In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.
In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve planted seeds in this garden myself. In 2017, I published Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and five years later, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Both could be shelved without injustice in the self-help section. But both exhibit some discomfort with that fact. When I wrote Midlife, on the heels of a midlife crisis—philosophy, which I had loved, felt hollow and repetitive, a treadmill of classes to teach and papers to write, with tenure a gilded cage—I adopted the conventions of the self-help genre partly tongue-in-cheek. The midlife crisis invites self-mockery, and I was happy to oblige: there’s respite to be found in laughing at oneself. If my options were to quit my job, have an extramarital affair or write a navel-gazing book, my wife and I were glad that I had chosen option three. I hope the book helped others too—but it never really faced up to the problems of its project.
Asking a professor of moral philosophy for life advice can seem quixotic, like asking an expert on the mind-body problem to perform brain surgery. Philosophy is an abstract field of argument and theory: this is true as much of ethics as it is of metaphysics. Why should reflection in this vein—ruthless, complex, conceptual—make us happier, more well-adjusted people? (If you’ve spent time with philosophers, you may doubt that it has such salutary effects.) And why should philosophers want to join the self-help movement, anyway?
Historians often trace the origins of self-help to 1859, when the aptly monikered Samuel Smiles published Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct, a practical guide to self-improvement that became an international blockbuster. (The term itself derives from earlier writing by Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.)1 Smiles inspired readers across the globe, from Nigeria to Japan. And he inspired imitators—thousands of them. Between his time and ours, self-help has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Smiles was a social reformer, but his book tells people that reform begins at home: self-transformation is, he promises, a sure path to success. The fantasy of self-reliance is a hallmark of the genre—and a focus of political critique. According to the literary critic Beth Blum, “self-help is widely understood as a technology of neoliberal self-governance used to discipline citizens and manage populations”: the social function of self-help is to obfuscate injustice, directing us to work not on society but ourselves. As if that wasn’t bad enough, self-help provokes eye-rolling cynicism. It has become “synonymous with sentimentality, idiocy, and hucksterism”—and this from one of its foremost advocates, the bestselling Alain de Botton. According to its detractors, self-help is glib, politically obtuse and intellectually dishonest: embarrassing, if not shameful. Philosophy is better off without it.
What, then, should we make of the philosophers who write self-help books? Are they bowing to market forces, dumbing down ideas to cash in on a credulous readership? Or returning to a calling they should never have renounced, “a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy”—in the words of Theodor Adorno, no admirer of dumbing down or cashing in—“but which … has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life”?
●
If self-help as a distinctive genre is an invention of the Victorian era, thinking and writing aimed at better living is not. In this broader sense, self-help was entwined with philosophy at the birth of the Western tradition. In Plato’s Republic, “the argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live”; and in the Apology, Socrates definitively states: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Philosophy is not just a guide to life; it’s an essential part of living well.
By philosophy, Socrates meant ethics, the systematic study of that extraordinary topic, how to live. Like Diogenes the Cynic, his descendant, he disdained the metaphysical speculations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who argued that all is flux, or that all is one, or that all is water. But Socrates’s more dominant descendants, Plato and Aristotle, disagreed: they argued that philosophy as a whole, including its more esoteric parts—like metaphysics—lies at the heart of the best human life. This idea was common ground among the Hellenistic schools, the Stoics, Skeptics and Epicureans who shaped philosophy in ancient Rome.2 They promised a life of tranquility to those who grasp reality as it is.
When contemporary writers treat ancient philosophy as self-help, they tend to minimize its metaphysical presumptions. But the Stoic injunction to let go of what is out of your control—“If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset”—tends to ring hollow without a Stoic faith in providence. And it’s distorting when contemporary readers, like the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, extract from Aristotle a pedestrian vision of the good life as “one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.” For Aristotle, the nature you should perfect is not your individual potential, but an objective human nature whose ideal expression lies in theoretical contemplation of the cosmos.
