Review of LIFE IS HARD by Dr Kieran Setiya

Writing is one way I de-stress and relax.  Another is to listen to music.  Another is trying to learn a different language, Italian for me these days.  As I type these words on this screen, I am listening to the dulcet tones of Andrea Bocelli singing a selection of songs, and it's Il Mare Calmo della Sera, precisely at this moment as I type.  The above are all ways for me to attempt to live in the present, to "seize the day" or "carpe diem," as the Roman poet Horace (65 - 8 B.C.) put it.  Readers will obviously list their own ways to de-stress as they read.  The whole line from that poem runs: "carpe diem quam minimum credula postero", which translates as "Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one."  This is wonderful Stoic advice. (Horace, after the death of his father, had travelled from Rome to Athens, where he enrolled at Plato's "Academy", where he would have learned much from the Stoics and Epicureans who then dominated that illustrious school.) 

A statement from Iris Murdoch constantly rattles around in my mind, namely, "existentialism is basically a lived-in philosophy." She spent a good period of her life teaching and writing about moral philosophy and existentialism.  She felt that a true moral philosophy had to be "lived in" or "inhabited", that is, that a really authentic philosophy must provide us with practical, sensible and concrete guidance in a world that is often messy, and not waste our energy too much on cold, airtight intellectual puzzles.  No wonder she turned to writing novels during her later life.

The book I want to review here is Dr Kieran Setiya's recent book Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (Hutchinson Heinemann, Penguin Random House, London, 2022).  Setiya presents us with an atheist's calmly considered "lived-in philosophy," just as Iris Murdoch would have loved.  Not for him the wasting of his energy on cold, airtight intellectual puzzles unrelated to the messiness of life.  Professor Setiya, an English philosopher, teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he specialises in ethics, epistemology and philosophy of mind.  Apart from his academic publications, he has written several self-help books, and this one falls somewhere in-between a self-help book and a book of philosophical reflections related to living our lives better.  The chapter headings clearly delineate the themes explored: Infirmity/Suffering, Loneliness, Grief, Failure, Injustice, Absurdity and Hope.

His approach approximates a Buddhist one.  He argues that we must first acknowledge that suffering exists whether we like it or not; life is painful and often unfair, or, as Setiya puts it in his title, LIFE IS HARD. He puts his aim in writing this well-researched and passionately "lived-in" self-help book:  "So this is where we are: heirs to a tradition that urges us to focus on the best in life but painfully aware of the ways in which life is hard.  To open our eyes is to come face-to-face with suffering - with infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity.  We should not blink.  Instead, we should look closer.  What we need in our affliction is acknowledgement." (p. 5 - 6)  The book basically provides a map to guide the reader over the rough terrain of life.  In guiding us on our way, Setiya draws on the writings of many philosophers, novelists, poets, artists, and vignettes from memoirs and films.  All is grist to the mill of his reflections and his well-thought-out discernment of the malaises besetting humanity in these stressful times.

The book is highly compassionate throughout and begins with an appropriate epigraph from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby.  He doesn't know what storm is raging out there or that this person might only with difficulty be keeping himself on his feet."  I can understand his wishing to quote something compassionate from a leading philosopher, but the language in this quotation is highly convoluted and stilted.  We can forgive Wittgenstein, as he was Viennese, so English was his second language.  The late great actor, Robin Williams, stated it better, more succinctly and to the point: "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."  Again, the ability to empathise with the human condition is central to both philosophical anthropology and psychotherapy.

From the beginning, Setiya roots his reflections in his lived experience by emphasising that since the age of twenty-seven, he has experienced persistent chronic pain, and he outlines all the ways he has sought over the intervening years to combat that pain to little or no success.  This is the human condition: life is hard, suffering exists.  Life is unfair, too, and some of us are luckier with our health than others.  There is, of course, no cure for the human condition, but Setiya believes that philosophy and philosophising can help.  Like the wounded healer, he stresses that any philosopher, like any psychotherapist who addresses the human condition, is "bound to disclose themselves in describing the world" (p. 11).  Self-disclosure is used widely by psychotherapists in their consulting rooms, and Setiya uses it wisely in this book.

