Caring for the body to save the spirit. Advice on happiness from the French essayist Alain

Alain – who was he? Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alain (the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier) was one of the greatest and most original French essayists and journalists. His humorously pragmatic genius made him a moral philosopher who was wary of systems and ideas, countering them with arguments that were shrewdly attentive to concrete, physical details. A philosopher, therefore, accessible to the general public, who observes the facts of everyday life and overturns the prejudices surrounding them.

A couple of years ago, La Vita Felice published a fine collection of articles or micro-essays entitled "Sulla felicità", which concludes with a reflection entitled "Il dovere di essere felici", dated 16 March 1923. The previous year had seen the publication of famous, highly ambitious and fateful works such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Valéry’s Charmes, whilst the following year would see the publication of both the Manifesto of Surrealism and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, as well as Kafka’s posthumous The Trial. What modesty and traditionalism characterize the exercises and advice—virtuously useful to all—that Alain proposes. In the nearly one hundred short articles devoted to the virtue of being happy, Alain begins with "Irritation", "Neurasthenia", "Melancholy", ‘Imagination’ and ‘Afflicts of the Spirit’, before venturing into therapeutic reflections on smiling and death, exercise and prayer, will and destiny, domestic peace and relationships, boredom and hope, action and travel, stoicism and good humour, before concluding with friendship, the art of living and the art of well-being.

It is notable that this moral philosopher served as Simone Weil’s first teacher—a true Socratic pedagogue whose method and style of thinking were based on improvisation. However, this approach was merely a façade, for Alain encouraged his students to write as much as possible, convinced as he was that ‘learning to write well means learning to think well’.

From Alain, one learnt that thought is work: and that work is what reveals us to ourselves and shows just how important the body and matter are to thought, mental life and the spirit. Indeed, in all the photographs of Weil, what is clearly visible – more so than a polite smile or a deliberate display of self-control – is that ‘choice of happiness’ which her first teacher had taught her. There is nothing ‘psychological’, for example, in the article on neurasthenia: ‘In reality, the causes of joy and sadness are irrelevant: everything depends on the body and how it functions (…) A sensitive mind will always find enough reasons to be sad if it is sad, and to be cheerful if it is cheerful. Pascal, who was of a delicate constitution, was terrified by the multitude of stars, and the terrible shiver that shook him as he gazed at them was surely due to the chill he caught without realising it whilst standing at the window.”

In the article on passions, a speaker is quoted as saying: “I see everything as bleak, but current events have nothing to do with it; my reasoning has nothing to do with it; it is my body that wants to reason; and these are gut feelings.”

True? False? Alain often exaggerates, and the hypothetical characters he conjures up in his arguments make you laugh or smile: an effect that can dispel any gloom, as in the following observation, for example: “The situation of a healthy person who is afraid of dying is almost ridiculous.”

However, a talent for counselling such as Alain’s suggests a philosophical art without actually being one. When it comes to the ills of the spirit, he places greater trust in others and in more humble remedies: good manners, because they make us smile at our neighbours; exercise, because it prevents us from becoming rigid; and yawning, which drives away boredom and worries.