Humanity, prophet of the future, founder of the one universal religion’.

Comte’s religion had even greater success in Brazil, where it was put into practice by some students that Comte had taught in Paris in the 1840s. A Templo da Humanidade opened in Rio in 1890 and others followed in Sao Paulo and Curitiba. Unfortunately, infighting among the leadership (connected to doctrinal squabbles about the place of Western authors in ther liturgy) meant that the movement failed to grow into a truly popular religion and yet it acquired a small and permanent place in Brazil’s spiritual life. To this day, every Sunday morning in Rio de Janeiro, at 74 Rua Benjamin Constant, audiences – who make up in intensity what they lack for in numbers – arrive at the Templo da Humanidade to draw sustenance from the teachings of a Parisian sociologist’s unusual secular religion.

Whatever its shortcomings, Comte’s religion is hard to dismiss entirely, for it identified a psychic space in atheistic society which continues to lie fallow and to invite resolution. Comte’s work was an attempt to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching, reasonable and wise from what no longer seems true. For these reasons and more, it is extremely timely.

It is still, tragically, sometimes assumed that the best way to cheer someone up is to tell them that everything will turn out all right; to intimate that life is essentially a pleasant process in which happiness is no mirage and human fulfilment a real possibility.

However, we need only read a few pages of the book known as the Pensées by the great French 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62) to appreciate how entirely misguided this approach must be, because Pascal pulls off the feat of being both one of the most pessimistic figures in Western thought and simultaneously one of the most cheering. The combination seems typical: the darkest thinkers are, paradoxically, almost always the ones who can lift our mood.

Pascal was born in Auvergne in central France in June 1623, and from the earliest days, learnt to look at the glass of life as half-empty. His mother died when he was three, he had few friends, he was a hunchback and he was always ill. Luckily, he was recognised from an early age – and by more than just his proud family – to be a genius. By twelve, he had worked out the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, he went on to invent the mathematics of probability, he measured atmospheric pressure, constructed a calculating machine and designed Paris’s first omnibus.

Then, at the age of thirty-six, ill-health forced him to set aside plans for further scientific exploration and led him to write a brilliant, intensely pessimistic series of aphorisms in defence of Christian belief which became known as the Pensées – the book for which we today chiefly remember and revere him.

The purpose of the work was to convert readers to God and Pascal felt the best way to do this was to evoke everything that was terrible about life. Having fully considered the misery of the human condition, he assumed his readers would instantly turn for salvation to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately for Pascal, very few modern readers now follow the Pensées like this. The first part of the book, listing what is wrong with life, has always proved far more popular than the second, which suggests what is right with God.

Pascal begins by telling us that earthly happiness is an illusion – but is especially keen to point out how much we hate being on our own, thinking and exploring our lives. He is perhaps best known of all for this aphorism of genius:

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.

All of man’s unhappiness comes from his inability to stay peacefully alone in his room.

The aphorism should be written in large letters in the departure lounges of all the world’s airports.

Pascal’s charm lies in his bitterness and tart cynicism. People will do anything rather than consider their dreadful reality. “Man is so vain that…the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, is enough to divert him.” At the same time, they are tortured by their passions, especially the passion for fame; “We are so presumptuous that we want to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come after we have gone.” And perhaps the greatest source of suffering is the most banal – boredom. “We struggle against obstacles, but once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.” Pascal’s conclusion: “What is man? A nothing compared to the infinite.”

Pascal misses no opportunities to confront his readers with evidence of mankind’s resolutely deviant, pitiful and unworthy nature. In seductive classical French, he informs us that happiness is an illusion (‘Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself’), that misery is the norm (‘If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it’), that true love is a chimera (‘How hollow and foul is the heart of man’), that we are as thin skinned as we are vain (‘A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us’), that even the strongest among us are rendered helpless by the countless diseases to which we are vulnerable (‘Flies are so mighty that they can paralyse our minds and eat up our bodies’), that all worldly institutions are corrupt (‘Nothing is surer than that people will be weak’) and that we are absurdly prone to overestimate our own importance (‘How many kingdoms know nothing of us!’). The very best we may hope to do in these circumstances, he suggests, is to face the desperate facts of our situation head on: ‘Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched’.

Given the tone, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that reading Pascal is not at all the depressing experience one might have presumed. The work is consoling, heartwarming and even, at times, hilarious. For those teetering on the verge of despair, there can paradoxically be no finer book to turn to than one which seeks to grind man’s every last hope into the dust. The Pensées, far more than any saccharine volume touting inner beauty, positive thinking or the realisation of hidden potential, has the power to coax the suicidal off the ledge of a high parapet.

If Pascal’s pessimism can effectively console us, it may be because we are usually cast into gloom not so much by negativity as by hope. It is hope – with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet – that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.

Hence the relief, which can explode into bursts of laughter, when we finally come across an author generous enough to confirm that our very worst insights, far from being unique and shameful, are part of the common, inevitable reality of mankind. Our dread that we might be the only ones to feel anxious, bored, jealous, cruel, perverse and narcissistic turns out to be gloriously unfounded, opening up unexpected opportunities for communion around our dark realities.

We should honour Pascal, and the long line of Christian pessimists to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state. Reading Pascal reminds us that the secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naiveté and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realised on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics will together cure the ills of mankind.

Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.

Why should any of this be so cheering? Perhaps because pessimistic exaggeration is so comforting. Whatever our private disappointments, we can start to feel very fortunate when we compare our mood to Pascal’s. Pascal wanted to turn us to God by telling us how awful life was. But by sharing his troubles, he ironically strengthens us to face the troubles of our own lives on this earth with greater courage and forbearance.

Gustave Flaubert was a great French 19th-century (1821-1880) novelist who deserves our love and sympathy; as much for what he wrote as who he was.

We can admire him for four reasons at least:

HE UNDERSTOOD THE PURPOSE OF TRAGEDY

Flaubert produced arguably the single greatest tragic novel ever written: Madame Bovary – which he worked on for five years and published in 1857.

The point of a tragedy is to allow us to experience a degree of understanding for others’ failure so much greater than what we ordinarily feel. It shakes us from our customary moralism and brittle superiority. It helps us empathise in the way the modern media usually prevents.

In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A twenty-seven year old woman named Delphine Delamare living in Ry just outside Rouen, had become dissatisfied with the routines of married life, had run up huge debts on superfluous clothes and household goods and had committed suicide under emotional and financial pressure. Madame Delamare was leaving behind a young daughter and a distraught husband.

One of those reading the newspaper was a twenty-seven year old aspiring novelist, Gustave Flaubert – who grew so fascinated by the story, he used it to provide him with the exact plot structure for his eventual novel.

