The consolation of philosophy

I

Now that the coronavirus rules the world, I wonder what philosophy can mean for us. Can it help answer new questions that we come across? Can it help answer life questions? Can philosophy give us consolation now that our life have been turned upside down and we have lost our hold on what we are doing and on the world around us? A world in which we see so many people die, including people who are so dear to us? In order to find an answer how philosophy could console me I bought a book that I always wanted to buy but never did, one of the most read books in philosophy, namely The consolation of philosophy by Anicus Manlius Severinus Boethius.

Boethius (c. 477-524) was a Roman philosopher and politician, who lived in the latter years of the Roman Empire. He had an outstanding political career but he was falsely accused of high treason and executed. During his time in prison Boethius wrote his Consolation. It would become one of the most famous and most-discussed philosophy books of the Middle Ages and it is still widely read. With right. It’s a deep book that make you think. It contains a cosmology and treats questions that are important for everybody who wants to think about life and destination, free will and fortune, good and bad, and much more. It treats questions that are especially relevant for Christians without being a theological book or a Christian book. Boethius combines pagan Roman and Greek philosophy with Christian philosophy. The structure of the book is also special. It contains a conversation between Philosophy and Boethius in prison, where Philosophy has come to console him. But did Philosophy succeed to console Boethius? I am doubtful about it. My conclusion is that fate is as it is, and that’s it. Is this consolation, is it comfort? Nevertheless, Boethius’s Consolation has us much to say that is relevant to the present fate of the world: the coronacrisis. It asks relevant questions and it gives relevant observations, especially in Books (= chapters) I and II. In the next section of this blog I give a compilation of quotes from these books, which I present without comment.

II

Philosophy: “Do you remember that you are a man?” Boethius: “Of course, I do” Ph.: “Do you not know that you were ever any other thing?” B.: “No,” Ph.: “Now I know, the cause of your malady: you have ceased to know who and what you are. You are confounded with forgetting of yourself; for you cry that you are exiled from your own possessions. And since you do not know what the end of things is, you believe that criminal and wicked men are strong and healthy. And because you have forgotten by what law the world is governed, you think that these mutations of fortune fly about without governor. These are great causes not only of illness, but of death. But I thank the Maker and Author of health that nature has not totally abandoned you. I have a great treatment for your health, and that comes from your true understanding of the governance of the world. Therefore, have no fear; for from this little spark, the light of life shall shine.”

Then Philosophy began to speak in this way, “If I have understood and utterly grasped the causes and habit of your sickness, you are still desiring and longing for your former fortune. Fortune has apparently altered herself toward you. This has perverted the clearness and stability of your heart. However, if you clearly remember the type, the manner, and the works of Fortune, you shall well know that in her, you never had, nor ever lost any fair thing. No sudden mutation can occur without a kind of shifting of the heart. And so, it has befallen that you are a little removed from the peace of your mind.”

“What is it that has cast you into mourning and weeping? You have seen some new and unknown thing. You assume that Fortune has changed herself to oppose you; but if you believe that, you are wrong. Those have always been her ways. She has instead shown toward you her own stability in the changing of herself. Just such was she when she flattered you and deceived you to become unlawfully attracted to false goods. You have now known and seen the changing or double face of the blind goddess Fortune. She has shown you her true self. If you approve of her and think her good, then follow her ways and stop complaining; but if you are aggrieved by her false treachery, despise her, and cast away she who plays so hurtfully. For she, who is now the cause of such sorrow to you ought to be the source of peace and joy. She has truly forsaken you. Do you now consider Fortune precious, since she is unfaithful, and when she departs, she leaves a man in sorrow? At the end, it behooves you to suffer with calm spirit, in patience, all that is done within the domain of worldly Fortune.”

“Fortune says to you: ‘When nature brought you forth from your mother’s womb, I received you naked and needy of all things. I nourished you with my riches and was ready and attentive to sustain you with my favor and that causes you now to be impatient with me. I surrounded you with all the abundance and glitter of the goods that are rightfully mine. Now it pleases me to withdraw my hand. You have been graced with alien goods. You have no right to complain as though you had lost all your own things. Why do you complain? I have done you no wrong. Riches, honors, and other such things are rightfully mine.’ ”

B.: “Certainly, that’s true but the misery brings a deeper feeling of harm.”

Ph. “Just so, but since you will not cease to consider yourself wretched, have you forgotten the amount and ways of your happiness? If any fruit of mortal things may have any weight or value of happiness, can you ever forget, despite any shock of harm that has befallen, the happiness of the past? If you consider yourself unhappy because the things you deem joyful have passed, there is no reason that you should judge yourself wretched since the things that seem sorrowful will also pass.”