I’m not here to make a case for the revival of metaphysics as self-help. Nor do I agree with Socrates. Like Iris Murdoch, I believe that “an unexamined life can be virtuous.” But Murdoch was surely right that the question “How can we make ourselves better?” is one “that moral philosophers should attempt to answer.”
This thought persists through the ups and downs of the Western tradition into the early modern period—at which point it falters. It’s unfair to blame a single thinker for the fractures that began to surface then. But David Hume is representative. Bringing the methods of Newtonian natural science to “moral subjects,” Hume compared himself to an “anatomist” who seeks the “most secret Springs & Principles” of mind and body. His Treatise of Human Nature ends with a cautionary note: “The anatomist ought never to emulate the painter; nor in his accurate dissections and portraitures of the smaller parts of the human body, pretend to give his figures any graceful and engaging attitude or expression.” According to this dictum, a moral philosopher is not a moralist who guides us to virtue but a scientist who dissects what virtue is. The work of the anatomist may or may not help the painter, but there’s a clear division of labor. To anatomize is not to paint, and philosophy is not self-help.
Hume’s distinction has shaped the self-conception of subsequent moral philosophers. They may frame principles for living better lives, but it’s not their job to pitch advice for self-improvement of the sort one finds in Samuel Smiles. If these projects are connected, the connection is frayed, like a rope bridge across a ravine. Safer to stay on your own side, building theories of morality indifferent to applicable self-help—or self-help spaces unencumbered by philosophy. With rare exceptions—like the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which philosophized his nervous breakdown—the moral theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not look much like contemporary self-help. Its field is the construction and demolition of abstract arguments, addressed to ever more intricate questions, not the directive wisdom of the sage.
If philosophers hope to span this gulf, they will need a blueprint, or at least a sketch, of the bridge between theory and practice, an inkling of the flaw in Hume’s analogy. How can philosophy as it now exists—a discipline of argument, analysis and abstract principle—make us into better people, living better lives?
●
I’m not alone in asking this question or in being struck by the recent bloom of philosophical self-help. A mark of its professional recognition is the publication of an essay by Meghan Sullivan in the flagship journal, Ethics, that treats the Oxford Guides to the Good Life as specimens of a type. Sullivan calls this type “applied tradition”:
In applied tradition the focal questions concern how a person can embrace a comprehensive life goal, like enlightenment (Buddhists), sagehood (Confucians), freedom (Kantians), authenticity (existentialists), or flourishing (Aristotelians). Like applied ethics, applied tradition has its characteristic method: the philosopher takes a question where there are moral and practical stakes particularly with respect to the life goal, identifies ideas and practices within a tradition that might answer the question, and then develops a plan for implementing those ideas and practices within the seeker’s life.
This is one way to think about philosophy as self-help: it recruits a given tradition and makes it newly relevant. Go back to a time when philosophy functioned as self-help and recreate it in the present. If a tradition was therapeutic once before, why not again?
Yet as a writer of philosophical self-help, I’ve never thought of what I was doing in these terms. I don’t just mean that I’m more eclectic, dispensing “doses of Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and others,” to quote Sullivan’s description of my work. I mean that I am trying to get things right. When I engage with Aristotle, say, I’m as much concerned with his mistakes—an obsession with the ideal life, a meritocracy of friendship—as with his ethical insights.
If philosophy has authority, it’s the authority of truth, not tradition. Of the authors of the Oxford Guides, Sullivan writes: “These philosophers see themselves more as generating material that might fruitfully guide those drawn to the traditions than as adjudicating between the traditions.” But philosophy must judge. I don’t see how to reconcile its alethic self-image with a view on which one simply picks a goal—enlightenment, sagehood, freedom, authenticity or flourishing—and taps philosophy (and psychology) for the means. We have to know what the goal should be.
