PHILOSOPHY: A GUIDE TO HAPPINESS
WITH ALAIN DE BOTTON
EPICURUS ON HAPPINESS
Ever since ancient times
human beings have looked to philosophy for the secret of happiness.
But few philosophers have come up with more suggestive or more relevant answers
then one born on Greek island of Samos on the coast of modern Turkey.
341 years before the birth of Christ.
His name was Epicurus.
Very little about him has survived -
all of his books have been lost across the centuries,
leaving his philosophy of happiness to be reconstructed from just a few fragments.
Epicurus believed
that we can all find the way to be happy.
The problem was quite simply
that we were looking in the wrong place.
Unlike many philosophers Epicurus's is idea of happiness actually sounds rather fun.
He didn't think we should feel guilty about wanting to have a pleasurable
enjoyable life
and promised that he could show us how to.
Of course, you might wonder why you need a philosopher at all to teach you how to
have a good time.
We seem to think that the key to happiness is really pretty easy -
it's all about having a lot of money
so we can come to places like this
and go shopping.
But before we reach for our wallets, Epicurus wanted us to stop and think.
It's easy to imagine that money can solve everything,
but - can it?
Epicurus was committed to a life of happiness.
He liked sex, laughter and beauty
but crucialy spent his time pointing out that happiness is in fact rather
tricky issue,
and a philosopher might help you to find it more easily than a credit card ever could.
But if Epicurus was in favor of pleasure at all, he shocked many of his
ancient Greek contemporaries.
His philosophy became synonymous with our lotus-eating lifestyle.
To this day people who love luxurious eating and drinking can sometimes be
described as Epicurean.
In fact that's a complete misunderstanding.
Epicurus said that the pleasure was the most important thing in life
and yet when we actually look the way that he lived
it seemed he led far from a luxurious life.
His house was very simple, his clothes were extremely basic,
he was drunk water rather than wine,
he found fish much too expensive...
and he was happy just eating meals with bread, vegetables and a few olives.
He once asked friend:
"Send me a pot of cheese so that I can have feast whenever I like."
These were a kind of tastes of a man
who describe pleasure
as the end-of-life.
At the heart of Epicurus's philosophy is a simple thought
that we are all very good in knowing what will make us happy,
that we may feel powerfully drawn towards material things and be convinced
that they are what we required to be happy.
We're often wrong.
What we want is not always what we need
and nothing shows that up more starkly
than our impulse to go shopping.
I like shopping.
Most weeks it's just couple of bags, sometimes ten twelve bags...
I like designer names
Dolce and Gabanna stuff…
I love Gucci clothes as well.
Steven Perry is a hairdresser from Liverpool
who spends all his spare time shopping.
Suppose I could go to do something else
usually I don't
usually it's just like going in shop anyway...
Although when I go out buying all this stuff,
it makes me happy,
at the end of the month when my credit card and stall card bills and the lawn,
the payments come out and stuff like that,
that doesn't make me happy... cause I see how much is going off
and you don't want that.
How many watches have you got?
Not really many, I suppose... about ten... only ten.
I only got one!
What's the one you are wearing now?
Cause I like this one just for
general every day, cause it's like ninety nine pounds so...
Steven often gets into debt and I couldn't help wondering if he desires to go shopping
might be a bit out of control. What is the fancy watch?
The thousand pound watch.
So what's the craziest thing you've bought in terms of like
bad impulse buying?
Pair of shorts...
- From where? - It's from the shop in shopping moll in Liverpool...
These are much like that...
They didn't have my size, so I thought these will fit me
but you put them on and they just tend to look like truly horrendous...
like cycling shorts or something...
How much did they cost?
God, I don't know, about fifty pounds... fifty-sixty quits...
They would never take them back,
the same is...
these jeans
still have labels on them...
cause I just got this home and you are like...
didn't fit, miles too long, miles too big, I did mean to take them back
but I don't like taking things back.
