Paper 2: End of Course Reflection

 

PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME ON THE DOCUMENT. WHEN YOU UPLOAD YOUR PAPERS ON D2L, THIS WILL TELL ME WHOSE PAPER IT IS.

For this assignment, I would like you to write a short reflection essay on how you applied any of the ideas presented in this course to recent events in your life, or how it aided in your reflection(s) about world affairs (for example, it might be something like “did Socrates cause you to reconsider the assumptions you have been making about the world” or “how do the ideas of Montaigne or Seneca apply to today’s situations?” 

1) Make sure to have a short introductory paragraph in your essay, then explain the event.

2) Next, explain the ethical concept you thought about in relation to that event (do not just say “Socrates’s views” or “Montaigne’s views”; instead, explain what those views are and what they argue for, what these theories think the issue and solution is and WHY they think that).

3) Lastly, explain how you applied their ideas. And make sure to finish your short essay with a conclusion paragraph too.

500 words MINIMUM and 650 words MAXIMUM for this short essay. NO QUOTES: everything must be written in your own words. Follow the paper writing dos and don’ts (

Paper Writing Dos and Don’ts

) for this short essay as well. Make sure to double-space your essay, normal margins, and size 11-12 professional font. Only essays uploaded into D2L will be considered, so do not email me your essays directly. PLEASE FOLLOW DIRECTIONS GIVEN ABOVE.

ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain de Botton is the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement,
Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of
Philosophy, and The Art of Travel. His work has been translated into
twenty languages. He lives in Washington, D.C., and London, where
he is an Associate Research Fellow of the Philosophy Programme of
the University of London, School of Advanced Study.
The dedicated Web site for Alain de Botton and his work is
www.alaindebotton.com.

home

ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON
On Love
The Romantic Movement
Kiss & Tell
How Proust Can Change Your Life
The Art of Travel

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Alain de Botton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton,
a division of Penguin Books, Ltd., London and subsequently in hardcover
by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permissions acknowledgments appear on this page–this page.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
De Botton, Alain.
The consolations of philosophy / Alain de Botton.
p. cm.
1. Philosophical counseling.
I. Title.
BJ595.5.D43 2000 101—DC21
99-052188
eISBN: 978-0-307-83350-1
Author photograph © Roderick Field
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1

http://www.vintagebooks.com/

Consolation for
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
I Unpopularity
1
2
3
4
5
II Not Having Enough Money
1
2
3
4
5
6
III Frustration
1
2
3

file:///tmp/calibre_4.8.0_tmp_nZMw3x/BYVklY_pdf_out/OEBPS/Bott_9780307833501_epub_cvi_r1.htm

IV Inadequacy
1
2: On Sexual Inadequacy
3: On Cultural Inadequacy
4: On Intellectual Inadequacy
V A Broken Heart
1
2: A Contemporary Love Story: With Schopenhauerian Notes
3
VI Di�culties

Notes
Acknowledgments
Copyright Acknowledgments
Picture Acknowledgments

I

Consolation for Unpopularity

1
A few years ago, during a bitter New York winter, with an afternoon
to spare before catching a �ight to London, I found myself in a
deserted gallery on the upper level of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. It was brightly lit, and aside from the soothing hum of an
under-�oor heating system, entirely silent. Having reached a surfeit
of paintings in the Impressionist galleries, I was looking for a sign
for the cafeteria – where I hoped to buy a glass of a certain variety
of American chocolate milk of which I was at that time extremely
fond – when my eye was caught by a canvas which a caption
explained had been painted in Paris in the autumn of 1786 by the
thirty-eight-year-old Jacques-Louis David.
(Ill. 1.1)

Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to
drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. In the
spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens had brought legal
proceedings against the philosopher. They had accused him of
failing to worship the city’s gods, of introducing religious novelties
and of corrupting the young men of Athens – and such was the
severity of their charges, they had called for the death penalty.
(Ill. 1.2)
Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity. Though
a�orded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had
sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew
would be popular. In Plato’s account he had de�antly told the jury:
So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practising
philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet …
And so gentlemen … whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to
alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.
And so he had been led to meet his end in an Athenian jail, his
death marking a de�ning moment in the history of philosophy.
An indication of its signi�cance may be the frequency with which it
has been painted. In 1650 the French painter Charles-Alphonse
Dufresnoy produced a Death of Socrates, now hanging in the Galleria
Palatina in Florence (which has no cafeteria).

(Ill. 1.3)
The eighteenth century witnessed the zenith of interest in Socrates’
death, particularly after Diderot drew attention to its painterly
potential in a passage in his Treatise on Dramatic Poetry.
Étienne de Lavallée-Poussin, c. 1760 (Ill. 1.4)

Jacques Philippe Joseph de Saint-Quentin, 1762
Pierre Peyron, 1790 (Ill. 1.5)
Jacques-Louis David received his commission in the spring of 1786
from Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, a wealthy member of
the Parlement and a gifted Greek scholar. The terms were generous,
6,000 livres upfront, with a further 3,000 on delivery (Louis XVI
had paid only 6,000 livres for the larger Oath of the Horatii). When
the picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1787, it was at once judged
the �nest of the Socratic ends. Sir Joshua Reynolds thought it ‘the
most exquisite and admirable e�ort of art which has appeared since
the Cappella Sistina, and the Stanze of Raphael. The picture would
have done honour to Athens in the age of Pericles.’
I bought �ve postcard Davids in the museum gift-shop and later,
�ying over the ice �elds of Newfoundland (turned a luminous green
by a full moon and a cloudless sky), examined one while picking at
a pale evening meal left on the table in front of me by a stewardess
during a misjudged snooze.
Plato sits at the foot of the bed, a pen and a scroll beside him,
silent witness to the injustice of the state. He had been twenty-nine
at the time of Socrates’ death, but David turned him into an old
man, grey-haired and grave. Through the passageway, Socrates’
wife, Xanthippe, is escorted from the prison cell by warders. Seven
friends are in various stages of lamentation. Socrates’ closest
companion Crito, seated beside him, gazes at the master with

devotion and concern. But the philosopher, bolt upright, with an
athlete’s torso and biceps, shows neither apprehension nor regret.
That a large number of Athenians have denounced him as foolish
has not shaken him in his convictions. David had planned to paint
Socrates in the act of swallowing poison, but the poet André Chenier
suggested that there would be greater dramatic tension if he was
shown �nishing a philosophical point while at the same time
reaching serenely for the hemlock that would end his life,
symbolizing both obedience to the laws of Athens and allegiance to
his calling. We are witnessing the last edifying moments of a
transcendent being.
If the postcard struck me so forcefully, it was perhaps because the
behaviour it depicted contrasted so sharply with my own. In
conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the
truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a
parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I
adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients
in a hotel – salival enthusiasm born of a morbid, indiscriminate
desire for a�ection. I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the
majority was committed. I sought the approval of �gures of
authority and after encounters with them, worried at length
whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through
customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused
wish for the uniformed o�cials to think well of me.
But the philosopher had not buckled before unpopularity and the
condemnation of the state. He had not retracted his thoughts
because others had complained. Moreover, his con�dence had
sprung from a more profound source than hot-headedness or bull-
like courage. It had been grounded in philosophy. Philosophy had
supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to
have rational, as opposed to hysterical, con�dence when faced with
disapproval.
That night, above the ice lands, such independence of mind was a
revelation and an incitement. It promised a counterweight to a

supine tendency to follow socially sanctioned practices and ideas. In
Socrates’ life and death lay an invitation to intelligent scepticism.
And more generally, the subject of which the Greek philosopher was
the supreme symbol seemed to o�er an invitation to take on a task
at once profound and laughable: to become wise through
philosophy. In spite of the vast di�erences between the many
thinkers described as philosophers across time (people in actuality
so diverse that had they been gathered together at a giant cocktail
party, they would not only have had nothing to say to one another,
but would most probably have come to blows after a few drinks), it
seemed possible to discern a small group of men, separated by
centuries, sharing a loose allegiance to a vision of philosophy
suggested by the Greek etymology of the word – philo, love; sophia,
wisdom – a group bound by a common interest in saying a few
consoling and practical things about the causes of our greatest
griefs. It was to these men I would turn.

2
Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one
should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity. Some
of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a
legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical
and practical judgements described as ‘common sense’, which
dictates what we should wear, which �nancial values we should
adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow
and what domestic life we should lead. To start questioning these
conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense
is cordoned o� from questions, it is because its judgements are
deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny.
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of
an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose
of work.
(Ill. 2.1)

Or to ask a recently married couple to explain in full the reasons
behind their decision.
Or to question holiday-makers in detail about the assumptions
behind their trip.
(Ill. 2.2)
(Ill. 2.3)
Ancient Greeks had as many common-sense conventions and would
have held on to them as tenaciously. One weekend, while browsing
in a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury, I came upon a series of
history books originally intended for children, containing a host of
photographs and handsome illustrations. The series included See
Inside an Egyptian Town, See Inside a Castle and a volume I acquired

along with an encyclopedia of poisonous plants, See Inside an Ancient
Greek Town.
There was information on how it had been considered normal to
dress in the city states of Greece in the �fth century BC.
(Ill. 2.4)
The book explained that the Greeks had believed in many gods,
gods of love, hunting and war, gods with power over the harvest,
�re and sea. Before embarking on any venture they had prayed to
them either in a temple or in a small shrine at home, and sacri�ced
animals in their honour. It had been expensive: Athena cost a cow;
Artemis and Aphrodite a goat; Asclepius a hen or cock.

The Greeks had felt sanguine about owning slaves. In the �fth
century BC, in Athens alone, there were, at any one time, 80–100,000
slaves, one slave to every three of the free population.
The Greeks had been highly militaristic, too, worshipping courage
on the battle�eld. To be considered an adequate male, one had to
know how to scythe the heads o� adversaries. The Athenian soldier
ending the career of a Persian (painted on a plate at the time of the
Second Persian War) indicated the appropriate behaviour.
(Ill. 2.5)
Women had been entirely under the thumb of their husbands and
fathers. They had taken no part in politics or public life, and had
been unable either to inherit property or to own money. They had

normally married at thirteen, their husbands chosen for them by
their fathers irrespective of emotional compatibility.
(Ill. 2.6)
None of which would have seemed remarkable to the
contemporaries of Socrates. They would have been confounded and
angered to be asked exactly why they sacri�ced cocks to Asclepius
or why men needed to kill to be virtuous. It would have appeared as
obtuse as wondering why spring followed winter or why ice was
cold.
But it is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from
questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as
powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions
must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this
may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people
for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be
gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would
be alone in noticing the fact. We sti�e our doubts and follow the
�ock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of
hitherto unknown, di�cult truths.

It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we may turn to the
philosopher.

3
1. The life
He was born in Athens in 469 BC, his father Sophroniscus was
believed to have been a sculptor, his mother Phaenarete a midwife.
In his youth, Socrates was a pupil of the philosopher Archelaus, and
thereafter practised philosophy without ever writing any of it down.
He did not charge for his lessons and so slid into poverty; though he
had little concern for material possessions. He wore the same cloak
throughout the year and almost always walked barefoot (it was said
he had been born to spite shoemakers). By the time of his death he
was married and the father of three sons. His wife, Xanthippe, was
of notoriously foul temper (when asked why he had married her, he
replied that horse-trainers needed to practise on the most spirited
animals). He spent much time out of the house, conversing with
friends in the public places of Athens. They appreciated his wisdom
and sense of humour. Few can have appreciated his looks. He was
short, bearded and bald, with a curious rolling gait, and a face
variously likened by acquaintances to the head of a crab, a satyr or
a grotesque. His nose was �at, his lips large, and his prominent
swollen eyes sat beneath a pair of unruly brows.

(Ill. 3.1)
But his most curious feature was a habit of approaching Athenians
of every class, age and occupation and bluntly asking them, without
worrying whether they would think him eccentric or infuriating, to
explain with precision why they held certain common-sense beliefs
and what they took to be the meaning of life – as one surprised
general reported:
Whenever anyone comes face to face with Socrates and has a conversation with him,
what invariably happens is that, although he may have started on a completely
di�erent subject �rst, Socrates will keep heading him o� as they’re talking until he
has him trapped into giving an account of his present life-style and the way he has
spent his life in the past. And once he has him trapped, Socrates won’t let him go
before he has well and truly cross-examined him from every angle.
He was helped in his habit by climate and urban planning. Athens
was warm for half the year, which increased opportunities for
conversing without formal introduction with people outdoors.
Activities which in northern lands unfolded behind the mud walls of
sombre, smoke-�lled huts needed no shelter from the benevolent
Attic skies. It was common to linger in the agora, under the
colonnades of the Painted Stoa or the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, and
talk to strangers in the late afternoon, the privileged hours between
the practicalities of high noon and the anxieties of night.

The size of the city ensured conviviality. Around 240,000 people
lived within Athens and its port. No more than an hour was needed
to walk from one end of the city to the other, from Piraeus to Aigeus
gate. Inhabitants could feel connected like pupils at a school or
guests at a wedding. It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who
began conversations with strangers in public.
(Ill. 3.2)
If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the
weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate
what is popular with what is right. The sandalless philosopher
raised a plethora of questions to determine whether what was
popular happened to make any sense.
2. The rule of common sense
Many found the questions maddening. Some teased him. A few
would kill him. In The Clouds, performed for the �rst time at the
theatre of Dionysus in the spring of 423 BC, Aristophanes o�ered
Athenians a caricature of the philosopher in their midst who refused
to accept common sense without investigating its logic at impudent
length. The actor playing Socrates appeared on stage in a basket
suspended from a crane, for he claimed his mind worked better at

high altitude. He was immersed in such important thoughts that he
had no time to wash or to perform household tasks, his cloak was
therefore malodorous and his home infested with vermin, but at
least he could consider life’s most vital questions. These included:
how many of its own lengths can a �ea jump? And do gnats hum
through their mouths or their anuses? Though Aristophanes omitted
to elaborate on the results of Socrates’ questions, the audience must
have been left with an adequate sense of their relevance.
Aristophanes was articulating a familiar criticism of intellectuals:
that through their questions they drift further from sensible views
than those who have never ventured to analyse matters in a
systematic way. Dividing the playwright and the philosopher was a
contrasting assessment of the adequacy of ordinary explanations.
Whereas sane people could in Aristophanes’ eyes rest in the
knowledge that �eas jumped far given their size and that gnats
made a noise from somewhere, Socrates stood accused of a manic
suspicion of common sense and of harbouring a perverse hunger for
complicated, inane alternatives.
To which Socrates would have replied that in certain cases,
though perhaps not those involving �eas, common sense might
warrant more profound inquiry. After brief conversations with many
Athenians, popular views on how to lead a good life, views
described as normal and so beyond question by the majority,
revealed surprising inadequacies of which the con�dent manner of
their proponents had given no indication. Contrary to what
Aristophanes hoped, it seemed that those Socrates spoke to barely
knew what they were talking about.
(Ill. 3.3)

3. Two conversations
One afternoon in Athens, to follow Plato’s Laches, the philosopher
came upon two esteemed generals, Nicias and Laches. The generals
had fought the Spartan armies in the battles of the Peloponnesian
War, and had earned the respect of the city’s elders and the
admiration of the young. Both were to die as soldiers: Laches in the
battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, Nicias in the ill-fated expedition to
Sicily in 413 BC. No portrait of them survives, though one imagines
that in battle they might have resembled two horsemen on a section
of the Parthenon frieze.
(Ill. 3.4)
The generals were attached to one common-sense idea. They
believed that in order to be courageous, a person had to belong to
an army, advance in battle and kill adversaries. But on encountering
them under open skies, Socrates felt inclined to ask a few more
questions:
SOCRATES: Let’s try to say what courage is, Laches.
LACHES: My word, Socrates, that’s not di�cult! If a man is prepared to stand in the ranks,
face up to the enemy and not run away, you can be sure that he’s courageous.
But Socrates remembered that at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, a
Greek force under the Spartan regent Pausanias had initially

retreated, then courageously defeated the Persian army under
Mardonius:
SOCRATES: At the battle of Plataea, so the story goes, the Spartans came up against [the
Persians], but weren’t willing to stand and �ght, and fell back. The Persians broke
ranks in pursuit; but then the Spartans wheeled round �ghting like cavalry and hence
won that part of the battle.
Forced to think again, Laches came forward with a second common-
sense idea: that courage was a kind of endurance. But endurance
could, Socrates pointed out, be directed towards rash ends. To
distinguish true courage from delirium, another element would be
required. Laches’ companion Nicias, guided by Socrates, proposed
that courage would have to involve knowledge, an awareness of
good and evil, and could not always be limited to warfare.
In only a brief outdoor conversation, great inadequacies had been
discovered in the standard de�nition of a much-admired Athenian
virtue. It had been shown not to take into account the possibility of
courage o� the battle�eld or the importance of knowledge being
combined with endurance. The issue might have seemed tri�ing but
its implications were immense. If a general had previously been
taught that ordering his army to retreat was cowardly, even when it
seemed the only sensible manoeuvre, then the rede�nition
broadened his options and emboldened him against criticism.
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone
supremely con�dent of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was
an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native
Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue. In
order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very
rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an
accident.
We lack a portrait of Meno, too, though on looking through a
Greek men’s magazine in the lobby of an Athenian hotel, I imagined
that he might have borne a resemblance to a man drinking
champagne in an illuminated swimming pool.

(Ill. 3.5)
The virtuous man, Meno con�dently informed Socrates, was
someone of great wealth who could a�ord good things. Socrates
asked a few more questions:
SOCRATES: By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?
MENO: I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable o�ce
in the state.
SOCRATES: Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?
MENO: Yes, I mean everything of that sort.
SOCRATES: … Do you add ‘just and righteous’ to the word ‘acquisition’, or doesn’t it make
any di�erence to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly
acquired?
MENO: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue
must attach to the acquisition [of gold and silver] … In fact, lack of gold and silver,
if it results from a failure to acquire them … in circumstances which would have
made their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.
MENO: It looks like it.

SOCRATES: Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them …
MENO: Your conclusion seems inescapable.
In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and in�uence
were not in themselves necessary and su�cient features of virtue.
Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their
wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal
anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding
reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his
virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his
indigence was a sign of depravity.
4. Why others may not know
The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other
people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions,
even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast
majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their
beliefs logically.
Meno and the generals held unsound ideas because they had
absorbed the prevailing norms without testing their logic. To point
out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living
without thinking systematically to practising an activity like pottery
or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical
procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could
result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex
task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any
sustained re�ection on premises or goals?
Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact
complicated. Certain di�cult activities look very di�cult from the
outside, while other, equally di�cult activities look very easy.
Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second
category, making a pot or a shoe into the �rst.

(Ill. 3.6)
Making it was clearly a formidable task. Clay �rst had to be brought
to Athens, usually from a large pit at Cape Kolias 7 miles south of
the city, and placed on a wheel, spun at between 50 and 150
rotations per minute, the speed inversely proportional to the
diameter of the part being moulded (the narrower the pot, the faster
the wheel). Then came sponging, scraping, brushing and handle-
making.

(Ill. 3.7)
Next, the vase had to be coated with a black glaze made from �ne
compact clay mixed with potash. Once the glaze was dry, the vase
was placed in a kiln, heated to 800 °C with the air vent open. It
turned a deep red, the result of clay hardening into ferric oxide
(Fe2O3). Thereafter, it was �red to 950 °C with the air vent closed
and wet leaves added to the kiln for moisture, which turned the
body of the vase a greyish black and the glaze a sintered black
(magnetite, Fe3O4). After a few hours, the air vent was reopened,
the leaves raked out and the temperature allowed to drop to 900 °C.
While the glaze retained the black of the second �ring, the body of
the vase returned to the deep red of the �rst.
It isn’t surprising that few Athenians were drawn to spin their own
vases without thinking. Pottery looks as di�cult as it is.
Unfortunately, arriving at good ethical ideas doesn’t, belonging

instead to a troublesome class of super�cially simple but inherently
complex activities.
Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the con�dence of
people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views
without at least as much rigour as a potter. What is declared
obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach
us to think that the world is more �exible than it seems, for the
established views have frequently emerged not through a process of
faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle.
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
5. How to think for oneself
The philosopher does not only help us to conceive that others may
be wrong, he o�ers us a simple method by which we can ourselves
determine what is right. Few philosophers have had a more minimal
sense of what is needed to begin a thinking life. We do not need
years of formal education and a leisured existence. Anyone with a
curious and well-ordered mind who seeks to evaluate a common-
sense belief can start a conversation with a friend in a city street
and, by following a Socratic method, may arrive at one or two
ground-breaking ideas in under half an hour.
Socrates’ method of examining common sense is observable in all
Plato’s early and middle dialogues and, because it follows consistent
steps, may without injustice be presented in the language of a recipe
book or manual, and applied to any belief one is asked to accept or
feels inclined to rebel against. The correctness of a statement
cannot, the method suggests, be determined by whether it is held by
a majority or has been believed for a long time by important people.
A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally
contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can,
however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be
false and we are right to doubt it.

The Socratic method for thinking
1. Locate a statement con�dently described as common sense.
Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle.
Being virtuous requires money.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the con�dence of the person proposing it, the
statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be
true.
Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle?
Could one ever stay �rm in battle and yet not be courageous?
Could one ever have money and not be virtuous?
Could one ever have no money and be virtuous?
3. If an exception is found, the de�nition must be false or at least imprecise.
It is possible to be courageous and retreat.
It is possible to stay �rm in battle yet not be courageous.
It is possible to have money and be a crook.
It is possible to be poor and virtuous.
4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
Acting courageously can involve both retreat and advance in battle.
People who have money can be described as virtuous only if they have acquired it in a
virtuous way, and some people with no money can be virtuous when they have lived
through situations where it was impossible to be virtuous and make money.
5. If one subsequently �nds exceptions to the improved statements, the process should
be repeated. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies
in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by �nding out what
something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

6. The product of thought is, whatever Aristophanes insinuated, superior to the product
of intuition.
It may of course be possible to arrive at truths without
philosophizing. Without following a Socratic method, we may
realize that people with no money may be called virtuous if they
have lived through situations in which it was impossible to be
virtuous and make money, or that acting courageously can involve
retreat in battle. But we risk not knowing how to respond to people
who don’t agree with us, unless we have �rst thought through the
objections to our position logically. We may be silenced by
impressive �gures who tell us forcefully that money is essential to
virtue and that only e�eminates retreat in battle. Lacking
counterarguments to lend us strength (the battle of Plataea and
enrichment in a corrupt society), we will have to propose limply or
petulantly that we feel we are right, without being able to explain
why.
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. He likened the two versions of the truth to
beautiful works by the great sculptor Daedalus. A truth produced by
intuition was like a statue set down without support on an outdoor
plinth.

(Ill. 3.8)
A strong wind could at any time knock it over. But a truth supported
by reasons and an awareness of counterarguments was like a statue
anchored to the ground by tethering cables.
Socrates’ method of thinking promised us a way to develop opinions
in which we could, even if confronted with a storm, feel veritable
con�dence.

4
In his seventieth year, Socrates ran into a hurricane. Three
Athenians – the poet Meletus, the politician Anytus and the orator
Lycon – decided that he was a strange and evil man. They claimed
that he had failed to worship the city’s gods, had corrupted the
social fabric of Athens and had turned young men against their
fathers. They believed it was right that he should be silenced, and
perhaps even killed.
The city of Athens had established procedures for distinguishing
right from wrong. On the south side of the agora stood the Court of
the Heliasts, a large building with wooden benches for a jury at one
end, and a prosecution and defendant’s platform at the other. Trials
began with a speech from the prosecution, followed by a speech
from the defence. Then a jury numbering between 200 and 2,500
people would indicate where the truth lay by a ballot or a show of
hands. This method of deciding right from wrong by counting the
number of people in favour of a proposition was used throughout
Athenian political and legal life. Two or three times a month, all
male citizens, some 30,000, were invited to gather on Pnyx hill
south-west of the agora to decide on important questions of state by
a show of hands. For the city, the opinion of the majority had been
equated with the truth.
There were 500 citizens in the jury on the day of Socrates’ trial. The
prosecution began by asking them to consider that the philosopher
standing before them was a dishonest man. He had inquired into
things below the earth and in the sky, he was a heretic, he had
resorted to shifty rhetorical devices to make weaker arguments

defeat stronger ones, and he had been a vicious in�uence on the
young, intentionally corrupting them through his conversations.
Socrates tried to answer the charges. He explained that he had
never held theories about the heavens nor investigated things below
the earth, he was not a heretic and very much believed in divine
activity; he had never corrupted the youth of Athens – it was just
that some young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of free time
had imitated his questioning method, and annoyed important people
by showing them up as know-nothings. If he had corrupted anyone,
it could only have been unintentionally, for there was no point in
wilfully exerting a bad in�uence on companions, because one risked
being harmed by them in turn. And if he had corrupted people only
unintentionally, then the correct procedure was a quiet word to set
him straight, not a court case.
He admitted that he had led what might seem a peculiar life:
I have neglected the things that concern most people – making money, managing an
estate, gaining military or civic honours, or other positions of power, or joining
political clubs and parties which have formed in our cities.
However, his pursuit of philosophy had been motivated by a simple
desire to improve the lives of Athenians:
I tried to persuade each of you not to think more of practical advantages than of his
mental and moral well-being.
Such was his commitment to philosophy, he explained, that he was
unable to give up the activity even if the jury made it the condition
for his acquittal:
I shall go on saying in my usual way, ‘My very good friend, you are an Athenian and
belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom
and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as
much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no
attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?’
And should any of you dispute that, and profess that he does care about such things,
I won’t let him go straight away nor leave him, but will question and examine and
put him to the test … I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or
fellow-citizen.

It was the turn of the jury of 500 to make up their minds. After brief
deliberation 220 decided Socrates wasn’t guilty; 280 that he was.
The philosopher responded wryly: ‘I didn’t think the margin would
be so narrow.’ But he did not lose con�dence; there was no
hesitation or alarm; he maintained faith in a philosophical project
that had been declared conclusively misconceived by a majority 56
per cent of his audience.
If we cannot match such composure, if we are prone to burst into
tears after only a few harsh words about our character or
achievements, it may be because the approval of others forms an
essential part of our capacity to believe that we are right. We feel
justi�ed in taking unpopularity seriously not only for pragmatic
reasons, for reasons of promotion or survival, but more importantly
because being jeered at can seem an unequivocal sign that we have
gone astray.
Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when
we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he
would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth’s relation
to unpopularity: 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.
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us,
but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore
divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the
explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high
proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before

abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which
their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their
method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to
their disapproval.
We seem a�icted by the opposite tendency: to listen to everyone, to
be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. We fail to
ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what
basis has this dark censure been made? We treat with equal
seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously
and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of
misanthropy and envy.
We should take time to look behind the criticism. As Socrates had
learned, the thinking at its basis, though carefully disguised, may be
badly awry. Under the in�uence of passing moods, our critics may
have fumbled towards conclusions. They may have acted from
impulse and prejudice, and used their status to ennoble their
hunches. They may have built up their thoughts like inebriated
amateur potters.
(Ill. 4.1)

Unfortunately, unlike in pottery, it is initially extremely hard to tell
a good product of thought from a poor one. It isn’t di�cult to
identify the pot made by the inebriated craftsman and the one by
the sober colleague.
(Ill. 4.2)
It is harder immediately to identify the superior de�nition.
Courage is intelligent
endurance.
The man who stands in the ranks
and �ghts the enemy is courageous.
A bad thought delivered authoritatively, though without evidence of
how it was put together, can for a time carry all the weight of a
sound one. But we acquire a misplaced respect for others when we
concentrate solely on their conclusions – which is why Socrates
urged us to dwell on the logic they used to reach them. Even if we
cannot escape the consequences of opposition, we will at least be
spared the debilitating sense of standing in error.
The idea had �rst emerged some time before the trial, during a
conversation between Socrates and Polus, a well-known teacher of
rhetoric visiting Athens from Sicily. Polus had some chilling political
views, of whose truth he wished ardently to convince Socrates. The

teacher argued that there was at heart no happier life for a human
being than to be a dictator, for dictatorship enabled one to act as
one pleased, to throw enemies in prison, con�scate their property
and execute them.
Socrates listened politely, then answered with a series of logical
arguments attempting to show that happiness lay in doing good. But
Polus dug in his heels and a�rmed his position by pointing out that
dictators were often revered by huge numbers of people. He
mentioned Archelaus, the king of Macedon, who had murdered his
uncle, his cousin and a seven-year-old legitimate heir and yet
continued to enjoy great public support in Athens. The number of
people who liked Archelaus was a sign, concluded Polus, that his
theory on dictatorship was correct.
Socrates courteously admitted that it might be very easy to �nd
people who liked Archelaus, and harder to �nd anyone to support
the view that doing good brought one happiness: ‘If you feel like
calling witnesses to claim that what I’m saying is wrong, you can
count on your position being supported by almost everyone in
Athens,’ explained Socrates, ‘whether they were born and bred here
or elsewhere.’
You’d have the support of Nicias the son of Niceratus, if you wanted, along with his
brothers, who between them have a whole row of tripods standing in the precinct of
Dionysus. You’d have the support of Aristocrates the son of Scellius as well … You
could call on the whole of Pericles’ household, if you felt like it, or any other
Athenian family you care to choose.
But what Socrates zealously denied was that this widespread
support for Polus’s argument could on its own in any way prove it
correct:
The trouble is, Polus, you’re trying to use on me the kind of rhetorical refutation
which people in lawcourts think is successful. There too people think they’re proving
the other side wrong if they produce a large number of eminent witnesses in support
of the points they’re making, when their opponent can only come up with a single
witness or none at all. But this kind of reputation is completely worthless in the
context of the truth, since it’s perfectly possible for someone to be defeated in court

by a horde of witnesses who have no more than apparent respectability and who all
happen to testify against him.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from
proper reasoning. When we are making vases, we should listen to
the advice of those who know about turning glaze into Fe3O4 at
800°C; when we are making a ship, it is the verdict of those who
construct triremes that should worry us; and when we are
considering ethical matters – how to be happy and courageous and
just and good – we should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even
if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty generals and
well-dressed aristocrats from Thessaly.
It sounded élitist, and it was. Not everyone is worth listening to.
Yet Socrates’ élitism had no trace of snobbery or prejudice. He
might have discriminated in the views he attended to, but the
discrimination operated not on the basis of class or money, nor on
the basis of military record or nationality, but on the basis of
reason, which was – as he stressed – a faculty accessible to all.
To follow the Socratic example we should, when faced with
criticism, behave like athletes training for the Olympic games.
Information on sport was further supplied by See Inside an Ancient
Greek Town.
(Ill. 4.3)

Imagine we’re athletes. Our trainer has suggested an exercise to
strengthen our calves for the javelin. It requires us to stand on one
leg and lift weights. It looks peculiar to outsiders, who mock and
complain that we are throwing away our chances of success. In the
baths, we overhear a man explain to another that we are
(More interested in showing o� a
set of calf muscles than helping the city win the games.) Cruel, but
no grounds for alarm if we listen to Socrates in conversation with
his friend Crito:
SOCRATES: When a man is … taking [his training] seriously, does he pay attention to all
praise and criticism and opinion indiscriminately, or only when it comes from the
one quali�ed person, the actual doctor or trainer?
CRITO: Only when it comes from the one quali�ed person.
SOCRATES: Then he should be afraid of the criticism and welcome the praise of the one
quali�ed person, but not those of the general public.
CRITO: Obviously.
SOCRATES: He ought to regulate his actions and exercises and eating and drinking by the
judgement of his instructor, who has expert knowledge, not by the opinions of the
rest of the public.
The value of criticism will depend on the thought processes of
critics, not on their number or rank:
Don’t you think it a good principle that one shouldn’t respect all human opinions,
but only some and not others … that one should respect the good ones, but not the
bad ones?… And good ones are those of people with understanding, whereas bad
ones are those of people without it …
So my good friend, we shouldn’t care all that much about what the populace will
say of us, but about what the expert on matters of justice and injustice will say.
The jurors on the benches of the Court of the Heliasts were no
experts. They included an unusual number of the old and the war-
wounded, who looked to jury work as an easy source of additional
income. The salary was three obols a day, less than a manual

labourer’s, but helpful if one was sixty-three and bored at home. The
only quali�cations were citizenship, a sound mind and an absence
of debts – though soundness of mind was not judged by Socratic
criteria, more the ability to walk in a straight line and produce one’s
name when asked. Members of the jury fell asleep during trials,
rarely had experience of similar cases or relevant laws, and were
given no guidance on how to reach verdicts.
Socrates’ own jury had arrived with violent prejudices. They had
been in�uenced by Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates, and felt
that the philosopher had played a role in the disasters that had
befallen the once-mighty city at the end of the century. The
Peloponnesian War had �nished in catastrophe, a Spartan–Persian
alliance had brought Athens to her knees, the city had been
blockaded, her �eet destroyed and her empire dismembered.
Plagues had broken out in poorer districts, and democracy had been
suppressed by a dictatorship guilty of executing a thousand citizens.
For Socrates’ enemies, it was more than coincidence that many of
the dictators had once spent time with the philosopher. Critias and
Charmides had discussed ethical matters with Socrates, and it
seemed all they had acquired as a result was a lust for murder.
What could have accounted for Athens’s spectacular fall from
grace? Why had the greatest city in Hellas, which seventy-�ve years
before had defeated the Persians on land at Plataea and at sea at
Mycale, been forced to endure a succession of humiliations? The
man in the dirty cloak who wandered the streets asking the obvious
seemed one ready, entirely �awed explanation.
Socrates understood that he had no chance. He lacked even the time
to make a case. Defendants had only minutes to address a jury, until
the water had run from one jar to another in the court clock:

(Ill. 4.4)
I am convinced that I never wronged anyone intentionally, but I cannot convince
you of this, because we have so little time for discussion. If it was your practice, as it
is with other nations, to give not one day but several to the hearing of capital trials,
I believe that you might have been convinced; but under present conditions it is not
so easy to dispose of grave allegations in a short space of time.
An Athenian courtroom was no forum for the discovery of the truth.
It was a rapid encounter with a collection of the aged and one-
legged who had not submitted their beliefs to rational examination
and were waiting for the water to run from one jar to the other.
It must have been di�cult to hold this in mind, it must have
required the kind of strength accrued during years in conversation
with ordinary Athenians: the strength, under certain circumstances, not
to take the views of others seriously. Socrates was not wilful, he did
not dismiss these views out of misanthropy, which would have
contravened his faith in the potential for rationality in every human
being. But he had been up at dawn for most of his life talking to
Athenians; he knew how their minds worked and had seen that
unfortunately they frequently didn’t, even if he hoped they would
some day. He had observed their tendency to take positions on a
whim and to follow accepted opinions without questioning them. It
wasn’t arrogance to keep this before him at a moment of supreme
opposition. He possessed the self-belief of a rational man who

understands that his enemies are liable not to be thinking properly,
even if he is far from claiming that his own thoughts are invariably
sound. Their disapproval could kill him; it did not have to make him
wrong.
Of course, he might have renounced his philosophy and saved his
life. Even after he had been found guilty, he could have escaped the
death penalty, but wasted the opportunity through intransigence.
We should not look to Socrates for advice on escaping a death
sentence; we should look to him as an extreme example of how to
maintain con�dence in an intelligent position which has met with
illogical opposition.
The philosopher’s speech rose to an emotional �nale:
If you put me to death, you will not easily �nd anyone to take my place. The fact is,
if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached
by God to our city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of
its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gad�y … If you
take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will
awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus’s advice
and �nish me o� with a single slap; and then you will go on sleeping.
He was not mistaken. When the magistrate called for a second, �nal
verdict, 360 members of the jury voted for the philosopher to be put
to death. The jurors went home; the condemned man was escorted
to prison.

