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Text copyright © 2012 Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

‘The Shrink and the Sage’ is the name of a regular column written by the authors which appears in the FT Weekend section of the Financial Times newspaper. This book includes some material based on columns which originally appeared in FT Weekend. Those passages appear with the permission of the copyright owner, The Financial Times Limited.

Cartoon on p. 47 © Chris Madden

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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CONTENTS

Title page

Copyright

About the authors

Introduction

The way of Aristotle

PART ONE

Being the best you can

The Shrink

The Sage

The problem with happiness

The Sage

The Shrink

On goals

The Shrink

The Sage

Being true to yourself

The Shrink

The Sage

What should you do before you die?

The Shrink

The Sage

Being torn

The Sage

The Shrink

Dealing with emotions

The Sage

The Shrink

What should you be proud of?

The Sage

The Shrink

Gut feelings and intuitions

The Shrink

The Sage

Contrary to appearances?

The Shrink

The Sage

Will and resolution

The Sage

The Shrink

The varieties of self-love worth having

The Shrink

The Sage

On self-deception

The Shrink

The Sage

The status of status

The Sage

The Shrink

Are you responsible?

The Sage

The Shrink

The happy pessimist

The Shrink

The Sage

No regrets?

The Sage

The Shrink

Meaning and spirituality

The Shrink

The Sage

Thought and action

The Sage

The Shrink

On paying attention

The Sage

The Shrink

PART TWO

Psychology for philosophers

Julian Baggini

Philosophy for psychotherapy

Antonia Macaro

Conclusion: the serenity mantra

Notes

Julian Baggini is founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and the author of numerous books including The Pig That Wants to be Eaten and The Ego Trick.

Antonia Macaro has many years’ experience as an existential therapist and philosophical counsellor, and is the author of Reason, Virtue and Psychotherapy.

INTRODUCTION

Everyone with the slightest jot of wisdom, from the Buddha to the jaded old soak behind the bar, would ruefully nod in acquiescence with writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor’s line: ‘Life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.’ No wonder that the marketplace in life guidance is so crowded with both buyers and sellers. Canny shoppers might reasonably conclude: nothing works.

But while it’s true that no thing works, some things work. There is no secret, magic formula, no algorithm for living a good, satisfying life. But in the accumulated wisdom of the generations there are ideas and practices that can help us to deal with the problems of living that come as the non-negotiable fee for the privilege of being born. If we can use them well, we can develop practical wisdom: the ability to think for ourselves and make better choices about how to live.

There is a huge risk of hubris in daring to write about such matters. But by doing so we do not make any claims about our own wisdom. One of the features of practical wisdom is that you can’t tell how much of it people have by finding out what they know. Just as a clever mechanic can accomplish more with a single screwdriver than an incompetent one with a fully-equipped garage, so a little knowledge can go a long way for a wise person, while a lot can be wasted on a fool. All we claim is that we have access to a well-stocked garage, which we invite you to visit and use as you see fit.

Our toolkit is equipped with the resources of both psychotherapy and philosophy. It might not quite look as you’d expect. In particular, there is a widespread per­ception that both psychotherapy and philosophy are centrally concerned with exposing hidden depths. Philosophy pulls back the veil of appearances and reveals the real world for what it is, while psychotherapy is mainly an exploration of the unconscious. But while it is the case that some truths lie buried and things are often not as they seem, there is no reason to systematically concentrate on the invisible rather than the visible. In therapy, for instance, the reasons people give for their behaviour are often more illuminating than speculation about motives they might not be aware of.

We offer no grand unified theory. Our perspectives, tools and insights were gleaned from centuries-old philosophy and recent research in psychology. They also reflect the experience, over many years, of talking to people who were trying to work out how to live, and reflecting on those conversations. But although we draw from many sources, it’s very important to us that what we say fits into a coherent framework. We have striven to avoid the kind of promiscuous pick-and-mix approach that ends up with a hodgepodge of incompatible, contradictory advice from different thinkers and systems.