Did you ever go home and you think,
you are surrounded by shopping bags,
what am I doing with all this?
Yeah, especially like the moment when you
just have bags everywhere and you are just
why have I spent all these and then credit card bill comes
at the end of the month and you think:
why did I spent all that sorts of things...
In a way we're all a bit like Steven - people who shop too much.
Epicurus thought he knew why - we don't understand what we really need and soulful
pray to manic substitute desires for huge numbers of ill-fitting trousers
or countless pairs of shoes,
but Epicurus declared that he had actually discovered what we did need
and, luckily for anyone without much money, the ingredients of happiness come pretty cheap.
And first ingredient we need is friends.
Epicurus took the idea of friendship very seriously, so seriously that he made
an extremely radical innovation.
When he came to Athens at 306 BC at the age of 35
he bought a large house just outside the city of Athens
in this place here, which we called The Garden.
Of course, at that time it was rather beautiful, but more beautiful than it is now,
where seems to be a taxi graveyard.
What he did was that he bought this house
and asked a group of friends to move in with him.
The house was quite large and there was room enough - everyone had their own quarters
at the same time is coming together for meals and conversations
in the common rooms of the house.
What Epicurus was doing
was picking up on a rather common sense point
which is that friends are major source of happiness.
But I think what in his way was distinctive is the idea
that in order to really benefit from friends
you have to see them, not just occasionally, not just for a drink in a bar
or the chat on the phone,
but you have to live with these friends at all time,
so that they be your permanent companions.
And I think that was his distinctive idea of happiness.
You wouldn't catch Epicurus to wearing lunch on his own in a burger bar.
He recommended that we try
never even to eat a snack alone.
Before you eat or drink anything - he said - consider carefully who you eat or drink with,
rather than what you eat or drink.
The feeding without a friend is the life of the lion or a wolf.
The second thing Epicurus thought we needed to be happy was freedom,
and in order to achieve it, he and his friends decided to leave Athens all together.
For them to be free meant to be financially independent, economically self-sufficient,
not answerable to horrible bosses for their income,
so they resolved to leave the city life and it's competitive and gossipy atmosphere
behind them once and for all.
So they left Athens
and started what could best be described as a commune.
We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life and politics - Epicurus wrote.
And that is precisely what they did.
The life was simple but at least they enjoyed their freedom.
They didn't mind if they looked shabby or didn't have as much money as other people
because they were self-sufficient and had gained their independence
from what other people thought.
There was in the financial sense nothing to prove.
Epicurus believed there was a third ingredient necessary for happiness
and that was an analyzed life
by which he meant a life in which we take time off to reflect on our worries,
to analyze what is troubling us.
Our anxieties quickly diminish if we give ourselves time to think them through.
And to do that we need to take a step back from the noise and distractions
of the commercial world and to find time and space for quiet thinking about our lives.
Of course, having loads of money has never made anyone unhappy,
but I think the lovely idea of Epicurus is that if you are denied money for
whatever reason and yet you have his three goods, that is:
you've got friends, you've got an analyzed life and you're self-sufficient
then you'll never be denied happiness.
And conversely - if you've got loads of money but you lacking friends,
you haven't got a self-sufficient life, you're not doing a lot of analyzing
then you'll never be happy according to Epicurus.
So if we try to draw this relationship between happiness and money on a graph,
imagine that on the side of the graph you've got levels of happiness,
and then on this side you've got levels of income,
Now, for Epicurus, as long as you've got enough money to provide you with the essentials
of life, you can start to be happy fairly early on if you have his three goods.
And you won't get any happier the more money you accumulate -
level happiest is pretty steady.
However, if you've got loads of money, yet you haven't got any friends,
you are not self-sufficient, you've got loads of anxieties,
then your level of happiness is gonna stay very flat
and I think that's a lovely and consoling idea for anyone who is either worried
that they may loose their money
or it denied the chance to make any.
But if the ingredients of happiness is so simple, why aren't more of us actually happy?
