Alex Klaushofer

The Consolations of Philosophy , Alain de Botton (Hamish Hamilton) £14.99/$23.00

Philosophy, in the modern Anglo-American world, lives a life apart. While a few hundred academics talk amongst themselves, most people seeking insight into themselves and the world turn elsewhere, to the psychological understandings offered by therapy or to the variety of old beliefs now gathered under the New Age banner. Philosophy's current isolation could not contrast more strongly with its traditional self-understanding as the subject for interpreting the world.

Given this, the aspiration to coax philosophy down from her ivory tower seems a noble one, making the latest attempt to do so, from Alain de Botton, well-placed to succeed. But The Consolations of Philosophy fails horribly, because its core project - to derive bite-sized nuggets of consolation from the wisdom of the ages - is fundamentally misguided. This is not, as the hard-headed naturalist might claim, because philosophy has nothing meaningful to say about how one should live, but rather because, as mystics and myth-keepers have always known, a passage through difficulty and darkness is necessary to reach enlightenment. Philosophy too recognises the necessity of the via negativa: witness, for example, how the encounter with death and the nothing in Heidegger is the gateway to the ineradicable level of meaning he calls Being; the pain at the heart of Kierkegaard's existential fideism; the pervasive shadow of the holocaust in Levinas' work

Difficulty, too, is part of the process and experience of reading philosophy, whereby the reader tries to expand her mind to meet another's: think of what's involved in trying to grasp Hegel's thought. Even in the more workaday area of epistemology the going is tough, as philosophy's critical, questioning approach reflects the difficulty of the task in hand: recall Kant's struggle with the apparently intractable problem of reason.

De Botton's book tries to strip philosophy of this, hitching it to a self-help enterprise which produces off-the-peg tips for happy living. De Botton draws a variety of conclusions from the six philosophers he chooses, including: money isn't everything (Epicurus), love is difficult (Schopenhauer) and self-esteem is to be cultivated (Montaigne). It's an approach which solves problems before they've been allowed to surface, never mind reach the nuanced articulation at which philosophy has excelled.

Neither does the consolation-at-all-costs approach offer much succour, yielding some odd, rather unhelpful, conclusions. In the chapter offering solace to the broken-hearted, we are introduced to Schopenhauer's theory of the 'will to life', a precursor of evolutionary biology, which absolves us of personal responsability for our amatory failures. If it wasn't to be, this is by reason of our genes, therefore we have no cause to grieve. Apart from the obvious emotional obtuseness of such reasoning, it's ironic that an uncritical espousal of the evolutionary account of the human condition - which anyway is much better expressed by Dawkins et al - has quite rightly been given short shrift by philosophy. Neither does Schopenhauer's life seem to qualify him for the position of 'Dr Love' (de Botton's term in the accompanying TV series). A lifelong bachelor, Schopenhauer's refusal to marry his mistress and mother of his child at a time when this would deeply damage her social and economic status is hardly the behaviour of a loving spirit.

The mix of genres that de Botton deploys in the book is potentially interesting, but actually confusing. A blend of philosophical biography and exposition, with gestures to popular culture and cultural criticism, and glimpses of the author's own life experiences, makes for a multi-genre lacking in focus which reveals little of import about the subject it's treating. Where the writing does settle down, as in the Nietzsche chapter, there's evidence of a burgeoning talent for the new, hybrid genre of philosophical biography-criticism.

But de Botton's personal agenda - to give the sturm and drang view of love contemporary expression in his own life - keeps muscling in. He recounts how, on a train journey, he sees an 'angel' and asks her for a biro. In the TV programme on Schopenhauer, he interviews Michelle, recently jilted by her fiancee for whom, she says, she would have given up home, job and country. After a lengthy discourse attempting to console her on genetic grounds, de Botton asks her out to dinner. On screen he gets a laugh, and later, the girl. But Philosophy, for her part, would do well to suspect de Botton is not interested in her for herself and, rebuffing his dishonourable intentions, simply turn on her heel.