JONNY THOMSON: Hi, my name’s Jonny Thomson. I’m the staff writer at Big Think, and I’m the author of the book’s “Mini Philosophy” and “Mini Big Ideas,” and I run the social media account called Mini Philosophy.
– [Narrator] Philosophy’s Guide to Happiness with Jonny Thomson. Why is the study of happiness become your focus?
– So I started the Mini Philosophy project about seven years ago, and the aim was to try to teach philosophy to everybody. And so the idea was to duck and weave my way through the different philosophical traditions and different philosophical schools throughout time. And what you notice is that, over time, certain themes start to emerge. So if you imagine the history of philosophy as a kind of heat map, what you notice is that there are certain bubbles and certain hotspots start to pop up. And for me, I noticed that there were three particular ones which started to emerge, and they all to do with happiness. They all to do with how to live the best life and how to be a good person. And so I wanted to dig into those a lot more. ‘Cause, obviously, if you focus on the details of philosophy, you’ll notice there’s massive differences, like comparing Confucius and Kant to Al-Ghazali, it’s very difficult to do. But if you zoom out and if you look at philosophy like this heat map, you do start to notice certain commonalities and certain themes starting to emerge. And that’s what interested me, and that’s what is about happiness. The current project I work at the moment is to focus on happiness because it’s an incredibly important thing to get right. So, Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” argued that everything we do in life is for some purpose. So I go to school to get an education, I get an education to get a job, and I get a job so that I get money to buy nice things, and so on and so on. But the question Aristotle asks is, “What is the end point of all this?” “What lies at the top of the ladder?” And for Aristotle, that is happiness. The point of all human life is to reach happiness. And in the centuries or so after Aristotle, these different schools emerged, which were each trying to sell their version of happiness. You have epicureanism, you have skepticism, you have cynicism, and you have stoicism, all of which are trying to sell happiness and their way as the true root to happiness. And that interested me. Because if you step outside Greece, you see a very similar story emerging. And it’s not just in Athens, it’s in China and it’s in the Middle East and it’s in the European tradition as well. So that interested me and I want to dig in what commonalities we can find between all of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy.
– [Narrator] Why is happiness elusive?
– I think it’s so elusive because the term itself is so laden and there’s very different… There’s lots of different ways of understanding the term happiness. So my 4-year-old son at the moment, for example, is learning how to read emotions in kindergarten. And they teach ’em how to recognize sadness and anger and happiness. And, of course, the happy photo is someone with a beaming smile. And, of course, that’s what you do for a 4-year-old child. You teach ’em to read the basics of emotions. But the problem is when we grow up, we don’t really lose that image of happiness. We associate happiness as being this beaming smile with a selfie on social media. But I think happiness is not a smiling face, it’s more a smiling soul. And I think we don’t really like religious terms as much these days, but I think that expression, smiling soul, is probably the closest we can come to understanding what happiness really is. And in fact, Aristotle, when he uses the word eudaimonia, that translates literally as good spirit. So I think the idea of a laughing or a smiling soul is really important to happiness. But why do we find it confusing? Why is it hard to understand? I think Daoism offers a really good analogy here. So Daoism is about the Dao, which is the way, which is this kind of mystical kind of fundamental force which underpins everything. And an analogy that some Daoist stews is that imagine life as like a dense, thorny forest. And in the middle of this forest is a well-paved superhighway and it’s easy to walk along that path. It’s even fun to walk along that path. But there are other paths. But these paths go through swamps, they go through thorns, they go up and down hills, and they are difficult. And I think happiness is a little bit like that. There’s certain paths, there’s certain ways to happiness which feel right and are right, but there are so many different paths with their different sirens calls which attract us. And I think we don’t realize we’re on the wrong path often until it’s too late and we find the going really difficult. So if we imagine happiness as being on the right path, if we follow the Daoism metaphor, then the question we’ve got to ask ourselves is, “If we are unhappy, what’s going on there?” And the question then is about finding the right path again. If we return back to this kind of heat map analogy, there are certain lights which emerge in the history of philosophy and theology as well, which are meant to act as beacons or guides with which we can walk towards. So if we are unhappy, then we should work towards these lights. And I’ve identified three lights or what like to call pillars of happiness. And if we are unhappy, we should walk back towards these.
– [Narrator] What are the three pillars of happiness?