Epicurus blamed advertising.
As we've just seen advertising can be enormously seductive.
It tends to make us feel that there are all sorts of things missing from our lives,
but Epicurus insisted that we only need three things to be happy
friends, freedom and an analyzed life -
if he's right, why then do we want to shop so much?
Epicurus's answer would be that the commercial world slightly associates
the things it wants to sell us
with the things it knows we need.
So for example, this might persuade us to buy Bacardi,
but only by blurring the facts that it's really the friends we are looking for.
This one tries to sell us perfume
by naming it after the thing we're all really after - Freedom.
And this one fluxes whiskey
by promising the calm resolution of our problems that only an analyzed life could bring us.
And it's this blurring of our desires that makes us so confused about
what it is we want.
What are the most important things that make you happy?
The people around me -
if they're happy then I'm happy.
And if work goes good - that makes me happy as well.
But do you ever think: what if I
threw it away,
threw all that away, all your jumpers,
and just concentrated on getting the work right
getting the family and friends right, I would never have to go to traffic center again?
Yeah, cause I wouldn't have to shop jeans
if I'm already happy.
At the minute, I am fairly happy
so I'm missing a lot of shopping
quite as much as what I used to
but who's to say the last week,
something for myself and then
I'll just have to get shop.
Epicurus may have lived more than two thousand years ago
but he would have understood the pressures that make people like Steven
shop so much.
And he had a bold and practical solution to counter them.
The place to find it is here, in a dusty and remote corner of southwestern Turkey.
That Epicurus should still speaks to us all is something of a miracle
as every one of three hundred books he wrote has been lost
but his philosophy developed into a kind of credit, almost like a religion
and remain popular for some four hundred years.
Epicurean communities were founded in places like this all across the ancient world
and it's largely thanks to them that fragments of what Epicurus wrote have survived.
I've come with local archaeologist Mustafa Adak
to see the ruins of the ancient town of Oenoanda.
Oenoanda was once home to twenty five thousand people
a place with a lavish theater, busy market place or agora
and a huge aqueduct.
It was also a home
to a follower of Epicurus's philosophy,
one of the wealthiest citizens of the town
a man called Diogenes of Oenoanda.
Around AD twenties
this Diogenes took a highly unusual decision:
he paid for an enormous wall to be put up
as part of a joint structure known as the stele,
on which he had inscribed Epicurus's entire philosophy of happiness
so that all the citizens of his town could learn and be inspired by it.
So where we are walking at?
We are walking in the old agora of Oenoanda,
where Diogenes had this stele.
What we see now is this is bits of the wall
The stele was broken up by earthquake
most probably and there are more than fragments of the inscription.
This is a one of the fragments
it's the beginning of inscription... - And this is where Diogenes tries to
explain why he put up the wall in the first place...
Yes, he's saying that
if there were one or two persons who are lost
he could educate them personally,
but there are more many people,
so he decided to put up the stone.
So if there were just two or three people who didn't know how to be happy
he'd go talk to them,
but because there's so many, the best way to help them
is to actually put up a wall in the middle of the town.
That's right. That's the explanation he gives here in this fragment.
What a lovely thing to do!
Diogenes was acting on crucial idea in Epicurus,
that in order to live wisely it isn't enough just to read a
philosophical argument once or twice.
We need constant reminders of it or we'll forget.
When we're encouraged to go shopping by bright lights and inviting displays
were quickly liable to lose sight of our true desires.
So we have to counter the influence of advertising by creating advertisements
which say what we really do need,
and that's why Diogenes put up his wall.
What is this here?
This is another very fascinating fragment...
The massive limestone wall
originally stood right next to the marketplace of the town.
Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques of Oenoanda were warned to expect little
happiness from the activity.
"Luxurious food and drinks", says one fragment," in no way protect you from harm.
Wealth from beyond what is natural is no more use than overflowing
container. Real value is generated not by theaters and bars
and perfumes and ointments, but by philosophy."
