A de B of philosophy

by Anthony Gardner

'Angst,' wrote Cyril Connolly, 'is an awareness of the waste of our time and ability, such as may be witnessed among people kept waiting by a hairdresser.' Ask Alain de Botton what set him on the path to becoming a philosopher, and he will tell you that it was not Plato's dialogues or Nietzsche's diktats, but Connolly's aphorisms. The Unquiet Grave was the first book he read which made widespread use of philosophy, and he regrets that no one under 35 seems to have heard of it.

'The accusation most often levelled at it is that it is a work of self-indulgence,' he says: 'an accusation that fails to distinguish between talking a lot about yourself, which can be very entertaining, and being self-centred, which never is. Connolly did a lot of the former, but was not the latter. The book is a seductive mixture of diary, commonplace book, essay, travelogue and memoir - arranged in loose paragraphs, in which Connolly gives us his views on women, religion, death, seduction, infatuation and literature. The thoughts are wise, dark, and beautifully modelled, with the balance of the best French aphorisms.' The charm of the work, he adds, lies in the narrator's mischievous, melancholy tone as he shifts between the sublime and the banal.

De Botton himself has been unafraid to link the high-flown with the commonplace: indeed, no one among the writers of today has done more to demonstrate the relevance of philosophy to everyday existence. With books such as How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, he has managed against the odds to make his academic discipline cool without seeming pretentious. Another important influence on him in this respect has been Roland Barthes:

'Barthes spent much of his career writing about the most ordinary things: washing powder, the Eiffel Tower, falling in love, short- and long-hemmed skirts, photographs of his mother. And yet he brought a classical education and a philosophical mind to bear on these subjects. He knew how to connect Racine and beach holidays, Freud and the anticipation of a lover's phone call. His work rejected the division between the high and the low: like so many modern artists - Joyce and Beckett, Duchamp and Joseph Cornell - he could see the deeper themes running through supposedly banal things.'

He emphasises, however, that his debt to Barthes lies in style and approach rather than ideas: 'Barthes's next to last book, A Lover's Discourse helped me to shape my first book, On Love. His On Racine and Michelet were godfathers to How Proust Can Change Your Life.'

Now 37 and based in London, de Botton spent the early years of his life in Switzerland before going to school in England. Does he consider nationality to be a beneficial idea?

'To feel pride in more than just oneself and one's family is a wonderful relief from egoism,' he replies. 'It is just unfortunate that it is extremely hard to make meaningful connections with millions of people, as nationalism requires us to do. The Ancient Greeks felt proud of their cities, but then, these city states only numbered a few thousand. So the big problem of modern nationalism is size.'

As for the quest for a European identity, 'There are certainly ideals which you could pin to Europe, like a concern for the environment, an awareness of history, an interest in culture, a conscience towards the poor. This doesn't mean that all Europeans will feel sympathetic to this list, but there's no harm in putting it forward.' He hypothesises that this identity may be growing stronger in the face of challenges from China, India and the US - on the grounds that these make Europeans think about what they have in common.

His own writing is very much in a European tradition, because, he says, it was the one he grew up with - 'Though that didn't necessarily mean I understood it. I wanted to write about Western philosophy to gain a conscious grasp of many ideas that I'd passively taken in during my childhood.' Asked where the centre of Western civilisation now lies, he replies, 'There isn't a geographical location. Western civilisation resides in certain books, films, works of art and people that are constantly moving around. One could - for example - argue that Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard are emblematic figures of Western civilisation, both of them highly mobile.'

But while mobility was the subject of one of his most recent books, The Art of Travel, he believes that in the future more and more people will find 'the confidence to stay at home':

'Weeds will grow through the atriums of the world's big airports and vast concrete hotels will stand empty. We will by then have grasped what is essential to successful travel: we will have understood that our deepest problems and anxieties are not resolved by transporting ourselves somewhere else.'

It might appear that we live in an unusually anxious age, with the threat of global warming and terrorism ever present: but as de Botton observes, 'There is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order could soon disappear would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe.'

The difference, he says, is one brought about by the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 'We have always known ourselves to be short-sighted and murderous. We have only in the past few generations learnt that we are also very powerful. We have been blessed with enough intelligence to alter our fates in a way no other animal can, while being denied enough wisdom to keep our baser sides under control.'

What sets environmental destruction apart is that those responsible feel no aggression towards their fellow humans: 'However, we are daily reminded that innocent quotidian actions have a cumulative destructive potential greater than an A-bomb. We have been asked to reconceive of ourselves as unthinking killers.'

Given this sorry state of affairs, does professional contemplation of the human condition ever become too much for him? In reply, he points to Ancient Greek culture, which 'understood very well that enlightened moments should coexist with moments of intoxication and abandon. Hence the idea of the Dionysiac festival.' We may not have such festivals today, but, he adds mischievously, 'There are alternatives when thinking becomes too much!'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.