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Alain de Botton, the writer and philosopher, is editing a series of how-to books, a genre he says academe has unreasonably disparaged.
Writing self-help books was once a staple for philosophers. Then came the modern university.
So charges Alain de Botton, an idiosyncratic public intellectual who in 2008 founded the School of Life, in London. Its stated mission is to make learning—academic and other—relevant to everyday life. Such an approach is needed, de Botton argues, because from the mid-19th century, when universities became the main employers of philosophers, they have been rewarded “not for being useful or consoling, but for getting facts right.”
At the School of Life—which is about to open a branch in Melbourne, Australia—psychologists, journalists, and a few academics lead courses akin to university-extension programs. But the institution lays claim to being more steeped in considered thought about such issues as how to live more fully and satisfyingly by, for example, decluttering, being confident, and having better conversations.
Now de Botton and his colleagues are producing a series of guides to such existential quandaries as how to change the world, stay sane, find fulfilling work, and think more clearly about sex. Picador Original is publishing the series, called The School of Life, in the United States, Macmillan in Britain.
The series sits at the philosophical end of the self-help continuum; authors work in a proud tradition that academe has unreasonably disparaged, de Botton argues. They offer brass-tacks advice with a populist bent, but their prose is unlike that of most self-help books: It’s not just direct, but also measured and grounded in broad reading, thinking, and clinical practice in psychology and other realms. Inherent in the books’ pitch is the belief that self-help volumes, often reliant on shallow acquaintance with Buddhism, psychoanalysis, or other systems of learning and thought, tend to be overly prescriptive, reductionist, or ignorant while they indulge a Western obsession with instant gratification and the healing of life’s wounds.
De Botton, “curator” of the School of Life series, was born in Zurich in 1969 and lives in London. His works of popular philosophy, which he has been writing since the age of 23, have included such best sellers as How Proust Can Change Your Life, Status Anxiety, and The Architecture of Happiness. His books have drawn praise for their crystalline takes on complex subjects and for their acute but empathetic meditations on human folly.
He begins his contribution to the series, How to Think More About Sex, by proposing that most people obsess about that subject without considering it soberly. Those people, de Botton explains in an e-mail interview, are “haunted by guilt and neuroses, by phobias and disruptive desires, by indifference and disgust.” He suggests that reasoned books are needed “to suggest how, through a shared language, we might begin to feel a little less painfully strange about the sex we are either longing to have or struggling to avoid.” To that end, he surveys sex manuals over the ages, the neuroscience of romantic attraction, and cultural understandings of abstract concepts like the self and life.
Of course, de Botton acknowledges, “anyone wanting to damage their intellectual credentials at a stroke need only do one simple thing: confess they read self-help books,” let alone write them. And yet, he notes, the ancients were so intent on being useful that for them “most of philosophy simply was self-help.” Epicurus wrote 300 self-help books, like On Love, On Justice, and On Human Life. Seneca advised his fellow Romans on how to cope with anger. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is “one of the finest works of self-help ever written, as relevant to someone facing a financial meltdown as the disintegration of an empire.”
As early as the 1500s, de Botton notes, “Montaigne deplored the way in which academics tended to privilege learning over wisdom.” That effect was hastened in the 1800s, he says: The modern university became the major employer of philosophers and intellectuals, and the demise of the informed self-help book soon followed. Turning to a philosopher or historian to become wise was considered “laughably idealistic and adolescent.” That angers de Botton: “There’s a maddening snobbery among intellectuals about anyone who tries to write a book that could in some way be useful or enlightening to the mass of the population.”
That is why he and a group of “similarly disaffected academics, artists, and writers” started the School of Life. They wish to reach people of varied educational backgrounds—"to speak without speaking up or down.”
Many of the school’s instructors are public intellectuals, for lack of a better term: journalists with a record of cogent public comment, a psychologist or psychiatrist or two, a few academics deemed never to have fallen into a higher-education rut.
Forthcoming in May are How to Change the World, by the broadcaster and journalist John-Paul Flintoff, and How to Find Fulfilling Work, by the School of Life co-founder Roman Krznaric . The series will add about four titles a year, covering such topics as nature, money, children, and creativity.
The author of the other initial release in the series, Philippa Perry, is a psychotherapist. In her How to Stay Sane, she translates both common-sense and obscure insights from her clinical practice into comprehensible prose.
Although highly readable, the book is not self-consciously aphoristic or simplifying. In preparing her book, she says, she sought to use experiences in her own life and practice. For example, she went to a performance of a Wagner opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, “so the story of that found its way into the book. I like to mix art, observations from my work, my reading, my conversations, and research.”
Her personal experience matters to her book’s theme, she writes. After all, taking stock of one’s own experience is essential when striving “to remain stable and yet flexible, coherent and yet able to embrace complexity.”
