At The School of Life we're committed to exploring how culture can help us think through everyday concerns. Engaging with the history of ideas may not offer the quickest form of fix, but it offers a means of asking important and enduring questions about the art of living. While debate rages about the merits or otherwise of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help us live happier lives - see Darian Leader’s ambivalent article in yesterday’s Guardian - we agree with Hermione Eyre, who writing in the Independent last week, argued that the real reason to read Seneca rather than M Scott Peck isn’t intellectual snobbery but “just the fact that time is a great filter – the best there is for charlatans and cod-philosophical spam.” Read her full article here.
Meanwhile in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Matthew Reisz commended those brave academics willing to present their scholarly research in a more accessible form. His article I Can Help You Change Your Life explored the options open to academics who actually want to engage readers - and perhaps even "change lives”. The problem, as he acccurately explained it, is that “the main qualities needed by writers of self-help books - empathy, worldliness, an ability to cut to the chase - are neither particularly associated with academics nor encouraged by the structures of prestige and career development in universities. And then there are the ways that authors establish their authority. Scholars underwrite their views on macroeconomic policy or Chinese history by referring to their awards, prominent positions within faculties or PhDs from elite institutions. Self-help gurus may also mention their professorships in psychology but, along with the gravitas, they also need to get across that they understand people's everyday problems.”
Reisz picks out Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare specialist at the University of Oxford, whose book Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way; Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare is discussed on our Play course at The School of Life. When she went though a personal crisis in 1999, Maguire read her way through "the entire self-help section of the local bookstore and quickly realised that I had read it all before: in Shakespeare." The 16th century "saw the beginning of self-help literature" in the work of writers such as Machiavelli and Castiglione. As well as being a cultural icon, she suggests, Shakespeare too was "a self-help guru" and "life coach".
On the same shelf as Maguire’s book in our shop, you’ll find our own faculty member Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and Ilana Simons’ A Life Of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. As Simons explains: “You can probably name a few novelists or artists whom you call smart confidantes or friends. You draw on their writing for guidance at difficult crossroads--for sympathy or advice. After all, literature isn't only valuable because it's entertainment, but because it delivers memorable insight about life outside the book. We know more about love because of Shakespeare, about jealousy because of Tolstoy, about self-esteem because of Charlotte Bronte. Literature moves us for what it says about events outside of their plots.”
Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life
Find out more about The School of Life's bibliotherapy service here.