B.: “That’s true, but in all adversities of fortune, the unhappiest kind of contrary fortune is to have had happiness.”

Ph.: “I will not put up with your delicacy that complains so, weeping and anguishing because some things are lacking for your happiness. What man is so satisfied or enjoys such true happiness that he does not strive for, or complain on some account against the quality of his existence? That is why man’s condition is so miserable; for either he doesn’t get enough, or else it doesn’t last forever. No man is reconciled to the condition of his fortune; for always to every man there is missing some unknown thing, or else he dreads losing what he has attained. And add this also: that every well-off man has a delicate constitution; so that, unless everything goes according to his will, he is impatient, for he is not used to adversity. Right away, he is thrown by every little thing; and those are the ones that rob the most fortunate man of perfect happiness. Nothing is wretched but when you believe it so by coddling your feelings. All fortune is blissful to a man who bears it agreeably or with equanimity. Why do you seek happiness outside of yourself, when it has been put inside you? Is there anything more precious to you than yourself? If it is true that the tranquility of your soul makes you mighty over yourself, then you have something in your power that you can never lose, and that Fortune cannot snatch from you. Why are you swept away by idle joys? Why do you embrace alien goods as if they were yours? Fortune can never grant you things that are naturally alien to your nature. It’s true, without doubt, that the fruits of the earth are made to be food for beasts; but if you will fill yourself beyond natures requirements, that is the indulgence of Fortune. For with only a few things, and with a little amount, nature is satisfied. But if you will choke yourself with excess, certainly these things that you will thrust by force into your body will be unpleasing or harmful to you.”

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Compiled and adapted from Boethius, The consolation of philosophy, on https://parabola.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Boethius-rendered-into-modern-English-by-Thomas-Powers.pdf

III

This is the human condition that we now have to think about.

Philosophy and the corona pandemic

Pandemic

Now that the coronavirus rules the world, what can philosophy do for us? In recent blogs I have tried to give a few tools that help us answer difficult questions. But I think that some people expect something different. Isn’t is so that one of the main purposes of philosophy is to give us meaning, practical help if not consolation in difficult situations? Although you can see from my blogs that I don’t think that this is the main purpose of philosophy, I do think that it can be a purpose of philosophy. Therefore, in these days that life often seems to stand still (and then again to run), in these days that we need interpretation of what is happening, I have written down a few points of what philosophy has to say. Since I always need a handle to write my blogs, I have let myself be inspired by Alain de Botton’s The consolations of philosophy.

1) Our world has become restricted. Some of us even are not allowed to leave their homes any longer or they can only for very special reasons. Many things we were used to do and maybe loved to do, we cannot do any longer. On the other hand, now we must do, can do or choose to do things we would never do in normal circumstances; things we may have neglected too much in the past, like giving more attention to our family, reading a good book, being creative etc. In other words, your rat race has suddenly come to a halt. Now you can ask yourself: What is important for me? Is my job really so important, or is my family? Do I really need to go out so often? Do I need my friends, or which friends do I need? Is it really so annoying that I cannot get on holiday? Etc.

2) A lesson we should learn from Socrates’s life is, so de Botton, that we must be careful not to listen too much to “the dictates of public opinion”, but instead we must “listen always to the dictates of reason”. (p. 42) Many strange stories go around about the origin and spread of the virus and many people deny the most reasonable explanation, namely that the virus has a natural origin. Some even belief that the virus is spread by G5 antennas! But ways of reasoning that are incredible in the coronacrisis, are often accepted and believed in normal times when they are used by some politicians on other subjects. So, here the lesson is: be critical (more in my blog dated 9 March 2020).

3) Happiness is the highest good in life, so Aristotle, Epicurus and other classical philosophers. However, what makes us happy? For Epicurus happiness is the same as pleasure. Now that you must stay at home, you have time to think. You live now in a life experiment: Before and after the (semi-)lockdown. Compare what you like and don’t like in both situations and adapt your life to your conclusions. Following Epicurus, so de Botton, “the only way to evaluate their merits is according to the pleasure they inspire … [the feeling of pleasure] is our standard for judging every good. And because an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to guarantee an increase in pleasure, Epicurus would have suggested that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on which our happiness depends.” (p. 70) I wouldn’t identify happiness and pleasure but judge yourself.

4) Things often happen to us, and we cannot prevent that they happen. So it is with the coronacrisis. As long as no reliable medicine and no vaccine will have been developed, the only thing we can do is adapt ourselves and make the best of it. That’s also what Seneca would have told us. Accept the facts, even if it is death, he taught us. So when the Roman emperor Nero ordered him to commit suicide, he did it with stoical calm, and slit his veins without protest. As he once had written: “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” (p. 111). Do what is possible and don’t try what is not possible.