– So if we’re trying to find our way back to the path and we’re trying to follow these lights, we have to know what those lights are. And the first pillar or light number one is the idea that happiness is not measured by pleasure. So the ancient Greeks had a lot of different words for happiness, and one of them is hedonia. And hedonia is what we might want to call simple pleasure. It’s eating a Michelin starred steak, but it’s also binging on the KFC bucket. It’s a big night out with some friends, but it’s also drinking a herbal tea on the sofa. It’s quite easy to measure and it’s quite easy to understand because it’s an emotional affect. It’s pleasure. This idea is essential to Buddhism. So Buddhists tend to define pleasure as being a desire satisfied. So I want a drink of water, and so I reach for the water and I drink it, and that gives me a pleasure. But the problem, of course, is that this is an unwinnable game. Every day we have millions and millions of desires and it’s like a game of impossible whack-a-mole, and there’s no possible way we can satisfy them all. Even if we had all of the time in the world and all of the money of Elon Musk, there’s no way we can satisfy all of our desires. So if we’re to make sense of that word happiness, if we’re to be happy at all, it has to be found outside of this notion of pleasure. And what’s interesting is about 2,000 years ago in a very different tradition in Protestant, Denmark, Soren Kierkegaard was making the same point. Kierkegaard wrote a book called “The Seducers Diary,” which is found in his work either or. And in there, we meet a character called Johannes who is this aesthete who’s living the life of Riley. They’re like a first year university student going out, drinking and womanizing and having the time of their life. But the problem is, as we read the book, we realize that his life is pretty shallow and Johannes gets bored. When I teach Kierkegaard, I tend to describe him as similar to a vampire in one of those vampire movies. There’s a common trope where the vampire who’s been living for hundreds of years is just bored of existence. They’ve drunk all of the drinks they can drink, they’ve done all the drugs they can do, they’ve slept with all of the people they can possibly sleep with, and they’re lying on their sofa in this kinda listless state of dissatisfaction and they’re just bored of life. And so they often turn to increasingly brutal and disturbing things to keep the entertainment going. But the idea is that if we want to have more in life, if we want to be truly happy, we have to step beyond pleasure. We have to step beyond hedonia. Eudaimonia though is a much harder word to understand, and this is what Aristotle means when he talks about happiness. Eudaimonia is often translated as flourishing. And the reason why it’s difficult to understand is that it’s often understood in reverse. So there are many moments in life where we look back on our experiences and think they were really hard at the time, but actually we were supremely happy. For example, raising young kids or even school can be quite hard at the time, but we look back and think those were moments of flourishing and those were moments where I was deeply, supremely happy. And that’s what Aristotle talks about when he talks about eudaimonia. But, of course, most people are pretty familiar with that idea now. The idea that pleasure isn’t happiness is an old idea. But the problem is that we risk going too far. It’s a logical fallacy to say that just because pleasure doesn’t equal happiness, that suffering therefore must. And it’s a risk that we fetishize suffering, that we enjoy this kinda masochistic misery and we see that as essential to flourishing. But, of course, that’s not true. And the second pillar, the second light which emerges across all these traditions is moderation. That we have to find a middle way. And moderation is essential to a lot of philosophies. It’s found in the Buddhist’s middle way, and it’s in Aristotle’s golden mean. So Aristotle, for example, argued that if we want to be virtuous in life, if we want to find the virtue, it lies between two vices. There’s a vice of excess and the vice of deficiency. So let’s say the virtue of courage, it’s found between the vice of excess, which is recklessness, and the vice of deficiency, which would be cowardice. So the middle way is how to be virtuous. And as we see later on in his “Nicomachean Ethics,” to be virtuous is also to be happy. And so we need some kind of moderation. So happiness is not pleasure and happiness is not suffering. And that idea of moderation pops up again and again and again. It’s essential to Daoism. And most people are familiar of the yin-yang symbol, which features a black dot on a white background and a white dot on a black background. And the idea is that life is not black or white, but rather it’s a confused and confusing cocktail of things. It’s a soup. There is no white, there is no black. Everything is gray. So yin tends to represent the dark, the mysterious, the elusive, water, fluidity. And yang represents the exciting, the passionate, the loud, the sunny, and truth. And so for Daoists, we have to find the middle path, which is walking between yin and yang. More recently, I’ve read a book by a mythologist called Martin Shaw called “Courting the Wild Twin.” And rather than yin and yang, he tends to use the word castle and forest life. So Shaw talks about this myth where when we are all born, we are born with a wild twin. And because of the society we live in and because of the world that we live in, this wild twin is thrown out to the forest. And we live our life in the castle. We live our life in a safe, anodyne environment. But every now and again, we’ll hear a call. We’ll hear this whisper of the wild. And it’s unignorable. It’s always there, and this is our wild twin who needs our attention and wants our attention. So where Daoist talk about yin and yang and Shaw talks about this forest life and the castle life, I think moderation is one of the most essential pillars to happiness. So we’ve seen so far that we have two pillars. The first pillar is that pleasure does not mean happiness and that happiness is much fuller and deeper than that. And the second