5
It must have been dark and close, and the sounds coming up from
the street would have included jeers from Athenians anticipating the
end of the satyr-faced thinker. He would have been killed at once
had the sentence not coincided with the annual Athenian mission to
Delos, during which, tradition decreed, the city could not put
anyone to death. Socrates’ good nature attracted the sympathy of
the prison warder, who alleviated his last days by allowing him to
receive visitors. A stream of them came: Phaedo, Crito, Crito’s son
Critobulus, Apollodorus, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines,
Antisthenes, Ctesippus, Menexenus, Simmias, Cebes, Phaedondas,
Euclides and Terpsion. They could not disguise their distress at
seeing a man who had only ever displayed great kindness and
curiosity towards others waiting to meet his end like a criminal.
(Ill. 5.1)
Though David’s canvas presented Socrates surrounded by devastated
friends, we should remember that their devotion stood out in a sea

of misunderstanding and hatred.
To counterpoint the mood in the prison cell and introduce variety,
Diderot might have urged a few of the many prospective hemlock
painters to capture the mood of other Athenians at the idea of
Socrates’ death – which might have resulted in paintings with titles
like Five Jurors Playing Cards after a Day in Court or The Accusers
Finishing Dinner and Looking Forward to Bed. A painter with a taste
for pathos could more plainly have chosen to title these scenes The
Death of Socrates.
When the appointed day came, Socrates was alone in remaining
calm. His wife and three children were brought to see him, but
Xanthippe’s cries were so hysterical, Socrates asked that she be
ushered away. His friends were quieter though no less tearful. Even
the prison warder, who had seen many go to their deaths, was
moved to address an awkward farewell:
‘In your time here, I’ve known you to be the most generous and gentlest and best of
men who have ever come to this place … You know the message I’ve come to bring:
goodbye, then, and try to bear the inevitable as easily as you can.’ And with this he
turned away in tears and went o�.
Then came the executioner, bearing a cup of crushed hemlock:
When he saw the man Socrates said: ‘Well, my friend, you’re an expert in these
things: what must one do?’ ‘Simply drink it,’ he said, ‘and walk about till a heaviness
comes over your legs; then lie down, and it will act by itself.’ And with this he held
out the cup to Socrates. He took it perfectly calmly … without a tremor or any
change of colour or countenance … He pressed the cup to his lips, and drank it o�
with good humour and without the least distaste. Till then most of us had been able
to restrain our tears fairly well [narrated by Phaedo]; but when we saw he was
drinking, that he’d actually drunk it, we could do so no longer. In my own case, the
tears came pouring out in spite of myself … Even before me, Crito had moved away
when he was unable to restrain his tears. And Apollodorus, who even earlier had
been continuously in tears, now burst forth into such a storm of weeping and
grieving, that he made everyone present break down except Socrates himself.
The philosopher implored his companions to calm themselves –
‘What a way to behave, my strange friends!’ he mocked – then stood

up and walked around the prison cell so the poison could take
e�ect. When his legs began to feel heavy, he lay down on his back
and the sensation left his feet and legs; as the poison moved
upwards and reached his chest, he gradually lost consciousness. His
breathing became slow. Once he saw that his best friend’s eyes had
grown �xed, Crito reached over and closed them:
And that [said Phaedo] … was the end of our companion, who was, we can fairly
say, of all those of his time whom we knew, the bravest and also the wisest and
most upright man.
It is hard not to start crying oneself. Perhaps because Socrates is said
to have had a bulbous head and peculiar widely-spaced eyes, the
scene of his death made me think of an afternoon on which I had
wept while watching a tape of The Elephant Man.
(Ill. 5.2)
It seemed that both men had su�ered one of the saddest of fates – to
be good and yet judged evil.
We might never have been jeered at for a physical deformity, nor
condemned to death for our life’s work, but 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. We are
accused of stupidity when we are being cautious. Our shyness is
taken for arrogance and our desire to please for sycophancy. We
struggle to clear up a misunderstanding, but our throat goes dry and

the words found are not the ones meant. Bitter enemies are
appointed to positions of power over us, and denounce us to others.
In the hatred unfairly directed towards an innocent philosopher we
recognize an echo of the hurt we ourselves encounter at the hands
of those who are either unable or unwilling to do us justice.
But there is redemption in the story, too. Soon after the
philosopher’s death the mood began to change. Isocrates reported
that the audience watching Euripides’ Palamedes burst into tears
when Socrates’ name was mentioned; Diodorus said that his
accusers were eventually lynched by the people of Athens. Plutarch
tells us that the Athenians developed such hatred for the accusers
that they refused to bathe with them and ostracized them socially
until, in despair, they hanged themselves. Diogenes Laertius
recounts that only a short while after Socrates’ death the city
condemned Meletus to death, banished Anytus and Lycon and
erected a costly bronze statue of Socrates crafted by the great
Lysippus.
The philosopher had predicted that Athens would eventually see
things his way, and it did. Such redemption can be hard to believe
in. We forget that time may be needed for prejudices to fall away
and envy to recede. The story encourages us to interpret our own
unpopularity other than through the mocking eyes of local juries.
Socrates was judged by 500 men of limited intelligence who
harboured irrational suspicions because Athens had lost the
Peloponnesian War and the defendant looked strange. And yet he
maintained faith in the judgement of wider courts. Though we
inhabit one place at one time, through this example, we may
imaginatively project ourselves into other lands and eras which
promise to judge us with greater objectivity. We may not convince
local juries in time to help ourselves, but we can be consoled by the
prospect of posterity’s verdict.
Yet there is a danger that Socrates’ death will seduce us for the
wrong reasons. It may foster a sentimental belief in a secure
connection between being hated by the majority and being right. It

can seem the destiny of geniuses and saints to su�er early
misunderstanding, then to be accorded bronze statues by Lysippus.
We may be neither geniuses nor saints. We may simply be
privileging the stance of de�ance over good reasons for it, childishly
trusting that we are never so right as when others tell us we are
wrong.
This was not Socrates’ intention. It would be as naïve to hold that
unpopularity is synonymous with truth as to believe that it is
synonymous with error. The validity of an idea or action is
determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled
but by whether it obeys the rules of logic. It is not because an
argument is denounced by a majority that it is wrong nor, for those
drawn to heroic de�ance, that it is right.
The philosopher o�ered us a way out of two powerful delusions:
that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public
opinion.
To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive
instead to listen always to the dictates of reason.
(Ill. 5.3)

II

Consolation for Not Having Enough Money

1

Happiness, an acquisition list
1. A neoclassical Georgian house in the centre of London. Chelsea
(Paradise Walk, Markham Square), Kensington (the southern
part of Campden Hill Road, Hornton Street), Holland Park
(Aubrey Road). In appearance, similar to the front elevation of
the Royal Society of Arts designed by the Adam brothers (1772–
4). To catch the pale light of late London afternoons, large
Venetian windows o�set by Ionic columns (and an arched
tympanum with anthemions).
(Ill. 6.1)
In the �rst-�oor drawing room, a ceiling and a chimney-piece
like Robert Adam’s design for the library at Kenwood House.

2. A jet stationed at Farnborough or Biggin Hill (a Dassault Falcon
900c or Gulfstream IV) with avionics for the nervous �yer,
ground-proximity warning system, turbulence-detecting radar
and CAT II autopilot. On the tail-�n, to replace the standard
stripes, a detail from a still life, a �sh by Velázquez or three
lemons by Sánchez Cotán from the Fruit and Vegetables in the
Prado.
(Ill. 6.2)
(Ill. 6.3)
3. The Villa Orsetti in Marlia near Lucca. From the bedroom,
views over water, and the sound of fountains. At the back of the
house, a magnolia Delavayi growing along the wall, a terrace
for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games.

Sheltered gardens indulgent to �g and nectarine. Squares of
cypresses, rows of lavender, orange trees and an olive orchard.
(Ill. 6.4)
4. A library with a large desk, a �replace and a view on to a
garden. Early editions with the comforting smell of old books,
pages yellowed and rough to the touch. On top of shelves, busts
of great thinkers and astrological globes. Like the design of the
library for a house for William III of Holland.
(Ill. 6.5)

5. A dining room like that at Belton House in Lincolnshire. A long
oak table seating twelve. Frequent dinners with the same
friends. The conversation intelligent but playful. Always
a�ectionate. A thoughtful chef and considerate sta� to remove
any administrative di�culties (the chef adept at zucchini
pancakes, tagliatelle with white tru�es, �sh soup, risotto,
quail, John Dory and roast chicken). A small drawing room to
retire to for tea and chocolates.
6. A bed built into a niche in the wall (like one by Jean-François
Blondel in Paris). Starched linen changed every day, cold to the
cheek. The bed huge; toes do not touch the end of the bed; one
wallows. Recessed cabinets for water and biscuits, and another
for a television.
(Ill. 6.6)
7. An immense bathroom with a tub in the middle on a raised
platform, made of marble with cobalt-blue seashell designs.
Taps that can be operated with the sole of the foot and release
water in a broad, gentle stream. A skylight visible from the
bath. Heated limestone �oors. On the walls, reproductions of
the frescos on the precinct of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii.

(Ill. 6.7)
8. Money su�cient to allow one to live on the interest of the
interest.
9. For weekends, a penthouse apartment at the tip of the Ile de la
Cité decorated with pieces from the noblest period of French
furniture (and the weakest of government), the reign of Louis
XVI. A half-moon commode by Grevenich, a console by Saunier,
a bonheur-du-jour by Vandercruse-La Croix. Lazy mornings
reading Pariscope in bed, eating pain au chocolat on Sèvres china
and chatting about existence with, and occasionally teasing, a
reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna (from the Galleria
dell’Accademia in Venice), whose melancholy expression would
belie a dry sense of humour and spontaneity – and who would
dress in Agnès B and Max Mara for walks around the Marais.

(Ill. 6.8)
(Ill. 6.9)

2
An anomaly among an often pleasure-hating and austere fraternity,
there was one philosopher who seemed to understand and want to
help. ‘I don’t know how I shall conceive of the good,’ he wrote, ‘if I
take away the pleasures of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I
take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet
emotions that are caused by the sight of beautiful forms.’
Epicurus was born in 341 BC on the verdant island of Samos, a few
miles o� the coast of Western Asia Minor. He took early to
philosophy, travelling from the age of fourteen to hear lessons from
the Platonist Pamphilus and the atomic philosopher Nausiphanes.
But he found he could not agree with much of what they taught and
by his late twenties had decided to arrange his thoughts into his
own philosophy of life. He was said to have written 300 books on
almost everything, including On Love, On Music, On Just Dealing, On
Human Life (in four books) and On Nature (in thirty-seven books),
though by a catastrophic series of mishaps, almost all were lost over
the centuries, leaving his philosophy to be reconstructed from a few
surviving fragments and the testimony of later Epicureans.
What immediately distinguished his philosophy was an emphasis on
the importance of sensual pleasure: ‘Pleasure is the beginning and
the goal of a happy life,’ asserted Epicurus, con�rming what many
had long thought but philosophy had rarely accepted. The
philosopher confessed his love of excellent food: ‘The beginning and
root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and
culture must be referred to this.’ Philosophy properly performed was
to be nothing less than a guide to pleasure:

The man who alleges that he is not yet ready for philosophy or
that the time for it has passed him by, is like the man who says that
he is either too young or too old for happiness.
Few philosophers had ever made such frank admissions of their
interest in a pleasurable lifestyle. It shocked many, especially when
they heard that Epicurus had attracted the support of some wealthy
people, �rst in Lampsacus in the Dardanelles, and then in Athens,
and had used their money to set up a philosophical establishment to
promote happiness. The school admitted both men and women, and
encouraged them to live and study pleasure together. The idea of
what was going on inside the school appeared at once titillating and
morally reprehensible.
(Ill. 7.1)
There were frequent leaks from disgruntled Epicureans detailing
activities between lectures. Timocrates, the brother of Epicurus’s
associate Metrodorus, spread a rumour that Epicurus had to vomit
twice a day because he ate so much. And Diotimus the Stoic took
the unkind step of publishing �fty lewd letters which he said had
been written by Epicurus when he’d been drunk and sexually
frenzied.
Despite these criticisms, Epicurus’s teachings continued to attract
support. They spread across the Mediterranean world; schools for

pleasure were founded in Syria, Judaea, Egypt, Italy and Gaul; and
the philosophy remained in�uential for the next 500 years, only
gradually to be extinguished by the hostility of forbidding
barbarians and Christians during the decline of the Roman Empire
in the West. Even then, Epicurus’s name entered many languages in
adjectival form as a tribute to his interests (Oxford English
Dictionary: ‘Epicurean: devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; hence,
luxurious, sensual, gluttonous’).
Browsing in a newsagent in London 2,340 years after the
philosopher’s birth, I came upon copies of Epicurean Life, a quarterly
magazine with articles on hotels, yachts and restaurants, printed on
paper with the sheen of a well-polished apple.
(Ill. 7.2)
The tenor of Epicurus’s interests was further suggested by The
Epicurean, a restaurant in a small Worcestershire town, which
o�ered its clientele, seated on high-backed chairs in a hushed dining
room, dinners of seared sea scallops and cep risotto with tru�es.

(Ill. 7.3)

3
The consistency of the associations provoked by Epicurus’s
philosophy throughout the ages, from Diotimus the Stoic to the
editors of Epicurean Life, testi�es to the way in which, once the word
‘pleasure’ has been mentioned, it seems obvious what is entailed.
‘What do I need for a happy life?’ is far from a challenging question
when money is no object.
Yet ‘What do I need for a healthy life?’ can be more di�cult to
answer when, for example, we are a�icted by bizarre recurring
headaches or an acute throb in the stomach area after evening
meals. We know there is a problem; it can be hard to know the
solution.
In pain, the mind is prone to consider some strange cures: leeches,
bleeding, nettle stews, trepanning. An atrocious pain pulses in the
temples and at the base of the head, as though the whole cranium
had been placed in a clamp and tightened. The head feels as if it
may soon explode. What seems intuitively most necessary is to let
some air into the skull. The su�erer requests that a friend place his
head on a table and drill a small hole in the side. He dies hours later
of a brain haemorrhage.

(Ill. 8.1)
If consulting a good doctor is generally thought advisable despite
the sombre atmosphere of many surgery waiting rooms, it is because
someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body
works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than
someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a
hierarchy between the confusion the lay person will be in about
what is wrong with them, and the more accurate knowledge
available to doctors reasoning logically. Doctors are required to
compensate for their patients’ lack, at times fatal, of bodily self-
knowledge.
At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at
intuitively answering ‘What will make me happy?’ as ‘What will
make me healthy?’ The answer which most rapidly comes to mind is
liable to be as faulty. Our souls do not spell out their troubles more
clearly than our bodies, and our intuitive diagnoses are rarely any
more accurate. Trepanning might serve as a symbol of the
di�culties of understanding our psychological as much as our
physiological selves.

A man feels dissatis�ed. He has trouble rising in the morning and is
surly and distracted with his family. Intuitively, he places the blame
on his choice of occupation and begins searching for an alternative,
despite the high costs of doing so. It was the last time I would turn
to See Inside an Ancient Greek Town.
a blacksmith; a shoemaker; a �shmonger (Ill. 8.2)
Deciding rapidly that he would be happy in the �sh business, the
man acquires a net and an expensive stall in the market-place. And
yet his melancholy does not abate.
We are often, in the words of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, like ‘a
sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady’.
It is because they understand bodily maladies better than we can
that we seek doctors. We should turn to philosophers for the same
reason when our soul is unwell – and judge them according to a
similar criterion:
Just as medicine confers no bene�t if it does not drive away physical illness, so
philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the su�ering of the mind.
The task of philosophy was, for Epicurus, to help us interpret our
indistinct pulses of distress and desire and thereby save us from
mistaken schemes for happiness. We were to cease acting on �rst
impulses, and instead investigate the rationality of our desires
according to a method of questioning close to that used by Socrates

in evaluating ethical de�nitions over a hundred years earlier. And
by providing what might at times feel like counter-intuitive
diagnoses of our ailments, philosophy would – Epicurus promised –
guide us to superior cures and true happiness.
Epicurus 341 BC–270 BC (Ill. 8.3)

4
Those who had heard the rumours must have been surprised to
discover the real tastes of the philosopher of pleasure. There was no
grand house. The food was simple, Epicurus drank water rather than
wine, and was happy with a dinner of bread, vegetables and a
palmful of olives. ‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a
feast whenever I like,’ he asked a friend. Such were the tastes of a
man who had described pleasure as the purpose of life.
He had not meant to deceive. His devotion to pleasure was far
greater than even the orgy accusers could have imagined. It was just
that after rational analysis, he had come to some striking
conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable – and
fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the
essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very
expensive.
Happiness, an Epicurean acquisition list
1. Friendship
On returning to Athens in 306 BC at the age of thirty-�ve, 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.
Epicurus observed that:
Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness,
the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
Such was his attachment to congenial company, Epicurus
recommended that one try never to eat alone:
Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with
rather than what you eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or
a wolf.
The household of Epicurus resembled a large family, but there was
seemingly no sullenness nor sense of con�nement, only sympathy
and gentleness.
We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing,
what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while
to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity
con�rmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull
us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing,
they reveal they know our foibles and accept them and so, in turn,
accept that we have a place in the world. We can ask them ‘Isn’t he
frightening?’ or ‘Do you ever feel that …?’ and be understood,
rather than encounter the puzzled ‘No, not particularly’ – which can
make us feel, even when in company, as lonely as polar explorers.
True friends do not evaluate us according to worldly criteria, it is
the core self they are interested in; like ideal parents, their love for
us remains una�ected by our appearance or position in the social
hierarchy, and so we have no qualms in dressing in old clothes and
revealing that we have made little money this year. The desire for
riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger
for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to
be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no
greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people

who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning
our underlying need, recognized that a handful of true friends could
deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.
2. Freedom
Epicurus and his friends made a second radical innovation. In order
not to have to work for people they didn’t like and answer to
potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from
employment in the commercial world of Athens (‘We must free
ourselves from the prison of everyday a�airs and politics’), and
began what could best have been described as a commune,
accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They
would have less money but would never again have to follow the
commands of odious superiors.
So they bought a garden near their house, a little outside the old
Dipylon gate, and grew a range of vegetables for the kitchen,
probably bliton (cabbage), krommyon (onion) and kinara (ancestor of
the modern artichoke, of which the bottom was edible but not the
scales). Their diet was neither luxurious nor abundant, but it was
�avoursome and nutritious. As Epicurus explained to his friend
Menoeceus, ‘[The wise man] chooses not the greatest quantity of
food but the most pleasant.’
Simplicity did not a�ect the friends’ sense of status because, by
distancing themselves from the values of Athens, they had ceased to
judge themselves on a material basis. There was no need to be
embarrassed by bare walls, and no bene�t in showing o� gold.
Among a group of friends living outside the political and economic
centre of the city, there was – in the �nancial sense – nothing to
prove.
3. Thought

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.
There was much encouragement to think in the Garden, as
Epicurus’s community became known. Many of the friends were
writers. According to Diogenes Laertius, Metrodorus, for one, wrote
twelve works, among them the lost Way of Wisdom and Of Epicurus’s
Weak Health. In the common rooms of the house in Melite and in the
vegetable garden, there must have been unbroken opportunities to
examine problems with people as intelligent as they were
sympathetic.
Epicurus was especially concerned that he and his friends learn to
analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the
supernatural. If one thought rationally about mortality, one would,
Epicurus argued, realize that there was nothing but oblivion after
death, and that ‘what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry
in anticipation.’ It was senseless to alarm oneself in advance about a
state which one would never experience:
There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there
is nothing terrible in not living.
Sober analysis calmed the mind; it spared Epicurus’s friends the
furtive glimpses of di�culties that would have haunted them in the
unre�ective environment beyond the Garden.
Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the
crux of 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.

To highlight what is essential for happiness and what may, if one is
denied prosperity through social injustice or economic turmoil, be
forgone without great regrets, Epicurus divided our needs into three
categories:
Of the desires, some are natural and necessary. Others are natural but unnecessary.
And there are desires that are neither natural nor necessary.
WHAT IS AND IS NOT ESSENTIAL FOR HAPPINESS
Natural and Natural but Neither natural
necessary unnecessary nor necessary
Friends Grand house Fame
Freedom Private baths Power
Thought (about main Banquets
sources of anxiety: Servants
death, illness, Fish, meat
poverty, superstition)
Food, shelter, clothes
Crucially for those unable to make or afraid of losing money,
Epicurus’s tripartite division suggested that happiness was
dependent on some complex psychological goods but relatively
independent of material ones, beyond the means required to
purchase some warm clothes, somewhere to live and something to
eat – a set of priorities designed to provoke thought in those who
had equated happiness with the fruition of grand �nancial schemes,
and misery with a modest income.
To plot the Epicurean relation between money and happiness on a
graph, money’s capacity to deliver happiness is already present in
small salaries and will not rise with the largest. We will not cease
being happy with greater outlay, but we will not, Epicurus insisted,

surpass levels of happiness already available to those on a limited
income.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR SOMEONE WITH FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC.
The analysis depended on a particular understanding of happiness.
For Epicurus, we are happy if we are not in active pain. Because we
su�er active pain if we lack nutrients and clothes, we must have
enough money to buy them. But su�ering is too strong a word to
describe what will occur if we are obliged to wear an ordinary
cardigan rather than a cashmere one or to eat a sandwich rather
than sea scallops. Hence the argument that:
Plain dishes o�er the same pleasure as a luxurious table, when the pain that comes
from want is taken away.
Whether we regularly eat meals like the one on the right or like the
one on the left cannot be the decisive factor in our state of mind.

(Ill. 9.1)
(Ill. 9.2)
As for eating meat, it relieves neither any of our nature’s stress nor a desire whose
non-satisfaction would give rise to pain … What it contributes to is not life’s
maintenance but variation of pleasures … like drinking of exotic wines, all of which
our nature is quite capable of doing without.
It may be tempting to attribute this disparagement of luxury to the
primitive range of products available to the rich in the undeveloped
economy of Hellenistic Greece. Yet the argument may still be
defended by pointing to an imbalance in the ratio of price to
happiness in products of later ages.

(Ill. 9.3)
We would not be happy with the vehicle on the left but no friends;
with a villa but no freedom; with linen sheets but too much anxiety
to sleep. So long as essential non-material needs are unattended, the
line on the graph of happiness will remain stubbornly low.
RELATION OF HAPPINESS TO MONEY FOR SOMEONE WITHOUT FRIENDS, FREEDOM, ETC.
Nothing satis�es the man who is not satis�ed with a little.
To avoid acquiring what we do not need or regretting what we
cannot a�ord, we should ask rigorously the moment we desire an
expensive object whether we are right to do so. We should
undertake a series of thought experiments in which we imagine
ourselves projected in time to the moment when our desires have
been realized, in order to gauge our likely degree of happiness:
The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen
to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?

A method which, though no examples of it survive, must have
followed at least �ve steps – which may without injustice be
sketched in the language of an instruction manual or recipe book.
1. Identify a project for happiness.
In order to be happy on holiday, I must live in a villa.
2. Imagine that the project may be false. Look for exceptions to the supposed link
between the desired object and happiness. Could one possess the desired object but not
be happy? Could one be happy but not have the desired object?
Could I spend money on a villa and still not be happy?
Could I be happy on holiday and not spend as much money as on a villa?
3. If an exception is found, the desired object cannot be a necessary and su�cient cause
of happiness.
It is possible to have a miserable time in a villa if, for example, I feel friendless and
isolated.
It is possible for me to be happy in a tent if, for example, I am with someone I love and
feel appreciated by.
4. In order to be accurate about producing happiness, the initial project must be nuanced
to take the exception into account.
In so far as I can be happy in an expensive villa, this depends on being with someone I
love and feel appreciated by.
I can be happy without spending money on a villa, as long as I am with someone I love
and feel appreciated by.
5. True needs may now seem very di�erent from the confused initial desire.
Happiness depends more on the possession of a congenial companion than a well-
decorated villa.

The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to
remarkable joy. (Ill. 9.4)

5
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are
we so powerfully drawn to them? Because of an error similar to that
of the migraine su�erer who drills a hole in the side of his skull:
because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs
we don’t understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what
we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds
but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a
substitute for the counsel of friends.
We are not solely to blame for our confusions. Our weak
understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed
the ‘idle opinions’ of those around us, which do not re�ect the
natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches,
seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle
opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interests of commercial
enterprises to skew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a
material vision of the good and downplay an unsaleable one.
And the way we are enticed is through the sly association of
super�uous objects with our other, forgotten needs.

(Ill. 10.1)
It may be a jeep we end up buying, but it was – for Epicurus –
freedom we were looking for.
(Ill. 10.2)
It may be the aperitif we purchase, but it was – for Epicurus –
friendship we were after.

(Ill. 10.3)
It may be �ne bathing accoutrements we acquire, but it was – for
Epicurus – thought that would have brought us calm.
To counteract the power of luxurious images Epicureans appreciated
the importance of advertising.
In the AD 120s, in the central market-place of Oinoanda, a town of
10,000 inhabitants in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, an
enormous stone colonnade 80 metres long and nearly 4 metres high
was erected and inscribed with Epicurean slogans for the attention
of shoppers:
Luxurious foods and drinks … in no way produce freedom from harm and a healthy
condition in the �esh.
One must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a
container that is full to over�owing.
Real value is generated not by theatres and baths and perfumes and ointments …
but by natural science.
The wall had been paid for by Diogenes, one of Oinoanda’s
wealthiest citizens, who had sought, 400 years after Epicurus and
his friends had opened the Garden in Athens, to share with his
fellow inhabitants the secrets of happiness he had discovered in
Epicurus’s philosophy. As he explained on one corner of the wall:
Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of
departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken
by death, to compose a �ne anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure and so to
help now those who are well-constituted. Now, if only one person, or two or three
or four or �ve or six … were in a bad predicament, I should address them
individually … but as the majority of people su�er from a common disease, as in a
plague, with their false notions about things, and as their number is increasing (for
in mutual emulation they catch the disease from each other, like sheep) … I wished
to use this stoa to advertise publicly medicines that bring salvation.
The massive limestone wall contained some 25,000 words
advertising all aspects of Epicurus’s thought, mentioning the

importance of friendship and of the analysis of anxieties. Inhabitants
shopping in the boutiques of Oinoanda had been warned in detail
that they could expect little happiness from the activity.
(Ill. 10.4)
Advertising would not be so prevalent if we were not such
suggestible creatures. We want things when they are beautifully
presented on walls, and lose interest when they are ignored or not
well spoken of. Lucretius lamented the way in which what we want
is ‘chosen by hearsay rather than by the evidence of [our] own
senses’.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of
luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary
settings and individuals. We receive little encouragement to attend
to modest grati�cations – playing with a child, conversations with a
friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across
fresh bread (‘Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast
whenever I like’). It is not these elements which are celebrated in
the pages of Epicurean Life.
Art may help to correct the bias. Lucretius lent force to Epicurus’s
intellectual defence of simplicity by helping us, in superlative Latin
verse, to feel the pleasures of inexpensive things:

We �nd that the requirements of our bodily nature are
few indeed, no more than is necessary to banish pain,
and also to spread out many pleasures for ourselves.
Nature does not periodically seek anything more
gratifying than this, not complaining if there are no
golden images of youths about the house who are holding
�aming torches in their right hands to illuminate
banquets that go on long into the night. What does it
matter if the hall doesn’t sparkle with silver and gleam
with gold, and no carved and gilded rafters ring to the
music of the lute? Nature doesn’t miss these luxuries
when people can recline in company on the soft grass by
a running stream under the branches of a tall tree and
refresh their bodies pleasurably at small expense. Better
still if the weather smiles on them, and the season of the
year stipples the green grass with �owers.
Ergo corpoream ad naturam pauca videmus
esse opus omnino, quae demant cumque dolorem.
delicias quoque uti multas substernere possint
gratius interdum, neque natura ipsa requirit,
si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes
lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris,
lumina nocturnis epulis ut suppeditentur,
nec domus argento fulget auroque renidet
nec citharae reboant laqueata aurataque templa,
cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli
propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae
non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant,
praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni
tempora conspergunt viridantis �oribus herbas.
It is hard to measure the e�ect on commercial activity in the Greco-
Roman world of Lucretius’s poem. It is hard to know whether
shoppers in Oinoanda discovered what they needed and ceased
buying what they didn’t because of the giant advertisement in their
midst. But it is possible that a well-mounted Epicurean advertising
campaign would have the power to precipitate global economic
collapse. Because, for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate
unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true
needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-
awareness and appreciation of simplicity. Epicurus would not have
been perturbed:
When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth; limitless
wealth, great poverty.
It points us to a choice: on the one hand, societies which stimulate
unnecessary desires but achieve enormous economic strengths as a
result; and on the other, Epicurean societies which would provide
for essential material needs but could never raise living standards
beyond subsistence level. There would be no mighty monuments in
an Epicurean world, no technological advances and little incentive
to trade with distant continents. A society in which people were
more limited in their needs would also be one of few resources. And

yet – if we are to believe the philosopher – such a society would not
be unhappy. Lucretius articulated the choice. 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 …
We can imagine Epicurus’s response. However impressive our
ventures on to the high seas, the only way to evaluate their merits is
according to the pleasure they inspire:
It is to pleasure that we have recourse, using the feeling as our standard for judging
every good.
And because an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to
guarantee an increase in happiness, Epicurus would have suggested
that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on
which our happiness depends.

6
Happiness, an acquisition list
1. A hut.
2.
(Ill. 11.1)
. To avoid superiors, patronization, in�ghting and competition:

(Ill. 11.2)
. Thought.
(Ill. 11.3)
. A reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna (from the Galleria
dell’Accademia in Venice), whose melancholy expression would
belie a dry sense of humour and spontaneity – and who would dress
in manmade �bres from the sales racks of modest department stores.
(Ill. 11.4) Happiness may be di�cult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily �nancial.

