The Consolations of Philosophy

Six chapters, each pairing a problem with a philosopher. Socrates on being unpopular. Epicurus on not having money. Seneca on frustration. Montaigne on feeling inadequate. Schopenhauer on a broken heart. Nietzsche on difficulty.

The pairings are the book's device and they are chosen well: each philosopher is used for the thing they actually addressed rather than as a general authority.

Six problems, six philosophers, each used for the difficulty they genuinely wrote about.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

De Botton's method is biographical and practical. He gives enough of each life to make the ideas legible, then applies them directly to situations a reader will recognise.

The Montaigne chapter is the strongest: his argument that the body's indignities and one's own ordinariness are proper philosophical subjects is delivered through Montaigne's own preoccupation with exactly that.

This is philosophy as therapy rather than as analysis — the classical conception, which de Botton is explicitly reviving against the academic one.

Professional philosophers have objected that it simplifies and that the consolatory frame distorts several of the figures, particularly Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The objection is fair; so is de Botton's reply that the academy abandoned a use philosophy had for two thousand years.

Academics object that it simplifies. His reply is that philosophy had this use for two millennia.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Illustrated, conversational and short. It is a good first philosophy book for a reader who has bounced off primary texts, and a poor substitute for them afterwards.

Epicurus on what money actually buys — friends, freedom, thought, rather than possessions — is the chapter most readers remember.

Each chapter attaches one philosopher to one ordinary difficulty: Socrates on being unpopular, Epicurus on having little money, Seneca on frustration, Montaigne on feeling inadequate, Schopenhauer on a broken heart, and Nietzsche on hardship. The structure is the book's argument — that philosophy was originally addressed to precisely these problems.

The chapter that most changes a reader's assumptions concerns the philosopher whose name became a synonym for luxury, and who in fact argued for a very short list of genuine requirements: friends, freedom, thought, and enough food. De Botton uses him to separate what we want from what actually produces satisfaction.

The man whose name means indulgence thought you needed friends, freedom, and something to think about.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The material on inadequacy concentrates on embarrassment — the body, its functions, the gap between how a life is presented and how it is lived — and on Montaigne's decision to write about all of it plainly. The argument is that much suffering comes from believing your ordinary condition is an aberration.

The chapter on a broken heart uses a philosopher who explained romantic attachment as a biological drive with no regard for individual happiness. The consolation is unexpected: that the pain is impersonal, that it was never about your merits, and that the force operating through you did not have your interests in view.

The book is illustrated throughout with portraits, manuscripts, photographs and objects, and the visual material is doing deliberate work — locating the philosophers as people who lived somewhere, ate something and had faces, which is central to the argument that they were addressing lives rather than producing systems.

Academic readers have objected that the treatment is selective, that each thinker is reduced to whichever doctrine fits the chapter's problem, and that the wider systems are dropped. That criticism is fair as a description and misses the intent: the book is a work of popularisation making a case for philosophy's usefulness, not a survey.

It is the most accessible possible entry point and it is honest about being one. Its best effect is to send readers to the primary texts with a reason to be there — and it is unusually good at demonstrating that the questions philosophy started from are the ones people actually have.