One of things that happened when Madame Delamare, the adulteress from Ry, turned into Madame Bovary, the adulteress from fictional Yonville, was that her life ceased to bear the dimensions of a black-and-white morality tale.

Readers saw how easy it is to have a thoroughly miserable marriage without being in any way a bad person. Flaubert’s novel shows us the tensions and travails of married life without taking sides.

Emma gets bored with her husband, loses interests in her child, runs up debts, has affairs – and eventually kills herself. But by the time readers had taken in how she had pushed arsenic into her mouth and been laid down in her bedroom to await her death, they would not be in a mood to judge. All they could feel was pity at the cruelty and senselessness of life.

Flaubert seemed almost deliberately to enjoy unsettling the desire to find easy answers. No sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light, than he would undercut her with an ironic remark. But then, as readers were losing patience with her, he would draw them back to her, would tell them something about her sensitivity that would bring tears to the eyes.

We end Flaubert’s novel with fear and sadness at how we have been made to live before we begin to know how, at how limited our understanding of ourselves and others is, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions and at how pitiless and vengeful the upstanding members of the community can be in response to our errors.

Tragedy inspires us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified, judgemental perspective on failure and defeat; rendering us generous towards the foolishness and errors that are endemic to our nature.

WHAT WE READ MATTERS

A particular aspect of Madame Bovary’s tragic end sticks out: Flaubert tells us in no uncertain terms that the reason Emma Bovary grew so dissatisfied, unfairly so, with marriage – and therefore embarked on her disastrous affairs – was because of the books she had read.

He tells us that from a young age, Emma used to read Romantic novels that gave her an unrealistic, overly rosy picture of love that left her unprepared for the reality of marriage.

Emma was unprepared for how boring it can be to have dinner with the same person every night and by how difficult it is to keep a relationship alive after one has a baby – and therefore responded with too great a degree of panic, having multiple affairs to remind herself that she was still capable of passion and going shopping for more than she could afford as an alternative to the sometimes tedious business of bringing up a child.

What might ultimately have saved Emma Bovary was to read the novel of which she is the heroine. It’s a novel about love designed to cure us of the naive illusions about love created by bad novels.

THE STUPIDITY OF MODERN MEDIA

Flaubert couldn’t stand newspapers. He belonged to a generation that had experienced the rise of mass-circulation newspapers at first hand and believed that these were spreading a new kind of stupidity – which he termed ‘la bêtise’ (idiocy) – into every corner of France.

Idiocy wasn’t the same as ignorance for Flaubert, because it was compatible with knowing a lot of things – it just meant understanding nothing.

The most loathsome character in Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais, is introduced early on as an avid consumer of news who sets aside a special hour every day to study ‘le journal’ (Flaubert keeps the word in italics throughout, to send up the neo-religious reverence in which this object is held).

In the 1870s, Flaubert began keeping a record of what he judged to be the most idiotic patterns of thought promoted by the modern world in general and by the newspapers in particular. Published posthumously as The Dictionary of Received Ideas, this collection of clichés, organised by topic, was described by its author as an encyclopédie de la bêtise humaine (an encyclopedia of human stupidity). Here is a random sampling of its entries:

BUDGET: Never balanced.

CATHOLICISM: Has had a very good influence on art.

CHRISTIANITY: Freed the slaves.

CRUSADES: Benefitted Venetian trade.

DIAMONDS: To think that they’re nothing but coal; if we came across one in its natural state, we wouldn’t even bother to pick it up off the ground!

EXERCISE: Prevents all illnesses. To be recommended at all times.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Will make painting obsolete.

It is worth noting how many of the Dictionary’s clichés touch on sophisticated disciplines such as theology, science and politics, without, however, going anywhere very clever with them

The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he was still an idiot – a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.

A HATRED OF THE FRENCH BOURGEOISIE

Flaubert was a bourgeois, a middle class Frenchman, and yet he loathed a great deal to do with his country and class.

For Flaubert, the French bourgeoisie could be a repository of the most extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity.

‘It’s strange how the most banal utterances [of the bourgeoisie] sometimes make me marvel,’ he once complained in stifled rage, ‘There are gestures, sounds of people’s voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo…the bourgeois…is for me something unfathomable.’

He wrote that he had nothing but disdain for this ‘good civilisation’ that prided itself on having produced ‘railways, poisons, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine.’

What Flaubert hated above all was pomposity. This quote to his girlfriend Louise Colet, written in 1846, gives us an insight: ‘What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I’m essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not the kind of small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh, it seems so idiotic. All this is very difficult to explain…’

He was in the end a global citizen: ‘I’m no more modern than Ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.’

In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, there was an entry on: FRENCH – ‘How proud one is to be French when one looks at the Colonne Vendôme’.

Paradoxically, one can be proudest to be French when one reads Flaubert, for aside from hating a lot about his country, he also captures some of its best and wisest sides.

We should read him for his earthiness, his humanity, his frankness and above all else his generosity of spirit.

At the age of 17, Flaubert wrote, in a melodramatic mood, ‘Art is superior to everything, a book of poetry is worth more than a railway.’

It rarely is; but it might almost be worth giving up a railway line or two for the sake of Flaubert’s works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the father of American Literature. In a series of strikingly original essays written in the mid-nineteenth century, he fundamentally changed the way America saw its cultural and artistic possibilities, enabling its separation from transatlantic literary traditions. ‘We have listened too long,’ he wrote, ‘to the Courtly muses of Europe.’ His ejection of cultural traditions brought about what one contemporary called America’s ‘intellectual declaration of independence’ and established generational conflict and transformation as the commanding ideas in American Literature.

Emerson himself hardly seemed destined to fit the revolutionary mould. He was born in 1803, the son of a Boston preacher, and was descended from a line of New England ministers that went back to the bedrock of seventeenth-century Puritanism. When his father died in 1811 his mother took in boarders to pay the rent. Still, she sent him to Harvard in 1817 and then to Harvard Divinity School to train for the priesthood in 1825. As a young man he was strongly influenced by his remarkable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who, though self-taught, had read everything from Shakespeare to the Romantics and had formed a unique religious perspective based on piety, nature and literature that would resonate powerfully in the life and work of her nephew. So when he was ordained in 1829, marrying the love of his life Ellen Tucker in the same year, Emerson was already unsatisfied with the formal nature of New England religious orthodoxy. When Ellen died of tuberculosis just two years later he resigned from the church and soon after embarked on a recuperative trip to Europe, leaving on Christmas day 1832.