III

Consolation for Frustration

1
Thirteen years before painting the Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis
David attended to another ancient philosopher who met his end
with extraordinary calm, amidst the hysterical tears of friends and
family.
(Ill. 12.1)
The Death of Seneca, painted in 1773 by the twenty-�ve-year-old
David, depicted the Stoic philosopher’s last moments in a villa
outside Rome in April AD 65. A centurion had arrived at the house a
few hours before with instructions from the emperor that Seneca
should take his own life forthwith. A conspiracy had been
discovered to remove the twenty-eight-year-old Nero from the
throne, and the emperor, maniacal and unbridled, was seeking
indiscriminate revenge. Though there was no evidence to link

Seneca to the conspiracy, though he had worked as the imperial
tutor for �ve years and as a loyal aide for a decade, Nero ordered
the death for good measure. He had by this point already murdered
his half-brother Britannicus, his mother Agrippina and his wife
Octavia; he had disposed of a large number of senators and
equestrians by feeding them to crocodiles and lions; and he had
sung while Rome burned to the ground in the great �re of 64.
When they learned of Nero’s command, Seneca’s companions
blanched and began to weep, but the philosopher, in the account
provided by Tacitus and read by David, remained unperturbed, and
strived to check their tears and revive their courage:
Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending
misfortunes which they had encouraged in each other over so many years? ‘Surely
nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel!’ he added. ‘After murdering his mother
and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor.’
He turned to his wife Paulina, embraced her tenderly (‘very
di�erent from his philosophical imperturbability’ – Tacitus) and
asked her to take consolation in his well-spent life. But she could
not countenance an existence without him, and asked to be allowed
to cut her veins in turn. Seneca did not deny her wish:
I will not grudge your setting so �ne an example. We can die with equal fortitude,
though yours will be the nobler end.
But because the emperor had no desire to increase his reputation for
cruelty, when his guards noticed that Paulina had taken a knife to
her veins, they seized it against her will and bandaged up her wrists.
Her husband’s suicide began to falter. Blood did not �ow fast
enough from his aged body, even after he had cut the veins in his
ankles and behind his knees. So in a self-conscious echo of the death
in Athens 464 years previously, Seneca asked his doctor to prepare a
cup of hemlock. He had long considered Socrates the exemplar of
how one might, through philosophy, rise above external
circumstance (and in a letter written a few years before Nero’s
command, had explained his admiration):

He was much tried at home, whether we think of his wife, a woman of rough
manners and shrewish tongue, or of the children … He lived either in time of war or
under tyrants … but all these measures changed the soul of Socrates so little that
they did not even change his features. What wonderful and rare distinction! He
maintained this attitude up to the very end … amid all the disturbances of Fortune,
he was undisturbed.
But Seneca’s desire to follow the Athenian was in vain. He drank the
hemlock and it had no e�ect. After two fruitless attempts, he �nally
asked to be placed in a vapour-bath, where he su�ocated to death
slowly, in torment but with equanimity, undisturbed by the
disturbances of Fortune.
David’s rococo version of the scene was not the �rst, nor the �nest.
Seneca appeared more like a reclining pasha than a dying
philosopher. Paulina, thrusting her bared right breast forward, was
dressed for grand opera rather than Imperial Rome. Yet David’s
rendering of the moment �tted, however clumsily, into a lengthy
history of admiration for the manner in which the Roman endured
his appalling fate.
Loyset Liedet, 1462 (Ill. 12.2)

Rubens, 1608 (Ill. 12.3)
Ribera (Jusepe), 1632 (Ill. 12.4)
Luca Giordano, c. 1680

Though his wishes had come into sudden, extreme con�ict with
reality, Seneca had not succumbed to ordinary frailties; reality’s
shocking demands had been met with dignity. Through his death,
Seneca had helped to create an enduring association, together with
other Stoic thinkers, between the very word ‘philosophical’ and a
temperate, self-possessed approach to disaster. He had from the �rst
conceived of philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in
overcoming con�icts between their wishes and reality. As Tacitus
had reported, Seneca’s response to his weeping companions had
been to ask, as though the two were essentially one, where their
philosophy had gone, and where their resolution against impending
misfortunes.
Throughout his life, Seneca had faced and witnessed around him
exceptional disasters. Earthquakes had shattered Pompeii; Rome and
Lugdunum had burnt to the ground; the people of Rome and her
empire had been subjected to Nero, and before him Caligula, or as
Suetonius more accurately termed him, ‘the Monster’, who had ‘on
one occasion … cried angrily, “I wish all you Romans had only one
neck!” ’
Seneca had su�ered personal losses, too. He had trained for a
career in politics, but in his early twenties had succumbed to
suspected tuberculosis, which had lasted six years and led to
suicidal depression. His late entry into politics had coincided with
Caligula’s rise to power. Even after the Monster’s murder in 41, his
position had been precarious. A plot by the Empress Messalina had,
through no fault of Seneca’s, resulted in his disgrace and eight years
of exile on the island of Corsica. When he had �nally been recalled
to Rome, it had been to take on against his will the most fateful job
in the imperial administration – tutor to Agrippina’s twelve-year-old
son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would �fteen years later
order him to kill himself in front of his wife and family.
Seneca knew why he had been able to withstand the anxieties:
I owe my life to [philosophy], and that is the least of my obligations to it.

His experiences had taught him a comprehensive dictionary of
frustration, his intellect a series of responses to them. Years of
philosophy had prepared him for the catastrophic day Nero’s
centurion had struck at the villa door.
Double herm of Seneca and Socrates (Ill. 12.5)

2
A Senecan dictionary of frustration
Introduction
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast – from a stubbed toe
to an untimely death – at the heart of every frustration lies a basic
structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
The collisions begin in earliest infancy, with the discovery that the
sources of our satisfaction lie beyond our control and that the world
does not reliably conform to our desires.

(Ill. 13.1)
And yet, for Seneca, in so far as we can ever attain wisdom, it is by
learning not to aggravate the world’s obstinacy through our own
responses, through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness, self-
righteousness and paranoia.
A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure
those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and
understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot
fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of
reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its
panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.
Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible
on the adamantine wall of reality.
Anger
The ultimate infantile collision. We cannot �nd the remote control or the
keys, the road is blocked, the restaurant full – and so we slam doors,
deracinate plants and howl.
(Ill. 13.2)
1. The philosopher held it to be a kind of madness:

There is no swifter way to insanity. Many [angry people] … call down death on
their children, poverty on themselves, ruin on their home, denying that they are
angry, just as the mad deny their insanity. Enemies to their closest friends …
heedless of the law … they do everything by force … The greatest of ills has seized
them, one that surpasses all other vices.
2. In calmer moments, the angry may apologize and explain that
they were overwhelmed by a power stronger than themselves,
that is, stronger than their reason. ‘They’, their rational selves,
did not mean the insults and regret the shouting; ‘they’ lost
control to darker forces within. The angry hereby appeal to a
predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty,
the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by
passionate feelings which reason neither identi�es with nor can
be held responsible for.
This account runs directly counter to Seneca’s view of the
mind, according to which anger results not from an
uncontrollable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and
correctable) error of reasoning. Reason does not always
govern our actions, he conceded: if we are sprinkled with
cold water, our body gives us no choice but to shiver; if
�ngers are �icked over our eyes, we have to blink. But anger
does not belong in the category of involuntary physical
movement, it can only break out on the back of certain
rationally held ideas; if we can only change the ideas, we will
change our propensity to anger.
3. And in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously
optimistic notions about what the world and other people are
like.
4. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by
what we think of as normal. We may be frustrated that it is
raining, but our familiarity with showers means we are unlikely
ever to respond to one with anger. Our frustrations are tempered
by what we understand we can expect from the world, by our
experience of what it is normal to hope for. We aren’t

overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we
desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it. Our
greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the
ground rules of existence.
5. With money, one could have expected to lead a very comfortable
life in Ancient Rome. Many of Seneca’s friends had large houses
in the capital and villas in the countryside. There were baths,
colonnaded gardens, fountains, mosaics, frescos and gilded
couches. There were retinues of slaves to prepare the food, look
after the children and tend the garden.
(Ill. 13.3)
6. Nevertheless, there seemed an unusual level of rage among the
privileged. ‘Prosperity fosters bad tempers,’ wrote Seneca, after
observing his wealthy friends ranting around him because life
had not turned out as they had hoped.
Seneca knew of a wealthy man, Vedius Pollio, a friend of
the Emperor Augustus, whose slave once dropped a tray of
crystal glasses during a party. Vedius hated the sound of
breaking glass and grew so furious that he ordered the slave
to be thrown into a pool of lampreys.
7. Such rages are never beyond explanation. Vedius Pollio was
angry for an identi�able reason: because he believed in a world

in which glasses do not get broken at parties. We shout when we
can’t �nd the remote control because of an implicit belief in a
world in which remote controls do not get mislaid. Rage is
caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins
(however tragic in its e�ects), that a given frustration has not
been written into the contract of life.
(Ill. 13.4)
8. We should be more careful. Seneca tried to adjust the scale of
our expectations so that we would not bellow so loudly when
these were dashed:
When dinner comes a few minutes late:
What need is there to kick the table over? To smash the goblets?
To bang yourself against columns?
When there’s a buzzing sound:
Why should a �y infuriate you which no one has taken enough trouble to drive
o�, or a dog which gets in your way, or a key dropped by a careless servant?
When something disturbs the calm of the dining room:
Why go and fetch the whip in the middle of dinner, just because the slaves are
talking?
We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectibility of
existence:
Is it surprising that the wicked should do wicked deeds, or unprecedented that
your enemy should harm or your friend annoy you, that your son should fall into
error or your servant misbehave?

We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
(Ill. 13.5)
Shock
An aeroplane belonging to the Swiss national airline, carrying 229
people, takes o� on a scheduled �ight from New York to Geneva.
Fifty minutes out of Kennedy Airport, as the stewardesses roll their
trolleys down the aisles of the McDonald Douglas MD-11, the
captain reports smoke in the cockpit. Ten minutes later, the plane
disappears o� the radar. The gigantic machine, each of its wings 52
metres long, crashes into the placid seas o� Halifax, Nova Scotia,
killing all on board. Rescue workers speak of the di�culty of
identifying what were, only hours before, humans with lives and
plans. Briefcases are found �oating in the sea.

(Ill. 13.6)
(Ill. 13.7)
1. If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden disaster and pay a price
for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly
confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and
reliability lasting across generations; on the other, unheralded
cataclysms. We �nd ourselves divided between a plausible
invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today and
the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after
which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have
such powerful incentives to neglect the latter that Seneca invoked
a goddess.
2. She was to be found on the back of many Roman coins, holding a
cornucopia in one hand and a rudder in the other. She was
beautiful and usually wore a light tunic and a coy smile. Her
name was Fortune. She had originated as a fertility goddess, the
�rstborn of Jupiter, and was honoured with a festival on the 25th
of May and with temples throughout Italy, visited by the barren
and farmers in search of rain. But gradually her remit had
widened, she had become associated with money, advancement,
love and health. The cornucopia was a symbol of her power to
bestow favours, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power
to change destinies. She could scatter gifts, then with terrifying
speed shift the rudder’s course, maintaining an imperturbable

smile as she watched us choke to death on a �shbone or
disappear in a landslide.
(Ill. 13.8)
3. Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and
because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which
Fortune does not dare’), we must, proposed Seneca, hold the
possibility of disaster in mind at all times. No one should
undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs, or say
goodbye to a friend, without an awareness, which Seneca would
have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic,
of fatal possibilities.
Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all
the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. (Ill.
13.9)

4. For evidence of how little is needed for all to come to nought, we
have only to hold up our wrists and study for a moment the
pulses of blood through our fragile, greenish veins:
What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break …
A body weak and fragile, naked, in its natural state defenceless, dependent upon
another’s help and exposed to all the a�ronts of Fortune.
5. Lugdunum had been one of the most prosperous Roman
settlements in Gaul. At the junction of the Arar and Rhone rivers,
it enjoyed a privileged position as a crossroads of trade and
military routes. The city contained elegant baths and theatres and
a government mint. Then in August 64 a spark slipped out of
hand and grew into a �re that spread through the narrow streets,
terri�ed inhabitants levering themselves from windows at its
approach. Flames licked from house to house and by the time the
sun had risen the whole of Lugdunum, from suburb to market,
from temple to baths, had burnt to cinders. The survivors were
left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their
noble buildings roasted beyond recognition. The blaze was so
rapid, it took longer for news of the disaster to reach Rome than
for the city to burn:
You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that
will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that
it has already happened …?
6. On the �fth of February 62, similar disaster struck the province
of Campania. The earth trembled, and large sections of Pompeii
collapsed. In the months that followed, many inhabitants decided
to leave Campania for other parts of the peninsula. Their move
suggested to Seneca that they believed there was somewhere on
earth, in Liguria or Calabria, where they might be wholly safe,
out of reach of Fortune’s will. To which he replied with an
argument, persuasive in spite of its geological dubiousness:
Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places
have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can
none the less have quakes. Perhaps tonight or before tonight, today will split

open the spot where you stand securely. How do you know whether conditions
will henceforth be better in those places against which Fortune has already
exhausted her strength or in those places which are supported on their own
ruins? We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe …
Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile.
7. At the time of Caligula’s accession to the throne, away from high
politics in a household in Rome, a mother lost her son. Metilius
had been short of his twenty-�fth birthday and a young man of
exceptional promise. He had been close to his mother Marcia,
and his death devastated her. She withdrew from social life and
sank into mourning. Her friends watched with compassion and
hoped for a day when she would regain a measure of composure.
She didn’t. A year passed, then another and a third, and still
Marcia came no closer to overcoming her grief. After three years
she was as tearful as she had been on the very day of his funeral.
Seneca sent her a letter. He expressed enormous sympathies, but
gently continued, ‘the question at issue between us [is] whether
grief ought to be deep or never-ending.’
Marcia was rebelling against what seemed like an
occurrence at once dreadful and rare – and all the more
dreadful because it was rare. Around her were mothers who
still had their sons, young men beginning their careers,
serving in the army or entering politics. Why had hers been
taken from her?
8. The death was unusual and terrible, but it was not – Seneca
ventured – abnormal. If Marcia looked beyond a restricted circle,
she would come upon a woefully long list of sons whom Fortune
had killed. Octavia had lost her son, Livia her son, Cornelia hers;
so had Xenophon, Paulus, Lucius Bibulus, Lucius Sulla, Augustus
and Scipio. By averting her gaze from early deaths, Marcia had,
understandably but perilously, denied them a place in her
conception of the normal:
We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive … So many funerals pass
our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we

make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army,
and succeed to their father’s property.
The children might live, but how ingenuous to believe that they
were guaranteed to survive to maturity – even to dinner-time:
No promise has been given you for this night – no, I have suggested too long a
respite – no promise has been given even for this hour.
There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future
formed on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a
human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time,
is a possibility we must ready ourselves for.
9. 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.
A SENECAN PRAEMEDITATIO
[The wise] will start each day with the thought …
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men,
no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
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. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement
to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, su�ces for the overthrow of
empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single
shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have
been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
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.
10. The same could naturally have been conveyed in other ways. In
more sober philosophical language, one could say that a subject’s
agency is only one of the causal factors determining events in the
course of his or her life. Seneca resorted instead to continual
hyperbole:
Whenever anyone falls at your side or behind you, cry out: ‘Fortune, you will not
deceive me, you will not fall upon me con�dent and heedless. I know what you
are planning. It is true that you struck someone else, but you aimed at me.’
(The original ends with a �nal, more rousing alliteration:
Quotiens aliquis ad latus aut pone tergum ceciderit, exclama: ‘Non decipies me,
fortuna, nec securum aut neglegentem opprimes. Scio quid pares; alium quidem
percussisti, sed me petisti.’)
11. If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because
they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in
which it is presented to the reader will not determine its
e�ectiveness. Seneca believed in a di�erent picture of the mind.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the
mind’s weak grasp unless �xed there by imagery and style. We
need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or
touched, or else we will forget.
The goddess of Fortune, in spite of her unphilosophical,
religious roots, was the perfect image to keep our exposure to
accident continually within our minds, con�ating a range of
threats to our security into one ghastly anthropomorphic
enemy.
Sense of injustice
A feeling that the rules of justice have been violated, rules which
dictate that if we are honourable, we will be rewarded, and that if
we are bad, we will be punished – a sense of justice inculcated in the
earliest education of children, and found in most religious texts, for
example, in the book of Deuteronomy, which explains that the godly

person ‘shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water … and
whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are
like cha� which the wind driveth away.’
Goodness → Reward
Evil → Punishment
In cases where one acts correctly but still su�ers disaster, one is left
bewildered and unable to �t the event into a scheme of justice. The
world seems absurd. One alternates between a feeling that one may
after all have been bad and this is why one was punished, and the
feeling that one truly was not bad and therefore must have fallen
victim to a catastrophic failure in the administration of justice. The
continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in
the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
1. Justice was not an ideology that had helped Marcia.
2. It had forced her to oscillate between a debilitating feeling that
her son Metilius had been taken away from her because she was
bad, and at other moments, a feeling of outrage with the world
that Metilius had died given that she had always been
essentially good.
3. But we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our
moral worth; we may be cursed and blessed without justice
behind either. Not everything which happens to us occurs with
reference to something about us.
Metilius hadn’t died because his mother was bad, nor was
the world unfair because his mother was good and yet he had
died. His death was, in Seneca’s image, the work of Fortune,
and the goddess was no moral judge. She did not evaluate her
victims like the god of Deuteronomy and reward them
according to merit. She in�icted harm with the moral blindness
of a hurricane.

(Ill. 13.10)
4. Seneca knew in himself the sapping impulse to interpret
failures according to a misguided model of justice. Upon the
accession of Claudius in early 41, he became a pawn in a plan
by the Empress Messalina to rid herself of Caligula’s sister, Julia
Livilla. The empress accused Julia of having an adulterous
a�air and falsely named Seneca as her lover. He was in an
instant stripped of family, money, friends, reputation and his
political career, and sent into exile on the island of Corsica, one
of the most desolate parts of Rome’s vast empire.
He would have endured periods of self-blame alternating
with feelings of bitterness. He would have reproached himself
for misreading the political situation with regard to
Messalina, and resented the way his loyalty and talents had
been rewarded by Claudius.
Both moods were based on a picture of a moral universe
where external circumstances re�ected internal qualities. It
was a relief from this punitive schema to remember Fortune:
I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.
Seneca’s political failure did not have to be read as
retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out
after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence
in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless

by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress.
Seneca was not only distancing himself from disgrace. The
imperial o�cial he had been had not deserved all the credit
for his status either.
The interventions of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical,
introduced a random element into human destinies.
(Ill. 13.11)
Anxiety
A condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both
wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the
worst. Typically leaves su�erers unable to derive enjoyment from
supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social.

(Ill. 13.12)
Even in sublime settings the anxious will remain preoccupied by
private anticipations of ruin and may prefer to be left alone in a
room.
1. The traditional form of comfort is reassurance. One explains to
the anxious that their fears are exaggerated and that events are
sure to unfold in a desired direction.
2. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our
rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the
worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the
worst came to pass. Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that
bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely
ever to be as bad as we fear.
3. In February 63, Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a civil servant working
in Sicily, learned of a lawsuit against him which threatened to
end his career and disgrace his name for ever. He wrote to
Seneca.
‘You may expect that I will advise you to picture a happy
outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope,’ replied the
philosopher, but ‘I am going to conduct you to peace of
mind through another route’ – which culminated in the
advice:

If you wish to put o� all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is
certainly going to happen.
Seneca wagered that once we look rationally at what will occur
if our desires are not ful�lled, we will almost certainly �nd that
the underlying problems are more modest than the anxieties
they have bred. Lucilius had grounds for sadness but not
hysteria:
If you lose this case, can anything more severe happen to you than being sent
into exile or led to prison?… ‘I may become a poor man’; I shall then be one
among many. ‘I may be exiled’; I shall then regard myself as though I had been
born in the place to which I’ll be sent. ‘They may put me in chains.’ What then?
Am I free from bonds now?
Prison and exile were bad, but – the linchpin of the argument –
not as bad as the desperate Lucilius might have feared before
scrutinizing the anxiety.
4. It follows that wealthy individuals fearing the loss of their
fortune should never be reassured with remarks about the
improbability of their ruin. They should spend a few days in a
draughty room on a diet of thin soup and stale bread. Seneca
had taken the counsel from one of his favourite philosophers:
The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during
which he would be niggardly in satisfying hunger, with the object of seeing …
whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the de�cit good.
The wealthy would, Seneca promised, soon come to an
important realization:
‘Is this really the condition that I feared?’ … Endure [this poverty] for three or
four days at a time, sometimes for more … and I assure you … you will
understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune.
5. Many Romans found it surprising, even ridiculous, to discover
that the philosopher pro�ering such advice lived in
considerable luxury himself. By his early forties, Seneca had
accumulated enough money through his political career to
acquire villas and farms. He ate well, and developed a love of

expensive furniture, in particular, citrus-wood tables with ivory
legs.
He resented suggestions that there was something
unphilosophical in his behaviour:
Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned
wisdom to poverty.
And with touching pragmatism:
I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is o�ered, I
will choose the better half.
6. It wasn’t hypocrisy. Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it
recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers
wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a productum, a
preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime. Stoics
may live with as many gifts of Fortune as the foolish. Their
houses can be as grand, their furniture as beautiful. They are
identi�ed as wise by only one detail: how they would respond
to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and
the servants without rage or despair.
7. The idea that a wise person should be able to walk away from
all Fortune’s gifts calmly was Stoicism’s most extreme, peculiar
claim, given that Fortune grants us not only houses and money
but also our friends, our family, even our bodies:
The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.
The wise man is self-su�cient … if he loses a hand through disease or war, or if
some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satis�ed with what is
left.
Which sounds absurd, unless we re�ne our notion of what
Seneca meant by ‘satis�ed’. We should not be happy to lose an
eye, but life would be possible even if we did so. The right
number of eyes and hands is a productum. Two examples of the
position:
The wise man will not despise himself even if he has the stature of a dwarf, but
he nevertheless wishes to be tall.
The wise man is self-su�cient in that he can do without friends, not that he
desires to do without them.

8. Seneca’s wisdom was more than theoretical. Exiled to Corsica,
he found himself abruptly stripped of all luxuries. The island
had been a Roman possession since 238 BC, but it had not
enjoyed the bene�ts of civilization. The few Romans on the
island rarely settled outside two colonies on the east coast,
Aleria and Mariana, and it was unlikely that Seneca was
allowed to inhabit them, for he complained of hearing only
‘barbaric speech’ around him, and was associated with a
forbidding building near Luri at the northern tip of the island
known since ancient times as ‘Seneca’s Tower’.
Conditions must have contrasted painfully with life in
Rome. But in a letter to his mother, the former wealthy
statesman explained that he had managed to accommodate
himself to his circumstances, thanks to years of morning
premeditations and periods of thin soup:
Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be o�ering peace. All those
blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public o�ce, in�uence – I
relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me.
Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely taken
them, not torn them from me.
(Ill. 13.13)
Feelings of being mocked by
(i) inanimate objects
A sense that one’s wishes are being purposefully frustrated by a
pencil which drops o� a table or a drawer that refuses to open. The
frustration caused by the inanimate object is compounded by a sense
that it holds one in contempt. It is acting in a frustrating way in

order to signal that it does not share the view of one’s intelligence or
status to which one is attached and to which others subscribe.
(ii) animate objects
A similarly acute pain arising from the impression that other people
are silently ridiculing one’s character.
On arrival at a hotel in Sweden I am accompanied to my room by
an employee who o�ers to carry my luggage. ‘It will be far too heavy
for a man like you,’ he smiles, emphasizing ‘man’ to imply its
opposite. He has Nordic blond hair (perhaps a skier, a hunter of elk;
in past centuries, a warrior) and a determined expression. ‘Monsieur
will enjoy the room,’ he says. It is unclear why he has called me
‘Monsieur’, knowing that I have come from London, and the use of
‘will’ smacks of an order. The suggestion becomes plainly
incongruous, and evidence of conspiracy, when the room turns out to
su�er from tra�c noise, a faulty shower and a broken television.
In otherwise shy, quiet people, feelings of being slyly mocked may
boil over into sudden shouting and acts of cruelty – even murder.
1. It is tempting, when we are hurt, to believe that the thing which
hurt us intended to do so. It is tempting to move from a sentence
with clauses connected by ‘and’ to one with clauses connected by
‘in order to’; to move from thinking that ‘The pencil fell o� the
table and now I am annoyed’ to the view that ‘The pencil fell o�
the table in order to annoy me.’
2. Seneca collected examples of such feelings of persecution by
inanimate objects. Herodotus’s Histories provided one. Cyrus, the
king of Persia and the founder of its great empire, owned a
beautiful white horse which he always rode into battle. In the
spring of 539 BC King Cyrus declared war on the Assyrians in
hope of expanding his territory, and set o� with a large army for
their capital, Babylon, on the banks of the Euphrates river. The
march went well, until the army reached the river Gyndes, which
�owed down from the Matienian mountains into the Tigris. The
Gyndes was known to be perilous even in the summer, and at this
time of year was brown and foaming, swollen with the winter
rains. The king’s generals counselled delay, but Cyrus was not

daunted and gave orders for an immediate crossing. Yet as the
boats were being readied, Cyrus’s horse slipped away unnoticed
and attempted to swim across the river. The current seized the
beast, toppled it and swept it downstream to its death.
Cyrus was livid. The river had dared to make away with his
sacred white horse, the horse of the warrior who had ground
Croesus into the dust and terri�ed the Greeks. He screamed
and cursed, and at the height of his fury decided to pay back
the Gyndes for its insolence. He vowed to punish the river by
making it so weak that a woman would in future be able to
cross it without so much as wetting her knees.
Setting aside plans for the expansion of his empire, Cyrus
divided his army into two parts, marked out 180 small canals
running o� from each bank of the river in various directions
and ordered his men to start digging, which they did for an
entire summer, their morale broken, all hope of a quick
defeat of the Assyrians gone. And when they were �nished,
the once-rapid Gyndes was split into 360 separate channels
through which water �owed so languidly that astonished
local women could indeed wander across the trickling stream
without hoisting their skirts. His anger assuaged, the King of
Persia instructed his exhausted army to resume the march to
Babylon.
3. Seneca collected similar examples of feelings of persecution at
the hands of animate objects. One concerned the Roman
governor of Syria, Gnaeus Piso, a brave general but a troubled
soul. When a soldier returned from a period of leave without the
friend he had set out with and claimed to have no idea where he
had gone, Piso judged that the soldier was lying; he had killed his
friend, and would have to pay with his life.
The condemned man swore he hadn’t murdered anyone
and begged for time for an inquiry to be made, but Piso knew
better and had the soldier escorted to his death without
delay.

However, as the centurion in charge was preparing to cut
o� the soldier’s head, the missing companion arrived at the
gates of the camp. The army broke into spontaneous applause
and the relieved centurion called o� the execution.
Piso took the news less well. Hearing the cheers, he felt
them to be mocking his judgement. He grew red and angry,
so angry that he summoned his guards and ordered both men
to be executed, the soldier who hadn’t committed murder and
the one who hadn’t been murdered. And because he was by
this point feeling very persecuted, Piso also sent the
centurion o� to his death for good measure.
4. The governor of Syria had at once interpreted the applause of his
soldiers as a wish to undermine his authority and to question his
judgement. Cyrus had at once interpreted the river’s
manslaughter of his horse as murder.
Seneca had an explanation for such errors of judgement; it
lay with ‘a certain abjectness of spirit’ in men like Cyrus and
Piso. Behind their readiness to anticipate insult lay a fear of
deserving ridicule. When we suspect that we are appropriate
targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that
someone or something is out to hurt us:
‘So and so did not give me an audience today, though he gave it to others’; ‘he
haughtily repulsed or openly laughed at my conversation’; ‘he did not give me
the seat of honour, but placed me at the foot of the table.’
There may be innocent grounds. He didn’t give me an audience
today, because he would prefer to see me next week. It seemed
like he was laughing at me, but it was a facial tic. These are not
the �rst explanations to come into our minds when we are abject
of spirit.
5. So we must endeavour to surround our initial impressions with a
�reguard and refuse to act at once on their precepts. We must ask
ourselves if someone who has not answered a letter is necessarily
being tardy to annoy us, and if the missing keys have necessarily
been stolen:

[The wise do] not put a wrong construction upon everything.
6. And the reason why they are able not to was indirectly explained
by Seneca in a letter to Lucilius, the day he came upon a sentence
in one of the works of the philosopher Hecato:
I shall tell you what I liked today in [his writings]; it is these words: ‘What
progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.’ That was
indeed a great bene�t;… you may be sure that such a man is a friend to all
mankind.
7. There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness
and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we
respond to noise. Seneca lived near a gymnasium. The walls were
thin and the racket was continuous. He described the problem to
Lucilius:
Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates around my ears!… For example,
when a strenuous gentleman is exercising himself by swinging lead weights,
when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him
grunting; and whenever he releases his pent-up breath, I can hear him panting in
wheezy, high-pitched tones. When my attention turns to a less active type who is
happy with an ordinary, inexpensive massage, I can hear the smack of a hand
pummelling his shoulders … One should add to this the arresting of an
occasional reveller or pickpocket, the racket of the man who always likes to hear
his own voice in the bathroom … the hair-plucker with his shrill, penetrating cry
… then the cake seller with his varied cries, the sausage man, the confectioner
and everyone hawking for the catering shops.
8. Those who are unfriendly with themselves �nd it hard to
imagine that the cake seller is shouting in order to sell cakes. The
builder on the ground �oor of a hotel in Rome (1) may be
pretending to repair a wall, but his real intention is to tease the
man trying to read a book in a room on the upper level (2).

(Ill. 13.14)
Abject interpretation: The builder is hammering in order to
annoy me. Friendly interpretation: The builder is hammering
and I am annoyed.
9. To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those
making a noise know nothing of us. We should place a �reguard
between the noise outside and an internal sense of deserving
punishment. We should not import into scenarios where they
don’t belong pessimistic interpretations of others’ motives.
Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to
make us furious:
All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no
disturbance within.

3
Of course, there would be few great human achievements if we
accepted all frustrations. The motor of our ingenuity is the question
‘Does it have to be like this?’, from which arise political reforms,
scienti�c developments, improved relationships, better books. The
Romans were consummate at refusing frustration. They hated winter
cold and developed under-�oor heating. They didn’t wish to walk on
muddy roads and so paved them. In the middle of the �rst century
AD the Roman inhabitants of Nîmes in Provence decided they wanted
more water for their city than nature had granted them, and so
spent a hundred million sesterces building an extraordinary symbol
of human resistance to the status quo. To the north of Nîmes, near
Uzès, Roman engineers found a water source strong enough to
irrigate the baths and fountains of their city, and drew up plans to
divert the water 50 miles through mountains and across valleys in a
system of aqueducts and underground pipes. When the engineers
confronted the cavernous gorge of the river Gard, they did not
despair at nature’s obstacle but erected a massive three-tiered
aqueduct, 360 metres long and 48 metres high, capable of carrying
35,000 cubic metres of water a day – so that the inhabitants of
Nîmes would never be forced to su�er the frustration of a shallow
bath.

