Art is a weapon against despair

Alain de Botton talks us through two works, plus a list of therapeutic philosophers

I’ve just uploaded my podcast conversation with the British philosopher Alain de Botton. You can now download it here.

Many of you would be aware of Alain’s work. He set up The School of Life in London, which now has “campuses” around the world, and wrote a bunch of popular philosophy books that are exceptional if only for their innovative “f*cking with” the genre. In The Course of Love (which I loved) he writes a fictional account of a couple’s relationship, interrupted by slabs of philosophical interpretation of their behaviour. In A Week at the Airport he lived at the airport for, yes, a week and wrote a treatise on modern life in real time, using tweets.

A truly ridiculous photo of Alain and I in London. Poor Liana asks me to remember to take a picture or video when I do podcast interviews so we have something to “promote” with. I tend to miss part of a head, forget to press play…etc.

Alain had reached out to me with one of those letters that a certain man of his standing writes - effusively and generously claiming to be a fan of Wild and humbly requesting to be a guest (seriously, it’s a phenomenon). No assistant or publisher as intervener, and the email written using proper paragraphs and genteel sign-offs. Anyway, we arranged to meet in person at the We Are 8 offices on my way through London just before Christmas.

In this chat, we cover how philosophy can be used as a therapeutic device for living with thriving with anxiety. It’s a lovely conversation. We cover the healing effects of figs and dark chocolate, how to love, plus a super fresh take on “adult boredom” (embrace your impatience, get to the point!). As with most of his books, his latest, A Therapeutic Journey, is peppered with photographs of artwork, which he references and uses to “illustrate” his points. And so:

I get Alain to talk through two works of art…

…and how they can provide a reflective sanctuary for a despairing soul. As he writes,

"Religions knew what art was for. It had nothing to do with remembering dates or understanding techniques. It was for crying with and imploring.”

Which really lands for me. Art is for crying with.

1. “Grief with Agnes Martin”

Martin is an American abstract painter who suffered terribly from depression and schizophrenia and produced work that was mostly about a bunch of highly ordered patterns. 

Alain writes of the work (and you can hear more in the Wild chat):

“There is an invitation to slough off the normal superficiality of life and bathe in the void of emptiness. The effect is soothing and moving too. For reasons to be explored, we may want to start crying.

“Martin once remarked that her work was fundamentally about love, not the noisy, exuberant, romantic kind, but the selfless, patient sort a parent might feel for their sleeping newborn or a gardener might experience in relation to their seedlings.”

Alain quotes an art historian who says,

“‘What determines the sort of art a society is drawn to at a given moment is often the degree of chaos, difficulty, and struggle to which that society is subject. The more cacophonous it is, the more it tends to be attracted to the serenity and peace implied by the sober repetition of geometric patterns.’”

He adds,

“Martin matters because she gives dignity to a longing for ‘something infinitely more harmonious and loving than the world can generally offer’."

“The paintings are what we could be if we sat with our own feelings and let their range course through us, if we gave up using our clever minds to ward off sadness and stopped trying to make sense of every experience, if we made our peace with mystery and the encroaching darkness that will soon subsume us.”

“She knows how unsteady we have felt. Occasionally, after a lot of grays, she goes for a pink, as if to hell with reserve, why not surrender to sweetness and take a risk with innocence? She’s giving us a hug and inviting us to come to the window to watch a new day with her through her frame.”

2. The Disappointed Souls with Ferdinand Hodler

Alain writes of this painting in a section of his book where he picks up on the “cruel irony” of anxiety that I refer to in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: despairing souls so desperately need other people and yet we push them away.

He describes the artwork:

“Five figures are pictured in varying states of dejection. We don’t know quite what has gone wrong in their lives... However awful the individual stories might be, the true horror of the painting emerges from the way each crisis is unfolding in complete isolation.”

He goes on:

“Hodler intended his work as an allegory of modern society as a whole, with its absence of community, its lonely cities and its alienating technologies. But in this very depiction lies the possibility of redemption. We will start to heal when we realize that we are in fact always extremely close to someone who is as wretched as we are. We should therefore be able to reach out to a similarly broken neighbor and lament in unison. We should learn to come together for a very particular kind of social occasion the whole focus of which would be an exchange of notes on the misery and lacerations of existence.”

I love this idea…a gathering of tortured souls who meet to bear witness to each other’s laments. Alain describes in his book what he thinks this could look like…but I’m keen to get your thoughts.

I like this final line:

“It isn’t possible that we are as alone as we currently feel. Biology doesn’t produce complete one-offs. There are fellow creatures among the seven billion of our species. They are there, but we have lost all confidence in our right to find them. We feel isolated not because we are so but because we are unwell. We should dare to believe that a fellow disappointed soul is right now sitting next to us on the bench, waiting for us to make a sign.”

Other stuff from the episode

In the episode, I refer to a painting by Edward Hopper:

I also mention a few artists, poets and Wild episodes that are weapons against despair:

• My chat with (my now dear friend) AC Grayling on how to have a philosophy of your own is one such:

• And my conversation with Pico Iyer is another:

• The work of Mary Oliver.

• The poetry of David Whyte, in particular, his book Consolations…he’s also been on the podcast and reads some of his consoling poetry in the episode.

• The existentialists can provide incredible comfort – Camus and Simone Weil (not strictly existentialist but writing at the same time) are my favourites. 

• Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath write about the human condition in a way that always makes me feel less alone.

• Blaise Pascal and Kierkegaard are also helpful.

What about you, any therapeutic philosophers you turn to?

Sarah xx

PS #1 Paid subscriber crew, on Friday I’ll be resuming my AMA-style podcast video chats…so please post questions you have for this below.

PS #2 Some of you will have seen a discussion following last week’s post, pivoting from a comment from the feminist utopian writer

Elle Griffin

whose work I’ve shared here. She wrote that she’d follow up with a post on

The Elysian

. Here it is.

Siobhán Costigan

I know you’d been part of the thread and might like to chime in…