The Art of Existence

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I want to thank Jason Hoult, Terri Kulak, Aaron Richmond, Meghan Scott, Matthew Teitelbaum, and Lloyd DeWitt for reading and providing me with comments on my review-essay.

Notes

1. The following statement regarding Art as Therapy is found on the Phaidon Press website: “A new title from bestselling philosopher and essayist Alain de Botton, in collaboration with philosophical art historian John Armstrong, which asks the question ‘what is art for?’”

2. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 69.

3. Spinoza writes in the Ethics, Part 4, Preface, “that when I say that someone passes from lesser to greater perfection, and the opposite, I do not understand that he is changed from one essence… into another… but that his power of acting, insofar as it is understood through his nature, is increased or diminished.” Earlier in the same Preface he writes that “we say that men are more perfect or less perfect insofar as they approach more or less closely” what he calls “the exemplar of human nature.” In Definition 6 of Part 2 Spinoza writes: “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.” Ethics, in Opera, vol. 2, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925).

4. See the various statements that if faith has always existed then it has never existed in Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55, 56, 81.

5. De Botton, in contrast, embraces, yet does not truly engage, the paradox (actually, the contradiction) that, if art were truly successful in helping us reform our lives, then it would render itself superfluous. He writes: “The true purpose of art is to create a world where art is less necessary, and less exceptional. … The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. … The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary” (232). Such is the reductive consequence of viewing art, like life, as therapy, as need, and not as desire, as the will to exist, what Edgar in King Lear calls “our lives’ sweetness” in preferring to die hourly rather than once and forever in this particular hour (see 5.3.185f.).

6. Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s exhibition Art Is Therapy, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2014. Note the alternative title of the book.

7. I want to mention here that I am a member of the Curatorial Advisory Committee in European Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

8. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), part 2, 250.

9. De Botton largely views freedom in the reductive terms of license (self-interest) and what he calls “postmodern relativism” (227). It is in this context that he holds that to acknowledge that art is propaganda is to see that it necessitates censorship (221–27).

10. See the website of the National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh), where the painting is presently located.

11. Earlier in his book de Botton refers to Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Washing his Feet at a Fountain as “now a prestigious object of art.” He informs us that in the painting “Poussin is trying to tell himself and his friends that life is not elsewhere, and that trouble and toil are the inescapable accompaniments of the human condition” (194). But he does not actually show us how or in what sense this theme is significantly represented in this painting, thus making it worthy of prestige.

12. De Botton similarly claims that our urge to buy something at the end of a museum visit reflects our attempt to connect the art that we saw with our lives: “This points to the heart of what museums should really be about: giving us tools to extend the range and impact of what we admire in works of art across our whole lives. This is why the gift shop is, in fact, the most important place in the museum—if only its true potential could be grasped and made real” (84).

13. The National Gallery of Victoria website states that its Art as Therapy show was “developed in association with philosophers Alain de Botton and John Armstrong from the “School of Life.” At its heart is the idea that art can have a powerfully therapeutic effect and be enjoyed… for what it can do for our concerns regarding work, love, status, mortality and sometimes tricky relationships.” How different is the assessment that Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, gives of de Botton in “The Washington Diarist,” 12 June 2014, his regular column in the magazine! He writes there that he “is the celebrated author of a series of books that flatten great literature into self-help literature and philosophy into tasty little homilies for the haute bourgeoisie. … His books may be the most complacent books I have ever read. In his many accounts of the struggle for existence there is no evidence of the struggle, not a shred. … In London he has established an institution called the School of Life, which offers its paying students the opportunity to feel as lovely and as psychologically integrated as its founder.”