Everyday philosophy
AS part of the Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival the amazing space that is Rochdale Sixth form College Theatre was the venue for Jules Evans talk, entitled Thinking Outside the Books.
Jules is a philosopher, writer and speaker. His book, Life and Other Dangerous Situations has been printed in countries across the world, unusual in a book in which the topic is Philosophy.
He is also the co-writer and presenter of the popular BBC Radio 4 series, My Life as a Philosopher.
Based mainly on the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, the basis of Jules’ talk was that philosophy is not just a subject that is studied by academics in the ivory towers of our universities.
It is a way of making sense of our lives, a way of living and dealing with the everyday stresses in these modern times that we all feel at times unable to cope with.
The basis of the life theory was that we should always step back from negativity in our thoughts.
Often, we are not in control of our thoughts so therefore we accept them as correct.
It is not the events that happen to us, it is the way we interpret what happens and how we interpret the consequences.
We assure ourselves that our opinions are correct when very often they are not.
To unwrap the theory further, it was suggested that we should think of an event that happened to us.
We should then examine the belief we have evaluating truth from fact and opinion based on emotion or on past experience.
The event should then be divided into two zones.
Zone Two was examined first.
In this area things that we cannot control were looked at: such as the weather and other people; our way of focusing on things we cannot control.
Zone One was the things we have autonomy over: the things that we have a choice about how we react to them.
This does not mean that we should just give up on things in zone two.
We should learn to differentiate between ‘I must’ and ‘I would like’ and react accordingly, disregarding emotional reactions and concentrating on the things we can change.
His personal philosophy fell into three categories of realisation: first, that we are not our emotions, neither are we our habits or our beliefs and we can all take a step back when dealing with situations.