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What is a Good Life?
This is a difficult question. To answer it, you need to make sure you’re asking the right question in the right way. Consider any part of what you might traditionally (or stereotypically) think of as being essential to living a good life: wealth, property, success, family, love, confidence, popularity, freedom, power, status, productivity, etc., etc. These are the things that most people aim for […]
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Shadow Chasing
Over the past few years – having made an attempt to pursue philosophy as a way of life, to take it seriously and digest its lessons and not only treat it as an academic discipline – I’ve come to see new depths in old ideas. One example of this is the cynical little detail in Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’. There, Plato suggests that these poor souls – imprisoned in a dark cave of ignorance and only able to look at the shadows on the wall in front of them – would esteem those who are best at discerning the…
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The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates paints a strange picture. Imagine a cave, underground (as caves are), with no natural light. In this cave are people chained up and chained down; they can’t move a muscle, not even their heads from left to right, and they’ve been stuck like that forever. They’ve never known any different. They are stuck in a dark cave looking at the wall directly in front of them. On this wall are shadows cast from a fire behind them. Between the fire and the people and the wall is a little runway with a kind of shadow-puppet theatre.…
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Lovers of Wisdom
We are not lovers of wisdom but adulterers. We say we love wisdom but we are always pursuing something else: a job, a publication, a citation. These are our affairs.
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Cleverness and Wisdom
Cleverness does not correlate with wisdom. For many clever people have not even tried to be wise, and how wise is that?
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Can Virtue Be Taught?
Why do the Cynics shout over the choir? Why do they so visibly show themselves walking the walk of the philosopher’s life? It is to teach us a lesson. What lesson? That virtue is all that really matters and everything else is a matter of indifference. In this they presume an important idea: that virtue can be taught. In their case they think it is something best taught by example and learnt through experience. Whether or not virtue can be taught was a hotly-debated topic in ancient philosophy. It is an idea that can be challenged. Ancient philosophers would point…
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The Proper Time to Eat
‘What is the proper time to eat?’, someone asks Diogenes the Cynic. ‘When rich, whenever you want; when poor, whenever you can.’ A pithy phrase, apparently saying little. It is a seed. Perhaps you might remember it and reflect on it from time to time. At first glance it conveys a certain sense of living naturally: eat when hungry, sleep when tired, etc. Do as your nature wills. But perhaps there’s also a sense that the poor are unfortunate because they must do what they must and cannot do what they will. But isn’t Diogenes famous for being poor, and…
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Craft Your Nature
As natural as it should be to live in accordance with nature, we don’t take to it naturally. It takes practice and training and an amount of philosophical education to understand what nature requires and to align your will with those requirements. Our untrained nature often leads us astray. We’re naturally inclined to follow our desires for pleasure, for example, and will follow this desire far beyond any natural requirements, not realising these to be the small seeds of mistakes that will grow into entire forests; forests in which we will eventually get lost. We don’t like being poor. We…
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Align Your Will with Nature
Diogenes the Cynic sees a mouse, happily running about, not looking for money or prestige, and finds a lesson in the mouse’s behaviour: Diogenes says the gods have given us an easy life but we’ve made it difficult for ourselves by overlaying it with nonsense. Even in Diogenes’ time, to talk of ‘the gods providing’ would be taken metaphorically. This is all the more true in our more secular time. So we can replace ‘the gods’ with ‘nature’ here and the effect is the same. Nature has given us a relatively easy life but we’ve overlaid it with nonsense. We…
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Philosophy is a Magic Spell
Philosophy is like a kind of magic spell: you only need to say the right words in the right order and with the right intent you can change your world. Philosophy can turn poverty into wealth and sickness into health; it can free you from constraints, from the power of tyrants, from the fear of harm; it can protect you from yourself and warn you of errors before you make them; it can turn bad fortune into good. It is like a protective shield that makes you invulnerable to misfortune. Its effectiveness is limited to certain types of things. It…
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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