The problem with self-help

Last week I was set to appear on Radio Four’s Today programme to discuss self-help books with the concert pianist James Rhodes. Rhodes has suffered depression and attempted suicide, which makes his new “anti-self help” book Fire on All Sides a more interesting attack on the genre than most.

In the end I didn’t appear because one of the editors had noticed I’d been on the programme before Christmas and there’s only so much Baggini the broadcaster can inflict on the British people.

Rhodes made an eloquent and persuasive case in the discussion. His main complaint is that the self-help culture encourages us to think we are more perfectible than we are. The “good-enough human being” should indeed be good enough. “The human condition is one of fragility,” he said. “Just because we are not happy it doesn’t mean that we are unhappy. There is a huge amount of space between happiness and unhappiness and someone in between is OK.” Well said.

Rhodes acknowledged that many self-help books do contain nuggets of truth but insisted most of these are just common sense. That’s true, but as his interlocutor Dr Adrian James pointed out, often “common sense” is just what we lack and is only obvious when pointed out.

There is clearly nothing at all objectionable in the idea of self-help. I’d be a bit worried about anyone who claimed never to have read anything which they have sought to use for self-improvement. The problems with the genre are entirely contingent and generally concern their tendency to over-simplify and over-claim. Human life is a complex four-dimensional jigsaw in which the right pieces have a habit of changing into wrong ones. Any book which claims to be able to transform your life is pretending otherwise.

Sometimes, however, even these books can be of help, when there is a perfect coincidence of a book’s central message and what a person most needs to understand at a given time. The problem is that it’s very hard to know what will meet that need, so buying a book is a bit like buying a lottery ticket and hoping your numbers come up.

A deeper problem is that, on the whole, these books assume we know what we want and what a good life looks like and simply help us to close the gap between life as it is and life as we’d prefer it to be. That’s why I think philosophy is not “self-help” in the contemporary sense. Philosophy asks us to question what it means for a life to go well, what it means to be a good person. Not only might it provide no help reaching our current goals, it might even make us change them.

So I get quite cross when I see philosophy packaged as self-help. It’s why, for all its virtues, I was irritated by Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, which had in large type on its back cover just one quote from Epicurus: “Any philosopher’s argument which does not therapeutically treat human suffering is worthless.” There goes Kant’s Critique, Descartes’ Meditations, Berkeley’s Treatise, etc, etc.

Philosophy helps us to live better because living better doesn’t mean feeling better. Needless suffering should always be alleviated. But living to our full capacity, being as fully human as can be, is best served by ideas, art, engagement with the world and other people. If instead we’re reading self-help books, we’re allowing our pursuit of happiness to get in the way of our pursuit of the truly good life.

Receive A Life Philosophic direct to your inbox every week by signing up here.