Two crucial things happened to Emerson on that tour of Europe. In Paris he went to the famous Jardin des Plantes, a botanical and zoological garden. There he had an epiphany, writing in his journal that:

I feel the centipede in me — cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’

His insight was that nature is in us, part of us; and not just its higher forms, but in all its grotesquery and wildness. 

The second thing that happened on that tour was that he met the English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth – and found them rather ordinary, dry and conservative men. The insight that Emerson drew from this was that if great men could be so ordinary why should not ordinary men be great? As he would write a few years later: ‘Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.’ Emerson had found two ideas that would guide his life’s work: that man and nature are one and that everyone can recognise that they are a uniquely significant human being.

On his return to America in 1833 Emerson became a professional lecturer, giving talks on natural history and literature in halls around New England. He remarried and had several children, presenting a stolid, bourgeois appearance to the world. His inner life, though, was full of turbulence and originality. In his 1836 essay Nature, he outlined the germ of a new philosophy. A key element of this was the importance of American originality. In its opening lines he wrote: ‘Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?’ America needed to stop looking back to its European heritage and start looking about itself. No past moment was more important that the present moment. No tradition was more important than novelty. No generation was better than the current generation. Everything that matters is here now – and that ‘here’ was America.

This was an extension of Emerson’s ideas about the significance of the individual that came under the heading of ‘self-reliance.’ Everywhere he looked he saw people living lives that were based on tradition, that were limited by religious forms and social habits. No one could be themselves, he thought, because they were all too busy being who they were supposed to be. Emerson wanted to get rid of each of these burdens – the past, religion and social forms – so that each person could find out who they truly were. As he put it: ‘history is an impertinence and an injury’; ‘our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us’ and ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.’ We must, he argued, live from within, trusting nothing but our own intuitions. For, as he concludes: ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.’

This leaves open a vital question: what is your nature once you have rid yourself of history, tradition and religion? What can be said is that it is not self-indulgence, it is not hedonism, it is not narcissism – rather it is the surrender to that force which Emerson recognised back in the Jardin des Plantes: it is obedience to nature itself.

By nature Emerson seemed to mean the natural world – plants, animals, rocks and sky – but what he really meant was God. For Emerson was a Pantheist, someone who believed that God exists in every part of creation, from the smallest grain of sand to a star – but also, crucially, that the divine spark is in each of us. In following ourselves we are not being merely fickle and selfish, but rather releasing a Divine Will that history, society and organised religion have hidden from us. The individual, as he writes, ‘is a god in ruins’ (CW1 42); but we have it within us, by casting off all custom, to rebuild ourselves. He makes this Pantheist connection explicit in his most famous lines:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. […] Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.  

In the Romantic tradition, on which Emerson draws, it is the sublime – great mountains, rushing torrents, dark forests – which releases the inner vision as we find ourselves in awe of them. For Emerson it is a perfectly dull walk across an ordinary common on a dark winter’s evening that brings him ‘to the brink of fear.’ Emerson’s God is in the snow puddles too. Stood there, on the common, he disappears, becoming nothing, as the currents of God flow through him. What is left is a ‘transparent eyeball.’ Such transcendent moments are rare but they reveal an essential connection between nature, God and man – they are one. They also give, for Emerson, a proper sense of each individual’s importance as a part of God. ‘Transcendentalism’ became the name of the movement that grew up around Emerson at that time. 

Another aspect of this epiphany that was to have a profound effect on American literature was the emphasis on the value of the ordinary. What Emerson put forward in essays like ‘The American Scholar’ and ‘The Poet’ was that the American everyday was the proper subject of literature. This was because for Emerson the Transcendentalist God is everywhere and it is the poet’s job to reveal this. ‘There is no object,’ he writes, ‘so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. […] Even the corpse has its own beauty.’ This coming from a man who opened his first wife’s tomb a year after her death.

The great American writers who followed Emerson were liberated by his work to look around and write about what they saw and how they lived, transforming the everyday into a vital symbol of something higher and more elusive. Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond became a book that showed the cosmos reflected in the depths of its waters. The poet Walt Whitman said ‘I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.’ Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz and could write of the other side of death. The novelist Herman Melville took a whaling voyage and made it an allegory of American imperialism and the defiance of nature. In the twentieth century the critic Harold Bloom looked back at Emerson’s originality and saw in it the origin of the ‘strong tradition’ of American poets from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to John Ashbery. Emerson’s legacy to American literature and culture – and indeed to the world – was one of ceaseless invention and forward momentum – as he put it: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

Written by Dr David Greenham

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694. His father, a well-established lawyer, sent him to the best school in the capital, and by all accounts he was a brilliant student. The young Arouet decided at an early age to make his name as a writer – to remake his name, to be precise, as the first thing he did was to change his name to Voltaire. The eighteenth century is often referred to as the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment, sometimes as the Age of Voltaire. So changing his name was a good call – “the Age of Arouet” would just not have worked.

Voltaire was precociously talented as a poet. At the age of only 24, he had his first verse tragedy performed at the Comédie française. By then he had already begun work on an epic poem about the French religious civil wars of the sixteenth century, a poem glorifying Henry IV as the king who brought peace by pragmatically converting from Protestantism to Catholicism. This was a subject dear to Voltaire’s heart, for under the guise of writing a national epic, he was able to dwell at length on the bloody consequences of religious intolerance.

Right from the start, Voltaire’s views on religion are expressed robustly. He was not an atheist, in part because he thought that some minimal belief in a deity was useful for social cohesion. Voltaire’s God created the world, instilled in us a sense of good and evil, and then basically took a back seat. This is rational religion – known in the eighteenth century under the name of natural religion or deism – and it has no truck with metaphysics of any kind. Voltaire was a man of reason who loathed fanaticism, idolatry, superstition. That men can kill each other to defend some bit of religious doctrine which they scarcely understand is something he found repellent. And he reserved his greatest hatred for the clerics who exploited the credulity of believers to maintain their own power base. Voltaire wanted religion without the Church.

For obvious reasons, the Catholic authorities were not keen for Voltaire’s poem about Henry IV, La Henriade, to be published in France. So Voltaire decided to publish his poem in London instead, and in 1726 he travelled to England. What began as a business trip soon turned into something different, and Voltaire ended up staying in England for some two and a half years. He learned English, got to know writers and politicians, and became a great admirer of English (Protestant) culture. He decided to write a book about his experience of England, and the Letters Concerning the English Nation appeared first in English in 1733. The French authorities were horrified, the book was censored, and Voltaire only narrowly avoided prison.

The book presents an informal portrait of English culture in a witty and ironical style, looking in turn at religion, politics, science and literature. Here, for example, is how Voltaire presents the Royal Exchange, a handsome building in the heart of the City, where merchants from across the world met to transact business:

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan and the Christian transact together as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptised in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child.  If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there as such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.