We would describe our overall ethos as a minimalist one: while we believe that we can do things to make life better, solve some problems and make others less debilitating, we do not believe that lasting, uninterrupted contentment is a reasonable goal, even if some people do manage to achieve it. We hope and believe our resources can be of help, but they will not solve all your problems because life’s problems are just not like that.

In Part One we scrutinise twenty potentially tricky spheres of life. In Part Two we each explain a little about our approach. But before getting going we thought it would be useful to outline the central ideas of the philosopher and psychologist who has most influenced our thinking about problems of living: Aristotle. His work is a rare find when it comes to questions of how to live. Although he wrote over two thousand years ago, lacking all kinds of knowledge we now take for granted (and of course getting some things completely wrong as a result), his understanding of being human is more insightful and relevant than many modern theories. We have both taken much inspiration from his framework for the good life, and his influence can be seen behind every page of this book. We hope that filling in some of the background to our perspective will help to illuminate both the connections between the topics we discuss and any questions we don’t cover within these pages.

If you want to know more, give Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics a go. It’s essentially a set of lecture notes and so you may need to join a few dots, but we believe it’s well worth the effort, as this is one book that really merits the over-used tag of ‘essential reading for everyone’.

Although this book has two voices, they are intended to be in harmony, complementing more than contrasting with each other. Whether or not they’re singing the right tune is for you to decide.

THE WAY OF ARISTOTLE

Practical wisdom

To say Aristotle was a philosopher is an understatement. He was arguably the greatest polymath who has ever lived. As well as writing some of philosophy’s foundational texts on abstract matters of logic and metaphysics, he also turned his mind to biology, drama and the ordering of human affairs. His ability to seamlessly move from the abstract to the concrete is nowhere more evident than in his writings on ethics, and is encapsulated in an idea he put at the centre of a good human life: practical wisdom, phronēsis. If we have this we’ll reliably come up with the right judgements about how to act in different situations.

The question is, how do we go about developing it? First of all we need to think through our values and reach a good awareness of the sorts of things that contribute to a good life. Then it’s a question of gaining the skills to put this understanding into practice. These include thinking clearly about ourselves, our situation, other people, what is and is not possible; sharpening the ability to select and assess potential goals, work out the best way to achieve them, monitor their consequences, and use what we learn to adapt and change.

But good decision-making is only the first step. It’s just as important that the appropriate actions flow from it without too much struggle. Pushing ourselves to stick to our deliberations while gritting our teeth is better than not implementing them at all, but the ideal is to be able to follow them gracefully and easily. Reason will still have to guide this process, however, by instigating the actions and habits that can help us to develop the relevant qualities and character traits. This is how we become more likely to do the right thing automatically, without having to cogitate at every turn.

There is nothing mystical or mysterious about this ability. Aristotle’s ideas have a striking parallel in contemporary psychology’s concept of expert intuition. Once you’ve become an expert in any field, the best course of action is liable to pop up without the need to articulate the exact reasons behind it. Of course your judgement is always fallible, and it’s good practice to try to work out the rationale for it. Nonetheless, explicit justification often comes after the event, which is just as well, since we often have to rely on experts to make good decisions quickly. In this sense practical wisdom is simply expertise in the art of living.

Developing practical wisdom is not easy, but Aristotle has a useful device to think about it. It’s the doctrine of the mean. The idea is that we are not faced with a binary choice to be, say, assertive or unassertive, courageous or timid, hedonistic or puritanical. Instead, we have to find a place on a scale that is appropriate for us and the situation we’re in. That place is called the mean. This is how Aristotle puts it:

For example, fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain can be experienced too much or too little, and in both ways not well. But to have them at the right time, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the mean and best; and this is the business of virtue. Similarly, there is an excess, a deficiency and a mean in actions.¹

But the mean is not bland moderation for all. We shouldn’t always aim at a modest amount of anger: some situations might call for great anger (although how it’s expressed is another matter) and others for none at all. The mean should be finely calibrated to our particular circumstances. Aristotle is very clear about this, explicitly stating that the mean for human action is not like a mathematical average. Take weight, for example. 50kg is too light for a six-foot man and 100kg too heavy. But the mathematical average – 75kg – is not necessarily the right one for any given individual. A slight-framed dancer may need to be lighter, a body-builder closer to the excess. As with much else in the good life, there is no algorithm for calculating the mean.

