de Botton – Philosophy @Newcastle

The Gap Year and Finding Oneself: a Philosophical Discussion

It has been a growing phenomenon in recent years for young people to take a year out from education. There are a number reasons for this but the one most often given, the one which stands out above all others, is ‘to find oneself’. This project aims to explore the validity of such a claim in conjunction with the thought of Alain de Botton and Jean Paul Sartre. In order to offer the discussion some context I shall also be drawing on my own experiences volunteering in Africa.

De Botton’s work The Art of Travel is an investigation into the philosophical aspects of travel. From the anticipation of the trip, to the poetic nature of the journey, to the adventure itself and even the reflections upon your return. The entire experience is conducive to being potentially life changing, and as such no detail is left out. His over riding suggestion is that we travel in order to temporarily escape our ordinary, well established lives and that we have an inherent desire to wander without purpose for a time.

To support these claims I have also used Sartre’s phenomenology, as he makes the claim that consciousness constructs the ego. We only really become our true selves when we reflect on things and it is very much dependent on our mood or state at the time of the experience. His entire theory is building up to the fact that our consciousness is what frees us. A fact which is absolutely key in understanding how experience changes us. When this is applied to the concept of travel it becomes apparent that we may have a particular viewpoint or opinion of a place before we go there, but our experiences there will inevitably alter that preconception. As these change, as does our conception of self.

How Far do we have to Travel before we ‘Find Ourselves’?

When discussing travelling, it is very common for people to say they are going to ‘find themselves’, this idea has inspired me to philosophically explore the extent to which we discover more about ourselves when we go travelling. To supplement my discussion I have drawn upon my own experiences of travelling, especially my recent University Exchange trip to the University of Vermont, America.

One of the books I have studied is “The Art of Travel” by Alain de Botton, he explains several aspects of travelling such as the curiosity and expectations we have of somewhere and the feeling of surprise or disappointment we get when we arrive. He also finds interest in the ways we travel, such as the mystery of aeroplanes flying, or the “poetry” of a service station on the M25. He suggests that the reason we travel and have a desire to wander the earth without reference to a particular destination, is because we want to escape the confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

To accompany Alain De Botton’s theory, I’ve also had a look at Sartre’s phenomenology, as he argues that our consciousness constructs our ego. He explains that our experiences are transparent and are shaped by the state we are in and our disposition at the time. The ego is the last factor in our consciousness, and we only really acknowledge it when we reflect on things.

This means that essentially our consciousness is really free, and I think this is the key to understanding how and why our experiences change us. New experiences challenge our preconceptions about things, and therefore affect our ego. Sartre explains that a conception of something is given as a whole idea, where as when we perceive something it is given in profiles, it is broken down into individual aspects. If you apply this to travelling, we can have a conception of a place, and a general idea of what it might be like, but when we arrive we are often surprised by the many different things we observe. As our understanding of a place changes, our perception of ourselves changes too.