Introduction
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1885). This book contains the famous exhortation to ‘become what you are’, a masterly invitation to self-confidence, in all its particularity.
Christian Bobin, Donne-moi quelque chose qui ne meurt pas (Give Me Something that Won’t Die) (1996). The chiseled texts of Christian Bobin and the accompanying photographs by Edouard Boubat describe how self-confidence is always confidence in what is beyond us.
Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (2008). This biography of one of the great pop stars of the twentieth century lets us see the extent to which self-assurance is something achieved and not an innate gift.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841). This essay, by an American author who greatly influenced Nietzsche, is the only explicit work by a philosopher on self-confidence. A literary gem, it is also an elegy to intuition.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907) and Mind-Energy (1919). Classics of twentieth-century philosophy, these works reveal that self-confidence can also be a faith in the creative force coursing through living beings.
Boris Cyrulnik, Les Vilains petits canards (Nasty Little Ducks) (2001) and Les nourritures affectives (Emotional Nourishment) (1993). Neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik demonstrates that it’s never too late to find or rediscover confidence, to weave or reweave the relationships that allow us to believe in ourselves and in our happiness.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits I et II (1966), published in English as Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006). A difficult text by the great French psychoanalyst, but one that allows us to understand that the issue of confidence has to be considered in relation to the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic.
1 – Cultivate Strong Ties
Aristotle, Politics (fourth century B.C.). One of the most important books in the history of philosophy, it posits that man is a political animal because he is incomplete. He therefore seeks to build his confidence through his relationships with others.
___, Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century B.C.). Contains Aristotle’s fine definition of friendship, which helps us understand our need for mentors. For the human animals that we are, confidence cannot be attained alone.
Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910) and Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916–1917). The basic theoretical framework for understanding the theories of attachment and the need for ‘inner security’, which derive their meaning from Freud’s concept of ‘infantile anxiety’.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’ in Écrits I (1966). A short text, but one that is dense, fundamental, and extraordinarily powerful. It deserves to be read and reread for its exposition of the extent to which confidence is sought in the other’s confirming gaze. Assurance is never simply a confidence in ‘self’.
François Truffaut, The Wild Child (1970). A film classic that describes the impossibility for a child who has been severed from relationships with other humans to become fully human himself.
Immanuel Kant, On Education (1776). The great philosopher, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, explains that a good education is measured by the degree of autonomy it confers. To be well educated is to no longer need those who educated us. Self-confidence thus becomes a confidence in one’s own judgment, in one’s autonomous reason.
John Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (1956–1976) and Attachment and Loss (1969). This British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst has written decisive works on the theory of attachment and the need for ‘inner security’, works that were later referenced by, among others, Boris Cyrulnik.
Catherine Destivelle and Érik Decamp, Annapurna, duo pour un 8000 (Annapurna, Duet for an 8,000-metre Peak) (1994). In their account of a climb, these two great mountaineers show that self-confidence is inseparable from confidence in the other. That’s the lovely metaphor of a roped climbing party.
Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood (1936) and Absorbent Mind (1949). To understand the Montessori method, one may as well go to the source. Here, the Italian educator lays out her programme, which is based on trust, encouragement, and educating the student’s creativity and freedom.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963). For its power as a work of literature and its political importance. The ‘love’ that Baldwin evokes so eloquently speaks to the importance of relational confidence. The book also testifies to the political power that has emerged from the resistance of America’s black slaves and their descendants.
Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living (2013). Writing in a delicate style, this French psychoanalyst argues that there is never really a lack of confidence ‘in oneself’: it always comes down to a lack of confidence in the other.
Isabelle Filliozat, Fais-toi confiance (Trust Yourself) (2005). This contemporary psychologist combines insightful views with a wealth of cases from her clinical practice over the past few decades.
2 – Go into Training
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (2008). In this very instructive book, the New Yorker reporter details a fascinating investigation into how competence can turn into confidence.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (1931). In this introduction to phenomenology by one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, we are exposed to the idea that ‘all consciousness is consciousness of something’. Confidence, too, is first of all a confidence in oneself accomplishing something.