Maybe we don’t think about it in these terms, but many life issues we find difficult are struggles to find the mean. We may want to take more risks, be more confident, more patient, more tenacious, more able to resist immediate gratification. We may wonder whether we are pushing ourselves too hard or not hard enough, at what point tolerance gives way to being a doormat or courage to recklessness, what the right balance is between achievement and enjoyment. This dynamic is evident in many of the problems of living discussed in this book.

At times the mean is hard to locate, and Aristotle gives us two rules of thumb to deal with those situations. One is to steer away from the more harmful extreme. When you see the sign warning of bears, is it cowardly to turn back or appropriately brave to carry on? If you’re really not sure, turn back: better to have missed out on a lovely walk than to be mauled to death by an angry grizzly. The other is to steer away from the extreme towards which we are naturally inclined. In any sphere of human behaviour most of us tend more towards one pole. If you are inclined to be excessively cautious, say, you can gently nudge yourself towards the mean by taking tiny steps to be slightly more daring.

Moving towards the mean is possible because, unlike other objects in the universe, human beings have the capacity to change. As Aristotle put it, ‘a stone that naturally falls downwards could not be made by habituation to rise upwards, not even if one tried to habituate it by throwing it up ten thousand times … nor anything else that naturally behaves in one way be habituated to behave differently’. In contrast, good settled dispositions, which Aristotle calls virtues, ‘arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation’.²

We are responsible for building our character despite the deep roots of our behaviour in our childhood experience (and, we would now add, genetic inheritance). But how can we effect these changes? Primarily through habituation. ‘We become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre’, wrote Aristotle. ‘So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by temperate actions, and courageous by courageous actions.’³ Again, Aristotle’s ancient insight finds itself vindicated by contemporary psychological research. Various forms of behaviour therapy work precisely because changing what you do can influence how you think and feel.

The aim of all this self-training is not unthinking automaticity, but the intertwining development of our rational deliberation and our immediate responses. Aristotle’s account of the interplay between instinct and reflection has similarities with ‘dual-process’ models of the brain, such as the one described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. This describes two systems: System 1 is concerned with fast, automatic, unconscious thinking, System 2 with slow, conscious deliberation.⁴ Although Kahneman points out that the latter has little direct control over the former, it seems evident that reason can exert indirect influence on some instinctive reactions, for example by initiating habit change.

This does not happen without friction. If we have a habitual inclination to be impatient, say, and decide to cultivate patience, initially our only option may be to go against the grain and control our behaviour, suppressing the impulse to butt in, move on or give up. But if we persevere, eventually we should come to feel as well as act appropriately. We have achieved virtue or excellence (aretē) when inclination and deliberation feed harmoniously into each other.

The good life

Practical wisdom includes a good understanding of what is valuable in life. You cannot judge where the mean lies between cowardice and bravery, for instance, unless you are clear whether and how much something is worth taking a risk for. The right degree of loyalty will vary depending on how important you think it is to maintain social and family ties when other considerations suggest they should be severed. Any verdict about what it is best to do implies a judgement about what kind of life is better or worse.

We tend to be suspicious of general pronouncements about how best to live, often preferring to see these choices as purely subjective. But it wouldn’t be surprising if some elements of the good life were more or less universal, given the many experiences that all humans share. At the very least we should all be able to agree that a good human life is bound to look different from a good life for a cat or a pig. Rolling in mud may be fun sometimes, but doing it as much as a pig is no way for a human to live.

Trying to identify one or a set of key ingredients for the good life has been a kind of philosophical parlour game for millennia, over which time the key contenders have remained pretty constant. Richard Layard, for instance, believes there are strong evidential grounds for identifying five factors as being the most important for happiness: family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and health. Although Aristotle is interested in flourishing rather than happiness (see ‘The problem with happiness’ in Part One), he starts his