The picture I’m opposing is explicit in a recent book that is otherwise very good, How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy, edited by three philosophers: Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman. The book has fifteen chapters, retailing “philosophies of life” from Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism through Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics to the monotheistic religions, Ethical Culture, existentialism, pragmatism, Effective Altruism and secular humanism. Each thinker was invited to “reflect publicly on their choice of philosophy of life, explaining … why it works for them.” The options are offered up for our selection, like suits to purchase off the rack.
There is little acknowledgment that a central element of most every outlook in the book is that it alone is true and every other outlook false. What we get in place of argument is appeal to personal style. “What Buddhism might offer,” Owen Flanagan writes in the first chapter, “is a relatively stable sense of serenity and contentment, not the sort of feeling state that is widely sought and promoted in the West as the best kind of happiness.” Hiram Crespo became an Epicurean “after realizing that the Epicurean philosophy was the most satisfying for me,” not through being convinced that it was true. And in embracing Ethical Culture, Anne Klaeysen made “a deeply personal decision to attribute worth and dignity to every human being.”
In a passage that would shock Aristotle, Daniel Kaufman, whose “preferred philosophy of life [is] Aristotelianism,” buys wholesale the metaphor of clothes: “It is not enough, then, that one admire a philosophy for its intellectual qualities. It must be well suited to the type of person one is and the type of life one leads, an ill-fitting philosophy being even more obvious and awkward and ultimately useless than an ill-fitting suit.” But Aristotle believed that his philosophy was true—one size fits all—not a good look for some that others need not sport.
This sharpens the problem implicit in Hume’s distinction. If we are in pursuit of truth, not expressing our taste, if we take a critical stance toward consoling traditions, what assurance do we have that philosophy will help, not harm? In his madly egocentric autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote: “my truth is terrible.” For all we know, philosophy will drive us to despair.
●
When I was writing Midlife in the early 2010s, I didn’t have an answer to these problems. As it happened, thinking through regret and the relentless grind of things to do did give rise to insights that afforded consolation. (For instance, that missing out in middle age is the inevitable side effect of something good: the wild excess of things worth wanting, too many to contain within a single life.) But if you’d asked me why philosophy assuaged my midlife crisis, I could only say that I got lucky.
I think I have the rudiments of a theory now, though: a vision of philosophy as self-help that turns on reconceiving both. It begins by distinguishing happiness—a subjective state of mind—from the activity of living well. Imagine someone submerged in sustaining fluid, electrodes plugged into their brain, being fed each day a stream of consciousness that simulates an ideal life. Unaware that it’s unreal, they’re wildly happy. But their life does not go well. They don’t do most of what they think they’re doing or know most of what they think they know, and they don’t interact with anyone or anything but the machine. You wouldn’t wish it on someone you love: to be imprisoned in a vat, alone forever, duped.
If it aimed at nothing more than happiness, self-help would be a soulless enterprise. But it needn’t take that form. The idea of “living well” that animates the philosophical tradition—the aim of philosophical self-help—is to treat oneself and others as one should. It’s a platitude that we should try to live that way, but as Iris Murdoch argued in The Sovereignty of Good, we can do so only through the hard-won truth. We live within the world we see, “in the moral sense of ‘see’ [that calls for] moral imagination and moral effort.”
The vision intrinsic to living well need not rest on elaborate reasoning or systematic theory of the sort philosophers flaunt. It aims at an abundant honesty about one’s circumstance, about oneself and others. It is knowledge of this kind that tells us how to feel and what to do. But the difference between vision and philosophy is overblown. For Murdoch, attention turns on refining our concepts, portraying people as they are, while her philosophy interrogates the concepts that articulate our social world. To think about thinking of others in terms of attention, not “impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world” but “a refined and honest perception of what is really the case,” is to see ourselves differently.
Moral philosophy often works this way: the role of argument is not to compel assent—it almost never does—but to build conceptual schemes and through connection create new meaning. It’s what I’m doing now: sketching the relationship between moral philosophy, truth and argument in a way that makes room for philosophical self-help. It’s what Murdoch is doing when she identifies love with “the perception of individuals”: shifting our conceptions of attention, knowledge and love.