pillar is that we have to have some degree of moderation if we’re to be happy. But the third thing that I noticed appearing again and again across all these various philosophies and religions is the idea that happiness is an unavoidable emergent state of goodness. That you cannot be truly and meaningfully happy unless you are also virtuous. But, of course, this raises the problem, and the problem is, what does virtuous mean? ‘Cause if we zoom in on any different culture and any different time, what people define as right and wrong and good and bad will change from person to person, from philosopher to philosopher. But if we zoom out, if we look at the broader picture, we can see certain trends emerging across different times. And this is the idea that certain virtues are always virtues for different cultures across different times, and certain vices have always been seen as certain vices. So this is an argument made, for example, by the philosopher James Rachels, and more recently, by Paul Stearns. But the idea is that we can recognize about five virtues and vices, which have always been so throughout time. The first is altruism and the vice egoism. So this is seen in Augustine’s code for monks, and it’s seen in Islam’s zakat. It’s there in Peter Singer and Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas. And the idea is a sense of other-regardingness, charity and caring for other people. So the second is kindness and cruelty. So this is best represented by the golden mean, which most people are familiar with this from the gospels, which is, “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” But it’s not just in the gospels. It’s seen in Sanskrit, in Tamil, in Persian, in ancient Greece and in the Vedas. But it’s also seen in modern times in Kant’s first categorical imperative and in Aquinas’s natural law. Be good and kind to other people. And the third virtue vice is justice and injustice. I think if you put Plato and Mencius and John Rules in the same room, they would agree about the need for justice, which is the idea of some kind of retribution for wrongdoers. The fourth virtue of vice is wisdom and ignorance. Socrates famously wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the Buddha encourages disciples to meditate at great depth on the universe. I can’t think of any major philosopher who’s been treated seriously for long who advocates for ignorance. And the fifth virtue vice is humility and arrogance, and I think this has two strands, really. The first is a kind of intellectual humility, which is represented best by John Stewart Mill. And the second is a kind of existential humility, which is represented by the religions. It’s in Karl Barth, it’s in Maimonides, and the word Islam literally translates as surrender to Allah. This is the idea that you are not the center of the universe. There are things outside of your understanding which are far more powerful and which we occasionally have to bow to.
– [Narrator] How can we apply the three pillars of happiness to our lives?
– So, of course, the problem is when you zoom out and look at all these philosophies, it can come across as very abstract. So, we can look at a few examples about how these kind of pillars or these lights might relate to everyone’s everyday life. So if we’re looking at pillar number one, which is the idea that happiness cannot be measured by pleasure, I think a really good example of this is parenting. If you ever go on social media and you see a real or a post about a new parent, it’s inevitably moaning about something. Their sleep deprived nights or the germs or their kids aren’t eating anything and it’s full of stress and what appears to be misery. But then if you commented on those posts saying, “Well, why did you bother having kids in the first place?” Or “Why do kids make you unhappy?” Often, parents will reply, “I’m happiest I’ve ever been.” And I think parenting is an example of looking back at a stage of your life and thinking all of the ingredients might have been pretty hard in themselves. But as a whole, I was deeply existentially happy. So pillar number two is the idea of moderation in all things, and I think this is best seen in dieting. So most diets end within a month or, if not, weeks, and most New Year’s resolutions end pretty quickly. And it’s because they’re often very extreme. It’s, “I’m gonna go to the gym every day and run half marathons” or “I’m going to give up chocolate” or “I’m never gonna drink alcohol ever again.” And they fail because they are so extreme. And the best diets in history, for example, Weight Watchers, allow a degree of flexibility. There’s a degree of moderation. They allow for cheat days and the occasional snack or the occasional drink. So dieting when it’s done at these extremes does work for some people, no doubt. But for most people, dieting is best when it exists in this middle way. And pillar number three is the idea that you can’t be happy unless you are also good to some degree, which might seem ridiculous to lots of people because we can point to people who seem to be pretty cruel or immoral, and yet they seem to be also very happy. But in 2012, the evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, did an interesting study into gossip. And he argued that gossip is a kind of social culling where we talk to people about the immoral, the cruel people in our lives, the cheaters and the thieves, so we can shun them. But inversely, people who are friendly and good will also attract friends. And so the argument is that if you are cruel, you do not have friends. And if you do not have friends, you cannot be happy. Inversely, those who are kind will attract friends and they’ll also be happy for it. So what I find really interesting is if you zoom out and look at the history of philosophy, you see these three pillars emerging, and they act essentially as a diagnostic tool. If you feel you are unhappy in life, you can look at these pillars and think, “Which of these three am I not meeting?” Is it that I’m confusing a hard patch of my life of being unhappy? Is it that I’m going to two extremes? Or is it that possibly I’m not being as good as I could be? If we recognize that those are the problems in our life, we can take steps to fix it.
