8 December, 1922.
Alain
The French philosopher known as Alain (born Emile-Auguste Chartier) (1868-1951) lived in Mortagne in Normandy where a statue and small museum are a testimony to his continued standing in French intellectual life. He wrote many brief pieces attacking the establishment of his day clerics, academics, politicians - and Brenda Almond has selected and translated some of these for The Philosopher. This is the fourth of these selections and it is taken from his Propos sur le bonheur, most of which were written between 1921 and 1936. As the world speculates about the causes of the current recession, Alain might be carrying a message for us in this piece.
Bucephalus - Find The Pin
When a small child cries and refuses to be comforted, the child's nurse often makes ingenious assumptions about the young person's character, his likes and dislikes; she even summons up heredity to help, and claims she can already recognise the father in the son. These attempts at psychology continue until the nurse discovers what has really caused it all: a pin.
When the famous horse Bucephalus was presented to the young Alexander, there wasn't a horseman who could keep his seat on the wonderful creature. An ordinary person would have said: 'That's a wicked horse.' But Alexander looked for the pin, and he soon found it; he noticed that Bucephalus was terrified of his own shadow; and because his fear made his shadow jump too, this just kept the situation going. But Alexander pointed Bucephalus' nose towards the sun, and by keeping him going in that direction, he managed to calm him and tire him out. So Aristotle's pupil already knew that we can't control our feelings as long as we don't know their really causes.
Plenty of men have overcome their fear, and for good reasons; but someone who is afraid doesn't listen to reasons; he is listening to his own heartbeat and the pounding of his blood. The pedant reasons from danger to fear; the emotionally-charged individual reasons from fear to a danger. Both of them want to be reasonable, but both of them are making a mistake. The pedant, however, is doubly mistaken: he doesn't know the real cause and he doesn't understand the other person's mistake. A person who is afraid invents some danger in order to explain his real well-founded fear. Now the least little surprise can frighten someone when there isn't any danger at all, for example, a gun fired close to you when you aren't expecting it, or even just somebody's sudden unexpected appearance. [Napoleon's genera] Masséna took fright at a statue on a poorly-lit staircase and took to his heels and fled.
A man's impatience and bad temper are sometimes due to the fact that he's been standing up too long; don't reason with him about his temper, but offer him a seat. Talleyrand, in saying that manners are everything, was saying rather more than he realised. In his concern not to cause other people trouble, he was looking for a pin and he ended up by finding it. All diplomats today have a pin placed to prick them through their clothes it's the source of Europe's complexities; and everyone knows that when you get one child crying, it makes the others cry too; what's worse, they're crying because of the crying! Nurses, following their professional instinct, lay the child on its stomach; immediately there's a change of behaviour and a new regime; here's a way of persuading that doesn't aim too high.
The evils of 1914 happened, I believe, because important people were
taken by surprise; and this made them afraid. When a man is afraid, anger
is not far behind; irritation follows fright. It's not very nice for a
man to be brusquely called away from his leisure and his rest; he often
changes and changes a lot. Like a man whose been rudely awoken, he is too
wide awake. But never say that men are wicked; don't ever say that's their
nature. Look for the pin.
*Alain, Propos sur le bonheur, Folio Essais no. 21. Edition Gallimard, 1928. pp. 11-13.
The Alains: