Comment by bm3719
8 hours ago
Was in one of those chain book stores recently and decided to stop by the philosophy section. It was tiny, only taking up part of a single shelf in a huge store. I was surprised to find about half of the titles were on Stoicism and closely-related topics. There were many pop-psych texts about applying Stoicism to modern life. I guess it's been having a moment? Interestingly, it was right next to the massive self-help section.
I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.
In the west, we've had a long, deep split between what ordinary people rely on (religion and self-help) and respectable academic philosophy. Philosophy rooted in religion has a strict requirement to scale down to serve masses of people. Philosophy rooted in academia has a strict requirement to scale up to allow practitioners to flex their elite skills and show that they are worthy of scarce academic positions. Academic philosophers pay lip service to the idea that philosophy can and should be for everyone, but in practice, they shy away from anything that could compromise their primary pursuit of a career and academic prestige.
As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.
That's a pretty weak take. The difference between philosophy texts on ethics and the better self-help texts are just the difference between pulp fiction and classic novels. Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing". That said, there's a lot of self-help that isn't philosophical (or, more exactly, don't attempt to defend the philosophy that they present the conclusions of).
Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.
A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.
That seems like a rather cynical take. I think you’re conflating philosophy as guidance for how to live (stoicism etc) and philosophy as more of a science to explore unanswered questions, which are naturally going to have very different practitioners and audiences?
The latter can be applicable to the former. Traditionally the connection was acknowledged, with Socrates the prototype of the philosopher who believed that happiness, ethical living, and philosophy were inextricably linked. Obviously philosophy has come a long way since Socrates, but academic philosophers continue to give lip service to the idea that philosophy can be valuable in everyday living, if not in ethics then in processing information, critiquing arguments, and understanding the origins and limitations of ideas.
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Stoicism has had a bit of a revival since the early 2010s: https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=stoicism+before:2015
Christian thought remains diametrically opposed to Eastern philosophies, at least when it comes to religion. Rejecting desire in an attempt at eternal life is quite different from wanting to escape existence as a whole and return to non-existence.
Ryan Holiday has really popularized Stoicism in the last decade.
Wonderfully put.
Strictures which successfully regulated desire crystallized over the ages into particular forms of tradition and morality. Hence early conservatives like Carlyle and Chesterton were anti-capitalist: they saw the economics of desire as a corrosive force that would break down and nullify the experience of centuries as encoded in customs, tradition and other social bonds.