Big Ideas for Curious Minds, page 2
The big, important idea that we have just looked at (that we don’t know
ourselves very well) comes from a man called Socrates. Socrates lived in
the city of Athens in Greece more than two thousand years ago. He wore
long robes (like everyone else in those days) and had a long beard—which
was probably rather smelly because he was so busy thinking that he often
forgot to have a bath.
He liked to walk about the city, meet his friends and ask them questions
about what they were excited or worried or puzzled about. His idea was
that often people do not know why they have the thoughts and feelings
they do. Socrates invented philosophy to help us understand ourselves
better. Socrates was very keen on the word ‘why’. He was always asking
people tricky ‘why’ questions: why are you friends with this person? Why
don’t you like so-and-so? He was not being mean or awkward; he really
wanted to have an interesting discussion. He wanted to become people’s
‘thinking-friend’.
You can be like Socrates, too, by being your own thinking-friend. All you
have to do is ask yourself questions about what you’re feeling—why am
I upset with mum? Or, why do I feel like kicking over my little brother’s
bricks? When you do this you are doing something very special. You are
joining in the big conversation of philosophy that’s been going on ever
since Socrates sat down and started chatting with his friends in Athens.
BIG IDEA #2
Thanks to Socrates, our thinking-friend from Ancient Greece, we’ve learnt
about how you can get to know yourself better. However, quite often the
situation is a bit different: you might know yourself quite well, but what
you really wish is that other people understood you better.
The strange and important thing about being you, is that only you know
what you are thinking and feeling. Other people cannot automatically
understand what’s going on inside your head—and they never will, unless
you try hard to explain it, normally using quite a few words. They can’t
guess what you’re thinking or how you feel, even though sometimes we
all wish that they could, and even imagine that they do.
Your mind is like a box, with all your thoughts and feelings inside it. You
can see what’s in the box and feel it straight away, but no one else has
such immediate access. Your thoughts and feelings are as invisible to
other people as they are clear to you. That means there’s a big danger:
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other people may not understand you, but you will be thinking that they
do—or at least that they should.
It’s not that other people are mean or stupid when they don’t understand
what’s going on inside your head (even though that’s how it sometimes
feels). It’s just they need to be told—and you need to tell them. It can be
really difficult and tiring to do that, but it needs to be done.
When you were a baby, grown-ups could easily guess what was in your
‘mind-box’. There were only ever a few simple things you might need from
other people. Maybe you were hungry or sleepy or wanted to play a game.
At that time, you did not need to explain. Kind people guessed for you,
and most of the time they got it right.
Being a baby and having people guess what you were thinking or feeling
was nice. But as you get older, it creates a problem: if you are used to kind
people being able to guess what’s in your head, then you automatically
think that it will always be this way—if people are nice and kind, they
should be able to guess the contents of your mind. However, as you get
older, the thoughts and feelings in your mind have become a lot more
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complicated than they used to be. You don’t just feel tired, or hungry, or
like you need to go to the toilet. Now you have thoughts about all different
kinds of things. That means that other people can’t usually guess what
you are truly thinking and feeling.
Suppose you have to go to a party but you really don’t want to. You know
there will be a boy there that you do not like. He’s unfriendly, and you
heard him say something horrible about one of your friends. Your mum
keeps telling you to hurry up or you’ll be late, but you don’t want to get
ready and you don’t want to go at all. She asks if you’re not feeling well
and you almost say yes, but that’s not the real reason. Your mum is trying
to be patient but you can tell she wants to go soon. Next, she asks you if
you are upset about your shoes, or if you are wearing something you don’t
like, and you feel like she’s such an idiot for getting it so wrong.
All of this happens because sometimes it’s easy to forget to use words, or
to be scared or embarrassed to use them. You want a grown-up to guess
what you’re thinking, just like they did when you were a baby. You get
angry, annoyed and frustrated that they don’t know already. You feel they
are being stupid or horrible if they don’t guess right. You forget that it’s
not their fault that they don’t know—it’s just that they can’t see what’s
in your mind.
Sometimes you might not want to tell someone what is in your mind
because it can feel a bit weird. Maybe you do not want to go swimming
because you don’t like other people seeing your body (even though you
used to love swimming), or you do not want to visit your grandparents
because you do not like your granny very much (even though you think
people are supposed to like their grannies). It can feel like these sorts of
things will sound very odd if you say them out loud to someone else. But
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if you do try to put these feelings into words, your parents might actually
understand quite well. They were young once and they have had lots of
complicated experiences in their lives, too.
When you don’t explain how you feel to other people, it makes you feel
like you can’t escape. You feel like no one understands you, and that you
are all alone. Sometimes all you want to do is sit in your room and cry.
But when you try to tell people what’s in your mind, it gets better. They
mightn’t be able to do exactly what you want, or even solve your problem
completely, but they will start to understand what you’re thinking, and
you won’t feel so lonely. Knowing someone gets what’s going on inside
your head feels really nice, and sometimes sharing your problem can be
almost as good as getting what you want.
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The questions of how we can get other people to understand what is on
our minds was something that really excited a philosopher called Ludwig
Wittgenstein. He lived in the first half of the 20th century, from 1889 to
1951. He was German but for a lot of his life he lived and worked in other
places—mainly England. His favourite meal was bread and cheese and he
loved going to the cinema and flying kites. He was very rich but he did a lot
of jobs: he cleaned hospitals, he taught in a school, he was a gardener for a
while and he also taught students at university—he even designed a lovely
house for his sister in Vienna. He always wanted to build an aeroplane,
too, but he never did.
