Socrates on TV, Courtesy of Alain de Botton (2000)

We could call Alain de Bot­ton, in the clas­si­cal sense, a philo­soph­i­cal ama­teur: that is, one who loves phi­los­o­phy. But not every­body loves the way he approach­es the field. His 2000 book The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy drew a par­tic­u­lar­ly sharp line through the crit­ics: some found great refresh­ment in the acces­si­bil­i­ty he grant­ed philoso­phers like Seneca and Schopen­hauer by fram­ing them in an unex­pect­ed­ly sin­cere par­o­dy of a self-help book; oth­ers judged this method inad­e­quate to deal with the thinkers’ true seri­ous­ness and com­plex­i­ty. This clicks right in with what seems like de Bot­ton’s grand mis­sion: tak­ing West­ern civ­i­liza­tion’s most respect­ed words, writ­ten and spo­ken, and using them to adjust the nuts and bolts of our mod­ern, every­day pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. He wrote anoth­er book called How Proust Can Change Your Life; he estab­lished a school which offers cours­es like “How to Bal­ance Work with Life” and “How to Be Cool;” and his lat­est project involves adapt­ing reli­gion for use by athe­ists (watch relat­ed video here).

No sur­prise, then, that de Bot­ton’s work would extend to that most com­mon medi­um, tele­vi­sion, with a series called Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. You can watch a num­ber of episodes on YouTube, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to “Socrates on Self-Con­fi­dence.” Zip­ping through the streets of Athens on a canary-yel­low Ves­pa, de Bot­ton tells us of the life and meth­ods of the fifth-cen­tu­ry-BC philoso­pher who seems to remain the dis­ci­pline’s most famous prac­ti­tion­er. Illus­trat­ing Socrates’ famous habit of pub­lic inter­ro­ga­tion, de Bot­ton strolls up to oth­er vis­i­tors in the mar­ket­place, ask­ing them to define the idea of jus­tice or their con­cep­tion of their per­son­al life. The answers don’t come eas­i­ly: a French­woman strug­gles to respond even when our intre­pid host shifts into her lan­guage, and a reli­gious­ly out­fit­ted local blows him off with­out even slow­ing down. A few hearty Aus­tralian trav­el­ers — a breed found at every point on the map, cra­dles of phi­los­o­phy and oth­er­wise — do lay out their self-styled philoso­phies with­out hes­i­ta­tion, but de Bot­ton has plen­ty more places to go and peo­ple to see, like a focus group whose vol­ley of opin­ions would have sum­moned Socrates’ gravest reser­va­tions about democ­ra­cy, and a pot­ter who crafts a tan­gi­ble metaphor for Socrates’ notion of the well-test­ed, water­tight belief.

Those who’ve ques­tioned whether de Bot­ton knows how to han­dle phi­los­o­phy may well come away from these pro­grams con­vinced that he does­n’t. I, how­ev­er, find some­thing almost rad­i­cal in the way his demeanor, unyield­ing­ly straight­for­ward and nev­er for­get­ful of con­cerns oth­ers might dis­miss as mun­dane, inter­acts with the great works of the philo­soph­i­cal canon. I sense an almost strate­gic naïveté at work, and it takes him places, intel­lec­tu­al­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly, to which his clos­est peers in let­ters may nev­er get around. The stark­ly divid­ed reac­tion de Bot­ton draws shows, to my mind, that he’s being just the right kind of provoca­tive — in his gen­tle man­ner.

Com­plete set of links to Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness episodes: Socrates on Self-Con­fi­dence, Epi­cu­rus on Hap­pi­ness, Seneca on Anger, Mon­taigne on Self-Esteem, Niet­zsche on Hap­pi­ness

Relat­ed con­tent:

Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness

Alain de Bot­ton: The Glass of Life is Half-Emp­ty

Alain de Bot­ton Wants a Reli­gion for Athe­ists

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.