In Our Time - The Consolations of Philosophy

Episode Date: January 1, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the consolation of Philosophy. In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell, awaiting a brutal execution, he found solace in philosophical ideas - about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts did not save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote them into a book. He called it The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy was read widely and a sense of consolation is woven into many philosophical ideas, but what for Boethius were the consolations of philosophy, what are they more generally and should philosophy lead us to consolation or lead us from it?With AC Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and Roger Scruton, Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boetheus found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell awaiting a brutal execution,

he found solace in philosophical ideas about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil, and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts didn't save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote about them. He called the book The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy was read widely, and the sense of consolation is woven into many philosophical ideas,

but what for beaithius were the constellations of philosophy? What are they more generally, and should philosophy lead us to consolation or lead us from it? With me to discuss the Consolation of Philosophy are Roger Scruton, research professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. Melissa Lane,

senior university lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge, and Anthony Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London. Anthony Grayling, I understand that the form of the book is a dialogue between Boeutheus

and a grey-eyed lady. Could you elaborate on that? The grey-eyed lady is a giveaway that's Athene or Athena, who, that was one of her epithets, I think, given by Homer, and she is a personification of wisdom, she is the goddess of wisdom, and therefore the patron saint of all those who inquire. It's very important in this connection to remember that the word philosophy and its etymological origins

meant something much more general than we understand by philosophy now. It meant inquiry. It meant thinking about things. It meant reflecting on the world, on one's experience of the world, on one's life. So it had a much more embracing, much more inclusive sense than it. has now. And so when Boethius in his solitude and in his very uncomfortable situation was visited notionally by the grey-eyed lady, it was an opportunity to reflect and think and inquire. And can you tell listeners what form the book takes?

Well, I suppose it's really a dialogue. It's an inheritor of a tradition in the classical period of presenting arguments discursively through the medium of dialogue, through an encounter, a challenge, because what philosophy does is challenges Baratheas to stop being miserable and to start thinking and to start making use of his resources of reason and education so that he can somewhat at any rate to ameliorate the circumstances in which he finds himself. Can you give us some idea about what he's saying? Is he talking about the process of philosophy, the process of inquiry,

which was the word introduced by Anthony? Is he talking about that as being the way to find consolation? What's wonderful about the book is that while, as Anthony said, it's modeled on a Socratic dialogue, actually, whereas when Socrates faces death, he is preternaturally calm and cheerful. He never admits to any fear in the face of death, whereas Boethius begins his book by bewailing his fate, saying, I've been cast into prison, I've lost my library, I've lost my liberty, I've lost my honors and fame. And even all his philosophical education has not prevented him from this despair. And so what's so powerful and humane about the book is that it represents this philosophical dialogue in which philosophy has to recall him to his better self. And she actually uses the figure of philosophy as a figure, as this woman figure, absolutely. And she uses also the muses of poetry and rhetoric in what she calls her medicine for Boetheus. So she's doctoring him and recalling him, giving him stronger and stronger medicine progressively through the book so that he can reach the consolation of

understanding that true happiness only lies in the contemplation of God, which is goodness. Can we have a little more context about Boethias and the time from you now before we move on? It's past the end of the Roman Empire in a way. The barbarians are not at the gate there taking over, but the Rome goes on in some ways, and he becomes a consort, and he writes in Latin, of course, and so can you tell us a little more about him and the situation in which he found himself? Well, Boetheus has been called the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics, and I think that captures him very well. So although the last Western emperor had been deposed by a barbarian king,

nevertheless, the Senate still functioned, and Boetheus held these very high honors, rising to be the master of the horse in the empire, and his sons also became consuls. And he actually had chosen to live that life because he had been educated in the Greek and Roman and Latin classics, and indeed was one of the first people to begin translating large portions of Plato and Aristotle from Greek into Latin. And so he made major contributions in his writings to philosophy, writing major treatises on music, on mathematics and logic, but believed that he should live the life of a philosopher in politics, a philosopher king in Plato's terms, following in the footsteps of the great Roman philosophers, and so had dedicated himself to civic life.

