The Consolations of
Philosophy
by Alain de Botton
Notes by Llewellyn Johns
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©2002 The notewriter
Llewellyn Johns studied English and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She taught for many years in technical schools and then at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. From 1986 to 1988 she worked as Curriculum Development Officer at the Council of Adult Education. Reading literature counts as one of her greatest pleasures.
The text
References in these notes are to Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 2001 (first published in the UK in 2000).
This booklet is Number 1635 in the series of Book Discussion Notes produced for the Book Groups of the Centre for Adult Education.
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The Consolations of Philosophy
Introduction
I can't make up my mind about The Consolations of Philosophy. Is it, as some reviewers have claimed, 'stylish, urbane and charming', restoring to philosophy 'a long lost part of its character, the purpose to console'? Or does it pull 'a glittering skein over [its] subjects' depths' with its 'cute faux-naif tone'? Does it contain philosophical thinking or an upmarket version of New Age babble 'a
travesty' of serious thought?
The Consolations of Philosophy is part self-help tract, part biography, part introduction to philosophy. What is de Botton trying to do, apart from writing another bestseller to follow How Proust Can Change Your Life (which this book resembles closely)? Certainly he is seeking to relate philosophy to everyday life and the tone he has adopted fits with this, but the 'mix'n' match' approach makes me doubtful about his basic intent. More importantly, the notion of philosophy de Botton proposes a
sort of practical wisdom allied to the idea of consolation confounds
me.
Philosophy is thinking about thought. 'Philosophizing means thinking without proofs,' declares French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville. '... Knowledge must be the priority. The truth demands nothing other than that we pursue it.' For centuries philosophers have focused on trying to define truth and to differentiate between knowledge, belief and opinion. 'The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering them,' states Wittgenstein, the most representative figure of 20th-century western philosophy's turn to language.
De Botton is not alone in believing that the western world's philosophy should find everyday applications outside the academy.
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3 Books popularising philosophy continue to be published and, in advanced societies such as the USA, Canada, Germany and Israel, a new movement, the philosophical practice movement, is challenging psychotherapists by providing one-to-one counselling as well as sending its representatives into boardrooms to advise on business ethics. Lou Marinoff, a New York practitioner, explains.
People make daily inferences about themselves and others and the world, and whether these are sound or unsound is a matter of philosophical rigour. People obey or break laws, and follow or defy customs, according to their philosophical interpretations of justice, liberty and right. People seek, find or deny meaning and purpose in their lives and deaths according to their philosophical conceptions of these very things.
Moral dilemmas, the conflict of values, problems regarding the meaning of life, these are open to philosophical or ethical discussion; but are all human problems receptive to this sort of aid? If I don't have enough money to pay my bills or if my car breaks down on the way to a business meeting, philosophy won't solve it. It seems that many practical problems lie outside philosophy's scope unless you redefine it to mean an attitude to life. Then, for example, being stoical synonymous
with being 'philosophical' in popular parlance in
the face of misfortune could help contain despair or anger. Such a redefinition accords well with New Age understandings. Instead of the 'meditative science of thought' the
OED definition philosophy
becomes 'a philosophy', that is, any set of beliefs and its attendant practices like Sufism, distributivism or vegetarianism.
The questions in my first paragraph expose the logic of either/or. Every reviewer I read was adamant about The Consolations of Philosophy, it was good or bad. Therefore, my notes will be arranged as argument for and against de Botton's bestseller. But can't the book be both convincing in parts and yet fail in others as my reaction suggests?
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De Botton's project
There is 'something very nice in the idea of a book changing your life for the better ...' Alain de Botton insists, and so there is. Often writers write and readers read for enlightenment. The Consolations of Philosophy sets out to find wisdom in the thought of six Western philosophers Socrates,
Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. De Botton admits his choice is an unconventional one as the six are not often represented on university syllabi. 'Bound by a common interest in saying a few consoling and practical things about the causes of some of our greatest griefs,' (p.8) they represent the livelier end of philosophy. The Consolations of Philosophy sets up an opposition, sometimes implied, sometimes overt, between 'practical' and 'academic' or 'theoretical' while asserting that the six are, above all, practitioners of what they preach.