The stickiest ideas in philosophical self-help are not proofs but concepts or distinctions. Take the cliché “living in the present,” which calls to mind the German spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle, for whom “time is an illusion.” “In the Now, in the absence of time,” he counsels, “all your problems dissolve.” Despite the hyperbole, there’s something right in the idea that we should give “more attention to the doing than to the result [we] want to achieve through it.” Philosophy can make sense of this, contrasting “telic” activities, which aim at terminal ends—like earning a promotion, having a child or writing a book—with activities that are “atelic.” Philosophizing, parenting, spending time with friends: you can stop doing these things, but you can’t complete them, leaving nothing more to do. With telic activities, fulfillment is deferred to the future then archived in the past, so that the present feels empty—but atelic activities are fully realized in the Now. To live in the present is to cherish the value of the atelic, so easily neglected in our project-driven lives.
What philosophy gives us here is a conceptual lens: a capacity for self-audit that comes from asking what we value and what kind of value it has. It’s the redescription of life that is ethically orienting. Perhaps surprisingly, this way of thinking speaks to the political critique of self-help. Murdoch borrowed the concept of attention and its relation to love from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil; but while Murdoch was philosophically apolitical, Weil was not. For Weil, refining the concepts with which to frame our social circumstance was a politically urgent task. As World War II loomed over Europe, she would write: “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.”
Philosophy seeds new concepts, novel understandings—as it might be, alienation, ideology, structural injustice; new ways of comprehending freedom, status, power. Philosophical argument serves more to nurture these concepts and give them life than to establish theorems critics can’t dispute. In Murdoch’s words, “the task of moral philosophers [is] to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”
The most profound achievements of moral and political philosophy lie not in abstract theory or geometric proof but in finding words by which to light our way to lives well-lived. If that is not self-help, what is?
In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.
In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve planted seeds in this garden myself. In 2017, I published Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and five years later, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Both could be shelved without injustice in the self-help section. But both exhibit some discomfort with that fact. When I wrote Midlife, on the heels of a midlife crisis—philosophy, which I had loved, felt hollow and repetitive, a treadmill of classes to teach and papers to write, with tenure a gilded cage—I adopted the conventions of the self-help genre partly tongue-in-cheek. The midlife crisis invites self-mockery, and I was happy to oblige: there’s respite to be found in laughing at oneself. If my options were to quit my job, have an extramarital affair or write a navel-gazing book, my wife and I were glad that I had chosen option three. I hope the book helped others too—but it never really faced up to the problems of its project.
Asking a professor of moral philosophy for life advice can seem quixotic, like asking an expert on the mind-body problem to perform brain surgery. Philosophy is an abstract field of argument and theory: this is true as much of ethics as it is of metaphysics. Why should reflection in this vein—ruthless, complex, conceptual—make us happier, more well-adjusted people? (If you’ve spent time with philosophers, you may doubt that it has such salutary effects.) And why should philosophers want to join the self-help movement, anyway?
Historians often trace the origins of self-help to 1859, when the aptly monikered Samuel Smiles published Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct, a practical guide to self-improvement that became an international blockbuster. (The term itself derives from earlier writing by Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.)11. As Vladimir Trendafilov points out, Carlyle had used the phrase much earlier, in correspondence from 1822 and in fiction from 1831. According to Asa Briggs, Smiles took the phrase “self-help” from Emerson; but since Sartor Resartus was first published in America with a preface by Emerson in 1836, it is possible that Emerson took the phrase from Carlyle. Vladimir Trendafilov tracks Smiles’s use of the phrase instead to an unsigned editorial in the Leeds Times in 1836, written by Robert Nicoll: “Heaven helps those who help themselves, and self-help is the only effectual help.” Smiles inspired readers across the globe, from Nigeria to Japan. And he inspired imitators—thousands of them. Between his time and ours, self-help has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Smiles was a social reformer, but his book tells people that reform begins at home: self-transformation is, he promises, a sure path to success. The fantasy of self-reliance is a hallmark of the genre—and a focus of political critique. According to the literary critic Beth Blum, “self-help is widely understood as a technology of neoliberal self-governance used to discipline citizens and manage populations”: the social function of self-help is to obfuscate injustice, directing us to work not on society but ourselves. As if that wasn’t bad enough, self-help provokes eye-rolling cynicism. It has become “synonymous with sentimentality, idiocy, and hucksterism”—and this from one of its foremost advocates, the bestselling Alain de Botton. According to its detractors, self-help is glib, politically obtuse and intellectually dishonest: embarrassing, if not shameful. Philosophy is better off without it.