(Ill. 14.1)
Unfortunately, the mental faculties which search so assiduously for
alternatives are hard to arrest. They continue to play out scenarios
of change and progress even when there is no hope of altering
reality. To generate the energy required to spur us to action, we are
reminded by jolts of discomfort – anxiety, pain, outrage, o�ence –
that reality is not as we would wish it. Yet these jolts have served no
purpose if we cannot subsequently e�ect improvement, if we lose
our peace of mind but are unable to divert rivers; which is why, for
Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to
mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept
the unalterable with tranquillity.
The Stoics had another image with which to evoke our condition as
creatures at times able to e�ect change yet always subject to
external necessities. We are like dogs who have been tied to an
unpredictable cart. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of
leeway, but not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we
please.
The metaphor had been formulated by the Stoic philosophers
Zeno and Chrysippus and reported by the Roman Bishop Hippolytus:

When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its
spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be
compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be
compelled to follow what is destined.
A dog will naturally hope to go wherever it pleases. But as Zeno and
Chrysippus’s metaphor implies, if it cannot, then it is better for the
animal to be trotting behind the cart rather than dragged and
strangled by it. Though the dog’s �rst impulse may be to �ght
against the sudden swerve of the cart in an awful direction, his
sorrows will only be compounded by his resistance.
(Ill. 14.2)
As Seneca put it:
An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it … there is no yoke so tight that
it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it �ghts against it. The one
alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.
To reduce the violence of our mutiny against events which veer
away from our intentions, we should re�ect that we, too, are never
without a leash around our neck. The wise will learn to identify
what is necessary and follow it at once, rather than exhaust
themselves in protest. When a wise man is told that his suitcase has
been lost in transit, he will resign himself in seconds to the fact.
Seneca reported how the founder of Stoicism had behaved upon the
loss of his possessions:
When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been
sunk, he said, ‘Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’

It may sound like a recipe for passivity and quietude,
encouragement to resign ourselves to frustrations that might have
been overcome. It could leave us without heart to build even a
diminutive aqueduct like that in Bornègre, in a valley a few
kilometres north of the Pont du Gard, a modest 17 metres long and
4 metres high.
But Seneca’s point is more subtle. It is no less unreasonable to
accept something as necessary when it isn’t as to rebel against
something when it is. We can as easily go astray by accepting the
unnecessary and denying the possible, as by denying the necessary
and wishing for the impossible. It is for reason to make the
distinction.
Whatever the similarities between ourselves and a dog on a leash,
we have a critical advantage: we have reason and the dog doesn’t.
So the animal does not at �rst grasp that he is even tied to a leash,
nor understand the connection between the swerves of the cart and
the pain in his neck. He will be confused by the changes in
direction, it will be hard for him to calculate the cart’s trajectory,
and so he will su�er constant painful jolts. But reason enables us to
theorize with accuracy about the path of our cart, which o�ers us a
chance, unique among living beings, to increase our sense of
freedom by ensuring a good slack between ourselves and necessity.
Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable
con�ict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly,
rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless
to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude
towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity
that we �nd our distinctive freedom.
In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero
ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company,
encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty
praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his
taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken o�

the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers.
Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their
husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night
disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-
by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished
could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a
mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives
would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had
married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger,
Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his
villa outside Rome. Twice he o�ered his resignation; twice Nero
refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather
die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience
could allow him to believe such promises.
He turned to philosophy. He could not escape Nero, and what he
could not change, reason asked him to accept. During what might
have been intolerably anxious years, Seneca devoted himself to the
study of nature. He began writing a book about the earth and the
planets. He looked at the vast sky and the constellation of the
heavens, he studied the unbounded sea and the high mountains. He
observed �ashes of lightning and speculated on their origins:
A lightning bolt is �re that has been compressed and hurled violently. Sometimes we
take up water in our two clasped hands and pressing our palms together squirt out
water the way a pump does. Suppose something like this occurs in the clouds. The
constricted space of the compressed clouds forces out the air that is between them
and by means of this pressure sets the air a�re and hurls it the way a catapult does.
He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air
trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of
geological �atulence:
Among the arguments that prove earthquakes occur because of moving air, this is
one you shouldn’t hesitate to put forward: when a great tremor has exhausted its
rage against cities and countries, another equal to it cannot follow. After the largest
shock, there are only gentle quakes because the �rst tremor, acting with greater
vehemence, has created an exit for the struggling air.

It hardly mattered that Seneca’s science was faulty; it was more
signi�cant that a man whose life could at any time have been cut
short by the caprice of a murderous emperor appeared to gain
immense relief from the spectacle of nature – perhaps because in
mighty natural phenomena lie reminders of all that we are
powerless to change, of all that we must accept. Glaciers, volcanoes,
earthquakes and hurricanes stand as impressive symbols of what
exceeds us. In the human world, we grow to believe that we may
always alter our destinies, and hope and worry accordingly. It is
apparent from the heedless pounding of the oceans or the �ight of
comets across the night sky that there are forces entirely indi�erent
to our desires. The indi�erence is not nature’s alone; humans can
wield equally blind powers over their fellows, but it is nature which
gives us a most elegant lesson in the necessities to which we are
subject:
Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its heat;
and we must sweat. Unseasonable weather upsets the health; and we must fall ill. In
certain places we may meet with wild beasts, or with men who are more destructive
than any beasts … And we cannot change this order of things … it is to this law [of
Nature] that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they
should obey … That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.
Seneca began his book on nature as soon as he had �rst o�ered
Nero his resignation. He was granted three years. Then in April 65,
Piso’s plot against the emperor was uncovered, and a centurion
dispatched to the philosopher’s villa. He was ready. Topless Paulina
and her maids might have collapsed into tears –
– but Seneca had learned to follow the cart obediently, and slit his
veins without protest. As he had reminded Marcia on the loss of her
son Metilius:
What need is there to weep over parts of life?
The whole of it calls for tears.

(Ill. 14.3)

IV

Consolation for Inadequacy

1
After centuries of neglect, at times hostility, after being scattered
and burnt and surviving only in partial forms in the vaults and
libraries of monasteries, the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome
returned triumphantly to favour in the sixteenth century. Among the
intellectual élites of Europe, a consensus emerged that the �nest
thinking the world had yet known had occurred in the minds of a
handful of geniuses in the city states of Greece and the Italian
peninsula between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of
Rome – and that there was no greater imperative for the educated
than to familiarize themselves with the richness of these works.
Major new editions were prepared of, among others, Plato,
Lucretius, Seneca, Aristotle, Catullus, Longinus and Cicero, and
selections from the classics – Erasmus’s Apophthegmata and Adages,
Stobeus’s Sententiae, Antonio de Guevara’s Golden Epistles and Petrus
Crinitus’s Honorable Learning – spread into libraries across Europe.
In south-western France, on the summit of a wooded hill 30 miles
east of Bordeaux, sat a handsome castle made of yellow stone with
dark-red roofs.

(Ill. 15.4)
It was home to a middle-aged nobleman, his wife Françoise, his
daughter Léonor, their sta� and their animals (chickens, goats, dogs
and horses). Michel de Montaigne’s grandfather had bought the
property in 1477 from the proceeds of the family salt-�sh business,
his father had added some wings and extended the land under
cultivation, and the son had been looking after it since the age of
thirty-�ve, though he had little interest in household management
and knew almost nothing about farming (‘I can scarcely tell my
cabbages from my lettuces’).
He preferred to pass his time in a circular library on the third
�oor of a tower at one corner of the castle: ‘I spend most days of my
life there, and most hours of each day.’
(Ill. 15.5)
The library had three windows (with what Montaigne described as
‘splendid and unhampered views’), a desk, a chair and, arranged on
�ve tiers of shelves in a semicircle, about a thousand volumes of
philosophy, history, poetry and religion. It was here that Montaigne
read Socrates’ (‘the wisest man that ever was’) steadfast address to
the impatient jurors of Athens in a Latin edition of Plato translated

by Marsilio Ficino; here that he read Epicurus’s vision of happiness
in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, edited
by Denys Lambin in 1563; and here that he read and re-read Seneca
(an author ‘strikingly suited to my humour’) in a new set of his
works printed in Basle in 1557.
He had been initiated in the classics at an early age. He had been
taught Latin as a �rst language. By seven or eight, he had read
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Before he was sixteen, he had bought a set of
Virgil and knew intimately the Aeneid, as well as Terence, Plautus
and the Commentaries of Caesar. And such was his devotion to books
that, after working as a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux for
thirteen years, he retired with the idea of devoting himself entirely
to them. Reading was the solace of his life:
It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and,
at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain
is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply
need to have recourse to books.
But the library shelves, with their implication of an unbounded
admiration for the life of the mind, did not tell the full story. One
had to look more closely around the library, stand in the middle of
the room and tilt one’s head to the ceiling: in the mid-1570s
Montaigne had a set of �fty-seven short inscriptions culled from the
Bible and the classics painted across the wooden beams, and these
suggested some profound reservations about the bene�ts of having a
mind:

(Ill. 15.6)
The happiest life is to be without thought. – Sophocles
Have you seen a man who thinks he is wise? You have more to hope for from a
madman than from him. – Proverbs
There is nothing certain but uncertainty, nothing more miserable and more proud
than man. – Pliny
Everything is too complicated for men to be able to understand. – Ecclesiastes
Ancient philosophers had believed that our powers of reason could
a�ord us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures.
Reason allowed us to control our passions and to correct the false
notions prompted by our instincts. Reason tempered the wild
demands of our bodies and led us to a balanced relationship with
our appetites for food and sex. Reason was a sophisticated, almost
divine, tool o�ering us mastery over the world and ourselves.
In the Tusculan Disputations, of which there was a copy in the round
library, Cicero had heaped praise upon the bene�ts of intellectual
work:
There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making
known to us, while still in this world, the in�nity of matter, the immense grandeur
of Nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety,
moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them
all things, the high and the low, the �rst, the last and everything in between;
scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how
to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation.
Though he owned a thousand books and had bene�ted from a �ne
classical education, this laudation so infuriated Montaigne, it ran so
contrary to the spirit of the library beams, that he expressed his
indignation with uncharacteristic ferocity:
Man is a wretched creature … just listen to him bragging … Is this fellow describing
the properties of almighty and everlasting God! In practice, thousands of little
women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant
lives than [Cicero].

The Roman philosopher had overlooked how violently unhappy
most scholars were; he had arrogantly disregarded the appalling
troubles for which human beings, alone among all other creatures,
had been singled out – troubles which might in dark moments leave
us regretting that we had not been born ants or tortoises.
Or goats. I found her in the yard of a farm a few kilometres from
Montaigne’s château, in the hamlet of Les Gauchers.
(Ill. 15.7)
She had never read the Tusculan Disputations nor Cicero’s On the
Laws. And yet she seemed content, nibbling at stray pieces of
lettuce, occasionally shaking her head like an elderly woman
expressing quiet disagreement. It was not an unenviable existence.
Montaigne was himself struck by, and elaborated upon the
advantages of living as an animal rather than as a reasoning human
with a large library. Animals knew instinctively how to help
themselves when they were sick: goats could pick out dittany from a
thousand other plants if they were wounded, tortoises automatically
looked for origanum when they were bitten by vipers, and storks
could give themselves salt-water enemas. By contrast, humans were
forced to rely on expensive, misguided doctors (medicine chests
were �lled with absurd prescriptions: ‘the urine of a lizard, the
droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from
under the right wing of a white pigeon, and for those of us with
colic paroxysms, triturated rat shit’).
Animals also instinctively understood complex ideas without
su�ering long periods of study. Tunny-�sh were spontaneous

experts in astrology. ‘Wherever they may be when they are
surprised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the
following equinox,’ reported Montaigne. They understood geometry
and arithmetic, too, for they swam together in groups in the shape
of a perfect cube: ‘If you count one line of them you have the count
of the whole school, since the same �gure applies to their depth,
breadth and length.’ Dogs had an innate grasp of dialectical logic.
Montaigne mentioned one who, looking for his master, came upon a
three-pronged fork in the road. He �rst looked down one road, then
another, and then ran down the third after concluding that his
master must have chosen it:
Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and copulative propositions
and adequately enumerated the parts. Does it matter whether he learned all this
from himself or from the Dialectica of George of Trebizond?
Animals frequently had the upper hand in love as well. Montaigne
read enviously of an elephant who had fallen in love with a �ower-
seller in Alexandria. When being led through the market, he knew
how to slip his wrinkled trunk through her neckband and would
massage her breasts with a dexterity no human could match.
And without trying, the humblest farm animal could exceed the
philosophical detachment of the wisest sages of antiquity. The Greek
philosopher Pyrrho once travelled on a ship which ran into a �erce
storm. All around him passengers began to panic, afraid that the
mutinous waves would shatter their fragile craft. But one passenger
did not lose his composure and sat quietly in a corner, wearing a
tranquil expression. He was a pig:
Dare we conclude that the bene�t of reason (which we praise so highly and on
account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was
placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the
calm and repose which we should enjoy without it and if it makes our condition
worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig?
It was questionable whether the mind gave us anything to be
grateful for:
We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries
about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy,

unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and
curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and
to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive.
If o�ered a choice, Montaigne would in the end perhaps not have
opted to live as a goat – but only just. Cicero had presented the
benevolent picture of reason. Sixteen centuries later, it was for
Montaigne to introduce the adverse:
To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more
ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.
– the biggest blockheads of all being philosophers like Cicero who
had never suspected they might even be such things. Misplaced
con�dence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy – and, indirectly,
also of inadequacy.
Beneath his painted beams, Montaigne had outlined a new kind of
philosophy, one which acknowledged how far we were from the
rational, serene creatures whom most of the ancient thinkers had
taken us to be. We were for the most part hysterical and demented,
gross and agitated souls beside whom animals were in many
respects paragons of health and virtue – an unfortunate reality
which philosophy was obliged to re�ect, but rarely did:
Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it
merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.
And yet if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery
we did not have, we stood to �nd – in Montaigne’s generous,
redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate in
our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way.

2
On Sexual Inadequacy
How problematic to have both a body and a mind, for the former
stands in almost monstrous contrast to the latter’s dignity and
intelligence. Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They
force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to
lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds
reminiscent of hyenas calling out to one another across the barren
wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage
to their whims and rhythms. Our whole perspective on life can be
altered by the digestion of a heavy lunch. ‘I feel quite a di�erent
person before and after a meal,’ concurred Montaigne:
When good health and a �ne sunny day smile at me, I am quite debonair; give me
an ingrowing toe-nail, and I am touchy, bad-tempered and unapproachable.
Even the greatest philosophers have not been spared bodily
humiliation. ‘Imagine Plato struck down by epilepsy or apoplexy,’
proposed Montaigne, ‘then challenge him to get any help from all
those noble and splendid faculties of his soul.’ Or imagine that in
the middle of a symposium, Plato had been struck by a need to fart:
That sphincter which serves to discharge our stomachs has dilations and
contractions proper to itself, independent of our wishes or even opposed to them.
Montaigne heard of a man who knew how to fart at will, and on
occasion arranged a sequence of farts in a metrical accompaniment
to poetry, but such mastery did not contravene his general
observation that our bodies have the upper hand over our minds,
and that the sphincter is ‘most indiscreet and disorderly’. Montaigne
even heard a tragic case of one behind ‘so stormy and churlish that

it has obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and
unremittingly for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.’
No wonder we may be tempted to deny our uncomfortable, insulting
coexistence with these vessels. Montaigne met a woman who,
acutely aware of how repulsive her digestive organs were, tried to
live as though she didn’t have any:
[This] lady (amongst the greatest) … shares the opinion that chewing distorts the
face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; so when hungry, she
avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people
eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he �lls
his belly than when he empties it.
Montaigne knew men so overwhelmed by their sexual longings that
they ended their torment through castration. Others tried to
suppress their lust by applying snow-and-vinegar compresses to
their overactive testicles. The Emperor Maximilian, conscious of a
con�ict between being regal and having a body, ordered that no one
should see him naked, particularly below the waist. He expressly
requested in his will that he be buried in a set of linen underpants.
‘He should have added a codicil,’ noted Montaigne, ‘saying that the
man who pulled them on ought to be blindfolded.’
However drawn we may be towards such radical measures,
Montaigne’s philosophy is one of reconciliation: ‘The most uncouth
of our a�ictions is to despise our being.’ Rather than trying to cut
ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our
perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as
unalterable facts of our condition, neither so terrible nor so
humiliating.
In the summer of 1993, L. and I travelled to northern Portugal for a
holiday. We drove along the villages of the Minho, then spent a few
days south of Viana do Castelo. It was here, on the last night of our
holiday, in a small hotel overlooking the sea, that I realized – quite
without warning – that I could no longer make love. It would hardly
have been possible to surmount, let alone mention the experience, if

I had not, a few months before going to Portugal, come across the
twenty-�rst chapter of the �rst volume of Montaigne’s Essays.
The author recounted therein that a friend of his had heard a man
explain how he had lost his erection just as he prepared to enter a
woman. The embarrassment of the detumescence struck Montaigne’s
friend with such force, that the next time he was in bed with a
woman, he could not banish it from his mind, and the fear of the
same catastrophe befalling him grew so overwhelming that it
prevented his own penis from sti�ening. From then on, however
much he desired a woman, he could not attain an erection, and the
ignoble memory of every misadventure taunted and tyrannized him
with increasing force.
Montaigne’s friend had grown impotent after failing to achieve the
unwavering rational command over his penis that he assumed to be
an indispensable feature of normal manhood. Montaigne did not
blame the penis: ‘Except for genuine impotence, never again are you
incapable if you are capable of doing it once.’ It was the oppressive
notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and
the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left
the man unable to perform. The solution was to redraw the portrait;
it was by accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless
possibility in love-making that one could preempt its occurrence –
as the stricken man eventually discovered. In bed with a woman, he
learnt to:
admit beforehand that he was subject to this in�rmity and spoke openly about it, so
relieving the tensions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be
expected, his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily on him.
Montaigne’s frankness allowed the tensions in the reader’s own soul
to be relieved. The penis’s abrupt moods were removed from the
Cimmerian recesses of wordless shame and reconsidered with the
unshockable, worldly eye of a philosopher whom nothing bodily
could repulse. A sense of personal culpability was lessened by what
Montaigne described as:

[The universal] disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so
inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down
when we most need it.
A man who failed with his mistress and was unable to do any more
than mumble an apology could regain his forces and soothe the
anxieties of his beloved by accepting that his impotence belonged to
a broad realm of sexual mishaps, neither very rare nor very peculiar.
Montaigne knew a Gascon nobleman who, after failing to maintain
an erection with a woman, �ed home, cut o� his penis and sent it to
the lady ‘to atone for his o�ence’. Montaigne proposed instead that:
If [couples] are not ready, they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into
perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a �rst rejection, it is better
… to wait for an opportune moment … a man who su�ers a rejection should make
gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly
persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all.
It was a new language, unsensational and intimate, with which to
articulate the loneliest moments of our sexuality. Cutting a path into
the private sorrows of the bedchamber, Montaigne drained them of
their ignominy, attempting all the while to reconcile us to our
bodily selves. His courage in mentioning what is secretly lived but
rarely heard expands the range of what we can dare to express to
our lovers and to ourselves – a courage founded on Montaigne’s
conviction that nothing that can happen to man is inhuman, that
‘every man bears the whole Form of the human condition,’ a
condition which includes – we do not need to blush nor hate
ourselves for it – the risk of an occasional rebellious �accidity in the
penis.
Montaigne attributed our problems with our bodies in part to an
absence of honest discussion about them in polite circles.
Representative stories and images do not tend to identify feminine
grace with a strong interest in love-making, nor authority with the
possession of a sphincter or penis. Pictures of kings and ladies do
not encourage us to think of these eminent souls breaking wind or

making love. Montaigne �lled out the picture in blunt, beautiful
French:
Au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul.
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Les Roys et les philosophes �entent, et les dames aussi.
Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.
King Henri III (Ill. 16.1)

Catherine de’ Medici (Ill. 16.2)
He could have put it otherwise. Instead of ‘cul’, ‘derrière’ or ‘fesses’.
Instead of ‘�enter’, ‘aller au cabinet’. Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of
the French and English Tongues (for the furtherance of young Learners,
and the advantage of all others that endeavour to arrive at the most
exactly knowledge of the French language), printed in London in 1611,
explained that ‘�enter’ referred particularly to the excretions of
vermin and badgers. If Montaigne felt the need for such strong
language, it was to correct an equally strong denial of the body in
works of philosophy and in drawing rooms. The view that ladies
never had to wash their hands and kings had no behinds had made
it timely to remind the world that they shat and had arses:
The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what
have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and
to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the
words kill, thieve, or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our
teeth.
In the vicinity of Montaigne’s château were several beech-tree
forests, one to the north near the village of Castillon-la-Bataille,
another to the east near St Vivien. Montaigne’s daughter Léonor
must have known their silences and their grandeur. She was not
encouraged to know their name: the French for ‘beech tree’ is
‘fouteau’. The French for ‘fuck’ is ‘foutre’.
‘My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the
more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry,’ Montaigne
explained of Léonor, then about fourteen:
She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been
quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw o�
her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when
she came across the name of that well-known tree fouteau. The woman she has for
governess pulled her up short rather rudely and made her jump over that awkward
ditch.

Twenty coarse lackeys could not, Montaigne wryly remarked, have
taught Léonor more about what lurked beneath ‘fouteau’ than a
stern injunction to longjump over the word. But for the governess,
or the ‘old crone’ as her employer more bluntly termed her, the leap
was essential because a young woman could not easily combine
dignity with a knowledge of what might occur if in a few years’ time
she found herself in a bedroom with a man.
Montaigne was faulting our conventional portraits for leaving out so
much of what we are. It was in part in order to correct this that he
wrote his own book. When he retired at the age of thirty-eight, he
wished to write, but was unsure what his theme should be. Only
gradually did an idea form in his mind for a book so unusual as to
be unlike any of the thousand volumes on the semicircular shelves.
He abandoned millennia of authorial coyness to write about
himself. He set out to describe as explicitly as possible the workings
of his own mind and body – declaring his intention in the preface to
the Essays, two volumes of which were published in Bordeaux in
1580, with a third added in a Paris edition eight years later:
Had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet
liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have
portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked.
No author had hitherto aspired to present himself to his readers
without any clothes on. There was no shortage of o�cial, fully
clothed portraits, accounts of the lives of saints and popes, Roman
emperors and Greek statesmen. There was even an o�cial portrait
of Montaigne by Thomas de Leu (1562–c. 1620), which showed him
dressed in the mayoral robes of the city, with the chain of the order
of Saint-Michel o�ered to him by Charles IX in 1571, wearing an
inscrutable, somewhat severe expression.

(Ill. 16.3)
But this robed, Ciceronian self was not what Montaigne wished his
Essays to reveal. He was concerned with the whole man, with the
creation of an alternative to the portraits which had left out most of
what man was. It was why his book came to include discussions of
his meals, his penis, his stools, his sexual conquests and his farts –
details which had seldom featured in a serious book before, so
gravely did they �out man’s image of himself as a rational creature.
Montaigne informed his readers:
That the behaviour of his penis constituted an essential part of his identity:
Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none
makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait
complete.
That he found sex noisy and messy:
Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules
of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as �awed or ridiculous. Just try
and �nd a wise and discreet way of doing it!
That he liked quiet when sitting on the toilet:
Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate
being disrupted.
And that he was very regular about going:

My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous, which is (unless some urgent
business or illness disturbs us) when I jump out of bed.
If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us,
it is because we fashion our lives according to their example,
accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others
mention of themselves. 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.
When I picture to myself the most re�ective and the most wise of men in [sexual]
postures, I hold it as an e�rontery that he should claim to be re�ective and wise.
It is not that wisdom is impossible, rather it is the de�nition of
wisdom that Montaigne was seeking to nuance. True wisdom must
involve an accommodation with our baser selves, it must adopt a
modest view about the role that intelligence and high culture can
play in any life and accept the urgent and at times deeply un-
edifying demands of our mortal frame. Epicurean and Stoic
philosophies had suggested that we could achieve mastery over our
bodies, and never be swept away by our physical and passionate
selves. It is noble advice that taps into our highest aspirations. It is
also impossible, and therefore counter-productive:
What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can
settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power?
It is not very clever of [man] to tailor his obligations to the standards of a di�erent
kind of being.
The body cannot be denied nor overcome, but there is at least, as
Montaigne wished to remind the ‘old crone’, no need to choose
between our dignity and an interest in fouteau:
May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely
corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart?

3
On Cultural Inadequacy
Another cause of a sense of inadequacy is the speed and arrogance
with which people seem to divide the world into two camps, the
camp of the normal and that of the abnormal. Our experiences and
beliefs are liable frequently to be dismissed with a quizzical, slightly
alarmed, ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow,
amounting in a small way to a denial of our legitimacy and
humanity.
In the summer of 1580, Montaigne acted on the desire of a lifetime,
and made his �rst journey outside France, setting o� on horseback
to Rome via Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He travelled in the
company of four young noblemen, including his brother, Bertrand
de Mattecoulon, and a dozen servants. They were to be away from
home for seventeen months, covering 3,000 miles. Among other
towns, the party rode through Basle, Baden, Scha�hausen,
Augsburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence and
Siena – �nally reaching Rome towards evening on the last day of
November 1580.

As the party travelled, Montaigne observed how people’s ideas of
what was normal altered sharply from province to province. In inns
in the Swiss cantons, they thought it normal that beds should be
raised high o� the ground, so that one needed steps to climb into
them, that there should be pretty curtains around them and that
travellers should have rooms to themselves. A few miles away, in
Germany, it was thought normal that beds should be low on the
ground, have no curtains around them and that travellers should
sleep four to a room. Innkeepers there o�ered feather quilts rather
than the sheets one found in French inns. In Basle, people didn’t mix
water with their wine and had six or seven courses for dinner, and
in Baden they ate only �sh on Wednesdays. The smallest Swiss
village was guarded by at least two policemen; the Germans rang
their bells every quarter of an hour, in certain towns, every minute.
In Lindau, they served soup made of quinces, the meat dish came
before the soup, and the bread was made with fennel.
French travellers were prone to be very upset by the di�erences. In
hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods,
requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not
to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their
language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne
watched them from his table:
Once out of their villages, they feel like �sh out of water. Wherever they go they
cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-countryman

… they celebrate the event … With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel
about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of
an unknown clime.
In the middle of the �fteenth century, in the southern German
states, a new method of heating homes had been developed: the
Kastenofen, a freestanding box-shaped iron stove made up of
rectangular plates bolted together, in which coal or wood could be
burnt. In the long winters, the advantages were great. Closed stoves
could dispense four times the heat of an open �re, yet demanded
less fuel and no chimney-sweeps. The heat was absorbed by the
casing and spread slowly and evenly through the air. Poles were
�xed around the stoves for airing and drying laundry, and families
could use their stoves as seating areas throughout the winter.
(Ill. 17.1)
But the French were not impressed. They found open �res cheaper
to build; they accused German stoves of not providing a source of
light and of withdrawing too much moisture from the air, lending
an oppressive feeling to a room.

(Ill. 17.2)
The subject was a matter of regional incomprehension. In Augsburg
in October 1580, Montaigne met a German who delivered a lengthy
critique of the way French people heated their houses with open
�res, and who then went on to adumbrate the advantages of the
iron stove. On hearing that Montaigne would be spending only a
few days in the town (he had arrived on the 15th and was to leave
on the 19th), he expressed pity for him, citing among the chief
inconveniences of leaving Augsburg the ‘heavy-headedness’ he
would su�er on returning to open �res – the very same ‘heavy-
headedness’ which the French had long condemned iron stoves for
provoking.
Montaigne examined the issue at close quarters. In Baden, he was
assigned a room with an iron stove, and once he had grown used to
a certain smell it released, spent a comfortable night. He noted that
the stove enabled him to dress without putting on a furred gown,
and months later, on a cold night in Italy, expressed regret at the
absence of stoves in his inn.
On his return home, he weighed up the respective qualities of each
heating system:
It is true that the stoves give out an oppressive heat and that the materials of which
they are built produce a smell when hot which causes headaches in those who are
not used to them … On the other hand, since the heat they give out is even, constant

and spread all-over, without the visible �ame, smoke and the draught produced by
our chimneys, it has plenty of grounds for standing comparison with ours.
So what annoyed Montaigne were the �rm, unexamined convictions
of both the Augsburg gentleman and the French that their own
system of heating was superior. Had Montaigne returned from
Germany and installed in his library an iron stove from Augsburg,
his countrymen would have greeted the object with the suspicion
they accorded anything new:
Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to
another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.
When there was of course nothing barbarous nor wondrous about
either a stove or a �replace. The de�nition of normality proposed by
any given society seems to capture only a fraction of what is in fact
reasonable, unfairly condemning vast areas of experience to an alien
status. By pointing out to the man from Augsburg and his Gascon
neighbours that an iron stove and an open �replace had a legitimate
place in the vast realm of acceptable heating systems, Montaigne
was attempting to broaden his readers’ provincial conception of the
normal – and following in the footsteps of his favourite philosopher:
When they asked Socrates where he came from, he did not say ‘From Athens’, but
‘From the world.’
This world had recently revealed itself to be far more peculiar than
anyone in Europe had ever expected. On Friday 12 October 1492,
forty-one years before Montaigne’s birth, Christopher Columbus
reached one of the islands on the archipelago of the Bahamas at the
entrance of the gulf of Florida, and made contact with some
Guanahani Indians, who had never heard of Jesus and walked about
without any clothes on.
Montaigne took an avid interest. In the round library were several
books on the life of the Indian tribes of America, among them
Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s L’histoire générale des Indes, Girolamo
Benzoni’s Historia de mondo novo and Jean de Léry’s Le voyage au
Brésil. He read that in South America, people liked to eat spiders,
grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: ‘They cook them and serve
them up in various sauces.’ There were American tribes in which

virgins openly displayed their private parts, brides had orgies on
their wedding day, men were allowed to marry each other, and the
dead were boiled, pounded into a gruel, mixed with wine and drunk
by their relatives at spirited parties. There were countries in which
women stood up to pee and men squatted down, in which men let
their hair grow on the front of their body, but shaved their back.
There were countries in which men were circumcised, while in
others, they had a horror of the tip of the penis ever seeing the light
of day and so ‘scrupulously stretched the foreskin right over it and
tied it together with little cords’. There were nations in which you
greeted people by turning your back to them, in which when the
king spat, the court favourite held out a hand, and when he
discharged his bowels, attendants ‘gathered up his faeces in a linen
cloth’. Every country seemed to have a di�erent conception of
beauty:
In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, arti�cially. A
man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of
stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was
often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in
their lobes. Elsewhere there are whole nations which carefully blacken their teeth
and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red … The women of Mexico
count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck the hair from the rest
of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it arti�cially.
They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they a�ect giving suck to their
children over their shoulders.
From Jean de Léry, Montaigne learned that the Tupi tribes of Brazil
walked around in Edenic nudity, and showed no trace of shame
(indeed, when Europeans tried to o�er the Tupi women clothes,
they giggled and turned them down, puzzled why anyone would
burden themselves with anything so uncomfortable).

Tant les hommes que la femme étaient aussi entièrement nus que quand ils sortirent du ventre de
leur mère. Jean de Léry, Voyage au Brésil (1578) (Ill. 17.3)
De Léry’s engraver (who had spent eight years with the tribes) took
care to correct the rumour rife in Europe that the Tupis were as
hairy as animals (de Léry: ‘Ils ne sont point naturellement poilus que
nous ne sommes en ce pays’). The men shaved their heads, and the
women grew their hair long, and tied it together with pretty red
braids. The Tupi Indians loved to wash; any time they saw a river,
they would jump into it and rub each other down. They might wash
as many as twelve times a day.
They lived in long barn-like structures which slept 200 people.
Their beds were woven from cotton and slung between pillars like
hammocks (when they went hunting, the Tupis took their beds with
them, and had afternoon naps suspended between trees). Every six
months, a village would move to a new location, because the
inhabitants felt a change of scene would do them good (‘Ils n’ont
d’autre réponse, sinon de dire que changeant l’air, ils se portent mieux’ –
de Léry). The Tupis’ existence was so well ordered, they frequently
lived to be a hundred and never had white or grey hair in old age.

They were also extremely hospitable. When a newcomer arrived in a
village, the women would cover their faces, start crying, and
exclaim, ‘How are you? You’ve taken such trouble to come and visit
us!’ Visitors would immediately be o�ered the favourite Tupi drink,
made from the root of a plant and coloured like claret, which tasted
sharp but was good for the stomach.
Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said
to be devoted to them all. ‘Their entire system of ethics contains
only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love of their
wives,’ reported Montaigne. And the wives were apparently happy
with the arrangement, showing no jealousy (sexual relations were
relaxed, the only prohibition being that one should never sleep with
close relatives). Montaigne, with his wife downstairs in the castle,
relished the detail:
One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are
zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally
zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s
reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many
fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.
It was all undeniably peculiar. Montaigne did not �nd any of it
abnormal.
He was in a minority. Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and
Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands
and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The
Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human
face’ (‘ce sont des bêtes portant �gure humaine’); the Calvinist minister
Richer argued they had no moral sense (‘l’hébétude crasse de leur
esprit ne distingue pas le bien du mal’); and the doctor Laurent
Joubert, after examining �ve Brazilian women, asserted that they
had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the
human race.
Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to
slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after
Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed,

and their peoples enslaved or murdered. Montaigne read of the
barbarism in Bartolomeo Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la
Destrucción de las Indias (printed in Seville in 1552, translated into
French in 1580 by Jacques de Miggrode as Tyrannies et cruautés des
Espagnols perpétrées es Indes occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde).
The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the
weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the
Spanish, to �nd their guests turning on them when they were least
prepared. Their primitive weapons were no match for Spanish
cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy
towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of
pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and
set �re to villages in the night.
(Ill. 17.4)
They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had �ed
and to tear them to pieces.

