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A review by sinta
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
3.0
This was comforting in the areas where I needed insight (frustration, difficulties) and reaffirming where I already have the (some) skills (unpopularity, not having enough money, inadequacy, broken heart)
It makes me want to read more of Montaigne and Nietzsche.
Quotes:
“why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be
undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?”
“Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false”
“errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.”
“there is something universal in the scenario of being misunderstood of which these stories are tragic, consummate examples. Social life is beset with disparities between others’ perceptions of us and our reality.”
Epicurus: “Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind.”
“On returning to Athens in 306 BC at the age of thirty-five, Epicurus settled on an unusual domestic arrangement. He located a large house a few miles from the centre of Athens, in the Melite district between the market-place and the harbour at Piraeus, and moved in with a group of friends. He was joined by Metrodorus and his sister, the mathematician Polyaenus, Hermarchus, Leonteus and his wife Themista, and a merchant called Idomeneus (who soon married Metrodorus’s sister). There was enough space in the house for the friends to have their own quarters, and there were common rooms for meals and conversations.”
“There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.”
“Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy”
Lucretius: “In a world without Epicurean values:
Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure.
But at the same time:
It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas …”
Seneca: “philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality”
“in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like… Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground rules of existence.”
“Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, proposed Seneca, hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs, or say goodbye to a friend, without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.”
“There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability.”
“Because Fortune’s long benevolent periods risk seducing us into somnolence, Seneca entreated us to spare a little time each day to think of her. We do not know what will happen next: we must expect something. In the early morning, we should undertake what Seneca termed a praemeditatio, a meditation in advance, on all the sorrows of mind and body to which the goddess may subsequently subject us.”
Seneca: “Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day”
Seneca: “We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.”
“Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.”
“Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.”
“I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.”
“a wise person should be able to walk away from all Fortune’s gifts calmly”
“What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.”
Montaigne: “If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.”
“Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.”
Montaigne: “I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.”
“Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.”
Montaigne: “Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.”
“But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits”
“A range of arguments could show the value of producing an exegesis on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero. Montaigne emphasized the cowardice and tedium in the activity instead. There is little skill in secondary works (‘Invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation’), the difficulty is technical, a matter of patience and a quiet library.”
“Furthermore, many of the books which academic tradition encourages us to parrot are not fascinating in themselves. They are accorded a central place in the syllabus because they are the work of prestigious authors, while many equally or far more valid themes languish because no grand intellectual authority ever elucidated them.”
Schopenhauer: “Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion”
Schopenhauer: “he gave a name to a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason’s plans and judgements, and which he termed the will-to-life (Wille zum Leben) – defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce”
Nietzsche: “And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and Stendhal (‘These little things – nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto’),”
“Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.”
“Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate (sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to fruitfulness the difficulties in his path.”
Nietzsche: “Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.”
“He fought hard to be happy, but where he did not succeed he did not turn against what he had once aspired to.”
It makes me want to read more of Montaigne and Nietzsche.
Quotes:
“why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be
undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?”
“Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false”
“errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.”
“there is something universal in the scenario of being misunderstood of which these stories are tragic, consummate examples. Social life is beset with disparities between others’ perceptions of us and our reality.”
Epicurus: “Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind.”
“On returning to Athens in 306 BC at the age of thirty-five, Epicurus settled on an unusual domestic arrangement. He located a large house a few miles from the centre of Athens, in the Melite district between the market-place and the harbour at Piraeus, and moved in with a group of friends. He was joined by Metrodorus and his sister, the mathematician Polyaenus, Hermarchus, Leonteus and his wife Themista, and a merchant called Idomeneus (who soon married Metrodorus’s sister). There was enough space in the house for the friends to have their own quarters, and there were common rooms for meals and conversations.”
“There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.”
“Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy”
Lucretius: “In a world without Epicurean values:
Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure.
But at the same time:
It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas …”
Seneca: “philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality”
“in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like… Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground rules of existence.”
“Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, proposed Seneca, hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs, or say goodbye to a friend, without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.”
“There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability.”
“Because Fortune’s long benevolent periods risk seducing us into somnolence, Seneca entreated us to spare a little time each day to think of her. We do not know what will happen next: we must expect something. In the early morning, we should undertake what Seneca termed a praemeditatio, a meditation in advance, on all the sorrows of mind and body to which the goddess may subsequently subject us.”
Seneca: “Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day”
Seneca: “We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.”
“Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.”
“Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.”
“I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.”
“a wise person should be able to walk away from all Fortune’s gifts calmly”
“What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.”
Montaigne: “If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.”
“Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.”
Montaigne: “I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.”
“Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.”
Montaigne: “Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.”
“But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits”
“A range of arguments could show the value of producing an exegesis on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero. Montaigne emphasized the cowardice and tedium in the activity instead. There is little skill in secondary works (‘Invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation’), the difficulty is technical, a matter of patience and a quiet library.”
“Furthermore, many of the books which academic tradition encourages us to parrot are not fascinating in themselves. They are accorded a central place in the syllabus because they are the work of prestigious authors, while many equally or far more valid themes languish because no grand intellectual authority ever elucidated them.”
Schopenhauer: “Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion”
Schopenhauer: “he gave a name to a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason’s plans and judgements, and which he termed the will-to-life (Wille zum Leben) – defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce”
Nietzsche: “And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and Stendhal (‘These little things – nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto’),”
“Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.”
“Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate (sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to fruitfulness the difficulties in his path.”
Nietzsche: “Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.”
“He fought hard to be happy, but where he did not succeed he did not turn against what he had once aspired to.”