What, then, should we make of the philosophers who write self-help books? Are they bowing to market forces, dumbing down ideas to cash in on a credulous readership? Or returning to a calling they should never have renounced, “a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy”—in the words of Theodor Adorno, no admirer of dumbing down or cashing in—“but which … has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life”?
●
If self-help as a distinctive genre is an invention of the Victorian era, thinking and writing aimed at better living is not. In this broader sense, self-help was entwined with philosophy at the birth of the Western tradition. In Plato’s Republic, “the argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live”; and in the Apology, Socrates definitively states: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Philosophy is not just a guide to life; it’s an essential part of living well.
By philosophy, Socrates meant ethics, the systematic study of that extraordinary topic, how to live. Like Diogenes the Cynic, his descendant, he disdained the metaphysical speculations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who argued that all is flux, or that all is one, or that all is water. But Socrates’s more dominant descendants, Plato and Aristotle, disagreed: they argued that philosophy as a whole, including its more esoteric parts—like metaphysics—lies at the heart of the best human life. This idea was common ground among the Hellenistic schools, the Stoics, Skeptics and Epicureans who shaped philosophy in ancient Rome.22. For a fuller discussion, to which I am indebted, see John Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy (2012). They promised a life of tranquility to those who grasp reality as it is.
When contemporary writers treat ancient philosophy as self-help, they tend to minimize its metaphysical presumptions. But the Stoic injunction to let go of what is out of your control—“If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset”—tends to ring hollow without a Stoic faith in providence. And it’s distorting when contemporary readers, like the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, extract from Aristotle a pedestrian vision of the good life as “one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.” For Aristotle, the nature you should perfect is not your individual potential, but an objective human nature whose ideal expression lies in theoretical contemplation of the cosmos.
I’m not here to make a case for the revival of metaphysics as self-help. Nor do I agree with Socrates. Like Iris Murdoch, I believe that “an unexamined life can be virtuous.” But Murdoch was surely right that the question “How can we make ourselves better?” is one “that moral philosophers should attempt to answer.”
This thought persists through the ups and downs of the Western tradition into the early modern period—at which point it falters. It’s unfair to blame a single thinker for the fractures that began to surface then. But David Hume is representative. Bringing the methods of Newtonian natural science to “moral subjects,” Hume compared himself to an “anatomist” who seeks the “most secret Springs & Principles” of mind and body. His Treatise of Human Nature ends with a cautionary note: “The anatomist ought never to emulate the painter; nor in his accurate dissections and portraitures of the smaller parts of the human body, pretend to give his figures any graceful and engaging attitude or expression.” According to this dictum, a moral philosopher is not a moralist who guides us to virtue but a scientist who dissects what virtue is. The work of the anatomist may or may not help the painter, but there’s a clear division of labor. To anatomize is not to paint, and philosophy is not self-help.
Hume’s distinction has shaped the self-conception of subsequent moral philosophers. They may frame principles for living better lives, but it’s not their job to pitch advice for self-improvement of the sort one finds in Samuel Smiles. If these projects are connected, the connection is frayed, like a rope bridge across a ravine. Safer to stay on your own side, building theories of morality indifferent to applicable self-help—or self-help spaces unencumbered by philosophy. With rare exceptions—like the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which philosophized his nervous breakdown—the moral theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not look much like contemporary self-help. Its field is the construction and demolition of abstract arguments, addressed to ever more intricate questions, not the directive wisdom of the sage.
