Where's the beef?

Two of my passions over the past decade have been philosophy and self improvement, but I have had a love-hate relationship with each. I love both for their ability to better the self and provide a fresh, new way of perceiving life. They both have the ability to breathe life into a dying soul. However, I also go through periods where I hate them. I hate self improvement because so many of the forerunners in tis field pay little attention to the philosophical aspect of their work, that is, the question of whether it stands up to reason. I hate philosophy, too, because so much of philosophy study is so unconcerned with how it actually matters to people’s day to day lives.

Do you see the connection here? I hated self-improvement because it wasn’t philosophical enough, and I hated philosophy because it wasn’t enough about how to actually improve one’s life. With on hand, I was seeking truth. With the other, I was seeking the good life. Really though, my passion for each was one and the same thing: wisdom. If you read the Proverbs, those are not wise because they follow a logical pattern. But they flick the “aha” switch in our brains, and we are wiser for it. We lead a better life thanks to that knowledge. Any Ancient Greek philosopher on ethics would have the same goal: to give advice that would lead to the bettering of one’s life. When the Stoic philosopher Epictetus instructed us to listen to our reason rather than our emotions, this was not just empty philosophical pandering. This shit was meant to be the key to all your misery. Too often these days, in my opinion, people are scared to give advice or give direction for fear that it might be wrong, or that it is not the politically correct thing to do (after all, one should “make up one’s own mind”). This is bollocks. And the problem with it is that it nullifies the effect of doing the philosophy in the first place. If you take out the capacity for philosophy to impact on one’s life, you are effectively castrating it, you are neutralising it. You turn it into an academic game of chess which matters to the people playing it but no-one else. More people are worried about writing a good paper, or formulating a good argument, than actually getting to the beef. Where’s the beef?

The self-help industry, on the other hand, is all about the bettering of one’s life, so you would assume there would be plenty of beef. But there isn’t. What is wrong with it, then? Well, where to start. Basically it’s full of people who mean well but really know jack all. A philosopher might say that the problem with them is that they do not subject their claims to reasoned analysis. A scientist might say that they do not test their claims empirically. I agree with both: the thing is, there are many very wise self-help writers. The problem is, they are the vast minority. The question of how they get so popular then? Well, one has to look no further than the pop music charts to see how little quality means when it comes to popularity.

Maybe the problem was not in philosophy or self-help, but in me. I mean, as soon as you reify something, turn it into a thing-in-itself, then that thing will be imperfect. As soon as you can define something and grade it, then it loses its beef (after all, where is the value of a philosophy paper which is marked 0?). If I stop expecting so much out of philosophy, then, and stop expecting so much out of self-help, then maybe the wisdom that is in each will show itself. I think that is the beef.