The message is clear: religious differences are trivial and separate men, while trade is important and brings them together. His conclusion, that the plurality of religions in England leads to a more peaceful society, is of course a covert criticism of France, where the Catholic Church was dominant.

The Letters Concerning the English Nation also discuss Locke and Newton, thinkers then poorly known in France. The subject-matter might seem challenging, but Voltaire is a past master at popularising difficult material. Ask any schoolchild today what they know about Newton, and they’ll tell you about the apple falling on his head – and the survival of this anecdote is due entirely to Voltaire. He heard it apparently from Newton’s niece, and immediately understood that this simple homely image was the perfect way of conveying the simplicity of Newton’s explanation of the force of gravity. After Voltaire used the story in his Letters Concerning the English Nation, everyone remembered it, and Voltaire left his mark on English popular culture.

Voltaire struggled with the question of good and evil, the problem at the heart of his best known work, Candide. This short satirical novel first appeared in 1759, and was a best-seller from the moment it was published. Translated into every possible language, it remains the most widely read work of the European Enlightenment. It has even left its mark on our language. Expressions like pour encourager les autres [‘to encourage the others’] or il faut cultiver le jardin [‘we must cultivate the garden’] have entered common usage. In the best of all possible worlds – yes, that’s another one – speakers of French or English quote Candide without even realising it… – and that’s the sure mark of a classic.

Candide is a timeless work, a satire of the human condition. It is also a work of the Enlightenment, and its philosophical theme is announced in the title: Candide or Optimism. The hero of Candide, as his name tells us, is an innocent, an anti-hero. He is in thrall to his tutor Pangloss who preaches the philosophy of Optimism. This is not ‘optimism’ in the modern sense of ‘looking on the bright side’. Optimism, spelled with a capital O, and as expounded by the German philosopher Leibniz, was an attempt to answer the age-old problem of evil. Why, if God is good, does he permit the existence of evil in the world? To which the eighteenth-century Optimist replies, evil is all part of some greater pattern of good: ‘All partial evil, universal good’ as the English poet Pope put it. In other words, evil doesn’t really exist at all, it is just something which man imagines because of his limited view of the world.

You might think this sounds like a bit of a confidence trick – Voltaire certainly did – but this idea found widespread acceptance in the eighteenth century. Candide puts this philosophy to the test. Ejected from his comfortable home in an obscure German castle after trying to seduce the Baron’s beautiful daughter Cunégonde, he undergoes many trials and tribulations: conscripted into the army, he fights in a war, then deserts, only to find himself a witness to an earthquake in Lisbon – a reference to a recent event in which some 40,000 people had perished. Candide is repeatedly brought face to face with evil in its most extreme forms – moral evil, in the case of the earthquake, where man is not apparently to blame; and most of all human evil, such as the war, where man is very definitely to blame. Pangloss’s breezy Optimism is clearly an inadequate response to enormities on this scale. Eventually, even Candide comes to realise this:

And sometimes Pangloss would say to Candide: ‘All events form a chain in the best of all possible worlds. For in the end, if you had not been given a good kick up the backside and chased out of a beautiful castle for loving Miss Cunégonde, and if you hadn’t been subjected to the Inquisition, and if you hadn’t wandered about America on foot, and if you hadn’t dealt the Baron a good blow with your sword, and if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from that fine country of El Dorado, you wouldn’t be here now eating candied citron and pistachio nuts.’

‘That is well put,’ replied Candide, ‘but we must cultivate our garden.’

After 1760, Voltaire took up residence in the château at Ferney, just outside Geneva. By now he was the most famous living writer in Europe, and he became widely known as the ‘patriarch of Ferney’.  He took up a number of public causes. In 1761, a Protestant merchant Jean Calas was accused of murdering his son and sentenced by the judges of Toulouse to be tortured and then broken on the wheel. The legal processes were to say the least irregular, and the suspicion grew that the judges in this Catholic city had acted with excessive zeal out of religious bigotry. Voltaire became involved in the case, and mounted an energetic campaign to rehabilitate Calas’ memory and to help the members of his family, who had been left destitute. He wrote letters to those in authority and published a stream of pamphlets, culminating in 1763 in his Traité sur la tolérance (‘Treatise on Toleration’), which begins with the historical facts of the Calas case and broadens out into a history of religious intolerance in European culture.

Voltaire’s writings had enormous impact on public opinion, and eventually the judges in Paris quashed the judgment of the Toulouse court. Too late to save Calas, but a huge victory for Voltaire, who had learned an important lesson about how change could be brought about through the pressure of public opinion. ‘Opinion rules the world,’ he wrote in 1764, ‘but in the long run it is the philosophers who shape this opinion.’

Voltaire said of himself that he ‘wrote to act’, and he wanted his writings to change the way people thought and behaved. In leading his crusades against fanaticism, he even invented a campaign slogan, Ecrasez l’Infâme!, which translates roughly as ‘Crush the despicable!’. L’Infâme stands here for everything that Voltaire hates, everything that he had spent his life fighting: superstition, intolerance, irrational behaviour of every kind.

And we should never forget that he was a brilliant writer, one of the greatest stylist the French language has ever known. The power of his ideas had a lot to do with the power of his expression: many writers made fun of miracles, no one did is so hilariously as Voltaire. Always, Voltaire has an ear for the telling phrase: ‘If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him’ – it’s a good line, even in English, and better still in the original French, where it is more memorable because it is a classical alexandrine line in 12 syllables:

Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.

Voltaire’s legacy in our present debates about religious toleration remains potent. Hardly a week passes without an article in the press quoting ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ This rallying cry of tolerant multiculturalism is so potent, that if Voltaire hadn’t said it, we would have had to invent it. Which is what happened – the expression was invented, by an Englishwoman in 1906. No matter – it expresses a truth which is fundamentally important to our culture, so we have adopted the phrase and decided that Voltaire said it. Voltaire’s name has become synonymous with a set of liberal values: freedom of speech, rejection of bigotry and superstition, belief in reason and tolerance. It is a unique and precious legacy.

Written by Professor Nicholas Cronk

A good trick, with his name, is to say ‘toy’ in the middle: Dos-toy-ev-ski.

He was born 1821 and grew up on the outskirts of Moscow. His family were comfortably off – his father was a successful doctor, though he happened to work at a charitable hospital that provided medical services for the very poor. The family had a house in the hospital complex, so the young Dostoevsky was from the very beginning powerfully exposed to experiences from which other children of his background were usually carefully sheltered. Like almost everyone in Tsarist Russia his parents were devout Orthodox Christians – and Dostoevsky’s own religious faith got deeper and stronger all his life.  