Is there a sense in which there was a sense in which there was, bound to be a clash between him continuing to live the Roman life, where the barbarians, let's keep calling them, had taken over and were wanted to run the empire in a different way. I don't think it's quite as straightforward as that, because arguably what happened to him was a matter of politics between the Western part of the Empire and the Eastern Empire. So the only Roman Empire at this point is in the East. So Boetheus, perhaps because of his Greek learning, was suspected of having some interest in trying to bring about a reconciliation of the Western Church and the Eastern Church. So it's not quite as straightforward as any Roman at this period

who still held to Roman values would have been accused, but it is probably true that his classical education would have made him more sympathetic to the claims of the East and then he was suspected of treason by this Western Barbarian ruler. And it was out of that context that he was accused and put in prison. Exactly. Roger Scruton, I understand that the consolation of philosophy is thought of as a neo-Platonist book. Do you agree with that? And if so, can you tell me what that means? Yes, I suppose I'm bound to agree with it, because it's what the scholars say. But one thing that Melissa and Anthony have not said,

which I think should be said, is that each book of the consolation begins with a poem. And actually, they're rather beautiful poems. And it's quite clear that for Boethius, the poetic way of dealing with things was continuous with the philosophical, that, as it were, one could remake one's experience through poetry as much as one could do through the abstract thinking.

But that said, Plato, after all, was quite similar in that respect. That said, I think what Boethius took from Plato was the idea that we understand this world only if we can see it from the divine perspective. That means abstracting from time, from the process of our lives, and seeing things as they would appear to a purely eternal being. And that he thought, and this was, I think,

the standard neoplatonist thought, that we can in this life rise to that perspective and that philosophy is one of the ways in which we do it and having achieved that perspective we see the order in things here below and in seeing that order we see that those things which had caused us to suffer in fact don't merit any such response that they are part of a greater good and a larger whole when the name Plato has mentioned people think Greek they think pagan

and yet Boetheus was a Christian, but the feeding in of platonic ideas into the Christian religion who was very marked. So can you develop that with regard to this book and regard to the influence it had on Boetheus? I wish I could, but I think some scholars disagree that Boetheus was a Christian, actually, but I'm not sure whether this is relevant.

The fact is that St. Augustine was also a neoplatonist of a similar hue, And through St Augustine's writings, Platonism entered the teaching of the church from an early age. But the neo-Platonist view didn't only get incorporated into the Christian view. It was incorporated into the Islamic view as well, shortly after in the early days of Arabic philosophy. But because it lends itself to the idea of the one God,

one eternal being who is both creator of the world and also the provider of our redemption. And that to which you should have said, aspire through your crete virtue going in the direction of the good and the God. Exactly, that it's the thing towards which you rise from this world, and it's where your home is, your home as a spiritual being. Anthony, Anthony Grayling. Yes, it's always intrigued and to some extent amused me at any rate

to look at this process by which the platonic aspiration to the good, which is the highest of the forms, had been, I mean, very interestingly habilitated into a conception where the good is a divinity, a divine person. And the way that the idea of an ultimate repose for the soul's quest, the quest of the immortal soul to reattain communion with the forms, with the eternal and immutable truths of things which you find in Plato, has been reconfigured in neoplatonism, and that's precisely why it is that both Christianity and Islam found it very agreeable to them.

Not all Neoplatonists were either Christians or Muslims, of course, but the idea of this vision of things, subspeciate and itatus from the viewpoint of eternity, as Roger was saying, they're giving a sense of the divine order of things. It borrows, by the way, some of the lineaments of views about the order, the pattern of reality in Stoicism.

The Stoics had the view that the Logos, the principle of reason, underlay all things in the universe. And what we're witnessing in the first few centuries after the birth of Jesus is, a kind of rewriting of those sorts of insights philosophically into a metaphysic which is very congenial to a more religious outlook.

