Introduction

I have always had an interest in philosophy and took a few modules on the subject at university. I was even tempted at one stage to take philosophy as part of my degree, but I chose not to because I was turned-off by how disconnected it had become from the real world. Looking back over the centuries, philosophy was a pursuit to help people understand the world around them and how to achieve happiness and success in life, as well as use it to help them overcome pain, struggle or difficulty. Over the last 50 years with the ‘scientification’ of social science that has been lost.

Alain de Botton is one of the few voices leading the resurgence of this old way of thinking and I loved reading his book ‘Consolations of Philosophy’. His fundamental aim was to take the lessons taught by great Philosophers in the past and apply them to the modern world to help us deal with the difficulties of life today. Specifically, de Botton in this book takes six of the common trials and tribulations modern life and provides consolations to these from famous philosophers over human history. Reading this book will arm you with the knowledge and quotes to be able to rationalise and deal well with whatever throws at you.

As (almost) always with my book reviews I have tried to highlight with speech marks where I have taken direct quotes from the book. Where quotes aren’t used, I have made conclusions or reduced down the points I believe the author to be making. Apologies if anything hasn’t been quoted correctly.

Consolation of Unpopularity – Socrates 

• Socrates lived and taught through the ethos, ‘think for yourself’.
• Established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. Always be aware of this and don’t be afraid to challenge status quo & ‘common sense’
• Direct attention away from the presence of unpopularity and onto the explanations for it.
• Socrates death taught us that; ‘we should not always or never listen to dictates of public opinion. We should instead strive to always listen to dictates of reason.’

Consolation for Not Having Enough Money – Epicurean

• Epicurean’s guide to happiness has three core components:
  • Friendship – we don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing.
  • Freedom – enjoyed simplicity & self-reliance.
  • Thought – the remedy for anxiety, analysing anxieties about money, illness, death etc. will help you deal with them.
• If you have money without the above core components you can’t be happy, but if you have these 3 without money you’ll never be unhappy.
• Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
• ‘Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one’ – to put this in a modern context, you might buy an expensive SUV, but really it freedom you are looking for.

Consolation for Frustration – Seneca

• At the heart of frustration lies ‘collision of a wish with unyielding reality’.
• ‘Our frustrations are tempted by what we understand we can expect from the world’.
• Anger and frustration are strongly related, we are made angry by optimistic notions that aren’t reality.
• ‘We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful’
• ‘Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything, we must hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times’
• A Senecan Praemeditatio:
  • ‘[The wise] will start each day with a thought…
  • Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
  • Nothing, whether public or private, is stable: the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
  • Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in as single day.
  • No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortunate; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
  • How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake?
  • How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
  • We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die
  • Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
  • Reckon on everything, expect everything.’
• Injustice: ‘Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us’.
• Anxiety: Don’t palm it off as irrational (reassurance) otherwise you feel injustice if does happen. Instead do a logical reduction to understand what implications will be. Soon see those are not as bad as you first feared.
• Do more than logical reduction, live off stale bread & soup for a week ‘is this really the condition that I feared’. Once experienced that really not so bad won’t be made anxious by it again.
• ‘Stoicism does not recommend poverty, it recommends that we neither fear not despise it’.
• ‘We should not import into scenarios where they don’t belong pessimistic interpretations of others motives’ – i.e. don’t be annoyed when someone is doing something that annoys you, they aren’t doing it purposefully.
• ‘We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom’

Consolation for Inadequacy – Montaigne

• Montaigne believed that misplaced confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy – and, indirectly, also of inadequacy.
• Inadequacy of our bodies stems from an absence of honest discussion about them in public.
• ‘By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudices and the self-division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world’
• What matters is wisdom not learning. Books should be judged on usefulness & appropriateness to life, not the complexity of language they use.
• ‘If we attend properly to our experiences and learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for an intellectual life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive at insights no less profound than those in the great ancient books’.
• ‘A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough’

Consolation for a Broken Heart – Schopenhauer

• Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his concept of ‘will-of-life’ that drives love.
• ‘By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable…Schopenhauer’s theory of will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behavior to which love so often makes us subject’
• ‘It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan’…the only part of the plan was re-production.
• ‘There is consolation in realising that our case is only one of thousands…We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge’

Consolation for Difficulties – Nietzche

• ‘The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources if our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains….Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience’
• ‘We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment’
• Nietzche had significant faith in human potential & extreme toughness
• Nietzche believed that hard work & persistence takes you from mediocrity through pain to fulfilment
• ‘We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from more’. I.e. Don’t knock yourself for having anger, vanity, jealousy, but use it to motivate & grow yourself.
• Don’t declare things evil or bad just because they have been hard to achieve, always strive from them and fight through the pain to get there.
• ‘Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad’