Philosophy and the X Factor

The X philosophy

The mighty X Factor is upon us and - even after swapping that nice lad from Salford for the man with the most famous moobs in show business - is set to keep millions of viewers entranced, thrilled and enraged every Saturday night for the coming months.

The programme is scorned by musicians and mocked by critics yet adored by enough of the British public to make it one of the top television events of the year.

Why is that? I think the key to the show’s success lies in the philosophy of the X Factor.

It was Aristotle who said that we should all strive for excellence in our lives. Just as we say that a knife is good if it performs its function properly – eg. cutting vegetables - we can be judged by how well we carry out the function of being human.

One essential aspect of being a good person is to find where your natural skills lie and to develop those skills to your full potential. So those of us who watched an incredible young singer from Northern Ireland perform a stunning version of Elton John’s My Song witnessed someone with great natural talent expressing that talent to the best of her abilities.

Conversely, there are some truly terrible acts that probably shouldn’t be put on television at all. When it’s bad it’s really bad and these people have completely misunderstood where their natural talents lie – unfortunately being ridiculed on national television is a tough way of finding out about a fundamental lesson.

Chin Up

The idea of the stiff upper lip is often held up for ridicule as a relic of an emotionally buttoned up past.

But maybe we have been too quick to discard this approach to life.

When it comes to a choice between the stiff upper lip and the emotional incontinence that is now all too common, I prefer the former as an attitude.

Some claim that the death of Princess Diana was the watershed moment. Instead of responding with grace - resigned to the fact that terrible things will sometimes happen – there were hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets pouring out their supposed grief over someone they didn’t know.

We have now become a society where people are endlessly encouraged to talk about their feelings – to ‘let it all out’. Unfortunately it seems that the more we talk about how we feel, the more we want to talk about how we feel, so that we end up treating everyday problems as cause for counselling, rather than as a problem to be shrugged off.

While I would be the first to encourage people to engage with their emotions and rational decision making I think this can be taken too far. We could take some advice from the Stoics, who argued that the key to happiness lay in accepting the world as it is rather than wishing it to be otherwise. As Epictetus said: “We must make the best of what is under our control, and take the rest as its nature is.”

Beach philosophy

Enjoying a day on the beach today my thoughts didn’t stray too far from waves, sunshine and ice-cream.



August in Cornwall



Having an interest in practical philosophy can sometimes feel like a curse when over-analysing the minutiae of everyday life.

Socrates started it all off with his claim that stands as the philosopher’s mantra: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I think it’s vitally important that we ask ourselves fundamental questions about what we believe in as the answers should have a tremendous bearing on the way we live our lives.

As the great pessimist of philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer, warned against a life without self-reflection: “And so, the usual course of man’s life is that he, fooled by hope, dances into the arms of death.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

But while we need a certain amount of self-awareness and to think through why we are doing whatever it is we are doing, we also need just to get on with enjoying life.

Daniel Dennett sums it up perfectly: “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either.”