Philosophy is a discipline committed to helping us to live wiser and less sorrowful lives. Here are six ideas from its Western branch that can inspire and console
'What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears. ' The Roman philosopher Seneca used to comfort his friends – and himself – with this darkly humourous remark
which gets to the heart of Stoicism, the school of philosophy which Seneca helped to found and which dominated the West for two hundred years.
We get weepy and furious, says Stoicism, not simply because our plans have failed, but because they have failed and we strongly expected them not to.
Therefore, thought Seneca, the task of philosophy is to disappoint us gently before life has a chance to do so violently. The less we expect, the less we will suffer.
Through the help of a consoling pessimism, we should strive to turn our rage and our tears into that far less volatile compound sadness. Seneca was not trying to depress us, just to spare us the kind of hope that,
when it fails, inspires bitterness and intemperate shouting. In the late 4th century, as the immense Roman Empire was collapsing,
the leading philosopher of the age, St Augustine, became deeply interested in possible explanations for the evident tragic disorder of the human world. One central idea he developed was what he legendarily termed Peccatum Originale original sin.
Augustine proposed that human nature is inherently damaged and tainted because – in the Garden of Eden – the mother of all people, Eve, sinned against God by eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
Her guilt was then passed down to her descendants and now all earthly human endeavours are bound to fail because they are the work of a corrupt and faulty human spirit. This odd idea might not be literally true, of course.