. According to this author, the most practical question we can ask is:
What can these people do for me? What's the point of reading Socrates? What is the point of Nietzsche? These are supposedly great figures, but what can they do for me?
The query 'what's in it for me' has become emblematic of our hyper-individualistic, self-interested era. Nevertheless it's true that the getting of wisdom is deeply personal in a way that gaining information or knowledge is not. This has been expressed in different ways over the ages. For Buddha 'the wise fashion themselves'; for British philosopher, Iris Murdoch, 'to do philosophy is to explore one's own temperament, yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.' So what wisdom, deriving from living and thinking, do the six offer according to de Botton?
If people scoff at our ideas and make us doubt ourselves, from Socrates we learn to value truth over the opinion of others: '... when we are considering ethical matters how
to be happy and courageous and just and good we
should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty
1 CAE Book Groups generals and well-dressed aristocrats from Thessaly.' (p.33) For Socrates, true wisdom came as a result of perfect knowledge about ethical subjects. He confined himself to querying meanings attached to the Good Life and analysing the virtues. What is courage? What constitutes justice? The wise person is he or she who leads an examined life in pursuit of truth. Do we consider ourselves unhappy because we are not rich? Epicurus argues that pleasure and happiness derive from cultivating friendships, freedom and philosophy, not from worldly goods and power. Being wise is understanding this.
Are we beset by what psychologists have labelled 'low frustration tolerance'? Seneca believed that most of our problems arise from having high expectations. Therefore, we need to prepare ourselves for the worst and, when things go wrong, to remember that we are not the sole agents of our destinies. Wisdom lies in working out where reality can be changed and where we must submit graciously to the world's intransigence.
Montaigne's wisdom issues from proper understanding of the human condition. 'Misplaced confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy and,
indirectly, also of inadequacy' (p. 121). Montaigne's philosophy differed from that of the ancients in that it accepted human frailties, the animality of the body, and the violence of the emotions. He elevated experience instead of learning. 'If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.' (p. 152) Therefore 'a virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.' (p. 168) Like Montaigne, Schopenhauer believed that our minds are subservient to our bodies but he went further, proposing the Will-to-Live, that is, the drive to survive and reproduce, as the force that controls our being. Because of this biological impetus 'love ... interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds.' (p. 185) Knowing that the goal of love is not individual happiness but the continuance of the species will save us from disappointment in romantic matters and make us wise.
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Nietzsche believed in enjoying the here and now instead of waiting for fulfilment in the Christian heaven. Troubles are to be welcomed as the amount of pleasure we gain from life is proportionate to its pains and frustrations. 'The art of living lies in finding uses for our adversities.' (p.224) According to Nietzsche, fulfilment and wisdom was achieved by certain figures he called Ubermenschen -Supermen men
such as Montaigne, Stendhal, Goethe who lived active, manly lives but were also intellectually and artistically gifted. The message here is that we must continue to struggle and 'to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never.' (p.238)
The case FOR The Consolations of Philosophy Style
The greater part of this book's charm lies in its literary style. De Botton began his publishing career as a novelist melding narrative with philosophising quotations. In The Consolations of Philosophy the author reverses the emphasis, but personal anecdote and biographical narrative preserve his novelistic bent. In the section on Schopenhauer, there's a heading 'A Contemporary Love Story'. Two strangers, a young man and woman, are travelling on a train:
His mind turns over strategies for conversation. He considers asking her for the time, for a pencil, for directions to the bathroom, for reflections on the weather, for a look at one of her magazines. He longs for a train crash, in which their carriage would be thrown into one of the vast barley-fields through which they are passing. In the chaos, he would guide her safely outside, and repair with her to a nearby tent set up by the ambulance service, where they would be offered lukewarm tea and stare into each other's eyes. (p. 184)
Such passages reveal de Botton's ability to use characters to create lightness and intimacy in his text (see also the characterisation of Lady Fortune, p.87). He avoids the academic's impersonal, authoritative voice by telling such stories, yet his learning commands
© CAE Book Groups 7 our attention and his method of exposition is always lively and lucid.
