Congenial, refreshing, original—and mercifully succinct—de Botton may well achieve the impossible by making philosophy...
Having changed lives with the help of a French writer (How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997), de Botton now seeks to offer those lives needed consolation—and specific advice—with the writings of some of the world's most illustrious philosophers.
If too many nowadays find thinkers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer stifling and irrelevant, they need only turn to this witty, engaging book to see how wrong they are. These men—de Botton also calls on Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, and Montaigne—were in their own sometimes abstruse ways actually giving some downtoearth, practical advice about how to cope with life's miseries and frustrations. De Botton is an able and companionable guide as he demonstrates, for example, how Socrates proves there are things far more consoling than popularity. He turns to Epicurus for advice on how to cope with not having enough money. Montaigne—clearly de Botton's darling among the group—has the most earthy advice. The great essayist soothes, even bolsters, his readers in the face of impotence, flatulence, and other errant bodily functions. Montaigne was a man who looked at life with a gimlet eye and saw through pretense. Friendship, the gentleman from Bordeaux declared, was the most important thing—that, and accepting yourself. The misanthrope Schopenhauer then steps forward to explain why people pick the wrong partners in love: the choice is based—subconsciously but definitively—on creating the best offspring. Realize that, and you'll see your bad marriage as completely logical. Finally, Nietzsche declares that we should be reconciled to suffering: ``We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid.'' Or, as de Botton sums it up, ``Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us.'' De Botton applies these insights to contemporary situations, and he even writes about his own temporary impotence and subsequent cure by Montaigne. That's great consolation indeed.
Congenial, refreshing, original—and mercifully succinct—de Botton may well achieve the impossible by making philosophy popular.Pub Date: April 28, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44276-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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