At the age of 12 he was sent away to school first in Moscow and later in the capital, St Petersburg – he got a good education, though as a child of the tiny professional middle-class he felt out of place among his more aristocratic classmates. While he was away at school his father died – possibly murdered by his own serfs.

After graduating Dostoevsky worked as an engineer for a while. He started gambling and losing money (something that was to plague him all his life). In his late twenties he became friends with a group of radical writers and intellectuals. He wasn’t deeply involved but when the government decided to crack down on dissent, Dostoevsky was rounded up too and sentenced to be shot by a firing squad. At the last moment – when the soldiers were ready to fire – the message of a reprieve arrived. He was sent instead to Siberia for four years of forced labour in horrific conditions.

It was only after his return from Siberia that Dostoevsky established himself as a writer. Starting in middle age he produced a series of major books.

1864 – Notes from Underground

1866 – Crime and Punishment

1869 – The Idiot

1872 – Demons

1880 – Brothers Karamazov

They are dark, violent and tragic – and usually very long and complicated. He wrote them to preach five important lessons to the world.

(The discussion of Dostoevsky’s ideas involves revealing the plots of some of his novels. It’s not something that would have worried him because his books are written to be read more than once. But if it bothers you, this is the place to break off.)

1. The value of suffering

His first big book – Notes from Underground – is an extended rant against life and the world delivered by a retired civil servant. He is deeply unreasonable, inconsistent and furious with everyone (including himself); he’s always getting into rows, he goes to a reunion of some former colleagues and tells them all how much he always hated them; he wants to puncture everyone’s illusions and make them as unhappy as he is. He seems like a grotesque character to build a book around. But he’s doing something important. He’s insisting – with a peculiar kind of intensity – on a very strange fact about the human condition: we want happiness but we have a special talent for making ourselves miserable – “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering: that is a fact,” he asserts.

In the novel, Dostoevsky is taking aim at philosophies of progress and improvement – which were highly popular in his age (as they continue to be in ours). He is attacking our habit of telling ourselves that if only this or that thing were different, we could leave suffering behind. If we got that great job, changed the government, could afford that great house, invented a machine to fly us faster around the world, could get together with (or get divorced from) a particular person, then all would go well. This, Dostoevsky argues, is a delusion. Suffering will always pursue us. Schemes for improving the world always contain a flaw: they won’t eliminate suffering, they will only change the things that cause us pain. Life can only ever be a process of changing the focus of pain, never removing pain itself. There will always be something to agonise us. Stop people starving, says Dostoevsky – with calculated wickedness – and you’ll soon find there’s a new range of agonies: they’ll start to suffer from boredom, greed or intense melancholy that they haven’t been invited to the right party.

In this spirit, Notes from Underground launches an attack on all ideologies of technical or social progress which aspire to the elimination of suffering. They won’t succeed because as soon as they solve one problem, they’ll direct our nature to become unhappy in new ways. Dostoevsky is fascinated by the secret ways we actually don’t want what we theoretically seek: he discusses the pleasure a lot of people get from feelings of superiority (and for whom, consequently, an egalitarian society would be a nightmare); or the disavowed (but real) thrill we get from hearing about violent crimes on the news – in which case we’d actually feel thwarted in a truly peaceful world. Notes from Underground is a dark, awkwardly insightful, counterpoint to well-intentioned modern liberalism.

It doesn’t really show that social improvement is meaningless. But it does remind us that we’ll always carry our very complex and difficult selves with us and that progress will never be as clear and clean as we might like to imagine.

2. We don’t know ourselves

In Crime and Punishment, we meet an impoverished intellectual, Rodion Raskolnikov. Though he’s a currently nobody, he’s fascinated by power and ruthlessness. He thinks of himself as a version of Napoleon: “leaders of men, such as Napoleon, were all without exception criminals, they broke the ancient laws of their people to make new ones that suited them better, and they never feared bloodshed.”

Raskolnikov is also desperate for money and so, with his philosophy of aristocratic superiority in mind, he decides to murder an old woman who is a small time pawn broker and money lender and steal her cash. He’s tormented by the mad injustice of the fact that this horrible, mean old character has drawers full of roubles while he – who is clever, energetic and profound – is starving. (He doesn’t spend much time thinking about options like taking a job as a waiter.) He breaks into her apartment and bludgeons her to death; and – surprised in the act by the woman’s pregnant half-sister – kills her too.

But it turns out he’s nothing like the cold-blooded, rational hero of his imagination. He is tormented by guilt and horror at what he has done. Eventually he turns himself over to the police in order to face the proper punishment for his crime.

We’re (probably) never going to do what Raskolnikov did. But we often share a troubling tendency with him: we think we know ourselves better than we actually do. Raskolnikov thinks he’s ruthless; actually he’s rather tender hearted. He thinks he won’t feel guilt; but he’s overwhelmed by remorse.

Part of our life’s journey is to engage in the tricky task of disentangling ourselves from what we think we’re like – in order to discover our true nature. Raskolnikov is especially fascinating because of the direction this self-discovery takes. His striking realisation is that he’s actually a much nicer person than he takes himself to be.

Whereas so many novelists delight in showing the sickly reality beneath a glamorous or enticing facade, Dostoevsky is embarked on a more curious but rewarding mission: he wants to reveal that beneath the so-called monster, there is very often a far more interesting tender-hearted character lurking: a nice but deluded, intelligent but frightened and panicked person.

3. Nice people do some terrible things

Sticking for the moment with Crime and Punishment, it’s very significant the way Dostoevsky gets us to like his murderous hero. Raskolnikov is clearly an attractive person. At the very start we’re told -

“By the way, Raskolnikov is handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with lovely dark eyes and dark brown hair.”

Dostoevsky is lessening the imaginative distance between ‘us’ who live mainly law abiding and more of less manageable lives and ‘them’ – the ones who do terrible things and wreak havoc with their lives and those of others. That person, he is saying, is more like you than you might initially want to think – and therefore more accessible to sympathy.

The idea that you can be a good person, do something very bad and still deserve some compassion sounds very slight and obvious – until one has need of this kind of forgiveness in one’s own life (you may have to be over 30). This is where Dostoevsky wants to enter our inner conversation with ourselves – and tell us all about his character Raskolnikov – a serious, thoughtful, good-looking man who did worse then we have and still can be compassionately understood, as we can and must all be. This is Dostoevsky’s Christianity at work: no one is outside the circle of God’s love and understanding.

