Happy Thoughts. - Review - book review

The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, 249 pp., $22.95)

A liberal education can be a lot like a driver's license-a necessary credential for getting around in society given to more people than make proper use of it. Its goal, at least ostensibly, is not to expose the student to old books that somewhere acquired the reputation of Great, but to make him an intelligent participant in man's quest for how to live.

The 1997 bestseller How Proust Can Change Your Life revealed the then-28-year-old British writer Alain de Botton to have understood the purpose of his liberal education. Throughout Proust and de Botton's three earlier books runs the theme that high culture is high precisely because it reveals beauty in the low. Proust explored this theme by inventing a genre, the intellectual biography as self-help book. Much as Andy Warhol took an ordinary soup can and revealed its aesthetic qualities, Proust could take an everyday situation and tease out its moral, existential, and dramatic elements, finding in all of life its inherently interesting humanness. Presumably this would have been clear to anyone who read the seven volumes of Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, but de Botton's genius was to take Proust's ideas and attitudes and present them with just enough erudition, humor, and irony at once to attract, challenge, and amuse the legions who may have received a liberal education but don't know what to do with it.

The Consolations of Philosophy leaves behind the realm of literature but promises more of the same. De Botton takes six quotidian struggles-with unpopularity, lack of wealth, frustration, inadequacy, a broken heart, and adversity-and tries to show from ancient and modern philosophers how they can be overcome. Again, the emphasis is on how the thoughts of each philosopher are therapeutic for certain ills of the modern or the human condition. Do most people ridicule our ideas and make us doubt ourselves? De Botton encourages us to learn from Socrates, who was more interested in truth than in the opinion of others. Are we finding some endeavor exceedingly difficult? Read Nietzsche, he advises, and learn that the joyous affirmation of life first requires pain and suffering.

Not enough money to finance the lifestyle you covet? Follow Epicurus, and realize that possessions and worldly attachments only lead to anxiety and unhappiness; that pleasure and happiness consist in the company of friends, freedom from the expectations of others, and the exercise of our intellect-all of which are available to those with little money and none of which increases with great riches.

Each chapter follows the format of the Proust book: De Botton introduces theme and thinker simultaneously and relates one to the other throughout, with a biographical sketch getting most of the weight at the beginning and the consolations of the philosopher's thought controlling the middle and end. De Botton relates each theme to ordinary life with the help of vignettes, either made out of whole cloth or taken from history or the author's own experience.

Unfortunately, this literary structure, which was just right for tackling the difficult Proust in a short book, doesn't work here. The chapters are too short, the problems too simple, the thinkers too complex for de Botton to pull off the self-help conceit. The pictures and illustrations sprinkled cleverly throughout Proust come too fast here, seeming cutesy and contrived. De Botton was able to extract from Proust something of the Romantic drive to self-expression and present it with a dollop of irony to remind us that self-expression also requires humility. The irony does not work as well with the philosophers (except in the chapter on Montaigne, where it is too congenial, as if author and subject like all the same jokes). Irony undercuts Schopenhauer, neutralizes Seneca, and makes Epicurus seem naive. Socrates and Nietzsche, perhaps irony's best practitioners, took themselves very seriously, and de Botton's deprecating humor makes it harder to appreciate them. Proust could be presented as a moral authority because de Botton's irony was affectionate-nobody should really take Proust the man as a guide to life, except in the detached way that de Botton does. Here it seems forced, as if the publisher had told him to write six shorter Prousts and lay it on thick.

These weaknesses would not be so frustrating were it not for the author's ambitions. Unlike other popular presentations of important thinkers-the X in 90 Minutes series or Y for Dummies-The Consolations of Philosophy was written not simply to introduce difficult thinkers to a broader audience, but to persuade us to change how we live. The author still subscribes to the Romantic notion that truth and beauty ought to motivate one's life, which is a reprise of the classical belief that seeking wisdom is man's highest pursuit. De Botton wants our ideas to matter, and rightly so.

And therein lies the problem. The true flaw of the book is the characteristic flaw of liberal education, namely its eclecticism. These thinkers disagreed with each other on almost every matter of substance, a fact the author does not hide. Do we follow reason with Socrates or eschew it with Montaigne? Do we become ascetics like Schopenhauer, Seneca, and Epicurus, or affirm life as Nietzsche encouraged? De Botton's book juxtaposes six mutually incompatible theories of life without comment as to how to sort them out. For someone taking ideas seriously, the book would provide little consolation.