Professional philosophers may well find de Botton's explanatory devices mere frippery, but they make delightful reading. For example, de Botton develops Socrates' analogy between throwing a pot successfully and applying effective reason to our lives. First he gives us a thumbnail description of how to make an Attic vase (pp.21-2), adding amusing illustrations. Then he describes Socrates' method of inquiry point by point (pp.24-5). Similarly, to assist our understanding of Montaigne, he sets two examinations, one testing standard classical knowledge, the other Montaignean wisdom; and to explain Nietzschean elitism, he indulges in some alpine hiking while employing the philosopher's own metaphor of mountain heights.
Biographical sketches
The brief biographies of the six philosophers are the most engaging parts of the book. De Botton embeds each philosopher in his appropriate locale with wit and economy. He introduces subordinate characters such as Marcia, a Roman matron, Schopenhauer's mother, and Montaigne's friend, Etienne de la Boetie, to round out the philosophers' lives. He presents quirky details that suggest the domestic dimensions of these men's lives. At home, Seneca was disturbed by the grunts, wheezes and pants from the gymnasium next door, a fact which gives vividness to the Stoic's maxim: 'All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within.' (p. 105) Pessimistic and misogynistic Schopenhauer kept poodles: 'He lavishes affection on these poodles, addressing them as "sir", and takes a keen interest in animal welfare.' (p. 177)
De Botton's democratic stance
Despite the learning he displays, de Botton insists that the academic elite to which he belongs has no special purchase on wisdom. And despite belonging to a social elite all
his cultural references display
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a most expensive lifestyle and Gilbert de Botton, multi-millionaire businessman, was his father the
author is at pains to demonstrate his ordinariness. His fears, inadequacies and longings form the subtext of The Consolations of Philosophy.
In taking this tack, de Botton assumes the mantle of Montaigne, his favourite philosopher among the six, an erudite nobleman who nevertheless reveals the humdrum of existence in his essays. Montaigne, too, sought to dethrone humankind's ascendancy over animals, Reason's supremacy and the authority of book-learning:
... were I a good scholar I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise ... we are richer than we think, each one of us. (pp. 166-7)
More than any other philosopher, Montaigne redraws for us the portrait of the wise person: no longer the intimidating Socrates with his gadfly mind, the Rodinesque brooder or the professional scholar, but, potentially, any one of us living out our lives. This anti-elitist idea encourages the lay reader to consider her own attempts at philosophical reflection positively. It alone makes The Consolations of Philosophy an important addition to the literature of self-help.
The case AGAINST The Consolations of Philosophy Presentation
'...[The book's] presentation does its best to avoid being examined critically,' fulminates one critic. Never has a book on a supposedly serious subject contained so many diversions for the mind.
First, alone among philosophy popularisers, de Botton provides illustrations. Copious reproductions of Old Masters, pie charts, everyday snapshots, graphs, glossy advertisements and diagrams fall into the text like so many cake crumbs. Why does de Botton litter his script in this way? Occasionally the visuals assist his explanations; often, however, they simply restate the obvious. Do we need a dog on a lead to conceptualise restraint, a nibbling goat to imagine animal
© CAE Book Groups 9 content? These illustrations run the risk of becoming irritating and even patronising. We are not so stupid as to need them, nor are de Botton's commentaries so profound.
Of course, you could regard the illustrations as further evidence of de Botton's humour. But humour is the ultimate diversionary tactic and de Botton overplays his hand, exposing his work to ridicule. One critic sneers:
Such is the tone of this short book that it wouldn't have been surprising to turn the page and find photographs of two flaccid items, one with the caption 'my penis' and the other labelled 'Montaigne's friend's penis'.
De Botton's literary persona
By recounting intimate stories about himself, de Botton employs another diversionary tactic. You might find his self-exposure titillating, fascinating or embarrassing, depending on your attitude towards public confession (now a staple of 'infotainment'). Whatever your response, there's no doubt these admissions tend to draw the reader away from critical thinking.
While the personal voice now appears all over contemporary nonfiction (and this, I believe, is a good thing), a serious text can be made more user-friendly without resorting to gratuitous self-revelation. Do we need to know that de Botton is insecure about his girlish appearance, that he fantasises about attractive girls in trains, that he weeps over The Elephant Man and has an occasionally dysfunctional penis?