5) The French president Macron compared the coronacrisis with a war. Seen that way, it’s cynical that this crisis seems to subdue real wars, for instance in the Middle East. Also the number of crimes in corona infected regions has decreased much. Therefore, one of the main philosophical lessons we can learn from the coronacrisis is what de Botton writes in the last sentence of his book (p. 244): “Not everything which makes us feel better is good fur us. Not everything which hurts is bad.” Was pre-coronacrisis life really good for us, even if we felt well then? Is the coronacrisis only bad for us? Anyway, the good thing is that the crisis makes us think about life and existence.

But let me stop here. Too much of what I have written so far is derived from what others have said. As Montaigne told us: “There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is swarm with commentaries: of authors there is dearth.” (Essays, Book III-13). So go to the authors and read them and find then consolation in philosophy.

Inspiration

Alain de Botton, The consolations of philosophy. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

The trolley problem and moral judgment

The so-called “trolley problem” is more relevant than ever before in these days that the coronavirus rules the world. Lately yet, in my blog dated 23 March 2020, I discussed its relation to the corona crisis. Since then, again and again I have seen discussions on TV that prove the topicality of the problem.

To recapitulate, there are two versions of the trolley problem. In version 1, a runaway trolley is headed for five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. However, when you turn a switch, the trolley will be directed to another track where it will kill a man who is walking there. Will you turn the switch and save five lives against one person killed? Most people say yes. In version 2 you are standing on a footbridge and a fat man is standing next to you. Now you can stop the trolley by pushing the fat man off the bridge. His body will stop the trolley but the man will be killed. Will you push the man in order to save five lives? Most people say no. Generally, your options here are seen as a dilemma: Either you let utilitarian arguments prevail or you let deontological arguments prevail. Utilitarians reason that promoting the “greater good” is best. Since five lives saved is better than one life saved, you must push the fat man. Deontologists argue that certain moral lines ought not be crossed. They argue from principles. If your principle is “You shall not kill”, you are not allowed to kill the fat man.

These basic approaches are seen as alternatives, but recently, a Russian philosopher friend draw my attention to an article that throws a new light on the question. The philosophers and neuroscientists Joshua D. Greene et al. didn’t just want to argue about what the best approach is in trolley-like cases, but they wanted to see what happens in the brain, when people take decisions in such cases. (see Source below) I’ll skip the details, but the essence of what they did and found is this. First, they distinguished between personal and impersonal moral judgments. Personal moral judgments “are driven largely by social-emotional responses while other moral judgments, which we call ‘impersonal,’ are driven less by social-emotional responses and more by ‘cognitive’ processes.” Personal moral judgments concern the appropriateness of personal moral violations, like personally hurting another person. They require agency, doing something yourself. Impersonal moral judgments are then those that are not personal. They require not so much doing something actively but they are more a matter of interfering, directing or following (my words). Greene et. al say it this way: “it is ‘editing’ rather than ‘authoring’”, not agency. An example of a personal moral dilemma is the “footbridge version” of the trolley problem and an impersonal moral dilemma is the “turning the switch version”, so the authors. “Footbridge” arouses much emotion when deciding what to do, while “turning the switch” is a matter of calculation. According to the authors there is reason to believe that the distinction personal-impersonal is evolutionary. Impersonal approaches of moral dilemmas came later in human development than personal approaches.

Next, the authors developed a test in order to see what happens in the brain when moral decisions are taken. What did they find? When impersonal moral judgments are taken cognitive parts of the brain are involved, while in case of  personal moral judgments those parts of the brain are involved where social-emotional responses take place. Moreover, the authors found that in relevant cases impersonal judgments tend to prevail over personal judgments.

What does this mean for moral philosophy? I think that I can best extensively quote from the “Broader Implications” section of the article: “For two centuries, Western moral philosophy has been defined largely by a tension between two opposing viewpoints[: Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) and deontology (Kant)]. Moral dilemmas of the sort employed here boil this philosophical tension down to its essentials and may help us understand its persistence. We [=the authors] propose that the tension between the utilitarian and deontological perspectives in moral philosophy reflects a more fundamental tension arising from the structure of the human brain. The social-emotional responses that we've inherited from our primate ancestors …, shaped and refined by culture bound experience, undergird the absolute prohibitions that are central to deontology. In contrast, the ‘moral calculus’ that defines utilitarianism is made possible by more recently evolved structures in the frontal lobes that support abstract thinking and high-level cognitive control. … We emphasize that this cognitive account of the Kant versus Mill problem in ethics is speculative. Should this account prove correct, however, it will have the ironic implication that the Kantian, ‘rationalist’ approach to moral philosophy is, psychologically speaking, grounded not in principles of pure practical reason, but in a set of emotional responses that are subsequently rationalized .... Whether this psychological thesis has any normative implications is a complicated matter that we leave for treatment elsewhere ....”