Men were sent to work in gold- and silver-mines, chained together
by iron collars. When a man died, his body was cut from the chain,
while his companions on either side continued working. Most
Indians did not last more than three weeks in the mines. Women
were raped and dis�gured in front of their husbands.
(Ill. 17.5)
The favoured form of mutilation was to slice chins and noses. Las
Casas told how one woman, seeing the Spanish armies advancing
with their dogs, hanged herself with her child. A soldier arrived, cut
the child in two with his sword, gave one half to his dogs, then
asked a friar to administer last rites so that the infant would be
assured a place in Christ’s heaven.
With men and women separated from each other, desolate and
anxious, the Indians committed suicide in large numbers. Between
Montaigne’s birth in 1533 and the publication of the third book of
his Essays in 1588, the native population of the New World is
estimated to have dropped from 80 to 10 million inhabitants.
The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience
because they were con�dent that they knew what a normal human
being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore
breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed:
We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their
features and clothing were far di�erent from ours. Which of us did not take them for

brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and
brutish ignorance?
After all, they … were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.
They might have seemed like human beings: ‘Ah! But they wear no
breeches …’
Behind the butchery lay messy reasoning. Separating the normal
from the abnormal typically proceeds through a form of inductive
logic, whereby we infer a general law from particular instances (as
logicians would put it, from observing that A1 is ø, A2 is ø and A3 is
ø, we come to the view that ‘All As are ø’). Seeking to judge whether
someone is intelligent, we look for features common to everyone
intelligent we have met hitherto. If we met an intelligent person
who looked like 1, another who looked like 2, and a third like 3, we
are likely to decide that intelligent people read a lot, dress in black
and look rather solemn. There is a danger we will dismiss as stupid,
and perhaps later kill, someone who looks like 4.
(Ill. 17.6)

(Ill. 17.7)
(Ill. 17.8)
(Ill. 17.9)

French travellers who reacted in horror to German stoves in their
bedrooms would have known a number of good �replaces in their
country before arriving in Germany. One would perhaps have
looked like 1, another like 2, a third like 3, and from this they
would have concluded that the essence of a good heating system
was an open hearth.
1.
(Ill. 17.10)
2.
3.
(Ill. 17.11)
Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play. There were
savages in South America; they were not the ones eating spiders:
Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other
criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and
customs of our own country. There we always �nd the perfect religion, the perfect
polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!

He was not attempting to do away with the distinction between
barbarous and civilized; there were di�erences in value between the
customs of countries (cultural relativism being as crude as
nationalism). He was correcting the way we made the distinction.
Our country might have many virtues, but these did not depend on
it being our country. A foreign land might have many faults, but
these could not be identi�ed through the mere fact that its customs
were unusual. Nationality and familiarity were absurd criteria by
which to decide on the good.
French custom had decreed that if one had an impediment in the
nasal passage, one should blow it into a handkerchief. But
Montaigne had a friend who, having re�ected on the matter, had
come to the view that it might be better to blow one’s nose straight
into one’s �ngers:
Defending his action … he asked me why that �lthy mucus should be so privileged
that we should prepare �ne linen to receive it and then should wrap it up and carry
it carefully about on our persons … I considered that what he said was not totally
unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness which
we �nd so hideous in similar customs in another country.
Careful reasoning rather than prejudice was to be the means of
evaluating behaviour, Montaigne’s frustration caused by those who
blithely equated the unfamiliar with the inadequate and so ignored
the most basic lesson in intellectual humility o�ered by the greatest
of the ancient philosophers:
The wisest man that ever was, when asked what he knew, replied that the one thing
he did know was that he knew nothing.
What, then, should we do if we �nd ourselves facing a veiled
suggestion of abnormality manifested in a quizzical, slightly
alarmed ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow,
amounting in its own small way to a denial of legitimacy and
humanity – a reaction which Montaigne’s friend had encountered in
Gascony when he blew his nose into his �ngers, and which had, in

its most extreme form, led to the devastation of the South American
tribes?
Perhaps we should remember the degree to which accusations of
abnormality are regionally and historically founded. To loosen their
hold on us, we need only expose ourselves to the diversity of
customs across time and space. What is considered abnormal in one
group at one moment may not, and will not always be deemed so.
We may cross borders in our minds.
WHAT IS CONSIDERED ABNORMAL WHERE
Montaigne had �lled his library with books that helped him cross
the borders of prejudice. There were history books, travel journals,
the reports of missionaries and sea captains, the literatures of other
lands and illustrated volumes with pictures of strangely clad tribes
eating �sh of unknown names. Through these books, Montaigne
could gain legitimacy for parts of himself of which there was no
evidence in the vicinity – the Roman parts, the Greek parts, the
sides of himself that were more Mexican and Tupi than Gascon, the
parts that would have liked to have six wives or have a shaved back
or wash twelve times a day; he could feel less alone with these by
turning to copies of Tacitus’s Annals, Gonçalez de Mendoza’s history
of China, Goulart’s history of Portugal, Lebelski’s history of Persia,
Leo Africanus’s travels around Africa, Lusignano’s history of Cyprus,

Postel’s collection of Turkish and oriental histories and Muenster’s
universal cosmography (which promised pictures of ‘animaulx
estranges’).
If he felt oppressed by the claims made by others to universal
truth, he could in a similar way line up the theories of the universe
held by all the great ancient philosophers and then witness, despite
the con�dence of each thinker that he was in possession of the
whole truth, the ludicrous divergence that resulted. After such
comparative study, Montaigne sarcastically confessed to having no
clue whether to accept:
the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, the atoms of Epicurus, the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and
Democritus, the water of Thales, the in�nity of Nature of Anaximander, or the
aether of Diogenes, the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, the in�nity of
Parmenides, the Unity of Musaeus, the �re and water of Apollodorus, the
homogeneous particles of Anaxagoras, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the
�re of Heraclitus, or any other opinion drawn from the boundless confusion of
judgement and doctrines produced by our �ne human reason, with all its certainty
and perspicuity.
The discoveries of new worlds and ancient texts powerfully
undermined what Montaigne described as ‘that distressing and
combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself’:
Anyone who made an intelligent collection of the asinine stupidities of human
wisdom would have a wondrous tale to tell … We can judge what we should think
of Man, of his sense and of his reason, when we �nd such obvious and gross errors
even in these important characters who have raised human intelligence to great
heights.
It also helped to have spent seventeen months journeying around
Europe on horseback. Testimony of other countries and ways of life
alleviated the oppressive atmosphere of Montaigne’s own region.
What one society judged to be strange, another might more sensibly
welcome as normal.
Other lands may return to us a sense of possibility stamped out by
provincial arrogance; they encourage us to grow more acceptable to
ourselves. The conception of the normal proposed by any particular
province – Athens, Augsburg, Cuzco, Mexico, Rome, Seville,

Gascony – has room for only a few aspects of our nature, and
unfairly consigns the rest to the barbaric and bizarre. Every man
may bear the whole form of the human condition, but it seems that
no single country can tolerate the complexity of this condition.
Among the �fty-seven inscriptions that Montaigne had painted on
the beams of his library ceiling, was a line from Terence:
Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.
I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination,
Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudices and the self-
division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of
the world.
Another consolation for accusations of abnormality is friendship, a
friend being, among other things, someone kind enough to consider
more of us normal than most people do. We may share judgements
with friends that would in ordinary company be censured for being
too caustic, sexual, despairing, daft, clever or vulnerable –
friendship a minor conspiracy against what other people think of as
reasonable.
Like Epicurus, Montaigne believed friendship to be an essential
component of happiness:
In my judgement the sweetness of well-matched and compatible fellowship can
never cost too dear. O! a friend! How true is that ancient judgement, that the
frequenting of one is more sweet than the element water, more necessary than the
element �re.
For a time, he was fortunate enough to know such fellowship. At the
age of twenty-�ve, he was introduced to a twenty-eight-year-old
writer and member of the Bordeaux Parlement, Étienne de La
Boétie. It was friendship at �rst sight:
We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other because of the reports
we had heard … we embraced each other by our names. And at our �rst meeting,
which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we found ourselves so taken
with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that time on
nothing was so close to us as each other.

The friendship was of a kind, Montaigne believed, that only
occurred once every 300 years; it had nothing in common with the
tepid alliances frequently denoted by the term:
What we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and
familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which
our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are
mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they e�ace the seam which
joins them together so that it cannot be found.
The friendship would not have been so valuable if most people had
not been so disappointing – if Montaigne had not had to hide so
much of himself from them. The depth of his attachment to La
Boétie signalled the extent to which, in his interactions with others,
he had been forced to present only an edited image of himself to
avoid suspicion and raised eyebrows. Many years later, Montaigne
analysed the source of his a�ections for La Boétie:
Luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image.
He alone had the privilege of my true portrait.
That is, La Boétie – uniquely among Montaigne’s acquaintances –
understood him properly. He allowed him to be himself; through his
psychological acuity, he enabled him to be so. He o�ered scope for
valuable and yet until then neglected dimensions of Montaigne’s
character – which suggests that we pick our friends not only because
they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more
importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
The idyll was painfully brief. Four years after the �rst meeting, in
August 1563, La Boétie fell ill with stomach cramps and died a few
days later. The loss was to haunt Montaigne for ever:
In truth if I compare the rest of my life … to those four years which I was granted to
enjoy the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke
and ashes, a night dark and dreary. Since that day when I lost him … I merely drag
wearily on.
Throughout the Essays, there were expressions of longing for a soul
mate comparable to the dead companion. Eighteen years after La

Boétie’s death, Montaigne was still visited by periods of grief. In
May 1581, in La Villa near Lucca, where he had gone to take the
waters, he wrote in his travel journal that he had spent an entire
day beset by ‘painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie. I was in
this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.’
He was never to be blessed again in his friendships, but he
discovered the �nest form of compensation. In the Essays, he
recreated in another medium the true portrait of himself that La
Boétie had recognized. He became himself on the page as he had
been himself in the company of his friend.
Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the
vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone
elsewhere would understand; his book an address to everyone and
no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his
deepest self to strangers in bookshops:
Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and
for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a
bookseller’s stall.
And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the
most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books
that were written because authors couldn’t �nd anyone to talk to.
(Ill. 17.12)

Montaigne might have begun writing to alleviate a personal sense of
loneliness, but his book may serve in a small way to alleviate our
own. One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he
mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead
friend and explains that he needs quiet when sitting on the toilet –
enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have
gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but
which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality.

4
On Intellectual Inadequacy
There are some leading assumptions about what it takes to be a
clever person:
What clever people should know
One of them, re�ected in what is taught in many schools and
universities, is that clever people should know how to answer
questions like:
1. Find the lengths or angles marked x in the following triangles.
2. What are the subject term, predicate term, copula and quanti�ers (if any) in the
following sentences: Dogs are man’s best friend; Lucilius is wicked; All bats are
members of the class of rodents; Nothing green is in the room?
3. What is Thomas Aquinas’s First Cause argument?

4. Translate:

(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I i–iv)
5. Translate:
In capitis mei levitatem iocatus est et in oculorum valitudinem et in crurum
gracilitatem et in staturam. Quae contumelia est quod apparet audire? Coram uno
aliquid dictum ridemus, coram pluribus indignamur, et eorum aliis libertatem non
relinquimus, quae ipsi in nos dicere adsuevimus; iocis temperatis delectamur,
immodicis irascimur.
(Seneca, De Constantia, XVI. 4)

Montaigne had faced many such questions and answered them well.
He was sent to one of France’s best educational establishments, the
Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, founded in 1533 to replace the
city’s old and inadequate Collège des Arts. By the time Michel
started attending classes there at the age of six, the school had
developed a national reputation as a centre of learning. The sta�
included an enlightened principal, André de Gouvéa, a renowned
Greek scholar, Nicolas de Grouchy, an Aristotelian scholar,
Guillaume Guerente, and the Scottish poet George Buchanan.
If one tries to de�ne the philosophy of education underpinning
the Collège de Guyenne, or indeed that of most schools and
universities before and after it, one might loosely suggest it to be
based on the idea that the more a student learns about the world
(history, science, literature), the better. But Montaigne, after
following the curriculum at the Collège dutifully until graduation,
added an important proviso:

If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and
appropriateness to his life.
Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.
Two great thinkers of antiquity were likely to have featured
prominently in the curriculum at the Collège de Guyenne and been
held up as exemplars of intelligence. Students would have been
introduced to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, in which the
Greek philosopher pioneered logic, and stated that if A is predicated
of every B, and B of every C, necessarily A is predicated of every C.
Aristotle argued that if a proposition says or denies P of S, then S
and P are its terms, with P being the predicate term and S the
subject term, and added that all propositions are either universal or
particular, a�rming or denying P of every S or part of S. Then there
was the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who assembled a
library for Julius Caesar and wrote six hundred books, including an
encyclopedia on the liberal arts and twenty-�ve books on etymology
and linguistics.
Montaigne was not unmoved. It is a feat to write a shelf of books
on the origins of words and to discover universal a�rmatives. And
yet if we were to �nd that those who did so were no happier or
were indeed a little more unhappy than those who had never heard
of philosophical logic, we might wonder. Montaigne considered the
lives of Aristotle and Varro, and raised a question:
What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them
from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter?
Could logic console them for the gout …?
To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite
and so unhappy, 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.

The problem with the Collège de Guyenne, despite its professional
sta� and principal, was that it excelled at imparting learning but
failed entirely at imparting wisdom – repeating at an institutional
level the errors that had marred the personal lives of Varro and
Aristotle:
I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not
been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught
us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation
and their etymology …
We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’
But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We
ought to �nd out not who understands most but who understands best. We work
merely to �ll the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and
wrong empty.
He had never been good at sport: ‘At dancing, tennis and wrestling I
have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at
swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.’
Nevertheless, so strong was Montaigne’s objection to the lack of
wisdom imparted by most schoolteachers, that he did not shrink
from suggesting a drastic alternative to the classroom for the youth
of France.
If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgement, then I
would just as soon that a pupil spend his time playing tennis. (Ill. 18.1)

He would of course have preferred students to go to school, but
schools that taught them wisdom rather than the etymology of the
word and could correct the long-standing intellectual bias towards
abstract questions. Thales from Miletus in Asia Minor was an early
example of the bias, celebrated throughout the ages for having in
the sixth century BC tried to measure the heavens and for having
determined the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt according to
the theorem of similar triangles – a complicated and dazzling
achievement, no doubt, but not what Montaigne wished to see
dominate his curriculum. He had greater sympathy with the implicit
educational philosophy of one of Thales’s impudent young
acquaintances:
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.
Montaigne noted in other areas a similar tendency to privilege
extraordinary activities over humbler but no less important ones –
and just like the girl from Miletus, tried to bring us back to earth:
Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds.
Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and
justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to
yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more di�cult. Whatever
people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as
hard and as tense as those of other lives.
So what would Montaigne have wished pupils to learn at school?
What kind of examinations could have tested for the wise
intelligence he had in mind, one so far removed from the mental
skills of the unhappy Aristotle and Varro?
The examinations would have raised questions about the
challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children,
money and ambition.

An examination in Montaignean wisdom
1. About seven or eight years ago, some two leagues from here, there was a villager, who
is still alive; his brain had long been battered by his wife’s jealousy; one day he came
home from work to be welcomed by her usual nagging; it made him so mad that,
taking the sickle he still had in his hand he suddenly lopped o� the members which put
her into such a fever and chucked them in her face. (Essays, II.29)
a) How should one settle domestic disputes?
b) Was the wife nagging or expressing a�ection?
2. Consider these two quotations:
I want death to �nd me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the
un�nished gardening. (Essays, I.20)
I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces. (Essays, II.17)
What is a wise approach to death?
3. It is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the
living reality [of penis size] is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according
to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are, their hopes
and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big … What great
harm is done by those gra�ti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the
corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arises a cruel
misunderstanding of our natural capacities. (Essays, III.5)
How should a man with a small ‘living reality’ bring up the subject?
4. I know of a squire who had entertained a goodly company in his hall and then, four or
�ve days later, boasted as a joke (for there was no truth in it) that he had made them
eat cat pie; one of the young ladies in the party was struck with such a horror at this
that she collapsed with a serious stomach disorder and a fever: it was impossible to
save her. (Essays, I.21)
Analyse the distribution of moral responsibility.

5. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being
heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ (Essays, I.38)
The most uncouth of our a�ictions is to despise our being. (Essays, III.13)
How much love should one have for oneself?
Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than
learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the
hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne
delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now
be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy
traditional candidates.
I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than university
rectors. (Ill. 18.2)
What clever people should sound and look like
It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent
book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after
all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association
between di�culty and profundity might less generously be
described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity
familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and

elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear
ones do not.
Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with
mysterious books. ‘I cannot have lengthy commerce with [them],’
he wrote, ‘I only like pleasurable, easy [ones] which tickle my
interest.’
I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake,
however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an
honourable pastime … If I come across di�cult passages in my reading I never bite
my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be … If one book
wearies me I take up another.
Which was nonsense, or rather playful posturing on the part of a
man with a thousand volumes on his shelf and an encyclopedic
knowledge of Greek and Latin philosophy. If Montaigne enjoyed
presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence during
philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose.
The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical
ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good
writing.
There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books
in the humanities should be di�cult or boring; wisdom does not
require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience
bene�t from being wearied. Carefully used, boredom can be a
valuable indicator of the merit of books. Though it can never be a
su�cient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into wilful
indi�erence and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into
account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance for balderdash.
Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those
who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their su�ering
unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there
are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience
with our reading matter.

Every di�cult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge
the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not
grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the
author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted
more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so
written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being
incomprehensible o�ers unparalleled protection against having
nothing to say:
Di�culty 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.
There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound
out of place in a street or market:
Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some
personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and
little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I
could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris.
But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger
that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those
with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of
intelligence. So strong is this bias, Montaigne wondered whether the
majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a
man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached
them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato’s dialogues,
in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language:
The portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to
us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval
of them. It is not from our own knowledge; since they do not follow our practices: if
something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate
them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, in�ated and
magni�ed by arti�ce. Such graces as �ow on under the name of naivety and
simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours … For us, is not naivety
close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach? Socrates makes his
soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant;
thus speaks a woman … His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most
ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so

common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of
his astonishing concepts; we who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition
to be base and commonplace and who are never aware of riches except when
pompously paraded.
It is a plea to take books seriously, even when their language is
unintimidating and their ideas clear – and, by extension, to refrain
from considering ourselves as fools if, because of a hole in our
budget or our education, our cloaks are simple and our vocabulary
no larger than that of a stallholder in Les Halles.
What clever people should know
They should know the facts, and if they do not and if they have in
addition been so foolish as to get these wrong in a book, they should
expect no mercy from scholars, who will be justi�ed in slapping
them down, and pointing out, with supercilious civility, that a date
is wrong or a word misquoted, a passage is out of context or an
important source forgotten.
Yet in Montaigne’s schema of intelligence, what matters in a book is
usefulness and appropriateness to life; it is less valuable to convey
with precision what Plato wrote or Epicurus meant than to judge
whether what they have said is interesting and could in the early
hours help us over anxiety or loneliness. The responsibility of
authors in the humanities is not to quasi-scienti�c accuracy, but to
happiness and health. Montaigne vented his irritation with those
who refused the point:
The scholars whose concern it is to pass judgement on books recognize no worth but
that of learning and allow no intellectual activity other than that of scholarship and
erudition. Mistake one Scipio for the other, and you have nothing left worth saying,
have you! According to them, fail to know your Aristotle and you fail to know
yourself.
The Essays were themselves marked by frequent misquotations,
misattributions, illogical swerves of argument and a failure to de�ne

terms. The author wasn’t bothered:
I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me
and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the
Lord’s prayer let alone proper French.
Naturally there were errors in the book (‘I am full of them,’ he
boasted), but they weren’t enough to doom the Essays, just as
accuracy could not ensure their worth. It was a greater sin to write
something which did not attempt to be wise than to confuse Scipio
Aemilianus (c. 185–129 BC) with Scipio Africanus (236–183 BC).
Where clever people should get their ideas from
From people even cleverer than they are. They should spend their
time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities
who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge. They should
write treatises on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero.
Montaigne owed much to the idea. There were frequent passages of
commentary in the Essays, and hundreds of quotations from authors
who Montaigne felt had captured points more elegantly and more
acutely than he was able to. He quoted Plato 128 times, Lucretius
149 and Seneca 130.
It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own
thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot
match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy
and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our
pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our
borrowings from them indicating where we �nd a piece of
ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our
own minds are made – a congruence all the more striking if the
work was written in an age of togas and animal sacri�ces. We invite
these words into our books as a homage for reminding us of who we
are.

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. Montaigne knew one man
who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly:
Whenever I ask [this] acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about
something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has
scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to �nd out the meanings of scab and
arse.
Such reluctance to trust our own, extra-literary, experiences might
not be grievous if books could be relied upon to express all our
potentialities, if they knew all our scabs. But as Montaigne
recognized, the great books are silent on too many themes, so that if
we allow them to de�ne the boundaries of our curiosity, they will
hold back the development of our minds. A meeting in Italy
crystallized the issue:
In Pisa I met a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his
doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of
each and every truth must lie in conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside
of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything.
He had, of course, done and seen a lot. Of all the thinkers of
antiquity, Aristotle was perhaps the most comprehensive, his works
ranging over the landscape of knowledge (On Generation and
Corruption, On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, Parts of
Animals, Movements of Animals, Sophistical Refutations, Nicomachean
Ethics, Physics, Politics).
But the very scale of Aristotle’s achievement bequeathed a
problematic legacy. There are authors too clever for our own good.
Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word. Their
genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in
their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who
most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only
by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before
him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a

salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an
appreciation of their strengths. To act in a truly Aristotelian spirit,
as Montaigne realized and the man from Pisa did not, may mean
allowing for some intelligent departures from even the most
accomplished authorities.
Yet it is understandable to prefer to quote and write commentaries
rather than speak and think for ourselves. A commentary on a book
written by someone else, though technically laborious to produce,
requiring hours of research and exegesis, is immune from the most
cruel attacks that can befall original works. Commentators may be
criticized for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers; they
cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves – which was a
reason why Montaigne included so many quotations and passages of
commentary in the Essays:
I sometimes get others to say what I cannot put so well myself because of the
weakness of my language, and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect …
[and] sometimes … to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack
writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive … I have to hide my
weaknesses beneath those great reputations.
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken
after we have been dead a few centuries. Statements which might be
acceptable when they issue from the quills of ancient authors are
likely to attract ridicule when expressed by contemporaries. Critics
are not inclined to bow before the grander pronouncements of those
with whom they attended university. It is not these individuals who
will be allowed to speak as though they were ancient philosophers. ‘No
man has escaped paying the penalty for being born,’ wrote Seneca,
but a man struck by a similar sentiment in later ages would not be
advised to speak like this unless he manifested a particular appetite
for humiliation. Montaigne, who did not, took shelter, and at the
end of the Essays, made a confession, touching for its vulnerability:
If I had had con�dence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly
alone, come what may.

If he lacked con�dence, it was because the closer one came to him
in time and place, the less his thoughts were likely to be treated as
though they might be as valid as those of Seneca and Plato:
In my own climate of Gascony, they �nd it funny to see me in print.
I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread.
In the behaviour of his family and sta�, those who heard him
snoring or changed the bedlinen, there was none of the reverence of
his Parisian reception, let alone his posthumous one:
A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see
nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.
We may take this in two ways: that no one is genuinely marvellous,
but that only families and sta� are close enough to discern the
disappointing truth. Or that many people are interesting, but that if
they are too close to us in age and place, we are likely not to take
them too seriously, on account of a curious bias against what is at
hand.
Montaigne was not pitying himself; rather, he was using the
criticism of more ambitious contemporary works as a symptom of a
deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from
us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people
who lived long ago. It is a question of whether access to genuinely
valuable things is limited to a handful of geniuses born between the
construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome, or whether, as
Montaigne daringly proposed, they may be open to you and me as
well.
A highly peculiar source of wisdom was being pointed out, more
peculiar still than Pyrrho’s seafaring pig, a Tupi Indian or a Gascon
ploughman: the reader. If we attend properly to our experiences and
learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for an intellectual
life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive at insights
no less profound than those in the great ancient books.

The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with
submission to textual authorities, rather than with an exploration of
the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual
mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves:
We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These
are the ipsissima verba of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements
do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.
Parroting wouldn’t be the scholar’s way of describing what it takes
to write a commentary. 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
di�culty 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. The relation of art to reality has long been considered a
serious philosophical topic, in part because Plato �rst raised it; the
relation of shyness to personal appearance has not, in part because
it did not attract the attention of any ancient philosopher.
In light of this unnatural respect for tradition, Montaigne thought
it worth while to admit to his readers that, in truth, he thought
Plato could be limited and dull:
Will the licence of our age excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that [his]
Dialogues drag slowly along sti�ing his matter, and in lamenting the time spent on
those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things
to say?
(A relief to come upon this thought in Montaigne, one prestigious
writer lending credence to timid, silent suspicions of another.) As
for Cicero, there was no need even to apologize before attacking:
His introductory passages, his de�nitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat
up most of his work … If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and

then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I �nd
nothing but wind.
If scholars paid such attention to the classics, it was, suggested
Montaigne, from a vainglorious wish to be thought intelligent
through association with prestigious names. The result for the
reading public was a mountain of very learned, very unwise books:
There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each
other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.
But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every
life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights
from ourselves than from all the books of old:
Were I a good scholar, I would �nd enough in my own experience to make me wise.
Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger … sees the ugliness of this passion
better than in Aristotle. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which
have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one
condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the
exploring of his condition. Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our
own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life a�ected by everything that
can happen to a man.
Only an intimidating scholarly culture makes us think otherwise:
We are richer than we think, each one of us.
We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as
so unsuited to the task because we aren’t 2,000 years old, aren’t
interested in Plato’s dialogues and live quietly in the country:
You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as
well as to one of richer stu�.
It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne o�ered so
much information on exactly how commonplace and private his
own life had been – why he wanted to tell us:
That he didn’t like apples:
I am not overfond … of any fruit except melons.
That he had a complex relationship with radishes:

I �rst of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do
again.
That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene:
My teeth … have always been exceedingly good … Since boyhood I learned to rub
them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals.
That he ate too fast:
In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my �ngers.
And liked wiping his mouth:
I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining
without a clean napkin … I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the
fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course.
Trivia, perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking ‘I’
behind his book, that a moral philosophy had issued – and so could
issue again – from an ordinary, fruit-resistant soul.
There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look
nothing like those who have ruminated in the past.
Cicero 106–43 BC (Ill. 18.3)
In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational
human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s

mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient
philosophers and mistake Scipios.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from
folly, is achievement enough.
(Ill. 18.4)

V

Consolation for a Broken Heart

1
For the griefs of love, he may be the �nest among philosophers:
The Life, 1788–1860 (Ill. 19.1)
1788 Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig. In later years, he
looks back on the event with regret: ‘We can regard our life as a
uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’
‘Human existence must be a kind of error,’ he speci�es, ‘it may be
said of it, “It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the
worst of all happens.” ’ Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy
merchant, and his mother Johanna, a dizzy socialite twenty years
her husband’s junior, take little interest in their son, who grows into
one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy: ‘Even as a
child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found
me in deep despair.’

Heinrich Schopenhauer (Ill. 19.2)
Johanna Schopenhauer
1803–5 After the apparent suicide of his father (discovered �oating
in a canal beside the family warehouse), the seventeen-year-old
Schopenhauer is left with a fortune that ensures he will never have
to work. The thought a�ords no comfort. He later recalls: ‘In my
seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was
gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he

saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth … was that this
world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but
rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in
order to delight in the sight of their su�erings; to this the data
pointed, and the belief that it is so won the upper hand.’
Schopenhauer is sent to London to learn English at a boarding-
school, Eagle House in Wimbledon. After receiving a letter from
him, his friend Lorenz Meyer replies, ‘I am sorry that your stay in
England has induced you to hate the entire nation.’ Despite the
hatred, he acquires an almost perfect command of the language, and
is often mistaken for an Englishman in conversation.
Eagle House School, Wimbledon (Ill. 19.3)
Schopenhauer travels through France, he visits the city of Nîmes, to
which, 1,800 or so years before, Roman engineers had piped water
across the majestic Pont du Gard to ensure that citizens would
always have enough water to bathe in. Schopenhauer is
unimpressed by what he sees of the Roman remains: ‘These traces
soon lead one’s thoughts to the thousands of long-decomposed
humans.’

(Ill. 19.4)
Schopenhauer’s mother complains of her son’s passion for
‘pondering on human misery’.

1809–1811 Schopenhauer studies at the university of Göttingen and
decides to become a philosopher: ‘Life is a sorry business, I have
resolved to spend it re�ecting upon it.’
On an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggests they
should attempt to meet women. Schopenhauer quashes the plan,
arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is
not worth the trouble of major e�ort.’

Schopenhauer as a young man (Ill. 19.5)
1813 He visits his mother in Weimar. Johanna Schopenhauer has
befriended the town’s most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, who visits her regularly (and likes talking with Sophie,
Johanna’s housemaid, and Adele, Arthur’s younger sister). After an
initial meeting, Schopenhauer describes Goethe as ‘serene, sociable,
obliging, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever!’ Goethe
reports, ‘Young Schopenhauer appeared to me to be a strange and
interesting young man.’ Arthur’s feelings for the writer are never
wholly reciprocated. When the philosopher leaves Weimar, Goethe
composes a couplet for him:
Willst du dich des Lebens freuen,
So musst der Welt du Werth verleihen.
If you wish to draw pleasure out of life,
You must attach value to the world.
Schopenhauer is unimpressed, and in his notebook beside Goethe’s
tip, appends a quotation from Chamfort: ‘Il vaut mieux laisser les
hommes pour ce qu’ils sont, que les prendre pour ce qu’ils ne sont pas.’
(Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be
what they are not.)
1814–15 Schopenhauer moves to Dresden and writes a thesis (On
the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Su�cient Reason). He has few
friends and enters into conversations with reduced expectations:
‘Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to
her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand
her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a
pleasant and conscious self-deception.’ He becomes a regular in an
Italian tavern, which serves his favourite meats – Venetian salami,
tru�ed sausage and Parma ham.
1818 He �nishes The World as Will and Representation, which he
knows to be a masterpiece. It explains his lack of friends: ‘A man of
genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so
intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?’

1818–19 To celebrate the completion of his book, Schopenhauer
travels to Italy. He delights in art, nature and the climate, though
his mood remains fragile: ‘We should always be mindful of the fact
that no man is ever very far from the state in which he would
readily want to seize a sword or poison in order to bring his
existence to an end; and those who are far from believing this could
easily be convinced of the opposite by an accident, an illness, a
violent change of fortune – or of the weather.’ He visits Florence,
Rome, Naples and Venice and meets a number of attractive women
at receptions: ‘I was very fond of them – if only they would have
had me.’ Rejection helps to inspire a view that: ‘Only the male
intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized,
narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.’
1819 The World as Will and Representation is published. It sells 230
copies. ‘Every life history is a history of su�ering’; ‘If only I could
get rid of the illusion of regarding the generation of vipers and toads
as my equals, it would be a great help to me.’
1820 Schopenhauer attempts to gain a university post in philosophy
in Berlin. He o�ers lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the
theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Five
students attend. In a nearby building, his rival, Hegel, can be heard
lecturing to an audience of 300. Schopenhauer assesses Hegel’s
philosophy: ‘[I]ts fundamental ideas are the absurdest fancy, a
world turned upside down, a philosophical bu�oonery … its
contents being the hollowest and most senseless display of words
ever lapped up by blockheads, and its presentation … being the
most repulsive and nonsensical gibberish, recalling the rantings of a
bedlamite.’ The beginnings of disenchantment with academia: ‘That
one can be serious about philosophy has as a rule not occurred to
anyone, least of all to a lecturer on philosophy, just as no one as a
rule believes less in Christianity than does the Pope.’
1821 Schopenhauer falls in love with Caroline Medon, a nineteen-
year-old singer. The relationship lasts intermittently for ten years,
but Schopenhauer has no wish to formalize the arrangement: ‘To
marry means to do everything possible to become an object of
disgust to each other.’ He nevertheless has fond thoughts of

polygamy: ‘Of the many advantages of polygamy, one is that the
husband would not come into such close contact with his in-laws,
the fear of which at present prevents innumerable marriages. Ten
mothers-in-law instead of one!’
1822 Travels to Italy for a second time (Milan, Florence, Venice).
Before setting out, he asks his friend Friedrich Osann to look out for
‘any mention of me in books, journals, literary periodicals and such
like.’ Osann does not �nd the task time-consuming.
1825 Having failed as an academic, Schopenhauer attempts to
become a translator. But his o�ers to turn Kant into English and
Tristram Shandy into German are rejected by publishers. He con�des
in a letter a melancholy wish to have ‘a position in bourgeois
society’, though will never attain one. ‘If a God has made this world,
then I would not like to be the God; its misery and distress would
break my heart.’ Fortunately, he can rely on a comfortable sense of
his own worth in darker moments: ‘How often must I learn … that
in the a�airs of everyday life … my spirit and mind are what a
telescope is in an opera-house or a cannon at a hare-hunt?’
1828 Turns forty. ‘After his fortieth year,’ he consoles himself, ‘any
man of merit … will hardly be free from a certain touch of
misanthropy.’
1831 Now forty-three, living in Berlin, Schopenhauer thinks once
again of getting married. He turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a
beautiful, spirited girl who has just turned seventeen. During a
boating party, in an attempt to charm her, he smiles and o�ers her a
bunch of white grapes. Flora later con�des in her diary: ‘I didn’t
want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched
them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind
me.’ Schopenhauer leaves Berlin in a hurry: ‘Life has no genuine
intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’
1833 He settles in a modest apartment in Frankfurt am Main, a
town of some 50,000 inhabitants. He describes the city, the banking
centre of continental Europe, as ‘a small, sti�, internally crude,
municipally pu�ed-up, peasant-proud nation of Abderites, whom I
do not like to approach’.