More to the point in a book on philosophy by a teacher of philosophy, what are we to make of his confession at the outset?
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In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play ... I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed. I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they thought me acceptable, (p.7) [my emphasis]
De Botton uses the past tense here perhaps to indicate that this younger self has been overcome by
philosophising? and
that truth and honesty have triumphed. But have they? Charming de Botton's authorial character may be, endowed 'with what, at first sight looks like a kind of innocence,' according to Melbourne philosopher Raimond Gaita; but this literary persona is also very self-conscious, calculating and, at times, indulgent. My distrust of the author of The Consolations of Philosophy fixes on this equivocality.
On the one hand, de Botton depreciates himself in order to assure us that he's as 'ordinary' as we are, yet at the same time he shows off his erudition and elite status. Are words like 'Cimmerian', 'herm' and 'praemeditatio' appropriate in a popular text? Do we need passages in the original Greek and Latin as well as the English translations? As if he understands how undermining of 'ordinariness' these textual elements are, he creates a 'we' who live the life of the rich. Does he seriously mean his first wish list (pp.45-9) to be indicative of our materialist fantasies? Do most of us wear cashmere and eat dinners of 'seared sea scallops and cep risotto with truffles'? (p.52)
When it comes to philosophical thought rather than its historical and biographical trappings and cutesy illustrations, however, what we get in The Consolations of Philosophy is not a subtly-flavoured gourmet meal but a McDonalds hamburger, over-processed and effortlessly digestible. Are we, his audience, as resistant to intellectual complexity as his summations imply? Raimond Gaita again:
GroupsNothing in the content of this book nor in its voice convinces me that it contains wisdom hard won. If you were grieving about the loss of a loved one, would you trust an author who called it a frustration and drew a little picture of a wish hitting a brick wall?
De Botton's desire to be one of us and his desire to make The Consolations of Philosophy a bestseller lead him to confused representations of both his subjects and his audience.
A decadent philosophy
The most damning criticism of The Consolations of Philosophy is that it's not philosophy at all or, at best, offers a decadent form of it. The decadence arises from allying philosophy with therapy.
It was Epicurus who first promulgated the idea of a therapeutic philosophy. He was a keen populariser, taking the ideas of Socrates on the Good Life and giving them a psychological gloss all his own. Instead of the often uncomfortable pursuit of truth, in the hands of Epicurus and his followers, philosophy's purpose became the pursuit of tranquillity. Apart from the Epicureans, two other major schools of the Hellenistic period (323-31BC) took up philosophy as therapy the
Stoics, of whom Seneca is one, and the Sceptics.
Following this Hellenistic trend, de Botton steers us away from the realm of ethics into psychology:
Social life is beset with disparities between others' perceptions of us and our reality. We are accused of stupidity when we are being cautious. Our shyness is taken for arrogance and our desire to please for sycophancy, (p.40)
The relation of art to reality has long been considered a serious philosophical topic, in part because Plato first raised it; the relation of shyness to personal appearance has not, in part because it did not attract the attention of any ancient philosopher, (p. 165)
The qualifying 'in part' is important here. Why am I so shy? (p. 165), 'how should a man with a small "living reality" bring up the subject'?
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(p. 156) are not questions for which philosophy has answers. Unlike 'why should I be moral?', they are not generalisable, being concerned with personal needs to the exclusion of principles.
For all the book's quasi-ethical orientation, the author premises his argument on his audience's (and his own) perceived need to feel good. If philosophy doesn't meet this need, don't bother with it. 'Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding,' (p. 152) de Botton declares; but here, too, he qualifies his statement using
'may', not the categorical 'is'. For de Botton the academic knows that human wellbeing constitutes only part of the Good Life defined philosophically (the other part is virtue, which he hardly mentions), just as he knows that, of his six philosophers, only Epicurus and Seneca would agree that philosophy's aim is to console.