If philosophers hope to span this gulf, they will need a blueprint, or at least a sketch, of the bridge between theory and practice, an inkling of the flaw in Hume’s analogy. How can philosophy as it now exists—a discipline of argument, analysis and abstract principle—make us into better people, living better lives?
●
I’m not alone in asking this question or in being struck by the recent bloom of philosophical self-help. A mark of its professional recognition is the publication of an essay by Meghan Sullivan in the flagship journal, Ethics, that treats the Oxford Guides to the Good Life as specimens of a type. Sullivan calls this type “applied tradition”:
This is one way to think about philosophy as self-help: it recruits a given tradition and makes it newly relevant. Go back to a time when philosophy functioned as self-help and recreate it in the present. If a tradition was therapeutic once before, why not again?
Yet as a writer of philosophical self-help, I’ve never thought of what I was doing in these terms. I don’t just mean that I’m more eclectic, dispensing “doses of Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and others,” to quote Sullivan’s description of my work. I mean that I am trying to get things right. When I engage with Aristotle, say, I’m as much concerned with his mistakes—an obsession with the ideal life, a meritocracy of friendship—as with his ethical insights.
If philosophy has authority, it’s the authority of truth, not tradition. Of the authors of the Oxford Guides, Sullivan writes: “These philosophers see themselves more as generating material that might fruitfully guide those drawn to the traditions than as adjudicating between the traditions.” But philosophy must judge. I don’t see how to reconcile its alethic self-image with a view on which one simply picks a goal—enlightenment, sagehood, freedom, authenticity or flourishing—and taps philosophy (and psychology) for the means. We have to know what the goal should be.
The picture I’m opposing is explicit in a recent book that is otherwise very good, How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy, edited by three philosophers: Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman. The book has fifteen chapters, retailing “philosophies of life” from Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism through Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics to the monotheistic religions, Ethical Culture, existentialism, pragmatism, Effective Altruism and secular humanism. Each thinker was invited to “reflect publicly on their choice of philosophy of life, explaining … why it works for them.” The options are offered up for our selection, like suits to purchase off the rack.
There is little acknowledgment that a central element of most every outlook in the book is that it alone is true and every other outlook false. What we get in place of argument is appeal to personal style. “What Buddhism might offer,” Owen Flanagan writes in the first chapter, “is a relatively stable sense of serenity and contentment, not the sort of feeling state that is widely sought and promoted in the West as the best kind of happiness.” Hiram Crespo became an Epicurean “after realizing that the Epicurean philosophy was the most satisfying for me,” not through being convinced that it was true. And in embracing Ethical Culture, Anne Klaeysen made “a deeply personal decision to attribute worth and dignity to every human being.”
In a passage that would shock Aristotle, Daniel Kaufman, whose “preferred philosophy of life [is] Aristotelianism,” buys wholesale the metaphor of clothes: “It is not enough, then, that one admire a philosophy for its intellectual qualities. It must be well suited to the type of person one is and the type of life one leads, an ill-fitting philosophy being even more obvious and awkward and ultimately useless than an ill-fitting suit.” But Aristotle believed that his philosophy was true—one size fits all—not a good look for some that others need not sport.
This sharpens the problem implicit in Hume’s distinction. If we are in pursuit of truth, not expressing our taste, if we take a critical stance toward consoling traditions, what assurance do we have that philosophy will help, not harm? In his madly egocentric autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote: “my truth is terrible.” For all we know, philosophy will drive us to despair.
●
When I was writing Midlife in the early 2010s, I didn’t have an answer to these problems. As it happened, thinking through regret and the relentless grind of things to do did give rise to insights that afforded consolation. (For instance, that missing out in middle age is the inevitable side effect of something good: the wild excess of things worth wanting, too many to contain within a single life.) But if you’d asked me why philosophy assuaged my midlife crisis, I could only say that I got lucky.
