Aristotle

The task of art, as Aristotle saw it, is to make profound truths about life stick in our minds.

What are friends for? In books eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies three different kinds of friendship: there’s friendship that comes about when each person is seeking fun, their chief interest is in their own pleasure and the opportunity of the moment, which the other person provides. Then there are friendships that are really strategic acquaintances, where people take pleasure in each other’s company only in so far as they have hopes of taking advantage of it. Then, there’s the true friend. Not someone who’s just like you, but someone who isn’t you, but about whom you care as much as you care about yourself. The sorrows of a true friend are your sorrows. Their joys are yours. It makes you more vulnerable, should anything befall this person. But it’s hugely strengthening too. You’re relieved from the too small orbit of your own thoughts and worries. You expand into the life of another, and together you become larger, cleverer, more resilient, more fair-minded. You share virtues and cancel out each other’s defects. Friendship teaches us what we ought to be: it is, quite literally, the best part of life.

Epicurus

Epicurus’s influence continues into the modern age. Karl Marx did his PhD thesis on him and thought of him as his favourite philosopher. What we call communism is at heart just a bigger – and rather more authoritarian and joyless – version of Epicureanism.

Baruch Spinoza

As Spinoza put it, beautifully but rather caustically: ‘Whosoever loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.’ In other words, only naive (but perhaps rather touching) narcissism would lead someone at once to believe in a God who made the eternal laws of physics and then to imagine that this same God would take an interest in bending the rules of existence to improve his or her life in some way.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche thought of envy as a confused but important signal from our deeper selves about what we really want. Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential, which we disown at our peril. We should learn to study our envy forensically, keeping a diary of envious moments, and then sift through episodes to discern the shape of a future, better self.

Thomas Hobbes

For centuries, way back into the Middle Ages, there had been a standard answer to this, contained in a theory called the Divine Right of Kings. This was a blunt, simple, but highly effective theory stating that it was none other than God who appointed all kings and that one should obey these monarchs for one clear reason: because the deity said so – and He would send you to hell if you didn’t agree. But this was no longer proving quite so persuasive to many thoughtful people, who argued that the right to rule ultimately lay not with kings, but with ordinary people, who gave kings power – and therefore should only expect to take orders from kings so long as, but only so long, as things were working out well for them. This was known as the social contract theory of government.

Key to Hobbes’s argument was that the state of nature could not have been a pretty place, because humans, left to their own devices, without a central authority to keep them in awe, would quickly have descended into squabbling, infighting and intolerable bickering. It would have been a little like the English Civil War, but with people in bear skins bashing each other around with flint tools. In Hobbes’s famous formulation, life in the state of nature would have been: ‘nasty, brutish and short.’

He admitted that a ruler might come along with an ‘inclination to do wicked deeds’ but the people would still have a duty to obey as ‘human affairs cannot be without some inconvenience.’ But this inconvenience is the fault of people, not the sovereign, because: ‘if men could rule themselves, there would be no need at all of a common coercive power.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Primitive man, noted Rousseau, did not compare himself to others but instead focused solely on himself – his objective was simply to survive. Though Rousseau didn’t actually employ the term ‘noble savage’ in his philosophical writings, his account of natural man unleashed a fascination with this concept.

Adam Smith

So horrified were some thinkers by the implications of specialisation, they argued we should go back to an artisanal economy (the great fantasy of philosophers in the 19th century). But Smith was more inventive. He discerned that what many workers in advanced economies lack is a satisfying story about how their individual efforts fit into the bigger scheme; how they are helping other people and serving society. Bosses of the specialised corporations of modernity therefore have an additional responsibility to their workers: reminding them of the purpose, role and ultimate dignity of their labour.

(Adam Smith might be the origin of the corporate purpose statement)

How to treat the rich. Then as now, the great question was how to get the rich to behave well towards the rest of society. The Christian answer to this was: make them feel guilty; show them the sufferings of the poor and appeal to their consciences. Meanwhile, the radical, left-wing answer was: raise taxes. But Smith disagreed with both approaches: the hearts of the rich were likely to remain cold and high taxes would simply lead the rich to flee the country. He arrived at more original and more subtle recommendations thanks to a theory about what the rich really want. He proposed that, contrary to what one might expect, it isn’t money the rich really care about. It is honour and respect. The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but because they are emotionally needy. They do so primarily in order to be liked and approved of. This vanity provides wise governments with a highly useful tool. Rather than taxing the rich, these governments should learn to give the rich plenty of honour and status – in return for doing all the good things that these narcissists wouldn’t normally bother with, like funding schools and hospitals and paying their workers well. As Smith put it: ‘The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.’

John Ruskin

He also believed that we should not (cannot) leave this to the forces of the market, because they will never get round to planting wildflowers by the edges of roads and making sure that village greens are pretty.

He wrote with astonishing seriousness about the importance of looking at the light in the morning, of taking care to see the different kinds of cloud in the sky and of looking properly at how the branches of a tree intertwine and spread. He took immense delight in the beautiful structures of nests and beavers’ dams. And he loved feathers with a passion.