Of all the philosophers de Botton presents, Socrates best shows the discrepancy between philosophy's consoling powers and its real purpose. The Socratic view of philosophy works against life as lived; it represents perfection against life's muddle, adherence to the truth no matter what cost, and, remember, it cost Socrates his life.
The reduction of ideas
De Botton is eager to have us believe that we can be wise without lengthy learning and reflecting on life experiences. However, it's hard to accept that the director of a graduate program in philosophy believes that any serious thinker can be presented in a couple of summarising sentences and a few brief quotations.
In an interview de Botton admitted:
I had to search hard to find what was essential and interesting about these philosophers. They don't make it easy for the reader.
The argument against The Consolations of Philosophy is not that de Botton simplifies reductionism
is at the core of any book that seeks to present a complex subject to a lay audience, but that he
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13 oversimplifies. He seeks the essential when the idea of essence is now regarded as untenable; he seeks the interesting (read accessible) above the logically consistent.
In oversimplifying the author also misleads. He turns Socrates' obeisance before Truth into 'the scenario of being misunderstood,' implying that Socrates would have believed that unpopularity was something for which consolation was needed. He twists Montaigne's remark about usefulness and appropriateness being the only measure of worth of anything to mean 'only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding' (p. 152) when, of course, something useful or appropriate in life in fact may make you feel worse. But his portrayal of Nietzsche's thinking as a 'consolation for difficulties' is, perhaps, the greatest misrepresentation in The Consolations of Philosophy. For Nietzsche, the idea of seeking comfort or a remedy for life's difficulties belongs to what he calls 'the herd', timid, unrealised individuals who were the antithesis of his Ubermenschen.
Finally, de Botton's choices involve him in contradictoriness, for he must both applaud Socrates' elevation of reason and Montaigne's exposure of its limits, advocate the Epicurean and Stoic search for a tranquil life and embrace the Nietzschean notion of pain. And contradictoriness is not the basis of sound reasoning.
Conclusion
The Consolations of Philosophy may not do much sound philosophising but, unless you're a philosopher, probably you've enjoyed this book. As an introduction to the six thinkers, de Botton's simplifying strategies work. He presents their thought in entertaining ways, overcoming any stereotypes we might hold about them. But The Consolations of Philosophy remains fast food for thought. For those for whom this isn't satisfying enough, the next step, of course, is the philosophers themselves.
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Further reading
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Pantheon Books, New York, 1997.
A more coherent and apt realisation of de Botton's central idea: that from great works we can get clues to living successfully. It's charming.
How Are We to Live? Ethics in the Age of Self-Interest by Peter Singer. Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 1993.
Australia's most famous philosopher writes without de Botton's flair, but this, too, is a book for the lay reader, full of pertinent illustrations from private life and the business world. Concentrating on the social 'we' instead of de Botton's psychologised The', it stands as a corrective to The Consolations of Philosophy.
A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life by Andre Comte-Sponville. William Heinemann, London, 2002.
A five-star find! I can't praise this book's grace and intellectual savoirfaire too highly. A bit harder to read (as Comte-Sponville is always philosophising), it's divided into 16 chapters each dealing with a virtue. Beginning with Politeness and ending with Love, this book permits savouring chapters like de luxe chocolates, one at a time, and fully.Questions
1 In your opinion is The Consolations of Philosophy a wise book? Why, or why not?
2. An adage of the 20th-century information age: information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom. Discuss.
3. Would you agree with de Botton (and Montaigne) that public lives seem extraordinary because we don't hear about the private part?
4. What makes a human life extraordinary? Do these factors make it more valuable?
5. In de Botton's hands, does Socrates seem wise? Why, or why not?
6. The author confesses that Montaigne is his favourite among the six. Why, do you think?
7. Can Nietzsche's thinking as
de Botton presents it be
summed up by 'no pain, no gain'?
8. Would you agree that The Consolations of Philosophy 'veers from the anecdotal and the light to the "lite" '? What do you think 'lite' signifies in this context?
9. What did you think philosophy was, before you read this book? Has reading de Botton's book and these notes changed your ideas about what philosophy is?
10. What's wrong with seeking consolation from philosophy?
11. Seneca says we will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful. But in a grossly unjust world don't we need anger and hope to spur us to action?
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