Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's non-ecstatic.
It is not done with others.
And there's a sort of limit to what we're allowed to expect.
from a work of art.
It's both meant to be extremely important and nothing to cry about or indeed dance about.
And that strikes me.
And I'm intrigued because all societies, I mean, take the ancient Greeks who had some fascinating rituals.
So once a year, there was the festival of Dionysus.
Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of night, the god of folly.
And, you know, he's got his ritual moments and the whole citizenry, especially women, exit the city during the Festival of Dionysus, dance in ecstatic ways to the beating of drums.
And, you know, of course, our friend Nietzsche here is very interested in this.
What's going on here?
What are the ancient Greeks knowing?
What do they know about us that we seem to have forgotten?
And, you know, I'm not the first person to point out that there has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call mental illness, mental unwellness.
And one of the ways of thinking about that epidemic of mental unwellness is that the extreme emotions, the untenable emotions that manifest themselves now privately have been, in different points in history, marshaled around
common rituals which one might say handled them pretty cleverly quite in quite intelligently you know for the ancient greeks the concept of going a little mad once a year or perhaps more often was taken very seriously and was not seen was seen as different from actually being mad going mad is something that you do because you know there's divine madness in each of us
Being mad is a more permanent state, often to do with denying the fact that there is divine madness in us.
And so, you know, the Greeks rather cleverly had these two characters, Apollo and Dionysus, at the center of their culture.
Apollo interested in reason, in calm, in order, balance, symmetry, and Dionysus very interested in other things.
Showing 61–80 of 1,037 · page 4 of 52
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