4. We must learn to appreciate the beauty of life

Dostoevsky’s next great book, The Idiot, takes off from his near-death experience before the firing squad. In the novel, he recounts what it was like. Three minutes before his expected death he is able to see life clearly for the first time. He notices the gilded spire of a nearby church, and how it glitters in the sun. He’d never before realised how entrancing a glint of sunlight could be. He is filled with an immense, deep love of the world. You might see a beggar and think how you would love to change places with them so as to be able to continue to breathe the air and feel the wind – merely to exist seems (at that moment of final revelation) infinitely precious. And then the revised order comes and it is not over at all.

What would it be like to go through one’s whole life in such a state of gratitude and generosity? You wouldn’t share any of the normal attitudes. You’d love everyone equally, you’d be enchanted by the simplest things, you’d never feel angry or frightened. You would seem to other people to be a kind of idiot. Hence the title of the book.

It’s an extreme version of a very interesting step. We’re continually surrounded by things which could delight us, if only we saw them the right way, if only we could learn to appreciate them. Dostoevsky was desperate to communicate the value of existence before death would overtake him – and us.

5. Idealism has its limits

In Dostoyevsky’s final great work – Brothers Karamazov, which came out when he was nearly sixty – one of the central characters tells a long story-within-a-story. It’s called The Grand Inquisitor and imagines that the greatest event looked forward to by Christian theology – the second coming of Christ – has in fact already happened. Jesus did come back, several hundred years ago and turned up in Spain, during the highest period of power of the Catholic Church – the organisation established, in theory at least, entirely in devotion to him. Christ is back to fulfil his teachings of forgiveness and universal love. But something odd happens. The most powerful religious leader – the Grand Inquisitor – has him arrested and imprisoned.

In the middle of the night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and explains that he cannot allow him to do his work on Earth, because he is a threat to the stability of society.

Christ, he says, is too ambitious – too pure, too perfect. Humanity can’t live up to the impossible goals he sets us. The fact is, people haven’t been able to live according to his teachings and Jesus should admit he failed and that his ideas of redemption were essentially misguided.

The Grand Inquisitor is not really a monster. In fact, Dostoevsky portrays him as quite an admirable figure in the story. He is a guide to a crucial idea for Dostoevsky, that human beings cannot live in purity, cannot ever be truly good, cannot live up to Christ’s message – and that this is something we should reconcile ourselves to with grace rather than fury or self-hatred.

We have to accept a great deal of unreasonableness, folly, greed, selfishness and shortsightedness as ineradicable parts of the human condition and plan accordingly. And it’s not just a pessimistic thesis about politics or religion that we’re being introduced to. The primary relevance of this thesis is as a commentary on our own lives: we won’t sort them out, we won’t stop being being a bit mad and wayward. And we shouldn’t torment ourselves with the dream that we could – if only we tried hard enough – become the ideal beings that idealistic philosophies like Christianity like to sketch all too readily.

Dostoyevsky died in 1881. He had a very hard life, but he succeeded in conveying an idea which perhaps he understood more clearly than anyone: in a world that’s very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures. Dostoyevsky’s attitude – bleak but compassionate, tragic but kind – is needed more than ever in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea – which this great Russian loathed – that science can save us all and that we may yet be made perfect through technology. Dostoyevsky guides us to a more humane truth: that – as the great sages have always known – life is and ever will be suffering, and yet that there is great redemption available in articulating this message in great and complex works of art.

The 18th-century writer David Hume is one of the world’s great philosophical voices because he hit upon a key fact about human nature: that we are more influenced by our feelings than by reason. This is, at one level, possibly a great insult to our self-image, but Hume thought that if we could learn to deal well with this surprising fact, we could be (both individually and collectively) a great deal calmer and happier than if we denied it.

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 to a family that was long established but far from rich.  He was the second son, and it was clear early on that he would need to find a job eventually. But nothing seemed to suit him. He tried law (the vocation of his father and older brother), but soon decided that it was “a laborious profession” requiring “the drudgery of a whole life.” He was considered for academic posts at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, but he didn’t land either job.

So he set out to become a public intellectual, someone who would make his money selling books to the general public. It was hard going. His first book, A Treatise of Human Nature, for which he had the highest hopes, met with a dismal reception. “Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise,” he wrote. “It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”

But he kept at it, realising that the blame largely lay with the way he had expressed his ideas, and doggedly trained himself to write in a more accessible and popular manner. Eventually he did find an audience. His later works, history books and collections of elegant essays were bestsellers of the day. As he would say, not without some pride:  “The money given me by the booksellers much exceeded any thing formerly know in England; I was become not only independent but opulent.”

1. Feelings and Reason

Hume’s philosophy is built around a single powerful observation: that the key thing we need to get right in life is feeling rather than rationality. It sounds like an odd conclusion. Normally we assume that what we need to do is train our minds to be as rational as possible: to be devoted to evidence and logical reasoning and committed to preventing our feelings from getting in the way.

But Hume insisted that, whatever we may aim for, ‘reason is the slave of passion.’ We are more motivated by our feelings than by any of the comparatively feeble results of analysis and logic. Few of our leading convictions are driven by rational investigation of the facts; we decide whether someone is admirable, what to do with our spare time, what constitutes a successful career or who to love on on the basis of feeling above anything else. Reason helps a little, but the decisive factors are bound up with our emotional lives – with our passions as Hume calls them.

Hume lived in a time known as the Age of Reason, when many claimed that the glory of human beings consists in their rationality. But for Hume, a human is just another kind of animal.  

Hume was deeply attentive to the curious way that we very often reason from, rather than to, our convictions. We find an idea nice or threatening and on that basis alone declare it true or false. Reason only comes in later to support the original attitude.  

What Hume didn’t believe – however – was that all feelings are acceptable and equal. That is why he firmly believed in the education of the passions. People have to learn to be more benevolent, more patient, more at ease with themselves and less afraid of others. But to be taught these things, they need an education system that addresses feelings rather than reason. This is why Hume so fervently believed in the role and significance of public intellectuals: these were people who – unlike the university professors Hume grew to dislike immensely – had to excite a passion-based attachment to ideas, wisdom and insight (only if they succeeded would they have the money to eat). It was for this reason that they had to write well, use colourful examples and have recourse to wit and charm.

Hume’s insight is that if you want to change people’s beliefs, reasoning with them like a normal philosophy professor cannot be the most effective strategy, he is pointing out that we have to try to adjust sentiments by sympathy, reassurance, good example, encouragement and what he called Art – and only later, for a few determined souls, try to make the case on the basis of facts and logic.

2. Religion

A key place where Hume made use of the idea of the priority of feeling over reason was in connection with religion.

