The School of Life

Mark Vernon on What’s your philosophy type?

TAKE THIS QUIZ to see which master of good living has the best advice for you on how to live well. 

The philosophers of ancient Athens believed that ‘thought is therapy’ and were a powerhouse of ideas on how to live well.  Six main schools of philosophy emerged, each led by its own guru, each with its own approach, each appealing to different kinds of people. There were the Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics and Platonists, amongst others. A key question faced you as you travelled to Athens: who are you to follow? As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so the proof of any philosophy is in the living - and whether it helps you to live well.  What's your philosophy type? 

Designed by faculty member Mark Vernon, whose new book Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living is out now and available through The School of Life shop.

Guy Browning on how to live

Guy Browning publishes a regular How To column in the Guardian Saturday magazine. We particularly loved last week's entry:

People who are about to die generally don't regret the parachute jumps they haven't made (unless they're falling from an aircraft without one). Instead, they regret the love they haven't given or haven't expressed. Generally, the reason they haven't done this is because they've been too full of hate, too in love with themselves or simply too crushed by the business of survival.

The universe is in balance. If it wasn't, it wouldn't exist. Every constituent part of the universe is also in balance, including us. Life, therefore, is a question of balance. On the tightrope of life, the pole we have to balance with always has two sides: light and dark, male and female, good and bad. Acknowledging and understanding both sides is the only way of keeping upright and moving forward.

To get through life requires effort and luck. Generally, the harder you try, the luckier you get - but not always. Sometimes superhuman effort fails and, at other times, absolutely minimal effort succeeds spectacularly. That said, try trying first. Everyone has free will in life, but what happens to you is largely out of your control. We're like a flea on the head of an ox: we may be jumping around merrily, but the overall direction of travel is not really in our hands.

The secret of life is a combination of the combined wisdom of the great thinkers down the ages and the Cub Scout law: be nice to other people and do your best. It doesn't sound very inspiring but, on balance, it's probably right. Remember, too, that there's a reason that the universe is in balance. We don't know what it is, but it's likely to be a lot more impressive than we are.

Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.

John Armstrong suggests the best books ever written on love

John Armstrong, author of The Conditions of Love and contributor to The School of Life's Love course, recommends his top ten books on love.

(The photo, by the way, is by Matt Stuart, The School of Life's photography expert.)

1. The Symposium by Plato. Discussion of same-sex love at an Athenian drinking party; perhaps the most entertaining work of philosophy ever written (although the competition has not been terribly intense). The first really systematic and serious attempt to say what love is, weighing up the relative merits of different points of view. Two big claims. One: love is based in weakness - we love because there is something missing in us, because we are incapable of being happy on our own. Two: love is the most important experience in life - we love what is good in the beloved, and through this learn to love goodness itself.

2. First Letter to the Corinthians by St Paul. Mixed in with bizarre pronouncements (many of them about women's hair) are some of the most profound and influential assertions about the nature of love. Love is essentially linked to kindness, forgiveness and modesty. Not a very romantic message.

3. The Sonnets by Shakespeare. Often quite confusing, but Shakespeare's Sonnets include some of the most touching expressions of love. Filled with lovely, melancholy reflections.

4. Roman Elegies by Goethe. Guilt-free holiday romance; intelligent erotic poetry.

5. Elective Affinities by Goethe. Probably the first analysis of sexual chemistry. We don't have rational control over who we love. Tells the tragic story of the perfect couple whose idyllic life is destroyed when each falls in love with someone else.

6. Love by Stendhal. Obsessive, but insightful, study of the process of falling in love. Wonderful mixture of self-pity, philosophy and anecdote. Stendhal's 'tone' is a high point of civilisation - witty, cultivated, confessional.

7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The most intelligent and perceptive romantic novel ever written. Contains amazingly lucid evocations of every stage of love. Superlative narrative treatment which holds everything together with complete naturalness.

8. Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy. Brilliant study of the revival of love in a marriage grown stale over many years.

9. The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Love as the antidote to loneliness - but only if we get past our own romantic egotism and concentrate on caring for the other person. Wise and mildly depressing. Modern life feeds our selfish demands and therefore makes love harder to achieve, but all the more necessary.

10. Essays in Love by Alain de Botton. Charming analyses of the various phases of a relationship (from first sight to separation). The intellectual insights are so well digested and pleasantly expressed that one may fail to see just how serious they are. De Botton is currently the finest English prose stylist.