– [Narrator] What is true love?
– So I am a pretty soppy person anyway, and it doesn’t take much to make me cry. But I can guarantee you one thing which will always make me cry is if I look at pictures of old couples in love. If you see a husband and wife who have been married for many years sitting on the bench and holding hands or an elderly couple walking along the beach, it’s guaranteed to make me cry. And I think it’s a common thing. I think there’s something quite magical when you look at a love which has lasted that long. Through all of the wrinkles and the rheumatism and the gray hairs, there’s that kind of love, that kind of core to those two people. And I think the reason why that echoes to a lot of people is that it ties into what Plato thought about love. Because for Plato, love is something which goes beyond appearances. It goes beyond the changeable world. Plato described two types of love. The first love is vulgar love, which is the love of the material world. It’s the love of things. It’s born of pleasure. And when we’re talking about romantic relations, we might want to associate it more with attraction or eroticism. But Plato says that this is an inferior love to what he calls the pure or the true love, and that’s one which sees behind the appearances. It sees behind the facade. It sees behind the beauty. So the thing is, most relationships will start in some form of vulgar love. There’s a kind of attraction to that person, be that a friend or a romantic partner. But what Plato’s advice is, is that we have to push past that and we have to try to seek the soul behind the body. We have to see the mind behind the eyes. And to do that, we have to be with them and we have to ask important questions and we have to both want the same thing. So the word platonic love these days is often associated with a kind of friendship love. So, I love you in a kind of platonic way means that you are my friend and that there’s no sexual relations here at all. And when Plato is talking about love, he isn’t necessarily talking about love as being divorced from sex. You can have sex in a platonic relationship, but Plato would argue that sex in and of itself is not what true love is. Sex can reach a point where you are in union with that person, where you see behind their appearances and you see behind the flesh and you experience something which is more transcendental. It’s mystical. And so Plato argued that love is not blind, but the opposite, in fact. Love is piercingly insightful. Love sees behind the crack smiles and the wrinkles and the fake laughs and it sees the person there. And I think that’s why we find people who have survived all the changed of life very beautiful and moving and meaningful.
– [Narrator] Is there right and wrong?
– Discussing right and wrong can often be very difficult. In fact, Christmases have probably been ruined over that very thing. Wars have been fought over right and wrong. But at the turn of the 18th century, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham gave us a surprisingly simple calculation about how we can work out what is right and wrong. Jeremy Bentham became the father of the theory known as utilitarianism, which is the idea that a good action is one which creates the greatest good for the greatest number. So Benham argued that if we’re to decide if an action is right or wrong, we have to set it against seven different criteria of pleasure. The first is intensity. So, how intense is the pleasure? The second is duration. So, how long does it last? The third is proximity. So, how close is it to you or how far away is it? The fourth is fecundity. Does this pleasure produce more pleasure? The fifth is purity. Does this pleasure also create pain? The sixth is extent. How widespread is the pleasure? And the seventh is likelihood. So how likely is that pleasure to happen or not? So what we do is once we’ve calculated our pleasure, we add all the numbers together and we decide whether this action right now creates more pleasure or more pain, and we do the action which creates more pleasure. Of course, there’s a whole host of problems with this, not least who defines pleasure. And it’s a problem that John Stuart Mill, who’s Bentham’s successor, tried to resolve. But one of the biggest problems is, who actually has time for this? In any given day, we have thousands of ethical decisions and no one can sit down and draw out an hedonic calculus.
– [Narrator] How does someone become evil?