Can I ask each of you in turn what for Boeotheus were the consolations of philosophy? Melissa. Well, in some way Boetheus, I think, found that the consolation was that one shouldn't and didn't need consolation in the sense that if you actually understood what you thought were your sorrows,

so his sorrow at losing fame, at losing wealth, at losing liberty, actually those things are transit They can't give us the sort of perfect, self-sufficient and permanent happiness that we seek, and only philosophy can give us that. So the process of philosophy consoling him is actually a process of saying, actually, there was never anything to be sorry for having lost. Roger Scruton. He also addresses serious questions which trouble us in this life,

like the question of evil. Why is there evil? How is that compatible with the goodness of God? and he advances what is actually quite interesting solution to that, arguing that from God's perspective, since it's an eternal perspective, there is no evil, everything is reconciled. Evil only can be perceived by us in time. We see it as part of a process,

but since all processes ultimately are unreal or absorbed into this static, eternal vision, then there's no paradox in thinking that evil, in fact, disappears from the higher perspective. Which is, of course, a very consoling view for somebody to whom the thumbscrews are being applied at this moment. What's rather interesting about the solution

that Boetheus comes to, as Melissa describes it, is a very common, I think, a very deep and important theme which has run through all thinking about life because you find something very similar indeed in Spinoza many centuries later. You find it in the poetry of Horace, for example. You find it in the attitude of all those who say,

you find it in Marcus Aurelia, sort of late stoic thinker who says, when you die, what you lose is the present moment because the past cease to be, the future has not yet come. I mean, this idea of what you think you're losing, what it gives you pain to contemplate the loss of. In fact, it's insufficiently important in itself, and that realisation alone frees you from the agony that you experience when you contemplate it.

Well, of course, for both, you see, has this additional point, which is that there is going to be, a sort of consummation because of his orientation on the metaphysics, since he is a man of some kind of faith at least, that there would be some sort of resolution to be provided by that. But for somebody like David Hume, I mean, Hume also spoke about this, about the consideration that there is in knowing

that you would be liberated finally to a state rather similar to that of being unborn, which is also a great consolation. Melissa, you wanted to get in. I think in this moment of the financial crisis, It helps to recall one sentence of Boethias about this issue of fortune when he said, if riches cannot eliminate need, but on the contrary, create new demands, what makes you suppose that they can provide satisfaction? And that idea that he's unmasking the purported goods of fortune as not real goods, I think, actually had a tremendous influence in later

philosophy. So he uses the phrase the wheel of fortune. Fortune spins her wheel and sometimes we lose, sometimes we win. But, and in medieval and Renaissance thought that image of Fortune's wheel, Lady Fortune as a false goddess, was one of the great influences of Beletheus. Roger Scruton, one of the striking things about this book is that in medieval time, almost, give a take, a thousand years later, 800 years later, anyway, it enters into medieval literature, into the greatest medieval literature, and the most influential.

I mean, comes into Chaucer, for instance. What was the attraction there? How did it so easily and so fluently fit in there? Well, of course Chaucer translated the book into English prose, and it influenced his way of perceiving not just the redemption of human beings, but also the relations between them. And it's partly because of the, I think, because of the philosophy of courtly love, which he took over from the French sources, which maybe had its origin in Andalusian Arabic literature. But anyway, the philosophy of courtly love tells us that we, only love truly if we love each other from that higher perspective. And this is an idea which goes back to Plato, of course,

that the first stirrings of erotic desire could mislead us into thinking that carnal union is the goal, but actually they're really an invitation to transcend that and to rise to another perspective where lovers are united as eternal beings. And this is a philosophy which is beautifully expounded in the Knight's Tale in Canterbury Tales and is embellished all along the way with thoughts from Borethius. And integrating, you mentioned Spinoza earlier.

