Alain de Botton is the closest Britain has to a celebrity intellectual; his learned Harrovian tones have become a regular fixture on prime time television and his books regularly top best-seller lists. Embracing popular media has earned de Botton a considerable readership, which is unsurprising given his preferred subjects’ broad appeal: his work, like his latest offering, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, tends to analyse aspects of everyday life.
However, de Botton’s ‘philosophy of the everyday’ has divided critical opinion, receiving glowing praise from some while suffering searing criticism from others. But if critics dislike him, academics hate him. He explains: ‘Academics don’t like me at all… they told me that my book on Proust was the worst they’d ever read.’ But this doesn’t trouble de Botton. Although often classified as such, he rarely considers himself an academic: ‘I don’t see myself as a philosopher, my background is in the history of ideas.’
‘But why work?’ I asked. He explains that work provides us with a purpose and orders our lives, but other reasons stick in my mind: ‘I enjoy the interested, not disinterested, pursuit of knowledge… and I still have lingering questions over my own career. I had a curiosity that I might discover something about myself.’
Despite his reluctance to accept the ‘intellectual’ label, his analysis is littered with references to academics: Freud, Rousseau and Weber to name a few. But it always remains accessible. For example, he explains what he believes we need for job satisfaction: ‘We want the job to feel meaningful… We [need to] have increased the pleasure or decreased the suffering of other individuals. But we don’t all need to be firemen or nurses; this can constitute reuniting someone with their luggage or sanding their banister.’
Sounds good to me, if a little obvious. I’d expect to be bored listening to a balding Cambridge graduate talking about United Biscuits, but I found myself engaged. Although he is talks about mundane subjects, often dressed up in pompous language, it’s near impossible to disagree with him. That being said, he does skirt over important issues with alarming casualness – financial security appeared in his analyses only as an afterthought.
Not only did de Botton’s explanation of his latest work have the ring of truth about it (kind of), it was often marvellously entertaining. ‘Offices are rather erotic places’ is one sentence I’m sure I won’t forget any time soon.
De Botton’s witty insights do make him an entertaining author, but for some, his playful, intelligent brand of self-help falls short this time round. He often sounds like he has never had a proper job, and hence his claims of personal career crises sometimes smack of insincerity. But, nevertheless, he also seemed capable of making sense of the rather more woolly areas surrounding work. Issues like meaning, satisfaction and the provision of order. So despite those reservations, I left content, thinking that he’d done a pretty good job of it.