Heraclitus, ‘Fragments’ (sixth century B.C.) ‘We do not step twice into the same river,’ says the pre-Socratic philosopher. Confidence can therefore not simply be mastery: it must give us the strength to deal with the unexpected.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883). Worth reading for the grotesque character of the ‘Conscientious One’, the archetype of the person imprisoned by his own competence.
___, Untimely Meditations, Part II (1874). For its reflections on establishing a relationship with knowledge that frees us, gives us confidence, instead of walling us in.
___, The Gay Science (1882). For its meditations on the beneficial philosophy of ‘the great Yes to life’.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Origins of Greek Thought (1962). In particular for the way this great Hellenist characterises the god Hephaestus: it is by doing the work of a blacksmith, not surprisingly, that a man becomes a blacksmith.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). This book shows how a man who was meant to be turned into a beast became a free man – by training himself to read and write.
Emmanuel Delessert, Oser faire confiance (Daring to Have Confidence) (2015). Where it is neatly shown, by a young French philosopher, that self-confidence is not simply a question of reassurance.
3 – Listen to Yourself
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790). In this third critique, which followed the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the German philosopher defines the beautiful as ‘the free and harmonious play of the human faculties’. The aesthetic experience is a moment of inner attunement. There is no true self-confidence without a capacity to listen to oneself.
___, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ (1784). In this short text, Kant posits that it is the capacity to ‘have the courage to make use of one’s own understanding’. To trust oneself is to have confidence in one’s own thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1841). These essays include ‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘Nature’. Listening to oneself is learning to listen to one’s intuition, ‘that gleam of light that flashes across [one’s] mind from within’.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943). We find here, articulated by Saint-Exupéry’s fox, a succinct argument in favour of rites and rituals. Without them, how would we manage to listen to ourselves?
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1934). This collection, one of whose texts addresses intuition, provides the best possible entry into Bergson’s philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks (1901). Here, Nietzsche speaks of his admiration for the author of ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Emerson. Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my own home – I may not praise it, it is too close to me.’
Fabrice Midal, Comprendre l’art moderne (Understanding Modern Art) (2010). The philosopher and meditation instructor shows us in detail, using specific works of art as examples, that learning to look at the artworks of the twentieth century is learning to listen to oneself.
4 – Expose Yourself to Wonder
Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités Esthétiques (1868), in Selected Writings on Art and Literature. In these texts, the poet supports his statement that ‘the beautiful is always bizarre’. Strange indeed is the power that beauty gives us: it authorises us to finally listen to and trust ourselves.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790). This classic of philosophy is relevant to us here because it treats the question of how, strangely enough, the harmony in external nature creates harmony within our subjective selves, quiets interior conflict, and gives us confidence in our free judgment.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). In this masterpiece, a deep reflection on the bond between man and nature, Emerson’s friend Thoreau tells of living in a cabin by a pond in Massachusetts. It helps us understand why a walk in nature allows us to regain our confidence.
Jean-Paul Janssen, Une vie au bout des doigts (Life at One’s Fingertips) (1982). This short documentary film on the climber Patrick Edlinger offers a perfect illustration of how natural beauty can help inspire self-confidence.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (second century B.C.). An emperor and a Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius speaks of the cosmic energy that maintains the world in balance. How can we not have confidence in life when we live in the midst of such harmony?
Victor Hugo, Les Chansons des rues et des bois (Songs of Street and Wood) (1865). In the poem ‘Nature is full of love’, Hugo depicts nature as brimming with enough life to carry us and give us confidence.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907). In this work, Bergson develops his notion of élan vital, or vital impetus, a creative spontaneity that accounts for the evolution of living beings and that courses through us when we are inventive, free, and confident.
François Cheng, The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation (2006). A sustained reflection on the powers of beauty: ‘Beauty is something that is present virtually, that has always been present, a desire bubbling up from within individual beings, or from Being itself, like an inexhaustible fountain.’
François Jullien, The Strange Idea of the Beautiful (2010). The philosopher and China expert shows how beauty can make us present to the world: ‘The beautiful is there, like a glacial erratic in a changed world, like a holdover from the time of the gods.’
Charles Pépin, Quand la beauté nous sauve (When Beauty Saves Us) (2013). I published this book a few years ago and could easily have called it ‘When Beauty Saves Us from a Crisis of Confidence’. The ideas in the present chapter amplify the thoughts developed in the earlier book.