Hume didn’t think it was ‘rational’ to believe in God, that is, he didn’t think there were compelling logical arguments in favour of the existence of a deity. He himself seems to have floated between mild agnosticism – there might be a God, I’m not sure – and mild Theism – There is a God, but it doesn’t make much difference to me that there is. But the idea of a vindictive God – ready to punish people in an afterlife for not believing in him in this one – he considered a cruel superstition.

Hume’s central point is that religious belief isn’t the product of reason. So arguing for or against it on the basis of facts doesn’t touch the core issue. To try to persuade someone to believe or not believe with well honed arguments seemed particularly daft to Hume. This is why he was a foremost defender of the concept of religious toleration. We should not treat those who disagree with us over religion as rational people who have made an error of reasoning (and so need to be put right), but rather as passionate, emotion-driven creatures who should be left in peace so long as they do likewise. Trying to have a rational argument over religion was, for Hume, the height of folly and arrogance.

3. Common Sense

Hume was what is technically known as a sceptic, someone committed to doubting a lot of the common-sense ideas of the day.

One of the things he doubted was the concept of what is technically called personal identity – the idea that we have that we can understand ourselves and have a more or less graspable enduring identity that runs through life. Hume pointed out that there is no such thing as a core self: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he famously explained, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.  I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” Hume concluded that we aren’t really the neat definable people reason tells us that we are and that we seem to be when we look at ourselves in the mirror or casually use the grand misleading word I, we are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Yet despite being sceptical of temper, Hume was very happy for us to hold onto most of our common sense beliefs – because they are what help us to make our way in the world. Trying to be rational about everything is a special kind of madness.

Hume was making a sly dig at Descartes. The French philosopher had died 60 years before Hume was born but his intellectual influence was still very much alive. He had argued we should throw out every fruit of the mind that wasn’t perfectly rational.  But Hume proposed that hardly anything we do is ever truly rational. And yet he ventured that most beliefs are justified simply because they work. They’re useful to us. They help us get on with what we want to do. The test of a belief isn’t its provable truth, but its utility.

Hume is offering a corrective – which we sometimes need – to our fascination with prestigious, but not actually very important, logical conundrums. In opposition to academic niceties, he was a sceptical philosopher who stood for common sense, championing the everyday and the wisdom of the unlearned and the ordinary.

4. Ethics

Hume took a great interest in the traditional philosophical topic of ethics, the conundrum of how humans can be good. He argued that morality isn’t about having moral ideas, it’s about having been trained, from an early age, in the art of decency through the emotions. Being good means getting into good habits of feeling.

Hume was a great advocate of qualities like wit, good manners and sympathy because these are the things that make people nice to be around outside of any rational plan to be ‘good’.

He was hugely struck by the fact that a person – and here again he thought of Descartes – can be ostensibly rational, and yet not very nice, because being able to follow a complex argument or deduce trends from data doesn’t make you sensitive to the suffering of others or skilled at keeping you temper. All these qualities are – instead – the work of our feelings.

So if we want people to behave well, what we need to do is rethink education, we have to influence their feelings; we have to encourage benevolence, gentleness, pity and shame through seduction of the passionate side of our nature, without delivering dry logical lectures.

* * *

Hume’s philosophy always emerged as an attempt to answer a personal question: what is a good life? He wanted to know how his own character, and that of those around him, could be influenced for the best. And oddly for a philosopher, he didn’t feel that the traditional practice of philosophy could really help.

Though he was scholarly, he was in large part a man of the world. For some years he was an advisor to the British Ambassador in Paris, who welcomed his shrewd wisdom. He was much liked by those around him and was known by the French as le bon David: a humane, kind, and witty conversationalist, much in demand as a dinner companion. “Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man,” he insisted. That’s the way Hume lived — not in the intellectual seclusion of a monastery or an ivory tower but deeply embedded in the company of other humans — dining (he especially liked roast chicken), chatting about love and career and playing backgammon.

He died in Edinburgh, in August, 1776, at home in his house in St. Andrew’s Square. His doctor wrote about the last hours to Adam Smith – for many years Hume’s best friend:

‘He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness… He died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.’

Hume remains that rather outstanding thing: a philosopher alive to how much philosophy has to learn from common sense.

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) was a political economist who had a tremendous influence upon how people in capitalist societies understand the concept of liberty. Controversially, for Hayek ‘liberty’ did not mean democracy or a commitment to a set of ‘liberal’ ideals. Rather, Hayek believed that liberty was ‘a policy which deliberately adopts competition, markets and prices as its ordering principles’. To Hayek’s way of thinking, it was markets that guaranteed individual liberty. And, by contrast, it was the interference of the state in markets that disrupted the operation of liberty and started society down, as he famously put it, the road to serfdom.

Hayek was born into a minor part of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. His father, who came from a line of scholars, was a medical doctor and part time lecturer in botany. Hayek’s childhood was filled with consideration of philosophy and economics. After a brief stint in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, Hayek took up studies at the University of Vienna, obtaining doctorates in law and political science, and afterwards he became an academic economist. 

Hayek’s career can be divided into two periods. The first, which ended towards the end of the 1940s, was spent mainly at the London School of Economics where Hayek concerned himself with many of the macroeconomic debates of the day.  The second half of Hayek’s career was much more varied. From 1945 onwards in, first, Chicago and, later, Freiberg, Los Angeles, and Salzburg, Hayek wrote and lectured on a whole range of subjects – economics, yes, but also politics, psychology, philosophy, and the philosophy of science. And whilst he officially retired in 1968, it was actually in the 1970s and 1980s that Hayek enjoyed his greatest moments of influence, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and subsequently being influential upon the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Development of Key Ideas

During Hayek’s stay at the London School of Economics, which he joined in 1931, he wrestled with a number of the then contemporary debates within economic theory. Much of this revolved around the business cycle which, put simply, is the way in which economies grow and contract. Traditional economic theory held that, over time, economies find themselves in equilibrium. In short, gluts and shortages should balance out via market mechanisms, leading to the optimal distribution of resources within an economy. The problem was that the economic peaks and troughs seemed to keep occurring and they also seemed to be more dramatic than they should be. When the world economy stagnated and then crashed in the late 1920s and during the 1930s, fierce debate began as to why this had occurred.