We again taking up the idea that the philosophy can take you into a world of higher understanding, intellectual, moral, spiritual. Can you develop but with Spinoza and what Spinoza is saying that this gives us? In the fourth and fifth books of the ethics by Spinoza, Spinoza turns attention to this question of how we should view ourselves and the world, with a view to explaining how a right view of ourselves and the world will liberate us from all the things that cause us pain. So in fact it is a provision of consolation in exactly Burytheus's sort of sense. The fourth book is called of human bondage,

and it explains how it is that we imprison ourselves in false ideas, inadequate ideas, as you would say, sort of half-baked, half-formed conceptions, which mislead us about how things are. And the fifth and final book of the ethics of human freedom explains that if only we really understand things clearly, if only our ideas of things are truly adequate, which is the technical term he uses,

are true of the way things are with the world, we are free ourselves from the agonies that are caused by those inadequate ideas. And so, you know, the sort of terminus of this inquiry, which is why it's called the ethics, because it's about how we are and how we live and how we understand things in the end, is a form of liberation. And the liberation comes from recognizing that everything happens of necessity.

So are you saying, and would listeners be able to interpret this as, the study philosophy will in itself make you kind of, generous, freer, am I surrounded by these wonderful people? Of course I am. But is there a connection with what we can sort of call in a vernacular real life going on here? And what do you think, Roger? Well, to take up Anthony's point, Spinoza obviously thought so, because the free man, who is the one who has this adequate conception of the world, is also one whose moral character is utterly trustworthy

because he sees things as they are and doesn't put the kind of false valuation on his own appetites that less educated people would do. It's always about appetites, isn't it, really? Well, appetites are our problems. You know, if we didn't... But there are pleasure as well. Of course.

This is why the Platonic view is so different in the end from the Aristotelian. The Aristotelian view is that we don't, we shouldn't abolish our appetites and achieve the viewpoint of pure reason, that we should, on the contrary, educate them through the practice of virtue. So that then we want the right things on the right occasions to the right extent. And that is what human fulfillment requires. But that is a completely different. approach. Melissa. It's important that it's not just

appetites. I think it is also this desire for fame or glory, which of course, if we go back to Boethius in the Roman world would have been the great ambition of any Roman senator would have been to achieve fame. And I think one of the messages of some of the later reception of the book also, for example,

Queen Elizabeth did a translation for her own use just at a moment when she was disappointed with the lukewarm support and treachery of Henry IV of France. And she talked, and one of the phrases in that is glory is vain. And so the philosopher has to rise above even the desire for the noble desire for fame, for service, for public good, and realize that even that also is pales in comparison to the satisfaction of contemplation of the good.

Again and again, it's confirmed that Queen Elizabeth I've first is the most brilliant monarch we've ever had. The most scholarly and brilliant person has ever sat on the throne, maybe any throne. But Roger Scruton, to what extent does this idea still depend on the fact that existence is in some sense rational? If we're going to pursue that idea of atheists through, if we're taking what you suggested from neoplatism. Are we talking about the world out there being rational? I would imagine that a lot of people think there's now there rhyme, no reason in it. Well, the concept of fortune encapsulates that idea that the world,

judged in it independently of us, doesn't follow any rational pattern. But we still have the freedom that reason confers on us, which is the freedom to look on it from another perspective, to stand back from it, as it were, and try and conceive it as a whole. And that is a rational enterprise which does, according to this tradition, liberate us from enslavement to fortune. How do you find the reason, though? When you get there, how do you know it's the reason that you want to,

that you have found? That's a very good question. I suspect that all of us know exactly what the distinction between a rational and an irrational argument is. But we might not be able to put it into words, but nevertheless the idea is that by using our reason, we are being guided in some sense by something which has authority for us, greater than anything else that could guide us, and that we know this when we're doing it.