– There are many different theories of evil in the history of philosophy. So Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that it’s when we stray from the natural law. And many people might argue that evil is something innate and that we are born evil. But Hannah Arendt has a very different theory, and hers is all to do with banality. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann found himself in court. Eichmann was one of the orchestrators of the Holocaust. And in the court was the philosopher Hannah Arendt looking in. And what she noticed was something peculiar. But this was not a Disney villain. This was not somebody who looked monstrous. This was a boring bureaucrat. And she asked herself, “How is it that a whole nation of people just like Eichmann could turn themselves to do something so horrendous as the Holocaust?” A lot of Arendt’s work is discussing what are the ingredients necessary for a society to turn towards totalitarianism? And she comes up with two answers. The first answer is that a society has to feel disconnected and fragmented. People don’t form any communities and any sense of community has to be decided by the powers that be. The second factor is that all of the problems and fears of your society are because of some external force. It might be Jews, but it might be communists, it might be any foreigners. It’s some shadowy other who’s causing you to feel this way. From there, Hannah Arendt asked the question, “How is it that someone like Eichmann could become part of the Holocaust? And in her book, “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt believes that a human needs three things to flourish and to thrive. She says, we need action, labor, and work. Labor is what we might call the everyday drudgery of just getting by. It’s washing yourself in the shower, it’s cleaning dishes, it’s getting the kids to school. It’s just ending the day as you started. The second is work, and this is where we feel we’re giving back to society. It might be that we’re producing something in a factory or we’re providing a service to someone as a banker or an accountant. But the third and arguably most important is action. And this is where we feel as though we’re part of the political forum. We feel as though that we have a voice and our voice is heard. That we can discuss with other people our political opinions and they can discuss theirs with us. What Hannah Arendt argued is that totalitarianism and Nazi Germany denies people action. It denies them a sense of meaning and a sense of joining something bigger and being part of the discussion. So when Hannah Arendt watched Adolf Eichmann in court, she wasn’t watching a fully realized human being, she was watching a drone. He never questioned himself because he was denied access to himself. He only had targets to meet and promotions to get, and he was only following orders because orders were all he had.
– [Narrator] Why does money matter in our society?
– The best inventions are those which become so important to our lives, we can’t even imagine a world without them. There was a time, for example, when people lived without money. Let’s imagine that tomorrow all of the money in the world were to disappear. No more banks, no more notes, and no more numbers on screens. How would you get by? How would you do anything? Would you exchange your services for a product? Would you say, “I’ll give you a haircut in return for a stake?” It’s only when we imagine the world without something that we appreciate how important that thing is. And money is probably one of the most useful and important tools humans have ever invented. Money goes back a very long way, but it began in Egypt and around the Fertile Crescent and in the Middle East. Back then, money was more like a chit which you would exchange for a bag of grain at your local granary. So the chit would say, “The bearer of this chit is entitled to three bags of grain.” And that this bearer is entitled to bit is really important because if the chit was attached to me, Jonny Thomson, it couldn’t be used as the method of exchange. But the problem is that money is only as good as the authority which underwrites it. So if you took your chit to a granary and they said, “We’re not going to give you any grain,” you would no longer use that chit. Most of us today are lucky to live in governments where the money that we have is worth something. But if you live in Zimbabwe or North Korea, you’ll know what it’s like to have all of your life savings vanish overnight because your currency suddenly means nothing. It was a Chinese who first got wisely idea that carrying coins around in your bags is not only impractical but also very expensive. And so they were the first to invent not only paper, but paper money. And under the Song dynasty, that was then universalized for the whole country. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world without money. It’s hard to imagine a time where we’d have to exchange three chickens for one sheep. Money is probably one of the most important inventions in all humankind, and we don’t even think about it.
– Why is philosophy relevant to all of us?
