Nur ein Artikel.. in aller Eile
Lieber ...,
Ich
schicke dir diesen Artikel über Alain de Bottons Buch.
Somit kannst du ein wenig "brush up your English". :-)
---.
Humphrey Carpenter in The Sunday Times
Six of the best, in deep thought
"There
are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss
each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a
dearth." So wrote the essayist Montaigne in the late 16th century, and,
at first glance, Alain de Botton’s new book seems to run a risk by
quoting this remark in its chapter on Montaigne, since the book itself
exemplifies this trend, which has continued unabated since Montaigne’s
day.
The Consolations of Philosophy is certainly a commentary rather
than a work of original thought; but few discussions on the great
philosophers can have been so entertaining. De Botton takes us on a
brisk, playful tour of the lives and ideas of half-a-dozen of the big
names in the history of philosophy, done in the manner of his celebrated
How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Short, often whimsical passages of
prose are punctuated with little pictures dotted around the text. As in
the Proust book, these have occasionally been chosen with irritating
facetiousness - for example, the passing mention of chocolate milk gives
rise to a photograph of a packet of NesQuik. Yet most are thoroughly
justifiable. The pictures of Schopenhauer sunk in a typical angry gloom
and of Nietzsche sporting a ridiculous moustache like a hearth-brush
superbly complement de Botton’s verbal portraits of these two restless
thinkers. Even better, the weeping Adam and Eve from Masaccio’s fresco
of the Expulsion from Eden provides an eloquent visual climax to the
excellent chapter about Schopenhauer’s analysis of misery.
De
Botton’s title alludes, unacknowledged, to the De Consolatione
Philosophiae of the 6th-century philosopher Boethius, but de Botton uses
"consolation" in an entirely modern sense. His tour begins with a
chapter called Consolation for Unpopularity, which is about Socrates.
The title and its subject-matter don’t really mesh here, since Socrates
didn’t care two figs that he was unpopular with the Athenian rabble, who
had him sentenced to death because they blamed him for the city’s
misfortunes. Moreover de Botton’s exposition of the Socratic method
(philosophy by question-and-answer) doesn’t improve on, or add to,
Plato’s readable accounts of his old teacher. How could it?
In
contrast, the Greek philosopher Epicurus gets a witty chapter with a
fresh feel, entitled Consolation for Not Having Enough Money. De Botton
begins it by listing the constituent parts of his imaginary ideal
lifestyle but, as it progresses, the chapter shows us that Epicurus,
supposedly the high priest of hedonism, actually preferred water to
wine, bread and cheese to fancy cooking, and the company of friends to
limitless wealth. Consequently, de Botton (aided by appropriate
illustrations) revises his list to a few simple needs, of which the most
important is friendship.
The chapter Consolation for Frustration
unpacks the stoicism of Seneca, who (among other things) warns us
against getting into rages with inanimate objects. De Botton might have
cited John Cleese in Fawlty Towers beating his car with a tree-branch
when it won’t start. Instead he retells the legend of Cyrus, king of
Persia, who was so furious with the river which had drowned his
favourite horse that he wasted military time by ordering his army to
punish it by dividing it into 360 feeble little channels.
Following
current fashion, de Botton makes the book into something of a personal
quest. Every so often he drops little pieces of autobiography - or maybe
fiction - into the narrative. In the chapter on Montaigne, Consolation
for Inadequacy, we glimpse him experiencing impotence on holiday; and in
the Schopenhauer chapter, Consolation for a Broken Heart, he chats up a
girl on a train, but is rejected. Finally, in the Nietzsche chapter,
Consolation for Difficulties, he climbs one of Nietzsche’s favourite
Alps, and recites some of the philosopher’s words, but it exhausts him.
These
self-deprecating personal touches are quite unnecessary. When de Botton
sticks to the facts, he always has a story to tell - and tells it with
sparkle. Montaigne is the most charming member of his cast, a man who
should have been a book-reviewer, since he declared that if we find a
book incomprehensible we should blame the author rather than ourselves.
On
the other hand, the prize for ideas-ahead-of-their-time should probably
go to Schopenhauer, who wrote with immense shrewdness on falling in
love, despite - or perhaps because of - being rejected by every woman he
ever wooed. He anticipated Richard Dawkins in perceiving that the
apparently selfless process of falling in love is, in fact, governed by
the extreme selfishness of our genes. De Botton writes with tender
sympathy about the eccentric philosopher, who argued "this world could
not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather that of a
devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in
the sight of their sufferings".
Nietzsche, with whom the book
concludes, began as a disciple of the deeply depressive Schopenhauer,
but then developed his own manic views about mankind. (Of course, at
this point de Botton’s account of Nietzsche’s theory of the Ubermensch
has to be comically illustrated with a drawing of Superman.) Not
altogether surprisingly, Nietzsche eventually went mad, and throughout
The Consolations of Philosophy there is a slightly uncomfortable
contrast between the usually painful, struggling lives of the
philosophers themselves and de Botton’s urbane, faintly giggly
detachment as he narrates their stories.
Nevertheless this is an
ingenious, imaginative book which will not disappoint fans of How Proust
Can Change Your Life, and might even win over a few readers to study
philosophy at a more demanding level.