Is unreason sometimes wise of that, Anthony Grayling? Well, look, the idea of rationality in play here has two applications. One is to the process of our thinking about things, and I attempt to make some sense of them. And the other is to the order of things, whether nature itself or the universe itself is in some way rationally comprehensible because it is structured. One thinks here of Hegel's slogan,

the real is the rational, that somehow other reality has to be rational and anything which is irrational, can't be part of it. Now, it's a very long-standing theme, again from the thought of classical antiquity, that whatever belongs to reality, the nature of reality itself has to be deeply rational. This again is the Stoic idea of the Logos, the principle of things, that fundamentally the world is logical. And that means that there is a chance for rational inquiry

to discover it in the literal sense of that term, to find out what that order is. But there's a quite different conception, which is that reason by its exercise can impose some kind of rationality on things. It may be that in the nature of things there is this incoherence, this chaos, which explains why the wheel of fortune spins so erratically.

But nevertheless, by stepping back and taking a karma and a more studied perspective on things, just as Roger describes, you can make a kind of sense for yourself. You can navigate a route through that, coherence, which makes of your own experience a kind of rationality. Melissa. Well, I think there's an interesting contrast between a philosophy which would say, as

Boethius did, if we look at the world, it may appear irrational, but it's really rational. So that's Boethius or Hegel. But then opposed to that, you might have a view which says, well, the world as we see it really is irrational, but there's another world which is rational. And that would be, for example, Schopenhauer in the early 19th century, who says, well, we can't make sense of this world. It is a veil of tears. It is just simply the exercise of desires and passions and bad judgments and mistakes and so forth. But there's another world beyond where we can contemplate some truth. And I think that's a very interesting shift from the idea that

the world as we see it is intelligible to reason to projecting that elsewhere. Are you elasticating it too much, though, that word? I don't think so. I mean, I think it's terribly important to realize that there isn't a straightforward confrontation between emotion or appetite or the non-rational on the one hand and rationality on the other, that there is a kind of partnership here. Even somebody who was sceptical about the possibility of the deliverances of reason to solve final philosophical problems, somebody like Hume, for example, who thought that reason could only ever be the handmaid of the passions, nevertheless a tremendously important handmaid.

I mean, supposing you woke up one morning with an overwhelming desire to go to Bogner Regis, well, reason would tell you how to get there, even though reason didn't give you that motivation in the first place. You have me there. Listen, what did, as Botheus goes through his discussion, his education with philosophy, what is he arriving at? Can you just keep us back to the book for a second? What is he, where is he getting to? Well, he's getting to this understanding of the nature of the world as, in terms of providence, so that everything is ultimately intended by God.

for good. And actually, I think, as Roger said earlier, I think it's interesting to contrast that actually with the purely platonic source with Plato's view, because for Plato, actually, there's a limit to the intelligibility of the world. So the world is good up to a point, and then that point is matter, and matter isn't intelligible. So there is sort of real evil and chaos in the world. Whereas for Boetheus, he couldn't accept that now as a Christian. And so he has to say, actually, because that would be too manichae, and we would perhaps then have the devil being an independent power. And so he has to say, actually, even what seems to be evil is not really evil. And so actually here, I think there's a real break between the plate-up platonic view and the

Neoplatonic view. For the Neoplatonic view, evil is only sort of apparent. In reality, it's only the deprivation of goodness. It has no independent power. My just Gruden. Yes, that idea of evil being, in some sense, a nothing, because it's merely the absence of good, was a very powerful one. I mean, he fed into, obviously, into Christian and Muslim ways of thinking and has survived up to this day. And of course, in Thomism, in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas,

that idea is absolutely fundamental, that evil is a deprivation, not a reality in itself. Schopenhauer's been mentioned in the 19th century German philosopher. What kind of consolation, if that was one of his names, did Schopenhauer set out to achieve? Well, Schopenhauer was perhaps the first major philosopher to be influenced by the Hindu way of thinking. The Upanishads had only recently been translated into Latin

from a Persian version, and he read them with great enthusiasm, thinking that this is the way. So his notion of consolation was one of withdrawal, complete withdrawal from the world, the renunciation of the will. It's the will that drags us into conflict with things and is the true source of all unhappiness.