Coming at economics from a fairly classical position, Hayek focussed on issues of supply. Hayek noticed that when economies were in a recession, central banks often artificially injected more money into the economy by printing cash or else (or in addition) by holding interest rates low to encourage investment, rather than saving. Hayek argued that this was a mistake. When money was too readily available, entrepreneurs invested in products which were not necessarily desired by consumers. When these products went unsold, companies went bankrupt leaving industrial capacity invested where it need not be. In addition, cheap credit incentivised long-term capital investment and Hayek argued that this too was a problem because it limited the possibility of entrepreneurs attempting to realise short-term gains which could kick-start the economy. Resisting the temptation to meddle in the money supply was, for Hayek, crucial to solving the problems of the Great Depression.

Rivalry with Keynes

Hayek’s colleagues at the London School of Economics were receptive to his more classical approach to economics. But up the road in Cambridge, a very different set of ideas was emerging, centred on the thought of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes argued that the problems of the 1930s economy were located not so much in issues of supply, but rather demand. For Keynes, the role of government was to invest in public works, the building of roads for example, which would create employment and therefore give people money to spend, stimulating economic growth. For Keynes, full employment was, therefore, not only a laudable social goal but vital for the economy too. 

Keynes’s demand-led economics was fundamentally at odds with Hayek’s ideas. Hayek felt that Keynes’s focus on full employment would require governments to keep increasing money supply. This, in turn, would create severe inflation of the kind that had wiped out his family’s savings when 1920s Austria suffered a bout of hyperinflation. Throughout the 1930s Hayek and Keynes corresponded with each other, argued bitterly and found very little common ground. During the Second World War, they even met, under bizarre circumstances. Because of the German bombing campaign against London, the LSE had been evacuated to Cambridge. One night, Keynes and Hayek were assigned to fire watch duty together on the roof of the chapel of King’s College. Sadly, we do not know what it was that they talked about throughout that night.

The Road to Serfdom

The opening of the second half of Hayek’s career is marked by his first foray out from dry economic arguments and the publication of what is probably his most famous work, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek saw the writing of this book as a form of war work, forced upon him because, as a former enemy combatant, Hayek was refused official service in the British war effort. Against the backdrop of Keynes’s ideas on planning, which had become accepted within British government circles, The Road to Serfdom was an attempt to save people from themselves, or more accurately, from government.

Hayek put forward several key arguments:

1.  That there was nothing intrinsic to Germans as a race of people that had caused them to adopt authoritarian forms of government. Hayek rejected the idea, somewhat popular at the time, that there was something about German culture, or indeed inherent to Germans as a race, which predisposed them to authoritarian and expansionist forms of government.

2.  Hayek argued that where Germany, and the Soviet Union too for that matter, had gone wrong was in undertaking state planning that interfered in the natural operation of markets. For Hayek, the problem with state planning was that it necessarily involved offering up responsibility for deciding upon a plan to a single individual. In a bureaucratic system, such as the state, Hayek argued, someone had to ultimately decide on what course of action should be taken. And that person’s judgement would necessarily have to be deferred to and deferred to repeatedly over a given period of time. In this sense, planning led societies to sleepwalk into dictatorship.

3.  Not only did Hayek worry about the inherent need for planners to defer to a single individual, but also he was concerned that fundamentally no one individual could actually make rational choices in regards to economic problems due to them not having enough information to base decisions upon. To be clear, it was not that Hayek necessarily condemned dictatorship. After all, his vision of liberty was a society in which markets were the principle method of economic organisation, not necessarily one where society collectively decided upon governments via the ballot box. To this end, Hayek was comfortable with dictators who adopted free market economic policies involving minimal state intervention in a nation’s economy. But dictators who undertook economic planning were, for Hayek, a great evil. 

Hayek saw it like this; markets are extremely complicated networks with millions if not billions of transactions going on all the time. Even consideration of some of the basics of market transactions shows this – items are bought and sold, commodities are invested in and divested from, and famines and bumper crop yields affect how much there is to eat and how much it will cost to acquire it, in keeping with the laws of supply and demand. When individuals make choices as to whether or not to buy a commodity, they affect that commodity’s price. If it becomes scarce, its price increases. If it becomes plentiful, its price falls. In this sense, the free market acts as a kind of constant referendum on the value of goods within an economy. For Hayek, the market represented a form of collective agreement, made amongst all of the people operating in that market, as to the value of particular goods and services. And against the collective wisdom of hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people, what could one single planner hope to offer that represented a superior form of wisdom? Liberty, therefore, was to be found by letting the market do its work.

Later Career

The Road to Serfdom launched Hayek’s later career. Instantly, it became a bestseller (during the Second World War its print run was limited due to paper shortages and obtaining a copy was nigh-on impossible due to sheer demand). In the United States, a condensed Readers’ Digest version of the book brought the message to the public at large. So too did a series of lectures delivered by Hayek during 1945 at various venues in the United States. Hayek, cold shouldered by British policy makers and economists, was delighted at the reception he received in the US and in 1950 he moved to the University of Chicago, which became the centre of neoliberal economic thinking, with which Hayek was closely associated, much as Cambridge had been the locus for Keynesian economics.

But despite the popular acclaim of The Road to Serfdom, two negative reactions irked him. First of all, some of his own colleagues, normally sympathetic to the ideas he put forward, saw The Road to Serfdom as a kind of light-weight form of journalism, rather than as a form of scholarship. Second, Keynes, who read The Road to Serfdom, sent Hayek what was, for the most part, a complementary message about its content. However, towards the end, and in quick order, Keynes challenged Hayek as to where he would draw the line on government planning. Some planning was clearly needed, Hayek was not an economic anarchist after all, but, Keynes challenged, where would the line be drawn?

It took Hayek many years to work out his response to Keynes (who died in 1946) but the response eventually came in 1960 in Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty.  The book laid out Hayek’s practical vision for where the line between the state and market should be drawn and was highly influential amongst the political right. In an anecdote with, admittedly, somewhat apocryphal tinges to it, a story is told that at a meeting with the Conservative Research Department in 1975, Margaret Thatcher responded to a policy paper on political philosophy by reaching into her handbag and withdrawing a copy of The Constitution of Liberty.  Holding it aloft, Thatcher declared “This is what we believe”.

Legacy

As the twentieth century unfolded, Hayek’s ideas gained more common currency. The idea that the state should limit itself to providing a legal framework within which entrepreneurs can engage with free markets is at the heart of much of economic thinking in the world today. Many politicians, and large sections of the public too, are sceptical about the ability of the state to plan and undertake anything but the most simple of economic tasks, and this owes much to Hayek’s warnings about the anti-libertarian perils of planning and the inability of planners to truly understand the world around them.

Even when the financial crisis of 2007-8 hit the world economy, leading to a prolonged recession, faith in government planning was not restored in the popular imagination. This was best testified by The Road to Serfdom hitting the number one spot on the Amazon book bestseller list in 2010, despite it having been written over sixty years ago.