As a good philosopher, the author points out that we need to be careful with our words.  He gives an example from the philosophy of medicine: There is "an emerging consensus that contrasts disease - a category of malfunction - with illness, which is the negative impact of disease on lived experience.  Disease is biological; illness is, at least in part, 'phenomenological', a matter of how life feels.  It is, as philosophers say, 'contingent' whether or not disease makes life go worse." (p. 17) In this respect, Setiya reports an interesting debate between Harriet McBride Johnson, a sufferer of muscular dystrophy, a lawyer and disability activist, and the philosopher Peter Singer.  Singer believes that parents should be able to 'euthanise' infants born with her condition.  She replied: "Are we worse off?... I don't think so.  Not in any meaningful sense.  There are too many variables" (p. 24 - 25). In other words, Ms Johnson was pointing out that there is too much diversity in people's lives, too much contingency or uncertainty, in the prospects of living well.  Who are we to say that a person with MS, MND, muscular dystrophy or any other chronic disease or inherited disorder cannot acquire a certain state of well-being?  Consider the case of Stephen Hawking as an exceptional example.  In short, being disabled is compatible with living a good life in many situations.  It is simply wrong to generalise in the cases mentioned above.  Setiya references many literary figures and philosophers on their insights into the nature of pain, from Virginia Woolf, Elaine Scarry, Hilary Mantel, Emily Dickinson, Anne Boyer to Alphonse Daudet, René Descartes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Obviously, we only truly know ourselves through interactions with others, and to be in relationship is to develop our identity as human beings.  Setiya offers a long reflection on loneliness in this context.  He describes Aristotle's definition of friendship and finds it flawed: 

His mistake was to think of friendship as meritocratic: for him, it is conditional on virtue. "But if one accepts another man as good, and turns out badly and is seen to do so," Aristotle asks, "must one still love him?  Surely it is impossible, since not everything can be loved, but only what is good."  For Aristotle... friends should drop you, and stop loving you, the moment you lose the qualities that make you friends.  (p. 54)

Setiya is correct in his criticism of Aristotle. Friendship can be unconditional and often is, as we have all experienced.  We don't drop our friends because they have made mistakes or blunders in their lives.  As the author puts it: "Being loved for yourself is being loved precisely not for any special qualities by which love must be earned.  And to be valued as a friend is to be valued irrespective of your faults." (p. 54) (Of course, there are obviously exceptions with so-called friends who have committed outrageous and egregious crimes.) As Martin Buber remarked in I and Thou  (1937), "In the beginning is relation” (p. 18). In general, relationships and friendships are essential to building our identity as persons; if we lose contact with others, our sense of identity diminishes, and we begin to become invisible to ourselves. 

The author offers in-depth and well-thought-out chapters on grief, failure, injustice, absurdity and hope, all succinctly and clearly dealt with.  What appeals to this reader and reviewer is the fact that he presents all these themes with a "lived-in" or "inhabited" philosophy, where his philosophical reflections are deeply rooted in personal experience.  The following revelation about grief resonated with my own experience of my mother's dementia: "The closest I have come to grief is watching my mother sail into the darkness of Alzheimer's; but she is still alive." (p. 67)  Interestingly, he reminds the reader that grief comes in waves over the course of many years.  In a sense, we keep dealing with our various griefs as we age.  I loved the following sentiment from Setiya, a professional philosopher: "A fact of metaphysics - the dead are not unreal; we can still speak to them, have relationships with them - all easily misplaced in the fog of grief". (p. 76).  How many of us still visit the graves of our long-lost parents?  I still do, even if it is only once a year at Christmas time.

There is much other wisdom in this book besides the personal selection of thoughts referred to above that resonated with me.  However, I cannot finish this review without indulging myself with one other reference to this fascinating and thought-provoking text, and that is that life, any life, can never be a failure, or indeed a success, as it can only be lived.  It may rub against the very raison-d'etre of modern life; but the process of living is, in its granularity, always more important than its projects, be they ever so worthwhile or indeed desired.

I could go on forever expanding on thoughts and reflections occasioned by this book.  However, I will finish by recommending this as a highly enriching read that will repay the effort expended in reading it.  Highly recommended.