Wittgenstein liked spending time on his own, and he had a little hut in
the countryside in Norway where he could go to be by himself and think.
He was very interested in what we can do with words. Sometimes, he
said, we make pictures with words, so that other people can see what we
are thinking about. Imagine you said: ‘I saw an interesting dog today’.
People don’t know what the dog was like just from that, so instead you can
give more details: it had long floppy ears, a very short tail and only three
legs. Describing words like these help other people to make a picture
in their head that’s like the picture in your head. Wittgenstein said that
when people don’t understand one another it’s because the pictures in
their heads aren’t similar enough. When someone doesn’t understand
something that seems clear in your head, instead of getting frustrated,
try to describe it more carefully and see if it helps.
BIG IDEA #3
There are all sorts of lovely things that can happen in your life. People
are always looking forward to things that are going to happen, or making
plans to do things that will make them happy. However, even if you hope
something is going to happen that you think will make you happy, often
once it does happen, you realise that you don’t feel as happy as you had
expected! This happens to grown-ups quite a lot.
Maybe at one point you really wanted a frisbee. You saw other people
playing with one and it looked great. But, when you got one, you only
used it for a few minutes before you realised that actually you didn’t really
like it and it wasn’t that fun. Or perhaps you really wanted to paint the
walls of your room your favourite colour—bright yellow or turquoise. It
seemed like a great idea, but after you actually did it, it turned out to look
horrible and you wished you had never painted it in the first place.
When things like this happen, and something does not make you feel
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the way you thought it would, it does not mean that there isn’t anything
that really will make you happy. It just shows that (like everyone) you
sometimes find it hard to know in advance what will actually be very nice
in reality.
But why does it happen? And how can you get things to turn out better?
The big idea here is that you have to start to ask a lot more questions
about the things you think you want. Rather than just waiting and hoping
to get something, you have to stop and wonder whether it’s truly the
right thing to be wishing for. As ever, philosophy means asking ‘why?’ and
not giving up until you’re sure of the answer—or as sure as you can be.
There are some things that make it tricky to find out what you really want.
One of those things is that everybody changes. Even just during the last
year, you’ve probably changed quite a lot, so the things you really wanted
then might not be so interesting to you now. But the thing is, your brain
doesn’t always keep up. It may not have noticed properly that you’ve been
growing, so it might make you think that you still want some of the same
things, even though if you got them now, they’d be boring, or wouldn’t
make you as happy as they might have done before.
Another reason why knowing what you want can be difficult is that things
can sound great when you hear about them, but not actually be that nice
when you actually do them or have them. It probably sounds really cool
to sleep in an igloo, but in reality it would probably just be very damp and
cold and a bit creepy.
However, the biggest reason we make the wrong choices is that we are
usually very influenced by what other people think. Maybe your friends
are all saying that water parks are great, but actually you don’t like them.
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That does not mean you’re strange, or that
you should force yourself to like them, and
pretend you want to go. The truth is that you
are not exactly the same as your friends, and
they are not the same as you, so what makes
them happy might not be enjoyable for you.
It sounds a bit odd at first, but deciding what
you want for your birthday or for Christmas
is a philosophical question. You should take
time over it. The question, ‘What do I really
want?’ is a huge, important issue—and big,
important things take time to answer. It is
not just children and teenagers who find it
difficult to work out what they really want.
Grown-ups have this problem all their lives
too. Children and adults are not as different
as they sometimes seem.
Adverts are always encouraging us to think
that we want more things, and trying to tell
us that we will be happy if we buy them. For
example, an advert might show a picture of
someone with a very expensive new watch
looking really happy. This makes our brain
think: ‘If I get that watch I’ll feel as good as
the person in the advert.’ Maybe it really is a
great watch, but the problem is that feeling
happy is not actually connected to having a
great watch. It is much more about things
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like getting on well with your friends, enjoying school or your work, and getting plenty of rest and enough exercise. The watch itself can not make a big difference. We really want something, because we want to feel good about ourselves. But things cannot make us happy, it’s experiences and relationships that do that. We might think that a watch or a new pair of shoes is the answer, but it isn’t really. The same thing happens with cars, handbags, private jets, new phones or even going to a fancy restaurant. It’s weird to think how much of this goes on in the world.
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A philosopher who was very interested as to why it’s hard to know what
we really want was a French woman called Simone de Beauvoir. She was
born in Paris in 1908, when the very first cars were being made, and died
in 1986, by which time nearly everyone had a car. She liked parties and
wearing nice clothes, and loved travelling. She wrote many books during
her life, and was very good friends with another philosopher who we’ll be
meeting later—Jean-Paul Sartre (see page 104). They ate lunch together
nearly every day, and would talk about the books that they were writing.
De Beauvoir had lots of friends and often included them in her books
(which sometimes annoyed them). She thought about how easily we stop
focusing on what we really want and instead go along with what other
people seem to want. She realised that we’re so aware of other people’s
opinions that we forget to properly ask ourselves what we really like. She
thought that finding out what you really want was the most important