If all this is true, I think that as important is that making moral judgments is not simply a matter of either-or, in the sense that one follows either utilitarian rules or deontological principles. Even if one turns the switch, one can rightly have the feeling that one breaks the rule “you shall not kill”. And even if one doesn’t push the fat man from the bridge, one can still wonder whether it hadn’t been better to save the five lives of the people on the track. Taking decisions and making moral judgments is not simply a matter of choosing a guiding approach and that’s it. Apparently, utilitarianism and deontology are not alternatives but options.

Source

Green, Joshua D.; Leigh E. Nystrom; Andrew D. Engell; John M. Darley; Jonathan D. Cohen, “The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment”, in Neuron, 44/2 (October 14, 2004); and on https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(04)00634-8

Montaigne and the plague

In the days of Montaigne, life-disturbing epidemics were nothing exceptional. Of course, Montaigne didn’t know about the coronavirus. This virus is new, and as such viruses ̶ and bacteria as well ̶ were phenomena that had yet to be discovered. In Montaigne’s days it was especially the plague that could ruin lives and society as a whole.

Some say that Montaigne’s friend Étienne de La Boétie died of the plague, but I think that this is unlikely. Probably La Boétie died of dysentery. However, there are two famous cases that Montaigne was confronted with the plague. During a big part of his life France was plagued, so to speak, by one religious war after another. Altogether nine religious wars were fought during Montaigne’s life, especially just in his region, which was a bulwark of Protestantism. Because of these wars social life was often disturbed, and the plague had become endemic in France. And so it happened that there was another outbreak of this disease when Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux. It was in June 1585. 14,000 inhabitants of the town would die of the plague, which was about half of the population. When the outbreak begun, Montaigne wasn’t in Bordeaux. He had just finished a mission outside the town and then he had returned to his castle. It was at the end of his term of office. In July he had to lead yet only the meeting in which the new mayor and aldermen would be elected. The name of his successor was already known. Actually the meeting was a formality. Should he take the risk to die for such a thing? No. Montaigne wrote a letter that he wouldn’t come and that he wanted to turn over his office somewhere just outside the town. And so it happened. Some accuse Montaigne of cowardice. But in other situations Montaigne had always shown courage. Why taking a risk for an office that would last yet only a few days? As Montaigne says somewhere in his Essays: The mayor and Montaigne have always been two different persons.

But the real misery had yet to come for Montaigne. The plague didn’t go away, and although Montaigne writes that he lived in a healthy region, the plague reached also his castle. It was September 1586. He doesn’t give details, but in his essay “Of physiognomy” (Book III, chapter 12) Montaigne writes that he was visited by the plague both within and outside his house. Apparently one or more members of his personnel had died because of the disease. Therefore, Montaigne sees only one way out: To flee. Again, he doesn’t give details. But, following his biographer Bardyn, I think that we must imagine that he travelled around with some wagons and carts and horses: Montaigne on his horse, his wife, his daughter and his seventy years old mother on a cart, and some servants. Where did he go? We don’t know, and actually Montaigne himself didn’t know where to go. Nowhere he was welcome. Everybody was afraid that this caravan could bring the plague. As soon as one of the travellers had caught a cold everybody had to go in quarantine; for forty days. He, so Montaigne complains, who always had been prepared to receive others, couldn’t find a place stay. His money run out. He couldn’t buy new clothes or new horses. However, he was not forgotten. Catherine de Medici heard of Montaigne’s misery and she sent him money; not just a fee but a substantial amount. Of course, this was not only out of pity, for again she needed Montaigne as a mediator between her son Henri III, King of France, and Henri of Navarra, the leader of the Huguenots. So even during his ramble Montaigne was involved in political affairs.

In March 1587, six months after he had left his castle, Montaigne and his family and servants returned home. The plague had gone and the region had been pacified by the Huguenots. Because of his good relations with Henri of Navarra it was safe for Montaigne to go home, although he was a Roman Catholic. However, his castle was in bad condition and his lands had been neglected, with the grapes still hanging on the vines. Not many people there had survived the plague, but Montaigne and his caravan had overcome the misery. And one year later Montaigne published a new edition of his Essays, with a new book added.

“We have abandoned Nature, and will teach her what to do; teach her who so happily and so securely conducted us.” (Essays, III, 12)

Sources

- Bardyn, Christophe, Montaigne. La splendeur de la liberté. Paris: Flammarion, 2015; pp. 381-2, 398-403.

- Desan, Philippe, Montaigne. Une biographie politique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014