– I think a lot of people see philosophy as being this kind of esoteric ivory tower pursuit by people wearing cardigans and discussing the most ridiculous of things. And to be fair, my first experience of university weren’t too far away from that. Whenever I talk about this, I remember a lecturer who walked in and he spent half an hour of the lecture taking his glasses off and putting them back on. And he kept saying, “Isn’t it amazing how the world depends upon two tiny lenses?” And I tell people that that was what I paid for at university. And in that same year, I remember writing an essay in formal logic with the title, “What Is Is?” I had to write 2,500 words on the Law of Identity. I would also say that’s not a bad thing. I would say that some people enjoy doing philosophy in the same way that they enjoy doing a Sudoku. But the point I wanted to make was that philosophy is not always like this. In fact, I would argue that philosophy is at its best when it’s not like this. So, ethics, for example, underpins our laws and our political institutions, and the philosophy of religion is about the most important questions we can ask of ourselves. But I think the biggest way in which philosophy infuses our every day and is incredibly useful is through self-help. And I think if you look at a lot of modern self-help books, what they’ve done is they have diluted philosophy and they’ve made it accessible and applicable to modern life. And that’s fine. But what I would argue is if you go back to those original philosophical texts, you’ll actually find a depth there that you lack in a lot of modern self-help books. So one of the greatest examples of this, I think, is in cognitive behavioral therapy. I distinctly remember in the early 1990s when I’d just come back from school in a grump. I dunno what it was about. I probably got a bad grade or I fell out with some friends. And my mom, who was a therapist, she said to me, “Choose your mood.” And if you really want to irritate a teenager, what you should say to them is, “Choose your mood.” And only in hindsight do I realize that she’d probably just come back from a CBT refresher course, ’cause cognitive behavioral therapy is a hugely effective talking therapy, which was popularized by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis in the 1960s. And what’s interesting is if you put CBT next to stoicism, you can find a huge amount of similarities. The first is acceptance. So in stoicism, there’s this idea that you have to accept that there are certain things in life which are beyond your control. So the Buddha, for example, talks about the remembrances of old age and sickness and death. And these are things we cannot fix. They’re things we cannot control. And the stoic said the same thing. We have to recognize that there’s a great many things in our life which we just cannot control. For example, other people’s opinions. What people think of you is beyond your power, so you just have to accept them. And the second commonality is to do a rationality. And this is the idea that we can, to some degree, know ourselves. We can look in on our inner lives and recognize our emotions and our motivations. We can distance ourselves from our emotions and our feelings to look at them. And that distance is really important, the stoicism and CBT, both. And the third commonality between the two is what’s called the gap or the space or the pause. And this is an idea popularized by Epictetus, but it forms the bedrock of CBT. And this is the idea that between the world and our reaction, there is a pause. And into that pause, we can choose how we are to react. Nothing in life is predetermined and we can decide how we will respond to the world. So my mom might have been right. I can choose my mood. But there is a risk of overworking the connection because CBT is a proven talking therapy, which has been proven through experiment after experiment, and I’m sure many people have their own anecdotal experiences with it. Stoicism is an entire philosophy. For example, they believed in the logos, which is this rational force underpinning the universe, and they also believed that we have to be virtuous and moral. If you’re looking at any therapies where we’re looking at CBT, RBT or psychoanalysis, what you see is a common thread, which is that we are talking. And that’s what I think philosophy does best. Because I think when you’re doing philosophy, you are talking about these issues in a way which is really healthy. You are objectifying them, you’re treating them on the table to be examined. You dig up your problems and you dissect them as a group intellectually. I think any therapist who’s worth their weight will look at you unjudgmentally, and I think what philosophy does is look at our own problems in a similar intellectual unjudgmental way. So I remember when I was a teacher at school, a lot of students would come up to me afterwards and say, “Sir, I found that really useful.” “I found that really important to understanding my own issues.” Because when you’re reading philosophy and you’re looking at these philosopher’s lives, while you’re reading about their intellectual journeys at their times, you’re also reading about yourself. So Montaigne, for example, is this 16th century diarist and he’s also a philosopher and he’s talking about a whole range of things. He talks about friendship, he talks about love, he talks about relationships. And it’s tempting to think that when you’re reading Montaigne, you’re actually reading about this 16th century Frenchman, but you’re not. You’re really reading about yourself. And I think it’s really important for philosophy to unpack those. I think it’s also really important that we bring interesting conversations back into society. Life is too full of these boring and shallow conversations, and I think what it does is two things. The first is that it distances ourself from other people. You can’t get to know anyone else unless you have these deep and important conversations. And the second problem is that your distanced from yourself. You don’t get to understand what really matters to you and what motivates you. At the risk of overplaying my hand. I think this could transform society because I believe that a lot of people today feel very disconnected from each other and from their cultures. And the sociologist Émile Durkheim talked about this word anomie, which is a disconnection from our culture and our people. And I think if we go about our lives ignoring these conversations and refusing to see people and talk about these deep, meaningful things, we start to disassociate from each other and we fracture and we fragment. And I think if we have to come back together, we have to have these important conversations. We have to go past talking about the weather, and we have to ask about God and about our worries and about our existential angst, and we have to talk about right and wrong. And it’s only through that conversation that we can come together to understand each other and to form a community and to be understood and to understand other people as well.
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