The School of Life Dictionary

Alain de Botton, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781999747183
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

The School of Life's dictionary of emotional intelligence brings us the vocabulary we need in order to understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. A dictionary is a guide to a language. This one is a guide to the language of emotions and a tool to help us express our truest selves.Through an alphabetical selection of over 200 words and phrases (FOMO, existential angst, unrequited love, imposter syndrome, to name a few), The School of Life offers us a complete vocabulary with which to understand our emotions and to communicate them successfully.

• A COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
• A REFERENCE BOOK FOR KEY TERMS from The School of Life.
• A GUIDE TO THE VOCABULARY WE NEED to live emotionally intelligent lives in today's world.
• ILLUSTRATED with full color images throughout.

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¶ Addiction

We operate with some stock images of the addict: a person with a heroin needle in a park, or who nurses a bottle of gin in a paper bag at nine in the morning, or who sneaks off at every opportunity to light up another joint of marijuana.

However dramatic and tragic such cases of addiction might be, they are simultaneously hugely reassuring to most of us – because they locate the addict far from ordinary experience, somewhere off-stage, in the land of semi-criminality and outright breakdown.

The School of Life defines addiction in another way: as the manic reliance on something, anything, to keep our darker or more unsettling thoughts and feelings at bay. What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is addicted to, because we can get addicted to pretty much anything. It is the motives behind a reliance on a certain element – and, in particular, our attachment to it as a way of avoiding encounters with the contents of our own minds and hearts.

For most of us, facing up to ourselves is a deeply anxiety- inducing prospect. We are filled with thoughts we don’t want to entertain and feelings we are desperate not to feel. There is an infinite amount that we are angry and sad about that it would take an uncommon degree of courage to face. We experience a host of fantasies and desires that we have a huge incentive to disavow because of the extent to which they violate our self-image and our more normative commitments.

We should not pride ourselves because we aren’t injecting something into our veins. Almost certainly, we are doing something else to take us away from ourselves. We are checking the news at four-minute intervals to keep the news from ourselves at bay. We’re doing sport, exhausting our bodies in the hope of not having to hear from our minds. We’re using work to get away from the true internal work that we’re shirking.

To overcome addiction, we need to lose our fear of our minds. We need a collective sense of safety around confronting loss, humiliation, sexual desire and sadness.

On the other side of addiction is philosophy – understood as the patient, unfrightened, compassionate examination of the contents of our minds.

See also: Faulty Walnut, The; Monasteries; News from Within; Overeating; Philosophical Meditation; Unprocessed Emotion.

¶ Advertising

Adverts wouldn’t work as powerfully as they do if they didn’t operate with a very good sense of what our real needs are and what we really require in order to live good lives. Their emotional pull is based on their wise understanding that we are creatures who hunger not so much for material goods as for sexual love, good family relationships, connections with others and the feeling that we are respected. Advertisers build their most compelling campaigns by tapping into their intimate knowledge of our psyches.

An advert for a car might not tell us much about the quality of the suspension or the technology that went into the metallic paint because it realises that such things (mostly) don’t touch our souls. Instead it shows us what we really want: a family coping well with the ups and downs of life or a dignified grey-haired man who knows how to greet the challenges of existence with stoic strength. An advert for jewellery will mainly be about a couple who are still close after ten years of marriage; a chocolate bar or a cashmere jumper might be brought to our notice by means of a touching evocation of friendship.

This approach can look cynical, but there is a touch of tragedy in the situation – the tragedy that our manufacturers lag so far behind our advertisers. These manufacturers know how to make rather good car suspensions and can produce utterly reliable timepieces; the jumpers may be elegant and the chocolate delicious. However, none of these manufacturers make much headway in delivering the things we really would love to be getting: the good family life, the self-belief, the warm marriage and the better friendships that currently painfully elude us and whose exquisite portrayal cleverly tricked us (perhaps) into buying a sedan or a barbecue set.

In a stern mood, we might think that, in an ideal society, advertisers would be banned from hinting that the right bag or oven-ready meal could help us to find love and companionship. But the real solution goes in a different direction. We should want manufacturers and businesses to become much more ambitious about solving our real problems and to generate products that might actually help us with our big, underlying longings.

In most adverts, the pains and the hopes of our lives have been superbly identified, but the products on the shelves remain almost comically at odds with our real needs. The task is not to ban advertisements but to create an economy that lives up to their deepest promises.

See also: Glamour; Good Business; Good Demand; Higher Needs; Utopia.

¶ Akrasia

A central problem of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave, but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct.

We know in theory about not eating too much, being kind, getting to bed early, focusing on our opportunities before it is too late, showing charity and remembering to be grateful. Yet in practice, our wise ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour. Our knowledge is embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us.

The Ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: akrasia, commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is because of akrasia, they proposed, that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles.

There are two central solutions to akrasia, located in two unexpected quarters: art and ritual. The real purpose of art (which includes novels, films and songs as well as photos, paintings and works of design and architecture) is to give sensuous and emotional lustre to a range of ideas that are most important to us, but that are also most under threat in the conditions of everyday life. Art shouldn’t be a matter of introducing us to, or challenging us with, a stream of new ideas so much as about lending the good ideas we already have compelling forms – so that they can more readily weigh upon our behaviour. A euphoric song should activate the reserves of tenderness and sympathy in which we already believe in theory; a novel should move us to the forgiveness in which we are already invested at an intellectual level. Art should help us to feel and then act upon the truths we already know.

