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A review by hellhoundharry
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
1.0
At first I liked this book just fine. It was like a rom-com situation where a couple falls in love, and the guy is a philosopher. Cool cool, let's see where this goes. I don't mind philosophy, I read quite a bit of it myself.
But then I start to notice a pattern: The main character is an asshole! The kind of academic "intellectual" who puts up his nose because the Love of his life doesn't like Bach and reads Cosmo instead of some heavy literature. He is constantly seeing wrongs because she isn't perfect. Well boo-hoo!
And the result are fights now and then AND finally the woman breaks up with him! He whines about it. The end!
But at the end, where the book really fails for me is the characters failure to understand some philosophies. Oh sure he will quote Nietzche and Immanuel Kant among others to make his points. But then I get to the last chapter and he talks about how he read the stoics. Now I have read the stoics and what irks me is "At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else has the chance to do so " and ".stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy ofcertain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love."
Has this guy actually READ the stoics? Because I have and stoicism is not about self-disappointment or shunning human contact or even love! It's more about maintaining a calm center when life gets tough and deal with reality as it is right now in front of you.
I am seriously doubting he has read it, which to me was the final straw: This guy is a bad lover, he is an asshole and he is also a hack student of philosophy that doesn't understand the basic concepts when he disagrees with them!
He is Brian Griffin! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-O_ZbwwgBQ&ab_channel=MeltedCheese
But then I start to notice a pattern: The main character is an asshole! The kind of academic "intellectual" who puts up his nose because the Love of his life doesn't like Bach and reads Cosmo instead of some heavy literature. He is constantly seeing wrongs because she isn't perfect. Well boo-hoo!
And the result are fights now and then AND finally the woman breaks up with him! He whines about it. The end!
But at the end, where the book really fails for me is the characters failure to understand some philosophies. Oh sure he will quote Nietzche and Immanuel Kant among others to make his points. But then I get to the last chapter and he talks about how he read the stoics. Now I have read the stoics and what irks me is "At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else has the chance to do so " and ".stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy ofcertain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love."
Has this guy actually READ the stoics? Because I have and stoicism is not about self-disappointment or shunning human contact or even love! It's more about maintaining a calm center when life gets tough and deal with reality as it is right now in front of you.
I am seriously doubting he has read it, which to me was the final straw: This guy is a bad lover, he is an asshole and he is also a hack student of philosophy that doesn't understand the basic concepts when he disagrees with them!
He is Brian Griffin! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-O_ZbwwgBQ&ab_channel=MeltedCheese