The wall may have crumbled into ruin, but movingly the ideas inscribed on it
retained their life and their relevants.
What strikes me, is a real paradox that you would had
where people were going shopping, and then on the wall
you've got these reminders that shopping is not necessarily gonna make you happy.
Yes, the letters of the inscription were red so
everyone could see them... - So there was all written in red?
So you really could have see them, you could be on the other side of the market place... - Of course...
- And you would have see that there was this basic of an advertisement almost
for Epicureanism on the wall.
It must have been a beautiful spot, I mean, to have
not only philosophy enlightening but also a fantastic view onto
the surrounding countryside. -Yes. - I can imagine it would be easy to be wise,
not easy but easier,
to be wise here.
I would have done less shopping
if i had this wall and this surrounding.
It's a pity they didn't do it more
and that they don't do it today. I think it's a lovely idea.
We are all philosophers.
If Epicurus and his followers had been alive today,
they wouldn't have been sniffy about advertising,
they would've enlisted it for their own hands.
And for the same reason that Diogenes built his wall to counter the
constant inducements to go shopping with some equally visible inducements
to live philosophically.
The first idea is basically just kind a draw our kind of statements
SHOP YOUR BOOSE AWAY
I've come to the kind of place
where Epicureans might turned,
the offices of the advertising agency "St.Luke's",
to get ideas for creating some modern public reminders of how to live wisely.
The first idea their creative team came up with was a sarcastic campaign
saturising the materialistic messages of most adds.
BE HAPPY WITH SHOPPING, T.V. AND A YEARLY HOLIDAY
Right, I love that.
That really does something, doesn't it?
FILL THAT VOID IN YOUR LIFE WITH A PRODUCT.
And you have
shops advertising
I mean, shops selling these kind of products
and then this kind of stalk reminder: perhaps it's not gonna fill any void...
That's brilliant! - Thank you.
Probably the most obvious idea was to, just take
kind of luxury items and goods and
just somehow kind of undermined them
or show them for being kind a bit shallow or a bit kind of empty inside.
Kind of example for that:
Persona like this just taking your lovely image of the beautiful house
and kind of just using the language of that kind of advertising
the caveats like... batteries not included and
just change it to happiness not included. - Right, I really like that.
I mean, in a way that says it all, doesn't it? It says
because it gives you the source of Epicureanism which is
you could be happy in the house like that, but it's not included,
and I think that is something. It's not saying you won't be happy and that,
which would be sort of Marxism - it's just saying it's not included so you better
watch out before you spent all your energies trying to get this house.
Unfortunately philosophers have rarely much money for advertising campaigns
but imagine a world where instead of being surrounded by adverts selling you watches,
cars or fancy holidays, these adds reminded you of how important it is to
value friends, to scape the retrace reflect on your problems
and didn't just use these genuinely nice things to sell you aftershave or aperitifs.
It's hard to know where the people of Oenoanda
discovered what they did need and ceased buying what they didn't because of the
giant advertisement in their minds.
But Epicurus's essential message seems if anything more relevant to
today's consumer society than it did to his own
and there is no reason to believe that happiness is anymore included in a many
more things we can buy.
Of course, putting up one poster in the traffic center in Manchester
couldn't on its own turn back the tide of consumerism
and although shoppers seemed interested in what my add was trying to say
I didn't see much evidence of people stopping shopping.
But the fact remains:
we're horribly confused about what could make us happy.
if we really knew what we needed, there are few things we'll be desperate to buy.
Epicurus makes us think very carefully about the merits of our own society.
Of course, these societies are enormously wealthy, we can buy almost anything we want
in a place like this, full of colorful shops selling wonderfully well produced goods,
and yet what Epicurus wanted us to think is: do places like this really
provide us with the key ingredients of happiness?
And he thought, and I think he was right, that they don't.
Happiness may be difficult to attain, Epicurus admitted that,
but he insisted that the obstacles are not primarily financial.