And we should take a lesson, he thought, from the Hindus, for whom this renunciation of the world was the way to overcome unhappiness, overcome suffering, and achieve what consolation we can, the consolation being a purely negative thing. Is there any sense in which you can find a line between Borethia's and Schopenhauer? Yes, there are lines, but it's clear that Boetheus loved the world and Schopenhauer hated it.

And their philosophies reflect these different psychological dispositions. The Schopenhauer's view is beautifully summed up by one of his disciples, whose name I'm afraid, escapes me at the moment, who said everybody ought to be educated to the point of which they can understand Schopenhauer's philosophy. They would then commit mass suicide and the quantum of suffering in the world would be dramatically reduced. Because you see, Schovenard took the view that numeral reality, the way things are in themselves, in the universe, consists of will, of Conatus, of a desire to survive, to live, to strive. And this is the source of suffering.

This is what gives us our agony of existence. And if we deny that and we can reject that or free ourselves from it, then we will have achieved that ultimate consolation. So in a sense, he is of this long tradition, which attempts to teach us how we can escape the sources of pain in life and find that ultimate peace. It was, after all, the great desire of the post-arocetian ethical schools in antiquity, post-classical antiquity, to achieve what they called atarxia,

which means peace of mind or tranquility. And that's a theme which, of course, persists right the way to this day. Well, there's the idea of stoicism, which I'm not quite sure, whether Boetheus took on or reacted against. Can you bring that into play? It's a difficult question. I mean, at one point in the book, he makes a negative remark about the Stoics,

but actually I think one can see a marked influence, particularly in the first two books of the consolation, and in particular it's the idea that the wise man should neither hope nor fear, so that you don't, external things have no value or relevance to your happiness. And at that point, I think the neoplatonism and stoicism are sort of close enough. So he wouldn't have accepted all aspects of stoicism, but on that sort of core ethical point, I think he does learn from it. There's an interesting thing about stoicism, which was, after all, the outlook of most educated people

for something like half a millennium before Christianity became more influential. And it seeped so much into the thinking of all different schools that it's very hard not to find stoical influences. So this idea of courage towards the inevitable and self-mastery wherever possible over your own appetites, your fears, your desires and so on, is a very, very common theme. Indeed, I think when you read somebody like Cicero, when you look at the professed Stoics like Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, you're hearing something or seeing something at any rate, which is very familiar at all stages of our Western tradition. Because this idea, this stoic principle, is lodged very deep in the shoe. of Western civilization. Yes, I think that's right. And there's a great difference between those who take it as take the Stoic principles as part of a philosophy of action,

you know, the thing that enables you to do things and achieve things in this world, and those who see it on the contrary as a philosophy of renunciation, you know, that this is the way to stand back from the world. And, you know, I think this is one of the major differences running through all our philosophical tradition. It stems actually from the fact that the Stoics differed from, let us say, the cynics, who were the original hippies, you know, drop out, turn your back on things, it's pointless being engaged. The Stoics saw themselves as having a duty to participate,

to take a responsible part in the life of the police, in the life of the community. And I think those two strands, the activists and the, you know, sort of hippie views are reflected there. Staying with you for a moment, Anthony. Do you think that the ideas expressed by Camus relate to Boetheus? They do in very obvious ways that they too immediately began to feed into people's thoughts

about how they should live, they were taken up by politicians and other writers and so on. Well, this demands a certain heroic leap from Beautius to Camus. No, we went by way of Chauphanin. I take it that one thing that could be said in a sort of caricatured sketch of Camus' view, is that thinking that the world is intrinsically meaningless,

that is that there is no antecedent purpose for which we are born, for which we exist, places on us a demand to create meaning, to create value in the world and to do it by choosing things that are especially productive of value. So things like creativity, things like love, things like respecting the dignity that's somehow inherent in this rather tragic situation that human beings find themselves in, in the absurdity of the world. And accepting the demands of one's radical freedom. I mean, if there is no antecedent purpose,

then you are completely free to make choices, and it's up to you to reflect on those choices. Now, I'm blossing somewhat here, because I think that if you were to take seriously the idea of the absurd and the idea of the meaninglessness of things, you might think that anything follows, but it was of importance to Camus and I think to other existentialists of all stamps that the challenge that was posed by absurdity was that we should try to seek

and to make to impose value on life which was genuinely defensible as value and that's quite a hard thing to do in this but it's an interesting challenge well I just good yes well I agree with Anthony this is a huge leap but that particular moment in the history of Western consciousness, I see as something deviant. You know, that people, this emphasis on...