We should use the emotion we feel at the beauty of nature to energise us to equal its works.

Ruskin’s approach to politics was to hold resolutely on to a vision of what a really sane, reasonable, decent and good life would look like – and then to ask rigorously just how a society would need to be set up for that to be the average life, for an ordinary person, and not a rare piece of luck only for the very privileged. For this he deserves our, and posterity’s, ongoing interest and gratitude.

William Morris

Morris was the first person to understand two issues which have become decisive for our times. Firstly: the role of pleasure in work. And, secondly: the nature of consumer demand. The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society. It’s a huge idea.

John Rawls

This experiment is called ‘the veil of ignorance’, and through it Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances we were going to be born into; our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Standing high above the planet, we wouldn’t know what sort of parents we’d have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on … The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we knew nothing about where we’d end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter? In what kind of political system would it be rational and sane for us to take root – and accept the challenge laid down by the veil of ignorance?

Rawls provides us with a tool to critique our current societies based on a beautifully simple experiment. We’ll know we finally have made our societies fair when we will be able to say in all honesty, from a position of imaginary ignorance before our births, that we simply wouldn’t mind at all what kind of circumstances our future parents might have and what sort of neighbourhoods we might be born into.

Lao Tzu

We spend so much time rushing from one place to the next in life, but Lao Tzu reminds us ‘nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’

Confucius

He spoke about moral character and wisdom as the work of a lifetime. Of course, a burst of inspiration may well be what we need to start our business or redo our rough draft or even reinvent our life. But we also need to devote more energy to slowly changing our habits, for the core of who we are is determined by ingrained patterns of behaviour.

Sen no Rikyū

The Japan of his era had grown image-conscious and money-focused. Riky promoted an alternative set of values which he termed wabi-sabi – a compound word combining wabi, or simplicity, with sabi, an appreciation of the imperfect. Across fields ranging from architecture to interior design, philosophy to literature, Riky awakened in the Japanese a taste for the pared down and the authentic, for the undecorated and the humble.

St. Benedict

At many strategic points in Benedict’s buildings, you’ll see beautiful or dramatic works of art that remind you of some important idea or help you get into a useful mood. Benedict didn’t think that good art and architecture were luxuries: these were vital supports for our inner lives. He understood that we were likely to take our cue about how to be inside ourselves by looking around at the moods emanating from the walls around us.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracies, however, had dismantled every barrier to expectation. All members of the community felt themselves theoretically equal, even when they lacked the means to achieve material equality. ‘In America,’ wrote Tocqueville, ‘I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich’. Poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble backgrounds. However, exceptions did not make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, the American poor were no longer able to see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

Max Weber

The standard view is that capitalism is the result of developments in technology (particularly, the invention of steam power). But Weber proposed that what made capitalism possible was a set of ideas, not scientific discoveries – and in particular religious ideas. Religion made capitalism happen. Not just any religion; a very particular, non-Catholic kind of the sort that flourished in Northern Europe where capitalism was – and continues to be – particularly vigorous. Capitalism was created by Protestantism, specifically Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin in Geneva and by his followers in England, the Puritans.

In his great work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905, Weber laid out some of the reasons why he believed Protestant Christianity had been so crucial to capitalism:

• Protestantism makes you feel guilty all the time:
• God likes hard work
• All work is holy
• It's the community, not the family, that counts
• There aren't miracles

In this analysis, Weber was in direct disagreement with Karl Marx, for Marx had proposed a materialist view of capitalism (where technology was said to have created a new capitalist social system), whereas Weber now advanced an idealist one (suggesting that it was in fact a set of ideas that had created capitalism and given the impetus for its newfound technological and financial arrangements).

Theodor Adorno

But, in the modern world, Adorno bemoaned that leisure had fallen into the hands of an omnipresent and deeply malevolent entertainment machine he called ‘the culture industry’, which occupied the same demonic place in his philosophy as religion had occupied in Marx’s. Modern films, TV, radio, magazines and now social media seemed for Adorno to be designed to keep us distracted, unable to understand ourselves and without the will to alter political reality. This was a new and catastrophically dangerous opium for the masses.

Rachel Carson

It is perhaps her most radical idea of all: that it is love, rather than guilt, which is the key to transforming humanity’s relationship to nature.

Andrea Palladio

The fancy surrounds are not the crucial thing. Without them, the window opening will still look lovely, because it is the proportions and not the decoration that make it harmonious. This meant that an equally beautiful building could be produced more cheaply (always one of Palladio’s chief concerns) because the same proportions are beautiful irrespective of whether the building is made of marble, brick, concrete or wood.

Dieter Rams

Simplicity is so satisfying because our lives are cluttered, and the experience of having too many options is a constant drag on us. When we see simplicity, we know that we value it.

Being simple can make you feel vulnerable. But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.

True modesty comes from confidence. Modesty is a lack of anxiety about being ignored.