Can serious intellectual theory provide the key to happiness and personal fulfilment for everyone?

Everyday wisdom

Can serious intellectual theory provide the key to happiness and personal fulfilment for everyone? Julian Baggini examines a new series of practical philosophy books dedicated to 'the art of living'

• Julian Baggini
• The Guardian,
• Tuesday September 2 2008
• Article history

Hall of the Philosophers at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Photograph: Adam Eastland/Alamy

Over recent years,

more and more people have been arguing that philosophy must rediscover its historic mission to help us live better, more contented lives. The idea burst into the public consciousness with Alain de Botton's 2000 TV series Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness.

Its basic premise was spelled out on the back jacket of the accompanying book, The Consolations of Philosophy, in a quote by Epicurus:

"Any philosopher's argument which does not therapeutically treat human suffering is worthless," it began, concluding that "there is no profit in philosophy when it doesn't expel the sufferings of the mind."

De Botton's success helped boost the profile of philosophical counselling as a complement or alternative - depending on the zeal of the practitioner - to psychotherapy. But despite its plausibility as a worthwhile enterprise, so far the number of people practising or receiving such therapy has remained stubbornly low, and its purported benefits remain unproven. Therapeutic philosophy has arrived in the culture without yet embedding itself in it.
Now the diffuse practical philosophy movement is to receive another boost with the publication this month of a new series of nine books, The Art of Living, from the hitherto firmly academic publisher Acumen. The series editor is popular philosopher Mark Vernon, whose previous books range from the breezy and commercial What Not to Say to the meatier After Atheism. The mission statement of the series echoes the Epicurean manifesto of de Botton: "From Plato to Bertrand Russell philosophers have engaged audiences on matters of life and death. The Art of Living series aims to open up philosophy's riches to a wider public once again." Philosophy, we are told, is "a great untapped resource for our age".
It is hard to disagree with that premise: we ignore two millennia of accumulated wisdom at our peril. But how exactly can ancient philosophy help us to live today?
If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil. That's why appeals to philosophy's historic mission to help us live better are beside the point: both philosophy and society have changed.
Despite the nod to philosophy's past, the Art of Living series recognises this. Its contemporary feel is most evident in its mix of highbrow and lowbrow, the serious and the trivial. Books on obviously weighty topics such as hunger, illness, wellbeing and work sip cappuccinos at the same table as volumes on clothes, pets, fame and sport.
The books are also all short, meeting the demands of today's time-poor readers: a future volume on attention is clearly needed.
Most importantly, philosophy, like alcohol, can do us good, but it is poisonous drunk neat. It does not flow from a unique fount of wisdom that can quench all our existential thirsts. Perhaps that is why most of the authors in the series are not full-time professional philosophers at all. Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. The challenge for those who champion philosophy's usefulness is to show how it can fit in with the rest of life, not stand as master over it.
The Art of Living series rises to this challenge, up to a point. For instance, in Havi Carel's moving and thoughtful book on illness, she describes how her scholarly work on death in Freud and Heidegger helped her deal with her life-threatening lung condition, lymphangioleiomyomatosis.
However,

the main conclusions she draws seem to be almost identical to those that other people in her position come to without philosophy to help them through.

For example, she argues that phenomenology - an approach to philosophy that focuses on lived experience - helps us to understand how we are not simply minds inhabiting bodies, but are fully embodied, biological beings. But, although the medical profession has indeed been looking to learn from phenomenology recently, I can't see why we need Heidegger to know that we are animals. We just need a toothache and the absence of a philosophical or theological dogma which tells us we're disembodied souls in transit.
Similarly, she draws on Epicurus to appreciate how "Focusing on present abilities, joys and experiences instead of worrying about a no-longer-existing past and a not-yet-existing future, is a way of avoiding some of the suffering caused by illness." True and wise, but I've read many other accounts by seriously ill people who have drawn the same conclusion without ever having picked up a philosophy book.
Carel's book illustrates how the fact that philosophy can help us live better does not always mean it is uniquely positioned to do so. True, philosophy might lead you to draw certain conclusions more quickly and more clearly, but it could just as well muddy the waters and make you question whether you are right to, say, live more in the present.
If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately. Perhaps that is why some other books in the series, although interesting and thought-provoking, draw lightly on philosophy, don't tell us much about how to live, or both.
The prolific polymath Raymond Tallis, for instance, takes hunger as a theme to set off on a typically digressionary tour de force, the main goal of which is to counter the view that humans are "just animals".
I enjoyed it and it made me think, but it hasn't changed the way I live, and nor did it seem to set out to do so.
Similarly, John Harvey, reader in literature and visual culture at Cambridge, makes many interesting observations on why we dress as we do in his book on clothes, but its only therapeutic benefit is to reassure fashionistas that their passion is not always an intellectual or moral disgrace. For instance, "Clothes are like a lens," claims Harvey. "They bring us, or part of us, into focus, and push the less wanted selves back towards the shadows."
The most important respect in which philosophy differs from - and is in some sense superior to - self-help is that it encourages us to think about the value of ends and not just the means to achieve them. In theory, self-help could do this too, but in general, the genre is focused on helping you to get what you want, not questioning whether you're right to want it. Many bestsellers promise you instant confidence, greater powers of persuasion, and stress-free productivity. That we should be more confident, persuasive or productive is taken for granted.
Philosophy, in contrast, is about stepping back and questioning these assumptions. Mark Rowlands, for example, writes about fame in the Art of Living series, and in this he follows such luminaries as Plato and Aristotle, who both questioned the value of peer recognition.
So does the Art of Living series help make the case that philosophy really is valuable to living a good, examined life? An honest answer to that question must start with a recognition that the main problem with self-help is that it promises much more than it delivers. For philosophy to do better, it cannot afford to make the same mistake. If you think philosophy is the source of unique wisdom, essential for living a good life, then The Art of Living series will disappoint. See it as a rich resource among many, one that contributes to our understanding of the good life rather than prescribing what it should be, and suddenly these books seem much more fruitful.
· Julian Baggini (julianbaggini.com) is editor of The Philosophers' Magazine (philosophersnet.com). Nine books in the Art of Living series are published by Acumen this month.