The One Direction singer and the philosopher like to hang out with Jemima Khan and chat about 'Plato, Aristotle, love and beauty', apparently. So which school of philosophy does each of these big thinkers follow?
The latest unlikely but strangely heartwarming new friendship is that between Alain de Botton and Harry Styles, AKA him off of One Direction. This week Alain tweeted a picture of the pair grinning happily with Jemima Khan hanging from their necks. "We talk Plato, Aristotle, love and beauty," he reported.
The reaction of most of us to this news will have been surprise and, probably, a certain unattractive sniggering. We are accustomed to thinking of him as an intellectual lightweight, a Twitter-addicted, sex-obsessed celebrity socialite quite incapable of holding his end up in a conversation about philosophy with Harry Styles. We must revise those prejudices.
The two men do have contrasting philosophical styles. Here's Alain on beauty: "A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.'"
Harry's take is more riddling and paradoxical: "The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed, [...] You don't know,/ Oh oh,/ You don't know you're beautiful,/ Oh oh,/ That's what makes you beautiful."
I suspect Styles is the Aristotelean and De Botton the Platonist in this pairing. Plato believed that our perceptions of the phenomenal world are but imperfect impressions of unattainable ideal forms. Aristotle was a practical man: he was interested in the world as it is. Plato hated demagoguery and mistrusted rhetoric; Aristotle rejoiced in the human power to persuade.
One Direction working a big crowd is definitely on the Aristotelian end of things. Could we call Harry's pop-star strut "peripatetic"? We could. Alain, like Plato, is more sitty-and-thinky. If you had to nominate one of the two to make like Aristotle and dissect an octopus, Styles would definitely be your man.
But other questions arise. Is Harry's refulgent hairdo the Platonic ideal form of which Alain's is but a flickering shadow on a cave wall? And does all this make Jemima Khan Hypatia – the fourth-century mathematician and philosopher so memorably essayed by Rachel Weisz in 2009's Agora? Stay tuned to find out.
A final thought, for now. "The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society," Alain was to be found reflecting on Twitter at one in the morning after their symposium, "the less people want to be famous."
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