5 – Decide
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius (first century A.D.). In this masterpiece by the great Stoic philosopher, consisting of 124 letters, we find all the major themes of Stoic thinking, including what amounts to a defence of decision making: ‘Accidents happen hour after hour that require a decision, and it’s to philosophy that one must turn.’ Having self-confidence is learning to make decisions.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670). ‘God is not a question of proof but of experience,’ wrote this Christian apologist. From which we can understand how self-confidence has also to be confidence in something more than oneself.
Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Diary of a Seducer’, from Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). In all these major works by the Danish existentialist philosopher, faith appears as a ‘leap’ beyond reason, a pure decision and not a rational choice. It takes a full measure of self-confidence to decide in the face of uncertainty, to trust oneself in the midst of doubt.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (1946). A short lecture that clearly exposes the link between trusting one’s freedom and being able to make decisions. Self-confidence, to an existentialist, is first and foremost confidence in one’s freedom.
___, Being and Nothingness (1943). A long and difficult text, which argues that the anxiety provoked by the need for action is nothing other than ‘the reflexive seizure of freedom by its own self’, in other words, a sign of our freedom. The decision to act allows us to emerge from this anguish and take stock of the extent of our freedom.
6 – Get Your Hands Dirty
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009). An astonishing book, combining theory and life history, by a PhD in philosophy who explains how he found self-confidence by becoming a motorcycle mechanic.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century B.C.). Each person, says Aristotle, should have work that allows him to achieve his own perfection and therefore have confidence in himself.
___, On the Parts of Animals (fourth century B.C.). This is the work in which Aristotle argues that the hand is an extension of human intelligence. By doing nothing with our hands, we risk being cut off from a part of ourselves.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx criticises work in a capitalist economy, but not work per se. In fact, he has written a number of beautiful passages on the ideal conditions for work, where it would be neither exploitation nor alienation but an opportunity for self-realisation, for developing one’s personality, for self-confidence.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807). In his dialectic of ‘the master and the slave’, Hegel shows how much we need gratitude and recognition, as well as true contact with the things of this world, in order to gain confidence in ourselves, realise our value, and construct our happiness.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907). Bergson defines man in this text more as Homo faber than as Homo sapiens: ‘Intelligence, conceived in what appears to be its original capacity, is the faculty of making artifacts, especially tools for making other tools, and to vary the manufacture indefinitely.’ If our deep nature is to be Homo faber, we understand how our confidence can suffer when we ‘make’ nothing: we then need to re-establish ourselves as ‘makers’ to regain confidence.
Michel Serres, Pantopie, de Hermès à Petite Poucette, entretiens avec Martin Legros et Sven Ortoli (Pantopia, from Hermes to Thumbelina, discussions with Martin Legros and Sven Ortoli) (2014). A discussion on the disappearance of the rural way of life and all that has been carried away with it.
Georges Charpak, ed., La Main à la pâte, les sciences à l’école primaire (Hands-on: Science at Primary School level) (2011). In this book, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist describes ingenious and concrete experiments (establishing the boiling point of water, understanding the principle of buoyancy, seeing the air we breathe, making an hourglass …) that allow children not only to discover science but also to develop their personalities and have confidence in themselves.
7 – Swing into Action
Alain, Alain on Happiness (1925). Provides a true philosophy of action: action is not secondary to thought but has its own distinct value, its truth.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807). Even the Mind needs to act in order to know itself, even God must come to action to know his own value. The same thing is true for us: we must not wait to act until we are completely sure of ourselves but act in order to gain confidence along the way.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (second century A.D.). A belief in fate, we learn here, doesn’t rule out the need for a defence of action. To act is not to think that everything depends on us, but to act on all that does depend on us, while readily accepting all that doesn’t. Self-confidence is not arrogance. It is at the same time humility and a broadened confidence: humility because everything doesn’t depend on us; and broadened confidence because by acting we show confidence in what doesn’t depend on us, but which our action may set in motion.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness (1936). Our ‘me’, or ego, has value not in and of itself but outside itself, in the world that it subdues through its actions, and in the relationships it thereby creates with others. One must come out of oneself, out of one’s comfort zone, in order to have self-confidence.
