Dr. Feelgood

Let’s be honest: None of us has enough time to read everything we ought to or even want to. As the stack of books we should read to be culturally literate grows ever higher, competing as it does with CDs everyone seems to be listening to and movies it would be good to have an opinion about, even the weight of the Sunday papers pushes us dangerously close to the question: Can I really fit this in?

In an increasingly servant-based culture, we do the sensible thing: Pay other people to read for us. The cheapest way to do this, of course, is to buy a book review. (My job as reviewer is essentially to be a reader-for-hire.) Here we can find out, at the very least, what’s out there and how much of what’s out there is considered worth reading. Incidentally, we can pick up enough information on a book to hold up our end of a conversation if someone should happen to refer to it. At the higher end of the market, we can buy and read an author who reads other authors for us and offers up tasty nuggets of their thought for his own time-strapped readership.

The English writer Alain de Botton has set up a neat line for himself in this racket. His perky 1997 volume, “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” was a well-researched but light-handed gloss on “In Search of Lost Time,” which interspersed biographical sketches of Proust with quotations from his great work, leaving readers not just entertained and enlightened but also with a slyly flattering sensation that they had themselves read Proust or at the very least understood the important things he had to say. One could enjoy Proust’s views on “How to Be Happy in Love” or “How to Express Your Emotions” in a book that was accessible and short, even illustrated. Who knew Proust could be so breezy?

In his new book, “The Consolations of Philosophy,” De Botton takes the same approach with six philosophers, from Socrates to Nietzsche, with less happy results. De Botton stashes a justification for his method in one of the book’s best chapters, on Montaigne, where he writes that clever people should get their ideas “from people even cleverer than they are. They should spend their time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge.” To take on six philosophers is very different from taking on one novelist, however, and if in “How Proust” the author’s wry lovelorn sensibility seemed reasonably matched with his subject (though his cute faux-naif tone threatened to sound precious), here the benign guide simply seems out of his depth.

That De Botton directs a graduate program in philosophy in London is bewildering--as he sounds nothing like a philosopher--to the great relief of his publishers, no doubt. He writes not only as if there were no contemporary discipline of philosophy, with figures such as Richard Rorty or Bernard Williams producing thought-provoking works, but also as if he were unaware of what makes philosophy exciting: its promise to tell us something about what the world is (metaphysics) or how to behave (ethics) or what we can know (epistemology). For De Botton, none of this is of interest. In his view, philosophers are united by “a common interest in saying a few consoling and practical things about the causes of our greatest griefs.” It is philosophy as therapy, and truth--surely philosophy’s own holy Grail--does not get a look-in. Williams’ view, that “if philosophy, or anything like it, is to have a point, the idea of ‘getting it right’ must be in place,” is rejected by De Botton in favor of the pragmatic question: But does it help?

This deliberately anti-philosophical approach--in which the investigation is only important insofar as it might provide solace, say, for heartbreak--might not pall so if the wisdoms De Botton discovered were genuinely helpful or, as he would put it, consoling. He is setting out to write a lay person’s book, after all. Yet, though there are moments when De Botton stumbles upon a nicely humanist wisdom--in both Epicurus and Montaigne he finds lovely hymns to the value of friendship--on the whole his conclusions are remarkably banal, as is suggested by his chapter headings (“Consolation for Difficulties,” “Consolation for Frustration”).

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Thus, De Botton examines Socrates not for his many views on politics or justice or even love but for how he might provide “Consolation for Unpopularity.” De Botton focuses on Socrates’ being condemned to death by fellow Athenians who distrusted his unconventional questioning stance and allows this to lead, with almost comic deflation, to his own reflection that “social life is beset with disparities between other’s perceptions of us and our reality.” To follow Socrates, De Botton tells us, we must learn to think for ourselves. (Isn’t Apple Computer constantly telling us something similar?) Later, De Botton summarizes Nietzsche’s complex thoughts on the value of difficulty and struggle in our efforts toward fulfillment with the lines: “Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts us may be bad.” Compare this with De Botton’s similar, but altogether more graceful, reading of Proust: “We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context, it helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to its presence.”

In taking a USA Today approach to his selection of philosophers--peppering the text with tables, pictures (of a goat he saw near Montaigne’s chateau; of the decorations he would choose for his private jet, if he had one) and randomly enumerated thoughts and including brief autobiographical anecdotes along the way (such as how reading Montaigne made him feel better after a brief episode of impotence)--De Botton seems to be trying to jolly us along. He writes with appealing frankness of his own tendency toward ingratiation and of his lack of self-confidence, and you can see both at play in this work, in which he tries to distract us from any consideration of his book’s intellectual content. You begin to sense that De Botton is apologizing for the fact that he’s writing a book at all, that he is trying to write something that will seem as easy as, say, television.

Then again, it is television. In Britain, the series based on this book has started to air. It seems by far the more appropriate medium for it (if not quite as good as the recent BBC version of De Botton’s Proust book, which benefited from Ralph Fiennes’ handsome performance as the melancholy Marcel). Driving around London with a van driver frustrated by bad traffic, De Botton benevolently dispenses Seneca’s advice on dealing with anger; lounging in a young woman’s room, discussing her boyfriend’s abrupt walking out on her, De Botton sympathetically shares Schopenhauer’s wisdom on a broken heart. De Botton explains Schopenhauer’s view on the Will-to-Life and how her boyfriend must have rejected her not for any personal failings but rather because on a biological level he did not want to have children with her. “But isn’t that sad?” the woman asks reasonably; whereupon the amiable De Botton can only admit that it is sad and then sweetly offer his last best consolation: an invitation to dinner.

If this volume is half as successful as the Proust book, we can surely expect other future De Botton readings of the great works. It’s tempting to guess which authors might be next in line for his illustrated self-help treatment (Joyce was from Mars, Woolf was from Venus, perhaps?). I would say that De Botton, himself a novelist, has more to offer with his readings of literature than with any further philosophical excursions.

In “The Consolations of Philosophy,” it is in De Botton’s passing readings of Stendhal, or Goethe that his prose comes to life and his eye finally sharpens, and we begin to suspect that under this elaborately constructed authorial persona is a passionate reader--one who turns to great novels when he is seeking consolation.