Existential. Yes, this emphasis on the the meaninglessness of everything and the pure and absolute choice that this presents us with to be something other than nothing. You know, the nothingness that those writers produced is that to me, the testimony to their lasting value.

And I feel we've, luckily, we've grown up enough to put all that behind us. Yes, sir. I think one way to fill in the leap between to Khamu is to go back to Nietzsche and his response to Schopenhauer. And I think in important ways he perhaps prepares the way for Kammu. But what's interesting in Nietzsche is that he at first was very attracted by Schopenhauer's idea and then rejected it and said that rather than trying to flee into this other world where we can find consolation,

instead of consolation, we really need to, in a way, exert confrontation. And we need to face up to the terrible facts about reality. And actually, I've argued in my work that Nietzsche, in that way, I think, ends up being more favorable to the Stoics than is often thought precisely for the reason that the Stoics were willing to face up to reality, whereas people, the Epicureans sort of cut their cloth about what they thought the world was like just in order to console themselves. Now, of course, for Nietzsche, there's a limit to that because he also says we can't live just by that honesty alone. We also need art to kind of make that bearable. otherwise we would have nausea and we would all give up. But nevertheless, there is a kind of intellectual honesty, and I think that marks the difference then from some forms of existentialism that Roger mentioned.

Of course, the art that coincided with Nietzsche was that of Wagner, which renunciation is the principal theme for Wagner, and he was influenced, of course, by Schopenhauer. The way to achieve consolation is to renounce those things which cause in one the deep conflicts and he showed how in Tristan is older at least erotic love which is the source of the major conflicts

in human life can actually be turned into a form of mutual renunciation in which it becomes higher than itself and that's a remarkable thing to have done I mean the great influence that Schopenhauer had both on Wagner and on Nietzsche of course was his view tremendously interesting view

that music is the language of truth ultimately, and that's a very speaking fact. But what we're seeing coming out of this discussion is that this difference that Roger first drew our attention to earlier between the activist conception of consolation and the renunciatory conception of consolation. I get the sense that Roger is attracted more to the Wagnerian Schopenharian view, perhaps, than the existentialist one,

which is essentially an activist one. because it says, by the way, I mean, if one had world enough in time, one would see that, of course, some of the more responsible existentialist thinking, which I think is to be found in Camus, the most interesting of them, accepts that there is a given situation. So we are thrown into history at a certain time and there are constraints and there are facts that we have to deal with. So it's not as though, you know, we're in a vacuum entirely. But that it's in the realization that there are no antecedent or given vacuum. or purposes that this demand for an ethical activism is made. I find that interesting, I have to say, because it suggests that there is a sort of duty

that we recognize in ourselves to think very carefully indeed about what matters and then to pursue it. I would like to come back to you on Camus, Rogers Spritten, if you don't mind. I do see a relationship, and you know, you knock me out of the studio, and that's perfectly right, between Borethius and Communion, in the sense that Camus said, The most refined philosophical question is whether or not you put an end to your own life. And the absurdity is that we look for meaning in a meaningless world.

Out of that, you build a life on which you can base your actions. Now, it doesn't seem to me a very long way away from beaetheus saying, or knowing, I am on my way to execution. How do I deal with this? I deal with this by working through a philosophy which will enable me to not only bear this, but to give this regard and perspective. I see a connection there and not to necessarily to confuse total disadvantage. There is a connection, of course, in that both of them think that you can achieve

what reconciliation is possible with the world in which we are. by your own attitude. This isn't something given to you from outside. It has to come from within. But Boethius also thinks that he can rise to another perspective, which is God's perspective, and with God's help, of course, from which the world itself is seen to be other than it is, not meaningless at all, but meaningful.