His closest relationships are now with a succession of poodles,
who he feels have a gentleness and humility humans lack: ‘The sight
of any animal immediately gives me pleasure and gladdens my
heart.’ He lavishes a�ection on these poodles, addressing them as
‘Sir’, and takes a keen interest in animal welfare: ‘The highly
intelligent dog, man’s truest and most faithful friend, is put on a
chain by him! Never do I see such a dog without feelings of the
deepest sympathy for him and of profound indignation against his
master. I think with satisfaction of a case, reported some years ago
in The Times, where Lord X kept a large dog on a chain. One day as
he was walking through the yard, he took it into his head to go and
pat the dog, whereupon the animal tore his arm open from top to
bottom, and quite right, too! What he meant by this was: “You are
not my master, but my devil who makes a hell of my brief
existence!” May this happen to all who chain up dogs.’
The philosopher adopts a rigid daily routine. He writes for three
hours in the morning, plays the �ute (Rossini) for an hour, then
dresses in white tie for lunch in the Englischer Hof on the
Rossmarkt. He has an enormous appetite, and tucks a large white
napkin into his collar. He refuses to acknowledge other diners when
eating, but occasionally enters into conversation over co�ee. One of
them describes him as ‘comically disgruntled, but in fact harmless
and good-naturedly gru�’.

(Ill. 19.6)
Another reports that Schopenhauer frequently boasts of the
excellent condition of his teeth as evidence that he is superior to
other people, or as he puts it, superior to the ‘common biped’.
After lunch, Schopenhauer retires to the library of his club, the
nearby Casino Society, where he reads The Times – the newspaper
which he feels will best inform him of the miseries of the world. In
mid-afternoon, he takes a two-hour walk with his dog along the
banks of the Main, muttering under his breath. In the evening, he
visits the opera or the theatre, where he is often enraged by the
noise of late-comers, shu�ers and coughers – and writes to the
authorities urging strict measures against them. Though he has read
and much admires Seneca, he does not agree with the Roman
philosopher’s verdict on noise: ‘I have for a long time been of the
opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is
in inverse proportion to his mental powers … The man who
habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand … is
not merely ill-mannered, but also coarse and narrow-minded … We
shall be quite civilized only when … it is no longer anyone’s right to
cut through the consciousness of every thinking being … by means

of whistling, howling, bellowing, hammering, whip-cracking … and
so on.’
1840 He acquires a new white poodle and names her Atma, after
the world-soul of the Brahmins. He is attracted to Eastern religions
in general and Brahmanism in particular (he reads a few pages of
the Upanishads every night). He describes Brahmins as, ‘the noblest
and oldest of people’, and threatens to sack his cleaning lady,
Margaretha Schnepp, when she disregards orders not to dust the
Buddha in his study.
He spends increasing amounts of time alone. His mother worries
about him: ‘Two months in your room without seeing a single
person, that is not good, my son, and saddens me, a man cannot and
should not isolate himself in that manner.’ He takes to sleeping for
extended periods during the day: ‘If life and existence were an
enjoyable state, then everyone would reluctantly approach the
unconscious state of sleep and would gladly rise from it again. But
the very opposite is the case, for everyone very willingly goes to
sleep and unwillingly gets up again.’ He justi�es his appetite for
sleep by comparing himself to two of his favourite thinkers: ‘Human
beings require more sleep the more developed … and the more
active their brain is. Montaigne relates of himself that he had always
been a heavy sleeper; that he had spent a large part of his life in
sleeping; and that at an advanced age he still slept from eight to
nine hours at a stretch. It is also reported of Descartes that he slept a
great deal.’
1843 Schopenhauer moves to a new house in Frankfurt, number 17
Schöne Aussicht, near the river Main in the centre of town (English
translation: Pretty view). He is to live in the street for the rest of his
life, though in 1859, he moves to number 16 after a quarrel with his
landlord over his dog.

1844 He publishes a second edition and a further volume of The
World as Will and Representation. He remarks in the preface: ‘Not to
my contemporaries or my compatriots, but to mankind I consign my
now complete work, con�dent that it will not be without value to
humanity, even if this value should be recognized only tardily, as is
the inevitable fate of the good in whatever form.’ The work sells
under 300 copies: ‘Our greatest pleasure consists in being admired;
but the admirers, even if there is every cause, are not very keen to
express their admiration. And so the happiest man is he who has
managed sincerely to admire himself, no matter how.’
1850 Atma dies. He buys a brown poodle called Butz, who becomes
his favourite poodle. When a regimental band passes his house,
Schopenhauer is known to stand up in the middle of conversations
and put a seat by the window from which Butz can look out. The
creature is referred to by the children of the neighbourhood as
‘young Schopenhauer’.
1851 He publishes a selection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga and
Paralipomena. Much to the author’s surprise, the book becomes a
bestseller.

1853 His fame spreads across Europe (‘the comedy of fame’, as he
puts it). Lectures on his philosophy are o�ered at the universities of
Bonn, Breslau and Jena. He receives fan mail. A woman from Silesia
sends him a long, suggestive poem. A man from Bohemia writes to
tell him he places a wreath on his portrait every day. ‘After one has
spent a long life in insigni�cance and disregard, they come at the
end with drums and trumpets and think that is something’ is the
response, but there is also satisfaction: ‘Would anyone with a great
mind ever have been able to attain his goal and create a permanent
and perennial work, if he had taken as his guiding star the bobbing
will-o’-the-wisp of public opinion, that is to say the opinion of small
minds?’ Philosophically minded Frankfurters buy poodles in
homage.
1859 As fame brings more attention from women, his views on
them soften. From having thought them ‘suited to being the nurses
and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they
themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big-
children, their whole lives long’, he now judges that they are
capable of sel�essness and insight. An attractive sculptress and an
admirer of his philosophy, Elizabeth Ney (a descendant of
Napoleon’s Maréchal), comes to Frankfurt in October and stays in
his apartment for a month making a bust of him.
‘She works all day at my place. When I get back from luncheon
we have co�ee together, we sit together on the sofa and I feel as if I
were married.’

(Ill. 19.7)
1860 Increasing ill-health suggests the end is near: ‘I can bear the
thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the
idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me
shudder.’ At the end of September, after a walk by the banks of the
Main, he returns home, complains of breathlessness and dies, still
convinced that ‘human existence must be a kind of error.’
Such was the life of a philosopher who may o�er the heart
unparalleled assistance.

A
2

A contemporary love story
WITH SCHOPENHAUERIAN NOTES
man is attempting to work on a train between Edinburgh and
London. It is early in the afternoon on a warm spring day.
(Ill. 20.1)
Papers and a diary are on the table before him, and a book is open on
the armrest. But the man has been unable to hold a coherent thought
since Newcastle, when a woman entered the carriage and seated herself
across the aisle. After looking impassively out of the window for a few
moments, she turned her attention to a pile of magazines. She has been
reading Vogue since Darlington. She reminds the man of a portrait by
Christen Købke of Mrs Høegh-Guldberg (though he cannot recall either
of these names), which he saw, and felt strangely moved and saddened
by, in a museum in Denmark a few years before.

(Ill. 20.2)
But unlike Mrs Høegh-Guldberg, she has short brown hair and wears
jeans, a pair of trainers and a canary-yellow V-neck sweater over a T-
shirt. He notices an incongruously large digital sports-watch on her pale,
freckle-dotted wrist. He imagines running his hand through her chestnut
hair, caressing the back of her neck, sliding his hand inside the sleeve of
her pullover, watching her fall asleep beside him, her lips slightly agape.
He imagines living with her in a house in south London, in a cherry-tree-
lined street. He speculates that she may be a cellist or a graphic designer,
or a doctor specializing in genetic research. His mind turns over strategies
for conversation. He considers asking her for the time, for a pencil, for
directions to the bathroom, for re�ections on the weather, for a look at
one of her magazines. He longs for a train crash, in which their carriage
would be thrown into one of the vast barley-�elds through which they are
passing. In the chaos, he would guide her safely outside, and repair with
her to a nearby tent set up by the ambulance service, where they would
be o�ered lukewarm tea and stare into each other’s eyes. Years later,
they would attract interest by revealing that they had met in the tragic
Edinburgh Express collision. But because the train seems disinclined to
derail, and though he knows it to be louche and absurd, the man cannot
help clearing his throat and leaning over to ask the angel if she might

have a spare ballpoint. It feels like jumping o� the side of a very high
bridge.
1. Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed: the
tribulations of love have appeared too childish to warrant
investigation, the subject better left to poets and hysterics. It is
not for philosophers to speculate on hand-holding and scented
letters. Schopenhauer was puzzled by the indi�erence:
We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part
in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers,
and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
The neglect seemed the result of a pompous denial of a side of
life which violated man’s rational self-image. Schopenhauer
insisted on the awkward reality:
Love … interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes
perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate … to interfere
with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. It
knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and
philosophical manuscripts … It sometimes demands the sacri�ce of … health,
sometimes of wealth, position and happiness.
2. Like the Gascon essayist born 255 years before him,
Schopenhauer was concerned with what made man –
supposedly the most rational of all creatures – less than
reasonable. There was a set of Montaigne’s works in the library
of the apartment at Schöne Aussicht. Schopenhauer had read
how reason could be dethroned by a fart, a big lunch or an
ingrowing toenail, and concurred with Montaigne’s view that
our minds were subservient to our bodies, despite our arrogant
faith in the contrary.
3. But Schopenhauer went further. Rather than alighting on loose
examples of the dethronement of reason, 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) – de�ned as an inherent drive within human beings to
stay alive and reproduce. The will-to-life led even committed
depressives to �ght for survival when they were threatened by a
shipwreck or grave illness. It ensured that the most cerebral,
career-minded individuals would be seduced by the sight of
gurgling infants, or if they remained unmoved, that they were
likely to conceive a child anyway, and love it �ercely on
arrival. And it was the will-to-life that drove people to lose their
reason over comely passengers encountered across the aisles of
long-distance trains.
4. Schopenhauer might have resented the disruption of love (it
isn’t easy to pro�er grapes to schoolgirls); but he refused to
conceive of it as either disproportionate or accidental. It was
entirely commensurate with love’s function:
Why all this noise and fuss? Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and
exertion?… Why should such a tri�e play so important a role …? It is no tri�e
that is here in question; on the contrary, the importance of the matter is
perfectly in keeping with the earnestness and ardour of the e�ort. The
ultimate aim of all love-a�airs … is actually more important than all other
aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness
with which everyone pursues it.
And what is the aim? Neither communion nor sexual release,
understanding nor entertainment. The romantic dominates life
because:
What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next
generation … the existence and special constitution of the human race in
times to come.
It is because love directs us with such force towards the second
of the will-to-life’s two great commands that Schopenhauer
judged it the most inevitable and understandable of our
obsessions.

(Ill. 20.3)
5. The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our
minds when we ask for a phone number is no objection to the
theory. We are, suggested Schopenhauer, split into conscious and
unconscious selves, the unconscious governed by the will-to-life,
the conscious subservient to it and unable to learn of all its plans.
Rather than a sovereign entity, the conscious mind is a partially
sighted servant of a dominant, child-obsessed will-to-life:
[The intellect] does not penetrate into the secret workshop of the will’s
decisions. It is, of course, a con�dant of the will, yet a con�dant that does not
get to know everything.
The intellect understands only so much as is necessary to
promote reproduction – which may mean understanding very
little:
[It] remains … much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of
its own will.
An exclusion which explains how we may consciously feel
nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again, while
unconsciously being driven by a force aiming at the reproduction
of the next generation.
Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for
Schopenhauer, we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless
we �rst had lost our minds.

T
6. The analysis surely violates a rational self-image, but at least it
counters suggestions that romantic love is an avoidable departure
from more serious tasks, that it is forgivable for youngsters with
too much time on their hands to swoon by moonlight and sob
beneath bedclothes, but that it is unnecessary and demented for
their seniors to neglect their work because they have glimpsed a
face on a train. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable,
key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer’s theory of
the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the
eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
he man and woman are seated at a window-table in a Greek
restaurant in north London. A bowl of olives lies between them, but
neither can think of a way to remove the stones with requisite dignity
and so they are left untouched.
(Ill. 20.4)
She had not been carrying a ballpoint on her, but had o�ered him a
pencil. After a pause, she said how much she hated long train-journeys, a
super�uous remark which had given him the slender encouragement he
needed. She was not a cellist, nor a graphic designer, rather a lawyer
specializing in corporate �nance in a city �rm. She was originally from
Newcastle, but had been living in London for the past eight years. By the

time the train pulled into Euston, he had obtained a phone number and
an assent to a suggestion of dinner.
A waiter arrives to take their order. She asks for a salad and the
sword-�sh. She has come directly from work, and is wearing a light-grey
suit and the same watch as before.
(Ill. 20.5)
They begin to talk. She explains that at weekends, her favourite activity
is rock-climbing. She started at school, and has since been on expeditions
to France, Spain and Canada. She describes the thrill of hanging
hundreds of feet above a valley �oor, and camping in the high
mountains, where in the morning, icicles have formed inside the tent. Her
dinner companion feels dizzy on the second �oor of apartment buildings.
Her other passion is dancing, she loves the energy and sense of freedom.
When she can, she stays up all night. He favours proximity to a bed by
eleven thirty. They talk of work. She has been involved in a patent case.
A kettle designer from Frankfurt has alleged copyright infringement
against a British company. The company is liable under section 60,1,a of
the Patents Act of 1977.
He does not follow the lengthy account of a forthcoming case, but is
convinced of her high intelligence and their superlative compatibility.
1. One of the most profound mysteries of love is ‘Why him?’, and
‘Why her?’ Why, of all the possible candidates, did our desire
settle so strongly on this creature, why did we come to treasure
them above all others when their dinner conversation was not
always the most enlightening, nor their habits the most suitable?
And why, despite good intentions, were we unable to develop a
sexual interest in certain others, who were perhaps objectively as
attractive and might have been more convenient to live with?

2. The choosiness did not surprise Schopenhauer. We are not free to
fall in love with everyone because we cannot produce healthy
children with everyone. Our will-to-life drives us towards people
who will raise our chances of producing beautiful and intelligent
o�spring, and repulses us away from those who lower these same
chances. Love is nothing but the conscious manifestation of the
will-to-life’s discovery of an ideal co-parent:
The moment when [two people] begin to love each other – to fancy each other, as
the very apposite English expression has it – is actually to be regarded as the
very �rst formation of a new individual.
In initial meetings, beneath the quotidian patter, the unconscious
of both parties will assess whether a healthy child could one day
result from intercourse:
There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious
seriousness with which two young people of the opposite sex regard each other
when they meet for the �rst time, the searching and penetrating glance they cast
at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective
persons have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the
genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two.
3. And what is the will-to-life seeking through such examination?
Evidence of healthy children. The will-to-life must ensure that
the next generation will be psychologically and physiologically �t
enough to survive in a hazardous world, and so it seeks that
children be well-proportioned in limb (neither too short nor too
tall, too fat nor too thin), and stable of mind (neither too timid
nor too reckless, neither too cold nor too emotional, etc.).

(Ill. 20.6)
Since our parents made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely
to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too
tall, too masculine, too feminine; our noses are large, our chins
small. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were
aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder
in oddity. The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people
who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own
(a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect
nose), and hence help us restore physical and psychological
balance in the next generation:
Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own
weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or
even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.
The theory of neutralization gave Schopenhauer con�dence in
predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love
with tall men, but rarely tall men with tall women (their
unconscious fearing the production of giants). Feminine men who
don’t like sport will often be drawn to boyish women who have
short hair (and wear sturdy watches):

The neutralization of the two individualities … requires that the particular
degree of his manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of her
womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other.
4. Unfortunately, the theory of attraction led Schopenhauer to a
conclusion so bleak, it may be best if readers about to be married
left the next few paragraphs unread in order not to have to
rethink their plans; namely, that a person who is highly suitable
for our child is almost never (though we cannot realize it at the
time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life) very
suitable for us.
‘That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand
is the rarest stroke of good fortune,’ observed Schopenhauer. The
lover who saves our child from having an enormous chin or an
e�eminate temperament is seldom the person who will make us
happy over a lifetime. The pursuit of personal happiness and the
production of healthy children are two radically contrasting
projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as
one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised
by marriages between people who would never have been
friends:
Love … casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be
hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the
species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover
shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything,
misjudges everything, and binds himself for ever to the object of his passion. He
is thus completely infatuated by that delusion, which vanishes as soon as the
will of the species is satis�ed, and leaves behind a detested partner for life. Only
from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even
eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial �ends, and cannot conceive
how they could have made such a choice … A man in love may even clearly
recognize and bitterly feel in his bride the intolerable faults of temperament and
character which promise him a life of misery, and yet not be frightened away …
for ultimately he seeks not his interest, but that of a third person who has yet to
come into existence, although he is involved in the delusion that what he seeks
is his own interest.

T
The will-to-life’s ability to further its own ends rather than our
happiness may, Schopenhauer’s theory implies, be sensed with
particular clarity in the lassitude and tristesse that frequently
befall couples immediately after love-making:
Has it not been observed how illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli?
(Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard.)
So one day, a boyish woman and a girlish man will approach the
altar with motives neither they, nor anyone (save a smattering of
Schopenhauerians at the reception), will have fathomed. Only
later, when the will’s demands are assuaged and a robust boy is
kicking a ball around a suburban garden, will the ruse be
discovered. The couple will part or pass dinners in hostile silence.
Schopenhauer o�ered us a choice –
It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the
species must come o� badly
– though he left us in little doubt as to the superior capacity of
the species to guarantee its interests:
The coming generation is provided for at the expense of the present.
he man pays for dinner and asks, with studied casualness, if it might
be an idea to repair to his �at for a drink. She smiles and stares at
the �oor. Under the table, she is folding a paper napkin into ever smaller
squares. ‘That would be lovely, it really would,’ she says, ‘but I have to
get up very early to catch a �ight to Frankfurt for this meeting. Five
thirty or, like, even earlier. Maybe another time though. It would be
lovely. Really, it would.’ Another smile. The napkin disintegrates under
pressure.
Despair is alleviated by a promise that she will call from Germany,
and that they must meet again soon, perhaps on the very day of her
return. But there is no call until late on the appointed day, when she
rings from a booth at Frankfurt airport. In the background are crowds
and metallic voices announcing the departure of �ights to the Orient. She
tells him she can see huge planes out of the window and that this place is
like hell.

(Ill. 20.7)
She says that the fucking Lufthansa �ight has been delayed, that she will
try to get a seat on another airline but that he shouldn’t wait. There
follows a pause before the worst is con�rmed. Things are a little
complicated in her life right now really, she goes on, she doesn’t quite
know what she wants, but she knows she needs space and some time,
and if it is all right with him, she will be the one to call once her head is
a little clearer.
1. The philosopher might have o�ered un�attering explanations of
why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection – the
consolation of knowing that our pain is normal. We should not
feel confused by the enormity of the upset that can ensue from
only a few days of hope. It would be unreasonable if a force
powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could – if it
failed in its aim – vanish without devastation. Love could not
induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species
without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine.
To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what
acceptance involves. We must never allow our su�ering to be
compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in
su�ering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.
2. What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. There is nothing
wrong with us per se. Our characters are not repellent, nor our
faces abhorrent. The union collapsed because we were un�t to

F
produce a balanced child with one particular person. There is no
need to hate ourselves. One day we will come across someone
who can �nd us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally
natural and open with us (because our chin and their chin make
a desirable combination from the will-to-life’s point of view).
3. We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break-up
was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to
inform another that they need more space or time, that they are
reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is
striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative
verdict formulated by the will-to-life. Their reason may have had
an appreciation of our qualities, their will-to-life did not and told
them so in a way that brooked no argument – by draining them
of sexual interest in us. If they were seduced away by people less
intelligent than we are, we should not condemn them for
shallowness. We should remember, as Schopenhauer explains,
that:
What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the
procreation of children.
4. We should respect the edict from nature against procreation that
every rejection contains, as we might respect a �ash of lightning
or a lava �ow – an event terrible but mightier than ourselves. We
should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love:
between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might
produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony
in itself.
We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was
not – a greater reason to surrender our grip on love.
or a time, the man is beset by melancholy. At the weekend, he takes a
walk in Battersea Park, and sits on a bench overlooking the Thames.
He has with him a paperback edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young
Werther, �rst published in Leipzig in 1774.

(Ill. 20.8)
There are couples pushing prams and leading young children by the
hand. A little girl in a blue dress covered in chocolate, points up to a
plane descending towards Heathrow. ‘Daddy, is God in there?’ she asks,
but Daddy is in a hurry and in a mood, and picks her up and says he
doesn’t know, as though he had been asked for directions. A four-year-
old boy drives his tricycle into a shrub and wails for his mother, who has
just shut her eyes on a rug spread on a tattered patch of grass. She
requests that her husband assist the child. He gru�y replies that it is her
turn. She snaps that it is his. He says nothing. She says he’s crap and
stands up. An elderly couple on an adjacent bench silently share an egg-
and-cress sandwich.
1. Schopenhauer asks us not to be surprised by the misery. We
should not ask for a point to being alive, in a couple or a
parent.
2. There were many works of natural science in Schopenhauer’s
library – among them William Kirby and William Spence’s
Introduction to Entomology, François Huber’s Des Abeilles and
Cadet de Vaux’s De la taupe, de ses moeurs, de ses habitudes et des
moyens de la détruire. The philosopher read of ants, beetles,
bees, �ies, grasshoppers, moles and migratory birds, and
observed, with compassion and puzzlement, how all these
creatures displayed an ardent, senseless commitment to life. He

felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity
dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of
day and whose o�spring looked like gelatinous worms – but
who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate
itself:
To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole
life; permanent night surrounds it; it has its embryo eyes merely to avoid the
light … what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and
devoid of pleasure?… The cares and troubles of life are out of all proportion to
the yield or pro�t from it.
Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally
committed to an equally meaningless existence:
Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little ants … the
life of most insects is nothing but a restless labour for preparing
nourishment and dwelling for the future o�spring that will
come from their eggs. After the o�spring have consumed the
nourishment and have turned into the chrysalis stage, they
enter into life merely to begin the same task again from the
beginning … we cannot help but ask what comes of all of this
… there is nothing to show but the satisfaction of hunger and
sexual passion, and … a little momentary grati�cation … now
and then, between … endless needs and exertions.

(Ill. 20.9)
3. The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We
pursue love a�airs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and
have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles and
ants – and are rarely any happier.
(Ill. 20.10)
(Ill. 20.11)
4. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from
expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love

has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the
plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most
cheering:
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be
happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full
of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to
experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of
maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly
persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.
They would never have grown so disappointed if only they had
entered love with the correct expectations:
What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for
happiness on the �rm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this
arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images
of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected
shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained
if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated
from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to o�er
them.
(Ill. 20.12)

3
We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to �ght for
survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we
can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and
in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic
poems – and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a
supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. What
we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions
of our own pains and struggles, evoked and de�ned in sound,
language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what
we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and
intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of
our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have
understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us,
and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. We
may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through
creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insight into our
woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even
persecution) at being a�icted by them. In their di�erent ways, art
and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into
knowledge.
The philosopher admired his mother’s friend Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe because he had turned so many of the pains of love into
knowledge, most famously in the novel he had published at the age
of twenty-�ve, and which had made his name throughout Europe.
The Sorrows of Young Werther described the unrequited love felt by a
particular young man for a particular young woman (the charming
Lotte, who shared Werther’s taste for The Vicar of Wake�eld and

wore white dresses with pink ribbons at the sleeves), but it
simultaneously described the love a�airs of thousands of its readers
(Napoleon was said to have read the novel nine times). The greatest
works of art speak to us without knowing of us. As Schopenhauer
put it:
The … poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and
describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of
human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is
actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. From this it
arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general
apophthegms, �nd frequent application in real life.
Goethe’s readers not only recognized themselves in The Sorrows of
Young Werther, they also understood themselves better as a result, for
Goethe had clari�ed a range of the awkward, evanescent moments
of love, moments that his readers would previously have lived
through, though would not necessarily have fathomed. He laid bare
certain laws of love, what Schopenhauer termed essential ‘Ideas’ of
romantic psychology. He had, for example, perfectly captured the
apparently kind – yet in�nitely cruel – manner with which the
person who does not love deals with the one who does. Late in the
novel, tortured by his feelings, Werther breaks down in front of
Lotte:
‘Lotte’ he cried, ‘I shall never see you again!’ – ‘Why ever not?’ she replied: ‘Werther,
you may and must see us again, but do be less agitated in your manner. Oh, why did
you have to be born with this intense spirit, this uncontrollable passion for
everything you are close to! I implore you,’ she went on, taking his hand, ‘be calmer.
Think of the many joys your spirit, your knowledge and your gifts a�ord you!’
We need not have lived in Germany in the second half of the
eighteenth century to appreciate what is involved. There are fewer
stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly
while the names and backdrops alter. ‘The essence of art is that its
one case applies to thousands,’ knew Schopenhauer.
In turn, there is consolation in realizing that our case is only one of
thousands. Schopenhauer made two trips to Florence, in 1818 and

again in 1822. He is likely to have visited the Brancacci chapel in
Santa Maria del Carmine, in which Masaccio had painted a series of
frescos between 1425 and 1426.
(Ill. 21.1)
The distress of Adam and Eve at leaving paradise is not theirs alone.
In the faces and posture of the two �gures, Masaccio has captured
the essence of distress, the very Idea of distress, his fresco a
universal symbol of our fallibility and fragility. We have all been
expelled from the heavenly garden.
But by reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself
above his own situation; he is no longer one man su�ering alone,
singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings
who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the
agonizing drive to propagate the species. His su�ering loses a little
of its sting, it grows more comprehensible, less of an individual

curse. Of a person who can achieve such objectivity, Schopenhauer
remarks:
In the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own
individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct
himself … more as a knower than as a su�erer.
We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always
to transform our tears into knowledge.

VI

Consolation for Di�culties

1
Few philosophers have thought highly of feeling wretched. A wise
life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to reduce
su�ering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.
2
Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of
philosophers have always been ‘cabbage-heads’. ‘It is my fate to
have to be the �rst decent human being,’ he recognized with a
degree of embarrassment in the autumn of 1888. ‘I have a terrible
fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy’; and he set the date
somewhere around the dawn of the third millennium: ‘Let us assume
that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year
2000.’ He was sure they would enjoy it when they did:
It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest
distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his
shoes when he does so – not to speak of boots.
A distinction because, alone among the cabbage-heads, Nietzsche
had realized that di�culties of every sort were to be welcomed by
those seeking ful�lment:
You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ – to abolish su�ering; and
we? – it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it
has ever been!
Though punctilious in sending his best wishes to friends, Nietzsche
knew in his heart what they needed:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish su�ering, desolation,
sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar

with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the
vanquished.
Which helped to explain why his work amounted to, even if he said
so himself:
The greatest gift that [mankind] has ever been given.
3
We should not be frightened by appearances.
In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the �rst time … usually we are nothing more than a
single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus
the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache … usually be seen as
no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily
angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated. (Ill. 22.1)
4

He had not always thought so well of di�culty. For his initial views,
he had been indebted to a philosopher he had discovered at the age
of twenty-one as a student at Leipzig University. In the autumn of
1865, in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig’s Blumengasse, he had
by chance picked up an edition of The World as Will and
Representation, whose author had died �ve years previously in an
apartment in Frankfurt 300 kilometres to the west:
I took [Schopenhauer’s book] in my hand as something totally unfamiliar and
turned the pages. I don’t know which daimon was whispering to me: ‘Take this book
home.’ In any case, it happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise
never rushing into buying a book. Back at the house I threw myself into the corner
of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work
on me. Each line cried out with renunciation, negation, resignation.
The older man changed the younger one’s life. The essence of
philosophical wisdom was, Schopenhauer explained, Aristotle’s
remark in the Nicomachean Ethics:
The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.
The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the
impossibility of ful�lment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety
that we typically encounter in its pursuit:
[We should] direct our aim not to what is pleasant and agreeable in life, but to the
avoidance, as far as possible, of its numberless evils … The happiest lot is that of the
man who has got through life without any very great pain, bodily or mental.
When he next wrote home to his widowed mother and his nineteen-
year-old sister in Naumburg, Nietzsche replaced the usual reports on
his diet and the progress of his studies with a summary of his new
philosophy of renunciation and resignation:
We know that life consists of su�ering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more
enslaved we are by it, and so we [should] discard the goods of life and practise
abstinence.
It sounded strange to his mother, who wrote back explaining that
she didn’t like ‘that kind of display or that kind of opinion so much
as a proper letter, full of news’, and advised her son to entrust his
heart to God and to make sure he was eating properly.

But Schopenhauer’s in�uence did not subside. Nietzsche began to
live cautiously. Sex �gured prominently in a list he drew up under
the heading ‘Delusions of the Individual’. During his military service
in Naumburg, he positioned a photograph of Schopenhauer on his
desk, and in di�cult moments cried out, ‘Schopenhauer, help!’ At
the age of twenty-four, on taking up the Chair of Classical Philology
at Basle University, he was drawn into the intimate circle of Richard
and Cosima Wagner through a common love of the pessimistic,
prudent sage of Frankfurt.
5
Then, after more than a decade of attachment, in the autumn of
1876, Nietzsche travelled to Italy and underwent a radical change of
mind. He had accepted an invitation from Malwida von Meysenbug,
a wealthy middle-aged enthusiast of the arts, to spend a few months
with her and a group of friends in a villa in Sorrento on the Bay of
Naples.
(Ill. 22.2)
‘I never saw him so lively. He laughed aloud from sheer joy,’
reported Malwida of Nietzsche’s �rst response to the Villa
Rubinacci, which stood on a leafy avenue on the edge of Sorrento.
From the living room there were views over the bay, the island of

Ischia and Mount Vesuvius, and in front of the house, a small
garden with �g and orange trees, cypresses and grape arbours led
down to the sea.
The house guests went swimming, and visited Pompeii, Vesuvius,
Capri and the Greek temples at Paestum. At mealtimes, they ate
light dishes prepared with olive oil, and in the evenings, read
together in the living room: Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek
civilization, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La
Bruyère, Stendhal, Goethe’s ballad Die Braut von Korinth, and his
play Die natürliche Tochter, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato’s Laws
(though, perhaps spurred on by Montaigne’s confessions of distaste,
Nietzsche grew irritated with the latter: ‘The Platonic dialogue, that
dreadfully self-satis�ed and childish kind of dialectics, can only
have a stimulating e�ect if one has never read any good Frenchmen
… Plato is boring’).
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 sel�shness – are beyond all conception of
greater importance than anything that has been considered of
importance hitherto’), Nietzsche gradually changed his philosophy
of pain and pleasure, and with it, his perspective on di�culty.
Watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples at the end of October
1876, he was infused with a new, quite un-Schopenhauerian faith in
existence. He felt that he had been old at the beginning of his life,
and shed tears at the thought that he had been saved at the last
moment.
6
He made a formal announcement of his conversion in a letter to
Cosima Wagner at the end of 1876: ‘Would you be amazed if I
confess something that has gradually come about, but which has
more or less suddenly entered my consciousness: a disagreement

with Schopenhauer’s teaching? On virtually all general propositions
I am not on his side.’
One of these propositions being that, because ful�lment is an
illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather
than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counselled,
‘in a small �reproof room’ – advice that now struck Nietzsche as
both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put
it pejoratively several years later, ‘hidden in forests like shy deer’.
Ful�lment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by
recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to
reaching anything good.
7
What had, besides the food and the air, helped to change Nietzsche’s
outlook was his re�ection on the few individuals throughout history
who appeared genuinely to have known ful�lled lives; individuals
who could fairly have been described – to use one of the most
contested terms in the Nietzschean lexicon – as Übermenschen.
The notoriety and absurdity of the word owe less to Nietzsche’s
own philosophy than to his sister Elisabeth’s subsequent
enchantment with National Socialism (‘that vengeful anti-Semitic
goose’, as Friedrich described her long before she shook the Führer’s
hand), and the unwitting decision by Nietzsche’s earliest Anglo-
Saxon translators to bequeath to the Übermensch the name of a
legendary cartoon hero.