I think I have the rudiments of a theory now, though: a vision of philosophy as self-help that turns on reconceiving both. It begins by distinguishing happiness—a subjective state of mind—from the activity of living well. Imagine someone submerged in sustaining fluid, electrodes plugged into their brain, being fed each day a stream of consciousness that simulates an ideal life. Unaware that it’s unreal, they’re wildly happy. But their life does not go well. They don’t do most of what they think they’re doing or know most of what they think they know, and they don’t interact with anyone or anything but the machine. You wouldn’t wish it on someone you love: to be imprisoned in a vat, alone forever, duped.
If it aimed at nothing more than happiness, self-help would be a soulless enterprise. But it needn’t take that form. The idea of “living well” that animates the philosophical tradition—the aim of philosophical self-help—is to treat oneself and others as one should. It’s a platitude that we should try to live that way, but as Iris Murdoch argued in The Sovereignty of Good, we can do so only through the hard-won truth. We live within the world we see, “in the moral sense of ‘see’ [that calls for] moral imagination and moral effort.”
The vision intrinsic to living well need not rest on elaborate reasoning or systematic theory of the sort philosophers flaunt. It aims at an abundant honesty about one’s circumstance, about oneself and others. It is knowledge of this kind that tells us how to feel and what to do. But the difference between vision and philosophy is overblown. For Murdoch, attention turns on refining our concepts, portraying people as they are, while her philosophy interrogates the concepts that articulate our social world. To think about thinking of others in terms of attention, not “impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world” but “a refined and honest perception of what is really the case,” is to see ourselves differently.
Moral philosophy often works this way: the role of argument is not to compel assent—it almost never does—but to build conceptual schemes and through connection create new meaning. It’s what I’m doing now: sketching the relationship between moral philosophy, truth and argument in a way that makes room for philosophical self-help. It’s what Murdoch is doing when she identifies love with “the perception of individuals”: shifting our conceptions of attention, knowledge and love.
The stickiest ideas in philosophical self-help are not proofs but concepts or distinctions. Take the cliché “living in the present,” which calls to mind the German spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle, for whom “time is an illusion.” “In the Now, in the absence of time,” he counsels, “all your problems dissolve.” Despite the hyperbole, there’s something right in the idea that we should give “more attention to the doing than to the result [we] want to achieve through it.” Philosophy can make sense of this, contrasting “telic” activities, which aim at terminal ends—like earning a promotion, having a child or writing a book—with activities that are “atelic.” Philosophizing, parenting, spending time with friends: you can stop doing these things, but you can’t complete them, leaving nothing more to do. With telic activities, fulfillment is deferred to the future then archived in the past, so that the present feels empty—but atelic activities are fully realized in the Now. To live in the present is to cherish the value of the atelic, so easily neglected in our project-driven lives.
What philosophy gives us here is a conceptual lens: a capacity for self-audit that comes from asking what we value and what kind of value it has. It’s the redescription of life that is ethically orienting. Perhaps surprisingly, this way of thinking speaks to the political critique of self-help. Murdoch borrowed the concept of attention and its relation to love from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil; but while Murdoch was philosophically apolitical, Weil was not. For Weil, refining the concepts with which to frame our social circumstance was a politically urgent task. As World War II loomed over Europe, she would write: “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.”
Philosophy seeds new concepts, novel understandings—as it might be, alienation, ideology, structural injustice; new ways of comprehending freedom, status, power. Philosophical argument serves more to nurture these concepts and give them life than to establish theorems critics can’t dispute. In Murdoch’s words, “the task of moral philosophers [is] to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”
The most profound achievements of moral and political philosophy lie not in abstract theory or geometric proof but in finding words by which to light our way to lives well-lived. If that is not self-help, what is?
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.