Alain de Botton

Thinker Alain de Botton talks to Alistair Duncan about his content in West London and life’s big questions

Above: Alain de Botton © Vincent Starr

    Writer and thinker Alain de Botton has applied his restless, inquisitive mind to a plethora of elusive themes: love, travel, happiness and the soothing effects of philosophy on the soul have all come under his searching gaze, in books, then frequently in accompanying television series. 

    His demeanour is coolly intelligent; eloquent, meditative yet highly accessible. One of his great aims is to democratize philosophy, take the big questions in life and ponder them in a language that is intelligible to the average person. ‘What we’ve seen in the modern
age is an elitist approach to the big questions,’ he explains. ‘So only scientific professionals can discuss the meaning of life and preferably, they should do it in an incredibly obscure way. That’s wrong. There has to be a marketplace of ideas, a public forum for everyone.’

   I get the sense, speaking to de Botton, that he derives an impish pleasure in sticking two fingers up to dusty academics, as he demystifies their work before Joe Public. But then, he has always been a heretic. From the start, he has been attracted to oblique approaches to subject matters.

   His first book, Essays in Love – published when the Cambridge graduate was just 23 – was a novel about falling in and out of love but was largely essayistic in tone. The book that brought him to prominence in 1997, How Proust Can Change Your Life, was a self-help book that doubled as a commentary on the life and works of French writer Marcel Proust. 

   His subsequent writing has been targeted at topics not normally given the highbrow treatment – travel, ‘status-anxiety’ and most importantly, how to be happy.
His latest theme is architecture. ‘The origins of the book were really in a dissatisfaction of the world’s architecture’, he explains. ‘A lot of the world is quite ugly if you think about it. It’s full of pretty bad stuff, architecturally. Why is that? I want to ask that childlike question: ‘what’s
a good building?’’

   De Botton’s own home is situated between Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. He was attracted to the late Victorian terraced house because of its style and history. ‘What’s interesting about this part of London is that it shows what lower middle class life was like at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was boom time then. People who were probably occupying low, clerical jobs in the city were for the first time buying these large houses that aped the houses in Notting Hill. There’s nothing showy or dramatic about them but they’ve got pleasing facades and are generously proportioned. They’re basically houses made by developers but they look a good deal better than anything Barratt Homes would build you now.’

    Born in 1969 in Zurich, Switerzland de Botton is the son of a Jewish financier. At an early age, he was sent to boarding school in England, where he excelled academically. At Cambridge, he received a double first in history and philosophy. He then started a PhD at Harvard in French philosophy but abandoned it to turn his hand to writing, with four of his books getting published before his 30th birthday.

   When I interview writers, I’m often surprised to find how many of them hate the actual process of writing. I ask him if he loathes it as well – or does it give him a buzz? ‘I do find myself procrastinating – changing all the lightbulbs before I settle down to work,’ he concedes. ‘But writing is very hard. The human animal is designed to chat, to sit about and do stuff. To actually set out your thoughts very precisely on a piece of paper about a topic is an agonizing process.’

   I ask de Botton which pockets of West London fire his imagination, where he heads to in moments of creative frustration. He reveals a muse that rather wrong-foots me. ‘Tesco’s in Brook Green has been a favourite place for inspiration,’ he says, completely seriously. ‘I’ve often stopped in the aisle, at the biscuit section, and written something down in a notebook that has been eluding me all morning. The thing about writing is that you never quite know when you’re at work. It’s often when you’re sitting at the desk that you’re not doing anything properly productive. It’s when you pop out to Tesco’s that suddenly the ideas come.’

   He may well find inspiration in the biscuit section but he does also admit that he likes strolling along the river (‘the view by Hammersmith Bridge is one of London’s greatest views’) and he likes popping off for the occasional drink at The Havelock pub on Masbro Road, as well as tasting the tapas delights of Los Molinos restaurant on Shepherd’s Bush Road.

   Back to intellectual matters, though, and I bring up for discussion the accusation that he is lowering the bar for philosophical debate, with his coffee-table approach to the great questions in life. This is the criticism that has dogged de Botton over the years, with sniffy academics and other professionals claiming he is somehow sullying their important work. ‘There can be a strange snobbery, that somehow it’s cheapening the great debate,’ he says. ‘My view is: let’s cheapen it – if the alternative is just to talk about David Beckham’s love life or Big Brother for example. I’d rather have a slightly cheaper discussion of Aristotle’s ethics than that.’ There’s a steely note of resilience as he says this; I wonder, as a final thought, how much courage it has taken on his part to step out of the academic circle from whence he came, and discuss philosophical matters in as popularising a manner as he has. Has he been brave?

   ‘There’s heroism of all sorts in various areas of life,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t want to make great claims. But I suppose there is courage in writing books that don’t neatly fit
into an existing tradition. You do have to develop a thick skin for criticism. I suppose what gets me through the day is a feeling of responsibility. I don’t want to let completely lowbrow stuff always fill the public realm.’
Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness is published by Penguin at £9.99; www.penguin.co.uk; www.alaindebotton.com