Hitler greeting Elisabeth Nietzsche in Weimar, October 1935 (Ill. 22.3)
But Nietzsche’s Übermenschen had little to do with either airborne
aces or fascists. A better indication of their identity came in a
passing remark in a letter to his mother and sister:
Really, there is nobody living about whom I care much. The people I like have been
dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or
Montaigne.
He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
These four men were perhaps the richest clues for what Nietzsche
came in his maturity to understand by a ful�lled life.
They had much in common. They were curious, artistically gifted,
and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and
many of them danced, too; they were drawn to ‘gentle sunlight,
bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the sea
[and] �eeting meals of �esh, fruit and eggs’. Several of them had a
gallows humour close to Nietzsche’s own – a joyful, wicked laughter
arising from pessimistic hinterlands. They had explored their
possibilities, they possessed what Nietzsche called ‘life’, which
suggested courage, ambition, dignity, strength of character, humour

and independence (and a parallel absence of sanctimoniousness,
conformity, resentment and prissiness).
Montaigne (1533–92) (Ill. 22.4)
Abbé Galiani (1728–87)

Goethe (1749–1832) (Ill. 22.5)
Stendhal/Henri Beyle (1783–1842) (Ill. 22.6)
They had been involved in the world. Montaigne had been mayor
of Bordeaux for two terms and journeyed across Europe on
horseback. The Neapolitan Abbé Galiani had been Secretary to the
Embassy in Paris and written works on money supply and grain
distribution (which Voltaire praised for combining the wit of
Molière and the intelligence of Plato). Goethe had worked for a
decade as a civil servant in the Court in Weimar; he had proposed
reforms in agriculture, industry and poor relief, undertaken
diplomatic missions and twice had audiences with Napoleon.

(Ill. 22.7)
On his visit to Italy in 1787, he had seen the Greek temples at
Paestum and made three ascents of Mount Vesuvius, coming close
enough to the crater to dodge eruptions of stone and ash.
(Ill. 22.8)
Nietzsche called him ‘magni�cent’, ‘the last German I hold in
reverence’: ‘He made use of … practical activity … he did not
divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it … [he] took as

much as possible upon himself … What he wanted was totality; he
fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.’
Stendhal had accompanied Napoleon’s armies around Europe, he
had visited the ruins of Pompeii seven times and admired the Pont
du Gard by a full moon at �ve in the morning (‘The Coliseum in
Rome hardly plunged me into a reverie more profound …’).
Nietzsche’s heroes had also fallen in love repeatedly. ‘The whole
movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation,’
Montaigne had known. At the age of seventy-four, on holiday in
Marienbad, Goethe had become infatuated with Ulrike von
Levetzow, a pretty nineteen-year-old, whom he had invited out for
tea and on walks, before asking for (and being refused) her hand in
marriage. Stendhal, who had known and loved Werther, had been as
passionate as its author, his diaries detailing conquests across
decades. At twenty-four, stationed with the Napoleonic armies in
Germany, he had taken the innkeeper’s daughter to bed and noted
proudly in his diary that she was ‘the �rst German woman I ever
saw who was totally exhausted after an orgasm. I made her
passionate with my caresses; she was very frightened.’
And �nally, these men had all been artists (‘Art is the great
stimulant to life,’ recognized Nietzsche), and must have felt
extraordinary satisfaction upon completing the Essais, Il Socrate
immaginario, Römische Elegien and De l’amour.
8
These were, Nietzsche implied, some of the elements that human
beings naturally needed for a ful�lled life. He added an important
detail; that it was impossible to attain them without feeling very
miserable some of the time:
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have
as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other … you
have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as
much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle

pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former
and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish
and lower the level of their capacity for joy.
The most ful�lling human projects appeared inseparable from a
degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly
close to those of our greatest pains:
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask
yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense
with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some
kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do
not belong among the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of
virtue is scarcely possible.
9
Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without
experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a
great lover at the �rst attempt; and in the interval between initial
failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish
one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety,
envy and humiliation. We su�er because we cannot spontaneously
master the ingredients of ful�lment.
Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that ful�lment must
come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its e�ects, 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.
We might imagine that Montaigne’s Essays had sprung fully
formed from his mind and so could take the clumsiness of our own
�rst attempts to write a philosophy of life as signs of a congenital
incapacity for the task. We should look instead at the evidence of
colossal authorial struggles behind the �nal masterpiece, the
plethora of additions and revisions the Essays demanded.

(Ill. 22.9)
Le Rouge et le noir, Vie de Henry Brulard and De l’amour had been no
easier to write. Stendhal had begun his artistic career by sketching
out a number of poor plays. One had centred on the landing of an
émigré army at Quiberon (the characters were to include William
Pitt and Charles James Fox), another had charted Bonaparte’s rise to
power and a third – tentatively titled L’Homme qui craint d’être
gouverné – had depicted the slide of an old man into senility.
Stendhal had spent weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying
out dictionary de�nitions of words like ‘plaisanterie’, ‘ridicule’ and
‘comique’ – but it had not been enough to transform his leaden play-
writing. It was many decades of toil before the masterpieces
emerged.
If most works of literature are less �ne than Le Rouge et le noir, it
is – suggested Nietzsche – not because their authors lack genius, but
because they have an incorrect idea of how much pain is required.
This is how hard one should try to write a novel:

The recipe for becoming a good novelist … is easy to give, but to carry it out
presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have
enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none
longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary;
one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them
the most pregnant and e�ective form; one should be tireless in collecting and
describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others
and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the e�ect produced
on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer …
one should, �nally, re�ect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost for
instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One
should continue in this many-sided exercise for some ten years; what is then created
in the workshop … will be �t to go out into the world.
The philosophy amounted to a curious mixture of extreme faith in
human potential (ful�lment is open to us all, as is the writing of
great novels) and extreme toughness (we may need to spend a
miserable decade on the �rst book).
It was in order to accustom us to the legitimacy of pain that
Nietzsche spent so much time talking about mountains.
10
It is hard to read more than a few pages without coming upon an
alpine reference:
Ecce Homo: He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an
air of heights, a robust air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small
danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how
peacefully all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how much one feels
beneath one! Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary
living in ice and high mountains.
On the Genealogy of Morals: We would need another sort of spirit than those we are
likely to encounter in this age [to understand my philosophy] … they would need to
be acclimatized to thinner air higher up, to winter treks, ice and mountains in every
sense.

Human, All Too Human: In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain:
either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be
able to get up higher tomorrow.
Untimely Meditations: To climb as high into the pure icy Alpine air as a philosopher
ever climbed, up to where all the mist and obscurity cease and where the
fundamental constitution of things speaks in voice rough and rigid but ineluctably
comprehensible!
He was – in both a practical and spiritual sense – of the mountains.
Having taken citizenship in April 1869, Nietzsche may be
considered Switzerland’s most famous philosopher. Even so, he on
occasion succumbed to a sentiment with which few Swiss are
unacquainted. ‘I am distressed to be Swiss!’ he complained to his
mother a year after taking up citizenship.
Upon resigning his post at Basle University at the age of thirty-
�ve, he began spending winters by the Mediterranean, largely in
Genoa and Nice, and summers in the Alps, in the small village of
Sils-Maria, 1,800 metres above sea-level in the Engadine region of
south-eastern Switzerland, a few kilometres from St Moritz, where
the winds from Italy collide with cooler northern gusts and turn the
sky an aquamarine blue.
Nietzsche visited the Engadine for the �rst time in June 1879 and
at once fell in love with the climate and topography. ‘I now have
Europe’s best and mightiest air to breathe,’ he told Paul Rée, ‘its
nature is akin to my own.’ To Peter Gast, he wrote, ‘This is not
Switzerland … but something quite di�erent, at least much more
southern – I would have to go to the high plateaux of Mexico
overlooking the Paci�c to �nd anything similar (for example,
Oaxaca), and the vegetation there would of course be tropical. Well,
I shall try to keep this Sils-Maria for myself.’ And to his old
schoolfriend Carl von Gersdor�, he explained, ‘I feel that here and
nowhere else is my real home and breeding ground.’
Nietzsche spent seven summers in Sils-Maria in a rented room in a
chalet with views on to pine trees and mountains. There he wrote
all or substantial portions of The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the

Idols. He would rise at �ve in the morning and work until midday,
then take walks up the huge peaks that necklace the village, Piz
Corvatsch, Piz Lagrev, Piz de la Margna, jagged and raw mountains
that look as if they had only recently thrust through the earth’s crust
under atrocious tectonic pressures. In the evening, alone in his
room, he would eat a few slices of ham, an egg and a roll and go to
bed early. (‘How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend
at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?’)
Today, inevitably, there is a museum in the village. For a few
francs, one is invited to visit the philosopher’s bedroom,
refurbished, the guidebook explains, ‘as it looked in Nietzsche’s
time, in all its unpretentiousness’.
(Ill. 22.10)
Yet to understand why Nietzsche felt there to be such an a�nity
between his philosophy and the mountains, it may be best to skirt
the room and visit instead one of Sils-Maria’s many sports shops in
order to acquire walking boots, a rucksack, a water-bottle, gloves, a
compass and a pick.

(Ill. 22.11)
A hike up Piz Corvatsch, a few kilometres from Nietzsche’s house,
will explain better than any museum the spirit of his philosophy, his
defence of di�culty, and his reasons for turning away from
Schopenhauerian deer-like shyness.
At the base of the mountain one �nds a large car park, a row of
recycling bins, a depot for rubbish trucks and a restaurant o�ering
oleaginous sausages and rösti.
(Ill. 22.12)
The summit is, by contrast, sublime. There are views across the
entire Engadine: the turquoise lakes of Segl, Silvaplana and St
Moritz, and to the south, near the border with Italy, the massive

Sella and Roseg glaciers. There is an extraordinary stillness in the
air, it seems one can touch the roof of the world. The height leaves
one out of breath but curiously elated. It is hard not to start
grinning, perhaps laughing, for no particular reason, an innocent
laughter that comes from the core of one’s being and expresses a
primal delight at being alive to see such beauty.
But, to come to the moral of Nietzsche’s mountain philosophy, it
isn’t easy to climb 3,451 metres above sea-level. It requires �ve
hours at least, one must cling to steep paths, negotiate a way around
boulders and through thick pine-forests, grow breathless in the thin
air, add layers of clothes to �ght the wind and crunch through
eternal snows.

11
Nietzsche o�ered another alpine metaphor. A few steps from his
room in Sils-Maria a path leads to the Fex Valley, one of the most
fertile of the Engadine. Its gentle slopes are extensively farmed. In
summer, families of cows stand re�ectively munching the almost
luminously rich-green grass, their bells clanging as they move from
one patch to another.
(Ill. 22.13)
Streams trickle through the �elds with the sound of sparkling water
being poured into glasses. Beside many small, immaculate farms
(each one �ying the national and cantonal �ags) stand carefully
tended vegetable gardens from whose loamy soils sprout vigorous
cauli�owers, beetroots, carrots and lettuces, which tempt one to
kneel down and take rabbit-like bites out of them.
If there are such nice lettuces here, it is because the Fex Valley is
glacial, with the characteristic mineral richness of soil once a glacial
mantle has retreated. Much further along the valley, hours of
strenuous walking from the tidy farms, one comes upon the glacier
itself, massive and terrifying. It looks like a tablecloth waiting for a
tug to straighten out its folds, but these folds are the size of houses
and are made of razor-sharp ice, and occasionally release agonized
bellows as they rearrange themselves in the summer sun.

(Ill. 22.14)
It is hard to conceive, when standing at the edge of the cruel glacier,
how this frozen bulk could have a role to play in the gestation of
vegetables and lush grass only a few kilometres along the valley, to
imagine that something as apparently antithetical to a green �eld as
a glacier could be responsible for the �eld’s fertility.
Nietzsche, who often walked in the Fex Valley carrying a pencil
and leather-bound notebook (‘Only thoughts which come from
walking have any value’), drew an analogy with the dependence of
positive elements in human life on negative ones, of ful�lment on
di�culties:
When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we
think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered
by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of
mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their
work was none-the-less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might
raise its house. The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the
cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.
12

But frightful di�culties are sadly, of course, not enough. All lives
are di�cult; what makes some of them ful�lled as well is the
manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct
signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good
or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the
su�erer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of
what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a
ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to
bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the
production of a masterpiece.
As Nietzsche’s beloved Montaigne had explained in the �nal
chapter of the Essays, the art of living lies in �nding uses for our
adversities:
We must learn to su�er whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the
harmony of the world, of discords as well as of di�erent tones, sweet and harsh,
sharp and �at, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he
sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too
must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.
And some 300 years later, Nietzsche returned to the thought:
If only we were fruitful �elds, we would at bottom let nothing perish unused and see
in every event, thing and man welcome manure.
How then to be fruitful?
13
Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael from an early age displayed such
an interest in drawing that his father took the boy to Perugia to
work as an apprentice to the renowned Pietro Perugino. He was
soon executing works of his own and by his late teens had painted
several portraits of members of the court of Urbino, and altarpieces
for churches in Città di Castello, a day’s ride from Urbino across the
mountains on the road to Perugia.
But Raphael, one of Nietzsche’s favourite painters, knew he was
not then a great artist, for he had seen the works of two men,

Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci. They had shown
him that he was unable to paint �gures in motion, and despite an
aptitude for pictorial geometry, that he had no grasp of linear
perspective. The envy could have grown monstrous. Raphael turned
it into manure instead.
In 1504, at the age of twenty-one, he left Urbino for Florence in
order to study the work of his two masters. He examined their
cartoons in the Hall of the Great Council where Leonardo had
worked on the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo on the Battle of
Cascina. He imbibed the lessons of Leonardo and Michelangelo’s
anatomical drawings and followed their example of dissecting and
drawing corpses. He learned from Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi
and his cartoons of the Virgin and Child, and looked closely at an
unusual portrait Leonardo had been asked to execute for a
nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo, who had wanted a likeness of
his wife, a young beauty with a somewhat enigmatic smile.
The results of Raphael’s exertions were soon apparent. We can
compare Portrait of a Young Woman which Raphael had drawn
before moving to Florence with Portrait of a Woman completed a few
years after.
(Ill. 22.15)

(Ill. 22.16)
Mona had given Raphael the idea of a half-length seated pose in
which the arms provided the base of a pyramidal composition. She
had taught him how to use contrasting axes for the head, shoulder
and hands in order to lend volume to a �gure. Whereas the woman
drawn in Urbino had looked awkwardly constricted in her clothes,
her arms unnaturally cut o�, the woman from Florence was mobile
and at ease.
Raphael had not spontaneously come into possession of his
talents; he had become great by responding intelligently to a sense
of inferiority that would have led lesser men to despair.
The career path o�ered a Nietzschean lesson in the bene�ts of
wisely interpreted pain:
Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men
who were not very gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it)
through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak: all of them
had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning �rst to construct the parts
properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it,
because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in
the e�ect of a dazzling whole.

Raphael: studies for Niccolini-Cowper Madonna; Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (Ill. 22.17)
(Ill. 22.18)
Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate
(sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to
fruitfulness the di�culties in his path.
14

The philosopher had a practical as well as a metaphorical interest in
horticulture. On resigning from Basle University in 1879, Nietzsche
had set his heart on becoming a professional gardener. ‘You know
that my preference is for a simple, natural way of life,’ he informed
his surprised mother, ‘and I am becoming increasingly eager for it.
There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes
time and induces tiredness without mental strain.’ He remembered
an old tower in Naumburg near his mother’s house, which he
planned to rent while looking after the adjoining garden. The
gardening life began with enthusiasm in September 1879 – but there
were soon problems. Nietzsche’s poor eyesight prevented him from
seeing what he was trimming, he had di�culty bending his back,
there were too many leaves (it was autumn) and after three weeks,
he felt he had no alternative but to give up.
Yet traces of his horticultural enthusiasm survived in his
philosophy, for in certain passages, he proposed that we should look
at our di�culties like gardeners. At their roots, plants can be odd
and unpleasant, but a person with knowledge and faith in their
potential will lead them to bear beautiful �owers and fruit – just as,
in life, at root level, there may be di�cult emotions and situations
which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the
greatest achievements and joys.
One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate
the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and pro�tably as a
beautiful fruit tree on a trellis.

(Ill. 22.19)
But most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of
di�culty. We are liable to think that anxiety and envy have nothing
legitimate to teach us and so remove them like emotional weeds. We
believe, as Nietzsche put it, that ‘the higher is not allowed to grow
out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all … everything
�rst-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].’
Yet ‘good and honoured things’ were, Nietzsche stressed, ‘artfully
related, knotted and crocheted to … wicked, apparently antithetical
things’. ‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and
anger … belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be
expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a
negative successfully gardened. Therefore:
The emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness and lust for domination [are] life-
conditioning emotions … which must fundamentally and essentially be present in
the total economy of life.
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking
o� positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of
the plant.

We should not feel embarrassed by our di�culties, only by our
failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
15
It was for their apparent appreciation of the point that Nietzsche
looked back in admiration to the ancient Greeks.
It is tempting when contemplating their serene temples at dusk, like
those at Paestum, a few kilometres from Sorrento – which Nietzsche
visited with Malwida von Meysenbug in early 1877 – to imagine
that the Greeks were an unusually measured people whose temples
were the outward manifestations of an order they felt within
themselves and their society.
This had been the opinion of the great classicist Johann
Winckelmann (1717–68) and had won over successive generations
of German university professors. But Nietzsche proposed that far
from arising out of serenity, classical Greek civilization had arisen
from the sublimation of the most sinister forces:
The greater and more terrible the passions are that an age, a people, an individual
can permit themselves, because they are capable of employing them as a means, the
higher stands their culture.
The temples might have looked calm, but they were the �owers of
well-gardened plants with dark roots. The Dionysiac festivals
showed both the darkness and the attempt to control and cultivate
it:

Nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than when he discovers
that from time to time the Greeks made as it were a festival of all their passions and
evil natural inclinations and even instituted a kind of o�cial order of proceedings in
the celebration of what was all-too-human in them … They took this all-too-human
to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of
the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion:
indeed, everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it on
the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that �nds
expression in the evil qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered
su�cient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful
means of channeling and out�ow, con�ne them to de�nite cults and days. This is
the root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and
suspicious … a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.
The Greeks did not cut out their adversities; they cultivated them:
All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, in which they draw their
victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one in which they
marry the spirit, ‘spiritualize’ themselves. In former times, because of the stupidity
of passion, people waged war on passion itself: they plotted to destroy it …
Destroying the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the
disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself
simply an acute form of stupidity. We no longer marvel at dentists who pull out teeth
to stop them hurting.
(Ill. 22.20)
Ful�lment is reached by responding wisely to di�culties that could
tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull the molar

out at once or come o� Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche
urged us to endure.
16
And far from coincidentally, never to drink.

Dear Mother,
If I write to you today, it is about one of the most unpleasant and painful incidents I have
ever been responsible for. In fact, I have misbehaved very badly, and I don’t know whether
you can or will forgive me. I pick up my pen most reluctantly and with a heavy heart,
especially when I think back to our pleasant life together during the Easter holidays, which
was never spoiled by any discord. Last Sunday, I got drunk, and I have no excuse, except
that I did not know how much I could take, and I was rather excited in the afternoon.
So wrote eighteen-year-old Friedrich to his mother Franziska after
four glasses of beer in the halls of Attenburg near his school in the
spring of 1863. A few years later, at Bonn and Leipzig universities,
he felt irritation with his fellow students for their love of alcohol: ‘I
often found the expressions of good fellowship in the clubhouse
extremely distasteful … I could hardly bear certain individuals
because of their beery materialism.’
Nietzsche’s student fraternity at Bonn University.
Nietzsche is in the second row, leaning to one side.

Note, in the row below, the fraternity beerkeg. (Ill. 22.21)
The attitude remained constant throughout the philosopher’s adult
life:
Alcoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to
make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live.
(Ill. 22.22)
‘How much beer there is in the German intelligence!’ he complained.
‘Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our
forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages
… The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe.’
In the spring of 1871, Nietzsche went on holiday with his sister to
the Hôtel du Parc in Lugano. The hotel bill for 2–9 March shows
that he drank fourteen glasses of milk.
It was more than a personal taste. Anyone seeking to be happy
was strongly advised never to drink anything alcoholic at all. Never:
I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol
absolutely. Water su�ces.
Why? Because Raphael had not drunk to escape his envy in Urbino
in 1504, he had gone to Florence and learned how to be a great
painter. Because Stendhal had not drunk in 1805 to escape his
despair over L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné, he had gardened the
pain for seventeen years and published De l’amour in 1822:

If you refuse to let your own su�ering lie upon you even for an hour and if you
constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you
experience su�ering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as
a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the religion
of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable …
people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow
up together or, as in your case, remain small together.
17
Nietzsche’s antipathy to alcohol explains simultaneously his
antipathy to what had been the dominant British school of moral
philosophy: Utilitarianism, and its greatest proponent, John Stuart
Mill. The Utilitarians had argued that in a world beset by moral
ambiguities, the way to judge whether an action was right or wrong
was to measure the amount of pleasure and pain it gave rise to. Mill
proposed that:
[A]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they
tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the
absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
The thought of Utilitarianism, and even the nation from which it
had sprung, enraged Nietzsche:
European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas [is the work and invention of]
England.
Man does not strive for happiness; only the English do that.
He was, of course, also striving for happiness; he simply believed
that it could not be attained as painlessly as the Utilitarians
appeared to be suggesting:
All these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to pleasure
and pain, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are
foreground modes of thought and naïveties which anyone conscious of creative
powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on with derision.

An artist’s conscience because artistic creation o�ers a most explicit
example of an activity which may deliver immense ful�lment but
always demands immense su�ering. Had Stendhal assessed the
value of his art according to the ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ it had at once
brought him, there would have been no advance from L’Homme qui
craint d’être gouverné to the summit of his powers.
(Ill. 22.23)
Instead of drinking beer in the lowlands, Nietzsche asked us to
accept the pain of the climb. He also o�ered a suggestion for town-
planners:
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest
enjoyment is – to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!

Vesuvius, exploding in 1879, three years before the above statement was written (Ill.
22.24)
And if one were still tempted to have a drink, but had no high
opinion of Christianity, Nietzsche added a further argument to
dissuade one from doing so. Anyone who liked drinking had, he
argued, a fundamentally Christian outlook on life:
To believe that wine makes cheerful I would have to be a Christian, that is to say
believe what is for me in particular an absurdity.
18
He had more experience of Christianity than of alcohol. He was
born in the tiny village of Röcken near Leipzig in Saxony. His father,
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the parson, his deeply devout mother
was herself the daughter of a parson, David Ernst Oehler, who took
services in the village of Pobles an hour away. Their son was
baptized before an assembly of the local clergy in Röcken church in
October 1844.
(Ill. 22.25)
Friedrich loved his father, who died when he was only four, and
revered his memory throughout his life. On the one occasion when
he had a little money, after winning a court case against a publisher

in 1885, he ordered a large headstone for his father’s grave on
which he had carved a quotation from Corinthians (1 Cor 13.8):
Die Liebe höret nimmer auf
Charity never faileth
‘He was the perfect embodiment of a country pastor,’ Nietzsche
recalled of Carl Ludwig. ‘A tall, delicate �gure, a �ne-featured face,
amiable and bene�cent. Everywhere welcomed and beloved as
much for his witty conversation as for his warm sympathy, esteemed
and loved by the farmers, extending blessings by word and deed in
his capacity as a spiritual guide.’
(Ill. 22.26)
Yet this �lial love did not prevent Nietzsche from harbouring the
deepest reservations about the consolation that his father, and
Christianity in general, could o�er those in pain:
I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever
uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption … [it] has left
nothing untouched by its depravity … I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
great intrinsic depravity …
One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of
so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so … Everything in it is cowardice,
everything is self-deception and closing one’s eyes to oneself … Do I still have to add

that in the entire New Testament there is only one solitary �gure one is obliged to
respect? Pilate, the Roman governor.
Quite simply:
It is indecent to be a Christian today.
19
How does the New Testament console us for our di�culties? By
suggesting that many of these are not di�culties at all but rather
virtues:
If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out:
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)
If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from
their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil … your
reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22–3)
If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises:
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the �esh …
Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve
the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22–4)
If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to
enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)
There may be di�erences between such words and a drink but
Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and
alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously
thought de�cient in ourselves and the world does not require
attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both
deny us the chance of ful�lment:
The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of
timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to

climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a
philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had
wished to enjoy the real ingredients of ful�lment (a position in the
world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the
courage to endure the di�culties these goods demanded. They had
therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they
wanted but were too weak to �ght 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.
20
Having a ‘Christian’ perspective on di�culty is not limited to
members of the Christian church; it is for Nietzsche a permanent
psychological possibility. We all become Christians when we profess
indi�erence to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we
blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world,
money or success, creativity or health – while the corners of our
mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against
what we have publicly renounced, �ring shots over the parapet,
sniping from the trees.
How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our
setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we
do not have it, and may never. Put another way, to resist the
temptation to denigrate and declare evil certain goods because they
have proved hard to secure – a pattern of behaviour of which
Nietzsche’s own, in�nitely tragic life o�ers us perhaps the best
model.

21
Epicurus had from an early age been among his favourite ancient
philosophers; he called him ‘the soul-soother of later antiquity’, ‘one
of the greatest men, the inventor of an heroic-idyllic mode of
philosophizing’. What especially appealed to him was Epicurus’s
idea that happiness involved a life among friends. But he was rarely
to know the contentment of community: ‘It is our lot to be
intellectual hermits and occasionally to have a conversation with
someone like-minded.’ At thirty, he composed a hymn to loneliness,
‘Hymnus auf die Einsamkeit’, which he did not have the heart to
�nish.
The search for a wife was no less sorrowful, the problem partly
caused by Nietzsche’s appearance – his extraordinarily large walrus
moustache – and his shyness, which bred the gauche sti� manner of
a retired colonel. In the spring of 1876, on a trip to Geneva,
Nietzsche fell in love with a twenty-three-year-old, green-eyed
blonde, Mathilde Trampedach. During a conversation on the poetry
of Henry Longfellow, Nietzsche mentioned that he had never come
across a German version of Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’. Mathilde said
she had one at home and o�ered to copy it out for him. Encouraged,
Nietzsche invited her out for a walk. She brought her landlady as a
chaperone. A few days later, he o�ered to play the piano for her,
and the next she heard from the thirty-one-year-old Professor of
Classical Philology at Basle University was a request for marriage.
‘Do you not think that together each of us will be better and more
free than either of us could be alone – and so excelsior?’ asked the
playful colonel. ‘Will you dare to come with me … on all the paths
of living and thinking?’ Mathilde didn’t dare.
A succession of similar rejections took their toll. In the light of his
depression and ill health, Richard Wagner decided that there were
two possible remedies: ‘He must either marry or write an opera.’ But
Nietzsche couldn’t write an opera, and apparently lacked the talent
to produce even a decent tune. (In July 1872, he sent the conductor
Hans von Bülow a piano duet he had written, asking for an honest

appraisal. It was, replied von Bülow, ‘the most extreme fantastical
extravagance, the most irritating and anti-musical set of notes on
manuscript paper I have seen for a long time’, and he wondered
whether Nietzsche might have been pulling his leg. ‘You designated
your music as “frightful” – it truly is.’)
Wagner grew more insistent. ‘For Heaven’s sake, marry a rich
woman!’ he intoned, and entered into communication with
Nietzsche’s doctor, Otto Eiser, with whom he speculated that the
philosopher’s ill health was caused by excessive masturbation. It
was an irony lost on Wagner that the one rich woman with whom
Nietzsche was truly in love was Wagner’s own wife, Cosima. For
years, he carefully disguised his feelings for her under the cloak of
friendly solicitude. It was only once he had lost his reason that the
reality emerged. ‘Ariadne, I love you,’ wrote Nietzsche, or, as he
signed himself, Dionysus, in a postcard sent to Cosima from Turin at
the beginning of January 1889.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche intermittently agreed with the Wagnerian
thesis on the importance of marriage. In a letter to his married
friend Franz Overbeck, he complained, ‘Thanks to your wife, things
are a hundred times better for you than for me. You have a nest
together. I have, at best, a cave … Occasional contact with people is
like a holiday, a redemption from “me”.’
In 1882, he hoped once more that he had found a suitable wife,
Lou Andreas-Salomé, his greatest, most painful love. She was
twenty-one, beautiful, clever, �irtatious and fascinated by his
philosophy. Nietzsche was defenceless. ‘I want to be lonely no
longer, but to learn again to be a human being. Ah, here I have
practically everything to learn!’ he told her. They spent two weeks
together in the Tautenburg forest and in Lucerne posed with their
mutual friend Paul Rée for an unusual photograph.

(Ill. 22.27)
But Lou was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than as a
husband. The rejection threw him into renewed prolonged, violent
depression. ‘My lack of con�dence is now immense,’ he told
Overbeck, ‘everything I hear makes me think that people despise
me.’ He felt particular bitterness towards his mother and sister, who
had meddled in the relationship with Lou, and now broke o�
contact with them, deepening his isolation. (‘I do not like my
mother, and it is painful for me to hear my sister’s voice. I always
became ill when I was with them.’)
There were professional di�culties, too. None of his books sold
more than 2,000 copies in his sane life-time; most sold a few
hundred. With only a modest pension and some shares inherited
from an aunt on which to survive, the author could rarely pay for
new clothes, and ended up looking, in his words, ‘scraped like a
mountain sheep’. In hotels, he stayed in the cheapest rooms, often
fell into arrears with the rent and could a�ord neither heating nor
the hams and sausages he loved.

His health was as problematic. From his schooldays, he had
su�ered from a range of ailments: headaches, indigestion, vomiting,
dizziness, near blindness and insomnia, many of these the symptoms
of the syphilis he had almost certainly contracted in a Cologne
brothel in February 1865 (though Nietzsche claimed he had come
away without touching anything except a piano). In a letter to
Malwida von Meysenbug written three years after his trip to
Sorrento, he explained, ‘As regards torment and self-denial, my life
during these past years can match that of any ascetic of any time …’
And to his doctor he reported, ‘Constant pain, a feeling of being
half-paralysed, a condition closely related to seasickness, during
which I �nd it di�cult to speak – this feeling lasts several hours a
day. For my diversion I have raging seizures (the most recent one
forced me to vomit for three days and three nights; I thirsted after
death). Can’t read! Only seldom can I write! Can’t deal with my
fellows! Can’t listen to music!’
Finally, at the beginning of January 1889, Nietzsche broke down
in Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto and embraced a horse, was carried
back to his boarding-house, where he thought of shooting the
Kaiser, planned a war against anti-Semites, and grew certain that he
was – depending on the hour – Dionysus, Jesus, God, Napoleon, the
King of Italy, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Voltaire,
Alexander Herzen and Richard Wagner; before he was bundled into
a train and taken to an asylum in Germany to be looked after by his
elderly mother and sister until his death eleven years later at the
age of �fty-�ve.
22
And yet through appalling loneliness, obscurity, poverty and ill
health, Nietzsche did not manifest the behaviour of which he had
accused Christians; he did not take against friendship, he did not
attack eminence, wealth, or well-being. The Abbé Galiani and
Goethe remained heroes. Though Mathilde had wished for no more
than a conversation about poetry, he continued to believe that ‘for

the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure is to be loved by a
clever woman.’ Though sickly and lacking Montaigne or Stendhal’s
dexterity on a horse, he remained attached to the idea of an active
life: ‘Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and
dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious!’
He fought hard to be happy, but where he did not succeed he did
not turn against what he had once aspired to. He remained
committed to what was in his eyes the most important characteristic
of a noble human being: to be someone who ‘no longer denies’.
23
After seven hours of walking, much of it in the rain, it was in a state
of extreme exhaustion that I reached the summit of Piz Corvatsch,
high above the clouds that decked the Engadine valleys below. In
my rucksack I carried a water-bottle, an Emmental sandwich and an
envelope from the Hotel Edelweiss in Sils-Maria on which I had that
morning written a quote from the mountain philosopher, with the
intention of facing Italy and reading it to the wind and the rocks at
3,400 metres.
Like his pastor father, Nietzsche had been committed to the task
of consolation. Like his father, he had wished to o�er us paths to
ful�lment. But unlike pastors, and dentists who pull out throbbing
teeth and gardeners who destroy plants with ill-favoured roots, he
had judged di�culties to be a critical prerequisite of ful�lment, and
hence knew saccharine consolations to be ultimately more cruel
than helpful:
The worst sickness of men has originated in the way they have combated their
sicknesses. What seemed a cure has in the long run produced something worse than
what it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately,
anaesthetizing and intoxicating, the so-called consolations, were ignorantly supposed
to be actual cures. The fact was not noticed … that these instantaneous alleviations
often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint.

Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not
everything which hurts may be bad.
To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is
the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences … almost as stupid as
the will to abolish bad weather. (Ill. 22.28)

 
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements

Notes
Consolation for Unpopularity
Aside from a mention of Aristophanes and quotations from Plato’s
Phaedo, the portrait of Socrates is drawn from Plato’s early and
middle dialogues (the so-called Socratic dialogues): Apology,
Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major,
Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno, Protagoras and
Republic, book I
Quotations taken from:
The Last Days of Socrates, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, Penguin, 1987
Early Socratic Dialogues, Plato, translated by Iain Lane, Penguin, 1987
Protagoras and Meno, Plato, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie, Penguin, 1987
Gorgias, Plato, translated by Robin Water�eld, OUP, 1994.
1 So … deaths: Apology, 29d
2 Whenever … angle: Laches, 188a 3 Let’s … courageous: Laches,
190e–191a 4 At … battle: Laches, 191c
5 By … inescapable: Meno, 78c–79a 6 I … cities: Apology, 36b
7 I … well-being: Apology, 36d 8 I … fellow-citizen: Apology, 29d 9 I
… narrow: Apology, 36a
10 If … choose: Gorgias, 472a-b 11 The … him: Gorgias, 471e–472a
12 When … public: Crito, 47b 13 Don’t … say: Crito, 47a–48a 14 I
… time: Apology, 37a–b 15 If … sleeping: Apology, 30d–31a 16 In
… o�: Phaedo, 116c–d 17 When … himself: Phaedo, 117a-d 18
What … friends!: Phaedo, 117d 19 And … man: Phaedo, 118a

Consolation for Not Having Enough Money
Quotations taken from:
The Essential Epicurus, Epicurus, translated by Eugene O’Connor, Prometheus Books, 1993
The Epicurean Inscription, Diogenes of Oinoanda, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith,
Bibliopolis, 1993
On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius, translated by R. E. Latham, revised by John
Godwin, Penguin, 1994
1 If … forms: Fragments, VI.10
2 Pleasure … life: Letter to Menoeceus, 128
3 The … this: Fragments, 59
4 The … happiness: Letter to Menoeceus, 122
5 A … malady: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III.1070
6 Just … mind: Fragments, 54
7 Send … like: Fragments, 39
8 Of … friendship: Principal Doctrines, 27
9 Before … wolf: quoted in Seneca, Epistle, XIX.10
10 We … politics: Vatican Sayings, 58
11 The … pleasant: Letter to Menoeceus, 126
12 What … anticipation: Letter to Menoeceus, 124–5
13 There … living: Letter to Menoeceus, 125
14 Of … necessary: Principal Doctrines, 29
15 Plain … away: Letter to Menoeceus, 130
16 As … without: Porphyry reporting Epicurus’s view in On
Abstinence, 1.51.6–52.1
17 Nothing … little: Fragments, 69
18 The … accomplished?: Vatican Sayings, 71
19 The … joy: Vatican Sayings, 81
20 idle opinions: Principal Doctrines, 29

21 Luxurious … �esh: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 109
22 One … over�owing: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 108
23 Real … science: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 2
24 Having … salvation: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 3
(adapted) 25 chosen … senses: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,
V.1133–4
26 send … like: Fragments, 39
27 ergo … herbas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II.20–33
28 When … poverty: Vatican Sayings, 25
29 Mankind … seas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V.1430–5
30 It … good: Letter to Menoeceus, 129
Consolation for Frustration
Quotations taken from:
The Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus, translated by Michael Grant, Penguin, 1996
The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, translated by Robert Graves, Penguin, 1991
Dialogues and Letters, Seneca, translated by C. D. N. Costa, Penguin, 1997
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca, translated by Robin Campbell, Penguin, 1969
Moral Essays, volume 1, Seneca, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb-Harvard, 1994
Moral Essays, volume 11, Seneca, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb-Harvard, 1996
Moral and Political Essays, Seneca, translated by John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé, CUP,
1995
Naturales Quaestiones 1 & 11, Seneca, translated by T. H. Corcoran, Loeb-Harvard, 1972
1 Where … tutor: Tacitus, XV.62
2 I … end: Tacitus, XV.63
3 He … undisturbed: Epistulae Morales, CIV.28–9
4 the Monster: Suetonius, Caligula, IV.22
5 on … neck!: Suetonius, Caligula, IV.30

6 I … it: Epistulae Morales, LXXVIII.3
7 There … vices: De Ira, II.36.5–6
8 Prosperity … tempers: De Ira, II.21.7
9 What … columns?: De Ira, I.19.4
10 Why … servant?: De Ira, II.25.3
11 Why … talking?: De Ira, III.35.2
12 Is … misbehave?: De Ira, II.31.4
13 There … dare: Epistulae Morales, XCI.15
14 Nothing … happen: Epistulae Morales, XCI.4
15 What … Fortune: De Consolatione ad Marciam, XI.3
16 You … happened …?: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.5
17 Who … immobile: Naturales Quaestiones, I.VI.11–12
18 the … never-ending: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IV.1
19 We … property: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.1–2
20 No … hour: De Consolatione ad Marciam, X.4
21 [The wise] … thought …: De Ira, II.10.7
22 Fortune … own: Epistulae Morales, LXXII.7
23 Nothing … whirl: Epistulae Morales, XCI.7
24 Whatever … empires: Epistulae Morales, XCLI.6
25 How … ruins?: Epistulae Morales, XCI.9
26 We … die: Epistulae Morales, XCI.12
27 Mortal … birth: De Consolatione ad Marciam, XI.1
28 Reckon … everything: De Ira, II.31.4
29 Quotiens … petisti: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.3
30 I … myself: Epistulae Morales, XIV.16
31 You … hope: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.1

32 I … happen: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.1–2
33 If … prison?: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.3
34 ‘I … now?’: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.17
35 The … good: Epistulae Morales, XVIII.9
36 Is … Fortune: Epistulae Morales, XVIII.5–9
37 Stop … poverty: Vita Beata, XXIII.1
38 I … half: Vita Beata, XXV.5
39 The … himself: De Constantia, V.4
40 The … left: Epistulae Morales, IX.4
41 The … tall: Vita Beata, XXII.2
42 The … them: Epistulae Morales, IX.5
43 Never … me: Consolation to Helvia, V.4
44 a … spirit: De Constantia, X.3
45 ‘So … table’: De Constantia, X.2
46 [The … everything: Epistulae Morales, LXXXI.25
47 I … mankind: Epistulae Morales, VI.7
48 Imagine … shops: Epistulae Morales, LVI.1–2
49 All … within: Epistulae Morales, LVI.5
50 When … destined: Bishop Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies,
1.21 (quoted in A. A. Long & D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, CUP, 1987, volume 1, p. 386) 51 An … necessity: De
Ira, III.16.1
52 When … philosopher: De Tranquillitate Animi, XIV.3
53 A … does: Naturales Quaestiones, II.16
54 Among … air: Naturales Quaestiones, VI.31.1–2
55 Winter … endure: Epistulae Morales, CVII.7–9
56 Quid … est: De Consolatione ad Marciam, xi.1

Consolation for Inadequacy
Quotations taken from:
The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne, translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin, 1991.
The notes refer �rstly to the book number, then the essay number and lastly the page
number.
1 I … lettuces: II.17.741
2 I … day: III.3.933
3 splendid … views: III.3.933
4 the … was: II.12.558
5 strikingly … humour: II.10.463
6 It … books: III.3.932
7 There … vexation: II.12.544
8 Man … [Cicero]: II.12.544
9 the … shit: II.37.870
10 Wherever … equinox: II.12.534
11 If … length: II.534
12 here … Trebizond?: II.12.517
13 Dare … pig?: I.14.57
14 We … excessive: II.12.541
15 To … blockheads: III.13.219
16 Our … behind: III.5.1005
17 When … unapproachable: II.12.637
18 then … soul: II.37.865
19 That … them: I.21.115
20 most … disorderly: I.21.116
21 so … death: I.21.116

22 [This] … it: III.5.994
23 He … blindfolded: I.3.15
24 The … being: III.13.1261
25 Except … once: I.21.112
26 admit … him: I.21.112
27 [The … it: I.21.115
28 to … o�ence: II.29.801
29 If … all: I.21.115
30 every … condition: III.2.908
31 Au … cul: III.13.1269
32 Les … aussi: III.13.1231
33 The … teeth: III.5.956
34 She … ditch: III.5.967
35 old crone: III.5.967
36 Had … naked: introductory note
37 Every … complete: III.5.1004
38 Everywhere … it!: III.5.992
39 Of … disrupted: III.13.1232
40 My … bed: III.13.1232
41 When … wise: III.5.992
42 What … power?: III.9.1119
43 It … being: III.9.1121
44 May … apart?: III.5.1010
45 Once … clime: III.9.1114
46 It … ours: III.13.1226
47 Each … wonder: III.13.1226

48 When … world’: I.26.176
49 They … sauces: I.23.123
50 scrupulously … cords: II.12.647
51 gathered … cloth: I.23.125
52 In … shoulders: II.12.538
53 Their … wives: I.31.234
54 One … valour: I.31.239
55 We … bows: II.12.521
56 Ah!… breeches …: I.31.241
57 Every … anything!: I.31.231
58 Defending … country: I.23.126
59 The … nothing: II.12.558
60 the … perspicuity: II.12.606
61 that … itself: III.13.1220
62 Anyone … heights: II.12.613
63 In … �re: III.9.1110
64 We … other: I.28.212
65 What … found: I.28.211
66 Luy … image: III.9.1112 (footnote) 67 In … on: I.28.217
68 painful … harm: p. 125, Montaigne’s Travel Journal, translated by
Donald M. Frame, North Point Press, 1983
69 Many … stall: III.9.1109
70 If … life: II.12.543
71 What … gout …?: II.12.542
72 I … etymology: II.17.749
73 We … empty: I.25.153–4

74 At … all: II.17.730
75 If … tennis: I.25.156
76 I … feet: II.12.604
77 Storming … lives: III.2.912
78 About … face: II.29.800
79 I … gardening: I.20.99
80 I … lettuces: III.17.741
81 It … capacities: III.5.971
82 I … her: I.21.117
83 If … shit!’: I.38.264
84 The … being: III.13.1261
85 I … rectors: II.12.542
86 I … [them]: II.17.740
87 I … interest: I.39.276
88 I … another: II.10.459
89 Di�culty … payment: II.12.566
90 Just … Paris: I.26.194
91 The … paraded: III.12.1173
92 The … yourself: II.17.746
93 … French: III.5.989
94 … them: III.5.989
95 Whenever … arse: I.25.155
96 In … everything: I.26.170
97 I … reputations: II.10.458 (my italics) 98 No … born: Seneca,
Consolation to Helvia, XV.4
99 If … may: III.12.1196

100 In … spread: III.2.912
101 A … families: III.2.912
102 We … do: I.25.154
103 Invention … quotation: III.12. 1197
104 Will … say?: II.10.465
105 His … wind: II.10.464
106 There … dearth: III.13.1212
107 Were … man: III.13.1218
108 We … us: III.12.1175
109 You … stu�: III.2.908
110 I … melons: III.13.1251
111 I … again: III.13.1252
112 My … meals: III.13.1250
113 In … �ngers: III.13.1255
114 I … course: III.13.1230
Consolation for a Broken Heart
Quotations taken from:
Parerga and Paralipomena, volumes I and II, Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F.
Payne, OUP, 1972 (abbreviated as P1 and P2) The World as Will and Representation,
volumes I and II, Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover Publications,
1966 (abbreviated as W1 and W2, followed by page number) Manuscript Remains (4
volumes), Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Berg, 1988 (abbreviated as MR)
Gesammelte Briefe, Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Bonn, 1978 (abbreviated
as GB)
Gespräche, Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Stuttgart, 1971 (abbreviated as
G)
Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie, Rüdiger Safranski, Rowohlt, 1990

1 We … nothingness: P2.XII.156
2 Human … error: P2.XI.287
3 It … happens: P2.XII.155
4 Even … despair: MR4.2.121
5 In … hand: MR4.2.36
6 I … nation: Safranski, p. 74
7 These … humans: Safranski, p. 78
8 pondering … misery: Safranski, p. 48
9 life … e�ort: G.15
10 serene … ever!: Safranski, p. 267
11 Young … man: GB.267
12 Sometimes … self-deception: MR1.597
13 A … monologues?: MR3.1.50
14 We … weather: MR1.628
15 I … me: G.239
16 Only … sex: P2.XXVII.369
17 Every … su�ering: MR3.1.76
18 If … me: MR3.1.26
19 [I]ts … bedlamite: P1.3.144
20 That … Pope: MR3.3.12
21 To … other: MR4.7.50
22 Of … one!: MR4.4.131
23 any … like: GB.83
24 a … society: GB.106
25 If … heart: MR3.1.139
26 How … hare-hunt: MR3.4.26
27 After … misanthropy: P1.VI.482
28 I … me: G.58

29 Life … illusion: P2.XI.146
30 a … approach: Safranski, p. 419
31 The … heart: M14.7.25
32 The … dogs: P2.XII.153
33 comically … gru�: G.88
34 common biped: Safranski, p. 422
35 I … on: W2.30
36 the … people: W1.356
37 Two … manner: Safranski, p. 427
38 If … again: MR3.2.90
39 Human … deal: W2.243
40 Not … form: W, preface, 1844
41 Our … how: P1.298
42 the … fame: Safranski, p. 18
43 Would … minds?: MR3.II.5
44 suited … long: P2.614–26
45 She … married: G.225
46 I … shudder: MR4.7.102
47 human … error: P2.XI.287
48 We … material: W2.532
49 Love … happiness: W2.533
50 Why … it: W2.534
51 What … come: W2.534
52 [The … everything: W2.210
53 [It] … will: W2.209
54 The … individual: W2.536
55 There … two: W2.549
56 Everyone … produced: W2.546

57 The … other: W2.546
58 That … fortune: W2.558
59 Love … interest: W2.555
60 Has … heard: P2.XIV.166
61 It … badly: W2.558
62 The … present: W2.557
63 What … children: W2.545
64 between … itself: W2.536
65 To … it: W2.354
66 Contemplate … exertions: W2.353
67 There … disappointment: W2.634
68 What … them: P1.VI.480
69 The … life: W2.427
70 ‘Lotte … you!’: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe, translated
by Michael Hulse, Penguin, 1989, p. 115
71 The … thousands: P2.XIX.208
72 In … su�erer: W1.206
Consolation for Di�culties
Quotations taken from:
Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997 (abbreviated as
D)
Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1979
(abbreviated as EH)
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1973
(abbreviated as BGE)
Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1996
(abbreviated as HAH)

Wanderer and His Shadow, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale and
collected in HAH (Ibid.), CUP, 1996 (abbreviated as WS) Untimely Meditations, Friedrich
Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997 (abbreviated as UM)
The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale and collected in
Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, Penguin, 1990 (abbreviated as AC) The Will to
Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage,
1968 (abbreviated as WP) The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter
Kaufmann, Vintage, 1974 (abbreviated as GS)
Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Duncan Large, OUP, 1998
(abbreviated as TI)
On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Carol Diethe, CUP, 1996
(abbreviated as GM)
Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, Friedrich Nietzsche, 8 volumes, DTV and de
Gruyter, 1975–84 (abbreviated as Letter to/from followed by day/month/year)
1 cabbage-heads: EH. 3.5
2 It … being: EH. 14.1
3 I … holy: EH. 14.1
4 Let … 2000: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 24/9/86
5 It … boots: EH. 3.1
6 You … been!: BGE. 225
7 To … vanquished: WP. 910
8 the … given: EH. Foreword, 4
9 In … treated: D. 381
10 I … resignation: from Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre,
III.133, Werke, Karl Schlechta Edition 11 The … pleasure:
Schopenhauer, W2.150
12 [We … mental: Schopenhauer, P1.V.a.1
13 we … abstinence: Letter to his mother and sister, 5/11/65
14 I … joy: Letter from Malwida von Meysenbug, 28/10/76
15 The … boring: TI. X.2

16 These … hitherto: EH. 2.10
17 Would … side: Letter to Cosima Wagner, 19/12/76
18 in … room: Schopenhauer, P1.V.a.1
19 hidden … deer: GS. 283
20 that … goose: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, early May 1884
21 Really … Montaigne: Letter to his mother, 3/21/85
22 gentle … eggs: D. 553
23 magni�cent: TI.IX.49
24 the … reverence: TI. IX.51
25 He … will: TI. IX.49
26 The … profound: Stendhal, Voyages en France, Pleiade, p. 365
27 The … copulation: Montaigne, Essays, III.5.968
28 the … frightened: Stendhal, Oeuvres Intimes, Volume I, Pleiade, p.
483
29 Art … life: TI. IX.24
30 What … joy: GS. 12
31 Examine … possible: GS. 19
32 The … world: HAH. I.163 (my italics)
33 He … mountains: EH. Foreword, 3
34 We … sense: GM. II.24
35 In … tomorrow: HAH. II.358
36 To … comprehensible!: UM. III.5
37 I … Swiss!: Letter to his mother, 19/7/70
38 I … own: Letter to Paul Rée, end of July 1879
39 This … myself: Letter to Peter Gast, 14/8/81
40 I … ground: Letter to Carl von Gersdor�, 28/6/83
41 How … books?: WS. 324
42 Only … value: TI. I.34

43 When … humanity: HAH. I.246
44 We … life: Montaigne, Essays, III.13.1237
45 If … manure: HAH. II.332
46 Don’t … whole: HAH. I.163
47 You … strain: Letter to his mother, 21/7/79
48 One … trellis: D. 560
49 the … sui: TI. III.4
50 good … things: BGE. 2
51 Love … together: WP. 351
52 The … life: BGE. 23
53 The … culture: WP. 1025
54 Nothing … annihilation: HAH. II.220
55 All … hurting: TI. v.1
56 Dear … afternoon: Letter to his mother, 16/4/63
57 I … materialism: Letter to Carl von Gersdor�, 25/4/65
58 Alcoholic … live: EH. 2.1
59 How … intelligence!: TI. VIII.2
60 Perhaps … Europe: GS. III.134
61 I … su�ces: EH. 2.1
62 If … together: GS. 338
63 [A]ctions … pleasure: Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill, Chapter 2,
paragraph 2, Penguin, 1994
64 European … England: BGE. 253
65 Man … that: TI. I.9
66 All … derision: BGE. 225
67 The … Vesuvius!: GS. 283
68 To … absurdity: EH. 2.1

69 He … pastor … guide: III.93. Werke, Karl Schlechta Edition 70 I
… depravity: AC. 62
71 One … governor: AC. 46
72 It … today: AC. 38
73 The … Christianity: TI. VIII.2
74 not- … -revenge: GM. I.14
75 a … accomplishment: GM. I.13
76 the … comfortableness: GS. 338
77 the … antiquity: WS. 7
78 one … philosophizing: WS. 295
79 It … like-minded: Letter to Paul Deussen, ?/2/70
80 Do … thinking?: Letter to Mathilde Trempedach, 11/4/76
81 He … opera: Diary, Cosima Wagner, 4/4/74
82 The … time: Letter from Hans von Bülow, 24/7/72
83 You … is: Letter from Hans von Bülow, 24/7/72
84 For … woman!: Letter from Richard Wagner, 26/12/74
85 Ariadne … you: Postcard to Cosima Wagner, ?/1/89
86 Thanks … ‘me’: Letter to Franz Overbeck, late March or early
April 1886
87 I … learn!: Letter to Lou Salomé, 2/7/82
88 My … me: Letter to Franz Overbeck, 25/12/82
89 I … them: Letter to Franz Overbeck, ?/3/83
90 scraped … sheep: Letter to his mother, 4/10/84
91 As … time: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 14/1/80
92 Constant … music!: Letter to Doctor Otto Eiser, ?/1/80
93 for … woman: HAH. I.384
94 Early … vicious!: EH. 2.8
95 no … denies: TI. IX.49

96 The … complaint: D. 52 (my italics)
97 To … weather: EH. 14.4

Acknowledgments
I am much indebted to the following authorities for their comments
on chapters of this book: Dr Robin Water�eld (for Socrates),
Professor David Sedley (for Epicurus), Professor Martin Ferguson
Smith (for Epicurus), Professor C. D. N. Costa (for Seneca), the
Reverend Professor Michael Screech (for Montaigne), Reg
Hollingdale (for Schopenhauer) and Dr Duncan Large (for
Nietzsche). I am also greatly indebted to the following for their
comments: John Armstrong, Harriet Braun, Michele Hutchison,
Noga Arikha and Miriam Gross. I would like to thank: Simon
Prosser, Lesley Shaw, Helen Fraser, Michael Lynton, Juliet Annan,
Gráinne Kelly, Anna Kobryn, Caroline Dawnay, Annabel Hardman,
Miriam Berkeley, Chloe Chancellor, Lisabel McDonald, Kim
Witherspoon and Dan Frank.

Copyright Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for
permission to reproduce extracts from previously published
material:
Cambridge University Press: Human All Too Human, Friedrich
Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1996; and On the Genealogy of
Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Carol Diethe, 1996; Dover
Publications: World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer,
trans. Duncan Large, 1988; Oxford University Press: extracts
reprinted from Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans.
Duncan Large (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), by permission of
Oxford University Press; extracts reprinted from Parerga and
Paralipomena, Arthur Schopenhauer, (volumes I and II, trans. E. F.
Payne, 1974) by permission of Oxford University Press; Penguin
Books: Early Socratic Dialogues, Plato, trans. Iain Lane, 1987; The
Last Days of Socrates, Plato, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 1987;
Protagoras and Meno, Plato, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, 1987; Dialogues
and Letters, Seneca, trans. C. D. N. Costa, 1997; Letters from a Stoic,
Seneca, trans. Robin Campbell, 1969; The Complete Essays, Michel de
Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech, 1991; Beyond Good and Evil,
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1996; and Ecce Homo,
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1979; Random House,
Inc.: extracts from The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Copyright © 1967 by
Walter Kaufmann. Extracts from The Gay Science by Friedrich
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Copyright © 1974 by Random
House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Picture Acknowledgments
The photographs in the book are used by permission and courtesy of
the following: Aarhus Kunstmuseum: 20.2; The Advertising
Archives: 10.2 (DC Comics): 22.4; AKG London: (Musée du Louvre,
Paris/Erich Lessing) 12.4, 19.4 (National Research and Memorial
Centre for Classical German Literature, Weimar) 22.1, 22.2 (Neue
Pinakothek, Munich) 22.5, 22.7 (University Library, Jena) 22.8;
Albertina, Vienna: 22.17; Archivi Alinari, Florence: 22.24; American
School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations: 4.4; The
Ancient Art & Architecture Collection/© Ronald Sheridan: 13.10;
The Art Archive: 12.1 (detail) 14.3, 16.1, 17.9; Associated Press:
13.7; G. Bell and Sons Ltd, from A History of French Architecture by
Sir Reginald Blom�eld (from the French Cours d’Architecture, 1921, J.
F. Blondel & Daviler): 17.2, 17.10; Berkley, Miriam: 1.2;
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: 1.6; Bildarchiv Preussicher
Kulturbesitz, Berlin: (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussicher
Kulturbesitz. Kupferstichkabinet): 1.4 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin –
Preussicher Kulturbesitz. Antikensammlung): 12.5, 19.1, 22.3; The
Anthony Blake Photo Library (Charlie Stebbings): 9.1 (© PFT
Associates): 9.2; Bridgeman Art Library: (detail, INDEX, Spain): 6.3
(Galleria degli U�zi, Florence): 13.1 (British Library): 13.4 (Musée
Condé, Chantilly): 16.3 (Louvre, Paris/Peter Willi): 17.6 (Gavin
Graham Gallery, London): 17.7, 18.2 (Corpus Christi College,
Oxford): 17.8 (private collection): 13.6; British Architectural
Library, RIBA, London: 6.5; By permission of the British Library:
17.3 (detail) 157, 18.4; © The British Museum: 3.1, 3.6, 13.8,
22.15; Chloë Chancellor: 4.1; Jean-Loup Charmet, Paris: 12.2; From
Cheminées à la moderne, Paris, 1661: 17.11; CORBIS: 12.3, 14.1, 16.2,
18.3; Dassault Falcon Jet Corp, NJ, USA: 6.2; de Botton, Alain: 4.2

(Epicurean Life): 7.2, 10.4, 11.3, 13.2, 13.12, 13.13, 13.14, 14.2,
15.4, 15.5, 15.7, 20.1, 20.3, 20.7, 20.8, 22.10, 22.11–22.12, 22.13,
22.14, 22.23, 22.25, 22.28; From Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire,
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot & Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert, 1751: 8.1; Mary Evans Picture Library: 3.2,
3.8, 20.12, 22.6; Flammarion, Paris, from Les Arts Décoratifs – Les
Meubles II du style Régence an style Louis XVI by Guillaume Janneau,
1929: 6.8; Werner Forman, Archive: 3.4; The Fotomas Index, 18.1,
22.19; The Garden Picture Library: 11.2; Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, 17.1; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles, California: 7.1; Giraudon, Paris: 5B, 22.16; The Ronald
Grant Archive: 5.2; G-SHOCK: 20.5; Robert Harding Picture Library:
13.11; © Michael Holford: 2.6; The Image Bank/David W. Hamilton:
2.3; Images Colour Library: 11.1; From The Insect World; from the
French of Louis Figuier’s Les Insectes, 1868: 20.9; Ian Bavington
Jones (photography): 45; Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris: 20.11;
King�sher. Illustrations from See Inside an Ancient Greek Town,
published by King�sher. Reproduced with permission. Copyright ©
Grisewood & Dempsey Ltd, 1979, 1986. All rights reserved: 2.4, II,
4.3, 8.2; From Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias,
Bartolomeo Las Casas, 1552: 17.4, 17.5; Lucca State Archives: 6.4;
McDonald, Lisabel: 11.4, 17.12, 20.4, 20.10; Patrick
McDonald/Epicurean Restaurant/Epicurean Life: 7.3; Metropolitan
Museum of Art (Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund
1931): 1.1 (detail) 5.1 (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund 1930): 6.6;
Montabella Verlag, St Moritz: 22.27; From Montaigne: A Biography
by Donald M. Frame, published by Hamish Hamilton, 1965: 15.6; ©
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W.
Mellon Collection: 22.18; © The Trustees of the National Museum of
Scotland 2000: 2.5; PhotoDisc Europe Ltd/Steve Mason: 9.4; From
Pompeiana: The Topography, Edi�ces and Ornaments of Pompeii by Sir
William Gell, 1835: 13.3, 13.5; Quadrant Picture Library: 9.3, 13.9;
Roger-Viollet, Paris: 3.3; Scala, Florence: 1.3, 6.7, 6.9, 8.3, 20.6,
21.1; Schopenhauer Archiv: 19.2, 19.3, 19.5, 19.6–19.7; Société
Internationale des Amis de Montaigne, Paris: 22.9; Status,

Athens/CORBIS: 3.5; Stiftung Weimarer Klassik/Goethe-Schiller Archiv,
Weimar: 22.21, 22.26; Swissair Photo Library, Zurich: 86l; The
Telegraph Colour Library: 2.1, 2.2; Topham Picturepoint: 22.22;
University of Southampton, Brian Sparkes and Linda Hall: 3.7, 5.3;
Vin Mag Archiv Ltd: 10.3; Agency-WCRS, Photographer – Glen
Garner. Courtesy of Land Rover UK: 10.1; Wellcome Trust Medical
Photographic Library: 22.20

About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
I: Consolation for Unpopularity
1
2
3
4
5
II: Not Having Enough Money
1
2
3
4
5
6
III: Frustration
1
2
3
IV: Inadequacy
1
2: On Sexual Inadequacy
3: On Cultural Inadequacy
4: On Intellectual Inadequacy
V: A Broken Heart
1
2: A Contemporary Love Story: With Schopenhauerian Notes
3
VI: Difficulties
Notes
Acknowledgments
Copyright Acknowledgments
Picture Acknowledgments

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3) Good critical analysis (no “I agree because I agree” question begging present)

4) Creative opening paragraph with clear thesis (not just a thesis statement alone)

5) Lacking in grammatical errors

6) Avoided thought-clichés:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

7) Turned in on time through D2L link

8) Good conclusion that summarized the points of the paper creatively.

9) Clear understanding of the philosopher’s view, no strawman

10) Correct citation and quote formats, if quotes used

11) Quotes either not used (but no plagiarism too) or used sparingly, leading to personal, original writing

Common Problems in Essays:

1) “I feel”: In a philosophy class, do not start sentences with the phrase “In my personal opinion…” or “I feel like…” or “I believe…” or “I think…” “…to me…” or “personally” and all the many other variations of this. Opinions and feelings are in the end irrelevant to a good critical argument- there is something beyond “mere opinion”, such a good reason that can be shared by many, if not all for, well, good reason! They cannot be right or wrong, they just are. And if a “mere opinion” happens to be correct, it is by chance, not by good reason or fact. Philosophers do not “feel x is the case”. They “argue x is the case” and give reasons.

My feelings are irrelevant to this philosophy course, much like a chemistry professor’s feelings are irrelevant to chemistry. (For more:

https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/26-the-fact-opinion-distinction

)

2) Wrong Paper Tone/Please Avoid Casual Language: “Writing at the university level requires a professionalized communication style. Be formal, but not fancy. Picture an audience of academic peers, not friends. Remove the “sound” of your casual conversational style and avoid contractions like “can’t” or “don’t.” Think about the language you read in a textbook or academic journal – most academic publications do not use contractions, words like “okay,” or storytelling indicators like, “then,” “next,” and “after that.” They also do not address the reader casually with the word “you.” And of course, always avoid using foul language or off-color humor. This also includes “Well…”

TIP: One way to teach yourself formal language is to read newspapers, textbooks, academic journals, and nonfiction publications.”

https://awc.ashford.edu/tocw-academic-voice.html

3) Do not copy and paste writing prompt/questions into paper

4) Lacking proper formatting (

http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/academicessaystructures

)

a. Paragraphs not indented

b. Not double-spaced

c. Unnecessary spacing between paragraphs

5) Writing is hard to follow, needs polishing (Writing Consultant appointment, online)

https://www.lonestar.edu/23202.htm

6) Citation not used/used improperly (

http://upresearch.lonestar.edu/research

) Do not italicize quotes either. See link for proper quotation style.

7) Improper use of italics

https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Italics

8) Citation after every line (librarians will address this, more here:

https://style.mla.org/paraphrase-of-many-sentences/

)

9) Too many quotes: in this class, your paper should not exceed 10% direct quotes

10) Quotes in opening and closing paragraphs; please avoid this

11) Outside sources used when not allowed

12) Plagiarism (

https://upresearch.lonestar.edu/educ1300/citations

) As stated in the syllabus, plagiarism will severely reduce your grade, sometimes even to a zero with a report to the office. This is a course about the PHILOSOPHY and ideas valuable to YOUR LIFE. For goodness sake, don’t copy what you think meaningful things are TO YOU from the internet or from someone else. Seriously. This is YOUR LIFE, not someone else’s.

13) Word count not met. The required word count is the MINIMUM required, and is not a suggestion.

14) Off-topic/does not follow the writing prompt topic and questions. Please stay focused on what the paper prompt is asking for.

15) Grammar errors which made the paper’s argument and flow difficult to follow (

https://upresearch.lonestar.edu/grammarly/apps

) Reading your paper aloud to yourself can help you check for errors too! That is what I do to edit my proofread my professional writing.

16) “I agree because I agree” evaluation pf philosopher’s idea; never said WHY you agree, what reasons or evidence you find compelling and WHY. Also, avoid “poser questions” known as rhetorical questions (see #4 on this website:

https://unilearning.uow.edu.au/academic/2e.html

)

17) Critical evaluation missing from paper

18) No opening or no conclusion, no thesis statement (

https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/how-to-write-a-thesis-statement.html

)

19) Used quotes when no citation occurring, see rules about “scare quotes”:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/quotes/scare

)

20) Incomplete sentences/fragments (What is a Fragment?

Sentence Fragments

)

21) Spaces put between paragraphs (do not add an extra line of space between paragraphs)

22) Paragraphs not indented. Paragraphs should be indented using the tab key.

23) Paragraphs are needed/essay is missing paragraphs.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/paragraphs_and_paragraphing/index.html

24) Improper semicolon use.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/semicolon/

25) We do not read novels in philosophy. We read books, essays, or chapters of books.

26) First name of philosophers used. Please only use last names in scholarly work.

27) Titles not in proper form (MLA rules here:

https://symposium.curo.uga.edu/sites/default/files/docs/formatting_titles_of_texts_in_mla_style

)

28) Paper title is the same title of the work being discussed. You must create your own title (if you are writing about Plato’s Republic, you do not title your paper Plato’s Republic. You are not writing Plato’s Republic, but commenting on it)

29) Improper use of capitalization (

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/capitalization-rules/

)

30) Also, Capitalize proper names https://www.grammarly.com/blog/capitalization-rules/