Ritual is the second defence we have against akrasia. By ritual, we mean the structured, often highly seductive or aesthetic, repetition of a thought or an action, with a view to making it at once convincing and habitual. Ritual rejects the notion that it can ever be sufficient to teach anything important once – an optimistic delusion by which the modern education system has been fatefully marked. Once might be enough to get us to admit an idea is right, but is nothing like enough to convince us it should be acted upon. Our brains are leaky, and, under pressure of any kind, readily revert to customary patterns of thought and feeling. Ritual trains our cognitive muscles; it makes a sequence of appointments in our diaries to refresh our acquaintance with our most important ideas.

Our current culture tends to see ritual mainly as an antiquated infringement of individual freedom; a bossy command to turn our thoughts in particular directions at specific times. But the defenders of ritual would see it another way: we aren’t being told to think of something we don’t agree with; we are being returned with grace to what we always believed in at heart. We are being tugged by a collective force back to a more loyal and authentic version of ourselves.

The greatest human institutions that have tried to address the problem of akrasia have been religions. Religions have wanted to do something much more serious than simply promote abstract ideas: they have wanted to get people to behave in line with those ideas, which is a very different thing. They didn’t just want people to think that kindness or forgiveness were nice (which we generally do already); they wanted us to be kind or forgiving most days of the year. They invented a host of ingenious mechanisms for mobilising the will, which is why, across much of the world, the finest art and buildings, the most seductive music, the most impressive and moving rituals have all been religious. Religion is a vast machine for addressing the problem of akrasia.

This has presented a conundrum for a more secular era. Bad secularisation has lumped together religious superstition and religion’s anti-akrasia strategies. It has rejected both the supernatural ideas of the faiths and their wise attitude to the motivational roles of art and ritual.

A more discerning form of secularisation makes a major distinction between (on the one hand) religion as a set of speculative claims about God and the afterlife and (on the other hand) the always valid ambition to improve our social and psychological lives by combating our notoriously weak wills.

The challenge for the secular world is now to redevelop its own versions of purposeful art and ritual so that we will cease so regularly to ignore our real commitments and might henceforth not only believe wise things but also, on a day-today basis, have a slightly higher chance of enacting wisdom in our lives.

See also: Art, The Purpose of; Art and News; Art for Art’s Sake; Censorship; Culture Can Replace Scripture; Envy of the Future; Memento Mori; Pop Music; Ritual; Secularisation; Seduction; Sublime, The; Wisdom.

¶ Androcles and the Lion

A traditional fable tells of a lion prowling villages at night, roaring horribly. Everyone is terrified, so they want to kill the beast to feel a bit safer. One day, in the nearby hills, a shepherd gets caught in a sudden storm and seeks shelter in a cave – where the lion has made his home. The terrified shepherd called Androcles imagines he’s about to be ripped to pieces. Then he notices there’s a thorn in the lion’s paw: the creature is in agony and his terrible roars are his way of trying to express his pain. The shepherd takes a risk: he goes up and removes the thorn. The lion stops roaring, becomes gentle, licks the shepherd’s hand and they become friends.

In the fable, the ‘lion’ represents someone who frightens us. We assume they are determined to destroy us. But the story suggests an alternative explanation: the frightening person is suffering (psychologically rather than physically). It is their pain that drives them to behave in ways that distress and scare us. If we can be brave enough to notice, acknowledge and in some very tender manner address their suffering, we start to take away the cause of their aggression.

The French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (known as Alain) was said to be the finest teacher in France in the first half of the 20th century. He developed a formula for calming down himself and his pupils in the face of irritating people. ‘Never say that people are evil,’ he wrote; ‘You just need to look for the pin.’

What he meant was: look for the source of the agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways. The calming thought is to imagine that they are suffering off-stage, in some area we cannot see. To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain, despite the lack of available evidence. They may not look as if they were maddened by an inner psychological ailment: they may look aggressive or full of themselves. But the ‘pin’ simply must be there – or they would not be causing us harm.

See also: Charity of Interpretation; Nastiness; Other-as-Child.

¶ Anger

We start to reduce the danger of anger through the insight that not everything that makes us sad makes us angry. We may be irritated that it is raining, but we are unlikely ever to respond to a shower by screaming. We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; we are sent into a rage only when we first allowed ourselves to believe in a hopeful scenario that was then dashed suddenly and apparently without warning. Our greatest furies spring from unfortunate events that we had not factored into our vision of reality.

We typically think of anger as a dark and pessimistic state of mind. But behind anger lies a surprising emotion: optimism. Beneath their ranting, the angry are possessed of some recklessly optimistic notions of how life might go. They are not merely in a destructive fury; they are in the grip of hope.

The person who shouts every time they encounter a traffic jam betrays a faith, at once touching and demented, that roads must always be traffic-free. The person who loses their temper with every new employee or partner evinces a curious belief that perfection is an option for the human animal.

Serenity therefore begins with pessimism. We must learn to disappoint ourselves at leisure before the world ever has a chance to slap us by...