8 – Admire
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930). In this short, masterful text, Freud shows that what is good for society (the norm) is not good for the individual (the expression of his singularity). Hence the ‘discontent’. How are we to have confidence in our singularity in a society that values the norm? By admiring others, as Nietzsche tells us, who have developed their singularity and have dared to become themselves despite the pressure of social norms.
Michel Crépu, L’Admiration. Contre l’idolâtrie (Admiration. Against Idolatry) (2017). Idolatry diminishes the idolater, while admiration heightens the admirer, as we learn from this contemporary essay by an erudite literary critic.
9 – Stay True to Your Desire
Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics (1677). Spinoza defines joy as ‘the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection’. The joy of progressing, of developing, protects us from the temptation to compare ourselves to others, which is poison to our self-confidence.
Anthony Storr, Solitude (1988). A lovely essay, in which this Jungian psychoanalyst argues for the benefits of solitude – not isolation – in building one’s individuality, listening to one’s desire, and developing one’s imagination and creativity. We are all of us alone in being what we are – we are all of us solitaire diamonds. We have to know this to have self-confidence.
Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986). In this essay, Jacques Lacan delves into the idea of being faithful to one’s desire. All of us have desires. But our own desire is what we need to have faith in. This is our unconscious axis, our ‘affair’, as Lacan calls it, our secret coherence. When we are unfaithful to it, we are cut off from ourselves, and our sense of guilt keeps us from having self-confidence, sometimes leading us into depression. Self-confidence is keeping faith with oneself, with one’s desire or quest.
Homer, Odyssey (eighth century B.C.). An attentive reading of this classic shows us that Ulysses represents the hero who is armed with self-knowledge and who is faithful to his desire despite the temptations and enchantments put in his way. Ulysses derives self-confidence from knowing his true desire.
10 – Trust the Mystery
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (first century B.C.). This sublime poem awakens us to the mystery of the random nature of the world and the miracle of our existence. Having self-confidence starts with the consciousness of our great luck in emerging from nothingness to exist at all.
Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy (1919). In this book, probably Bergson’s most important, the philosopher defines life as the élan vital, the mysterious spiritual force at the heart of matter. Self-confidence is confidence in the creativity that fills us when we allow it to, notably when we turn away from repetition and habit.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913). In this late work, Husserl develops the lovely idea of an ‘original confidence’ in the world. To be born is to be entrusted to the world and to have a corresponding original confidence in it. Self-confidence is based on this primal confidence in the world around us.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (1964) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Like Husserl, this French phenomenologist believes that we are of this world and caught up in its ‘fabric’, its ‘flesh’. There can be no self-confidence without the sense of living in the world, being at home in the world.
Christian Bobin, L’épuisement (Exhaustion) (2015) and Les ruines du ciel (Heaven’s Ruins) (2009). A mystical Christian, Bobin is an inspired prose writer and finds beauty in the simplest aspects of daily life. For him, self-confidence is confidence in this life, whose every micro-fragment has been illuminated by the brief passage of Christ on earth. He believes, as Emerson does, that self-trust begins with a trust in something larger than oneself.
Pascal Quignard, Vie secrète (Secret Life) (1997). In this wonderful novel, Quignard (who is also a poet and essayist and whose Roving Shadows won the Prix Goncourt in 2002) writes the following: ‘Defeat comes from inside oneself. There is no defeat in the outside world. Nature, the sky, night, rain, and wind are a long, unseeing triumph’ – the triumph of a life as mysterious in its existence as in its perseverance. Having confidence in oneself is keeping oneself as close as possible to this mystery, this triumph.
Antoine Leiris, You Will Not Have My Hate (2016). In this account, written by a man who lost his wife in the Bataclan massacre in Paris on 13 November 2015, and was left to raise the couple’s son on his own, confidence in life opposes death, injustice, and hatred. It even seems to offer an answer to them.
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life (1985). This diary of a young Dutch woman deported to Auschwitz where she was killed in 1943 is a masterpiece. She displays a confidence in life that doesn’t quit, even in the concentration camps. From the fact of being alive, we all of us have in us just such a confidence in life, in one form or another. It nourishes our self-confidence.