And Camus, of course, stays in that rooted down-to-earth perspective where only the meaninglessness is visible. And of course he therefore has the question of suicide. And he lived in a reckless way which it effectively was suicide. And of course we admire him in a way for that because unlike Sartre, who is obviously a self-indulgent observer of things, Camus took his existentialism seriously and tried to find in it a philosophy of love.

There might be a sense in which some people listen to this programme I'm saying, consolation is all over well, but exhilaration is a lot better. And why don't we bring that into play? Melissa? Well, that was, those were the words I was going to use. I think that in a way the difference between Buehuis and Camus and Camus is that difference between, as it were, consolation and exhilaration. It's a difference in a way between accepting the world and sort of deciding as it is and being recalled to the world as you understand it to be, and then saying that you need to change the world. So Marx famously says the philosophers have only tried to understand the world,

the need is now to change it. And that idea that what philosophy should do is to give you a model of a world that needs to become, that you need to bring about as opposed to reconciling you to the world as it is is a profound difference. Well, of course, you can see that somebody's saying that exhilaration is indeed one form of consolation, but then that prompts the following thought that exhilaration is ultimately wearying. And consolation of the sort of atyxic kind, of the peaceful, tranquil kind is ultimately boring. It looks as they, you know, if one wanted to get the best of both, what one would have to do is to effect some sort of rapprochement between them.

There is... Hunting in the morning and literary criticism after the dinner thing is when Marxist's selection. There has been an underlying sense in this discussion from three of you and from me that philosophy can stand much in the place that Shelley said a poetry and unacknowledged legislators of the world. What is thought by these people enters into the way that people live their lives, conduct their lives, and set themselves goals.

Would you think that that's true, Roger Scruton? Well, it's certainly, of course, Plato's famous thesis in the Republic, that philosophers ought to be in charge of the political realm. But isn't there a contradiction, though, if philosophers are to look after their own lives, to withdraw, to a longer perspective and a higher understanding, and to retreat, how on earth can they get involved in politics anyway? The writing is a way of being involved in politics.

Boetheus changed the whole nature of European society by what he wrote. Melissa, Mr. Lane. One way in which philosophers become legislators, I think, is by becoming exemplars. And indeed, that's what Boetheus became. It was through his example of being true in the end to his philosophic ideals, finding consolation in them ceasing to rail against his fate and accepting it, that he became an example for how to live a good life. And I think that it's that embodiment of philosophy

in a number of the philosophers of the past, as well as in their actual writings, that provides that consolation. I think it's important to see that there is a broader sense of philosophy in a slightly narrower sense, which bears on answering this question about how philosophy can help us to live better lives and make us better people.

In the narrower sense, and certainly in the narrower sense, which is contemporary academic philosophy, There may not be that many resources in fact for finding consolation or for living a good life because it is a technical specialism which deals with problems, questions that are not always immediately relevant to the business of living. Indeed, incredibly boring. Some of it may be. But in the broader sense, a very great deal of very rich philosophical reflection is to be found in the reading of history

and certainly in the reading of literature. Poetry very early on in this discussion, Roger pointed out, that each of the books of Beirotheus begins with a poem. One thinks of that wonderful poem by Lucretius, Deerarum Natura. One thinks of the literary excellence of Plato's writing. That philosophy itself, as we understand it in the tradition, and then this broader sense of philosophical wealth to be found in literature generally and in the study of history, the study of man,

they provide resources for thinking about life, which makes philosophy in that broader sense, perhaps the form of consideration, the form of a continual preparation for living a life that is good and for living it well. Well, thank you very much, Melissa Lane, Anthony Grayling, and Roger Scroofman. Thanks for listening.

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