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| Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: Biography |
Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton's career to date has been spent writing books and making films that tackle questions of everyday life. They refer both to his own experiences and ideas -- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers of the past. His work has been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.'
He is perhaps best known for two books: How Proust can change your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy. In these works, de Botton considered the works of Marcel Proust and six great Western philosophers (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), and drew out of them ideas he found of particular value. Though sometimes described as works of 'popularisation,' the books are in fact attempts to develop original ideas (about, for example, friendship, art, envy, desire and inadequacy) with the help of the thoughts of great past thinkers. Not least in their titles, the books allude playfully to the genre of the self-help book. While de Botton is ready to be caustic about most contemporary works of self-help, he is powerfully drawn to one central, almost naïvely grand idea which they neatly capture: that a book should in some way help us to live. This idea would have been familiar to writers like Seneca, Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld, disappearing only with the growing professionalisation of scholarship in the 19th century -- and it is to this now often neglected tradition that de Botton is drawn.
Most recently, de Botton has written two books directly advancing his own philosophy of everyday life. In The Art of Travel, de Botton looked at themes in the psychology of travel: how we imagine places before we have seen them, how we remember beautiful things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, or stay in hotels or go to the countryside? The book was a mixture of intimate experiences and more abstract reflections.
In his latest book, his seventh, Status Anxiety, de Botton looked at an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. He defined this, for the first time, as 'status anxiety' -- and considered both the causes of, and possible consolations for, this condition.
De Botton has long been involved in making television documentaries based on his work. How Proust can change your Life was turned into a BBC film starring Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Kendal. De Botton subsequently wrote and presented two TV series based on The Consolations of Philosophy and Status Anxiety. These were originally made for Channel 4 in the UK and then shown on many stations around the world.
De Botton's works have been bestsellers -- selling in the many hundreds of thousands in many different territories over the last eleven years. In February 2003, de Botton was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of the France's highest artistic honours. In November of the same year, he was awarded the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon, whose previous recipients include Tzvetan Todorov, Roberto Calasso, Timothy Garton Ash and Jean Starobinski. In 2004, his book Status Anxiety was awarded the prize for the 'Economics Book of the Year' by the Financial Times, Germany.
Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and lives in London.
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