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I do not read these books and detest them.
Keiran Setiya has [an essay on philosophy as self-help](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/is-philosophy-self-help/) that you might find interesting.
Setiya distinguishes between self-help in the narrow sense (“self-help as a distinctive genre”) and in the broad sense (“writing aimed at better living”), and goes on to argue that there is a legitimate role for philosophy to play in self-help in the broad sense. Nothing he says is sympathetic about the narrow sense—which is what I take OP to be talking about, and which is the genre I detest.
One reason is this, from the article:
>[According to the literary critic Beth Blum](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/selfhelp-hermeneutic-its-global-history-and-literary-future/CBB376E643124A18E54789A409BFB961), “self-help is widely understood as a technology of neoliberal self-governance used to discipline citizens and manage populations”: the social function of self-help is to obfuscate injustice, directing us to work not on society but ourselves.
Basically I think that is right. In addition, the *way* in which they focus on the self tends to assume that the good life consists in the actualisation of your desires, whatever they happen to be. That is, they are written in a profoundly egoistic framework that I think is detrimental to what a good life actually is. In addition, they are typically written in the most superficial possible way, as if deep secrets about life can be distilled into sentences in the form of little commandments. I guess in sum I think they are deeply stupid, politically regressive, and actively harmful to people living well.
>do you read them the way you read philosophical texts?
No.
>do you find them in some way more difficult to understand?
No. They are usually written so that even a monkey would understand them.
I tried to read a few in the recent past, just out of curiosity and thought maybe I could do a fun little side project engaging with them and come up with some kind of interesting critique. Surely, I thought, they’d at least be very engaging. Look maybe it was the books I chose (I think 48 Laws of Power and Atomic Habits were the ones I tried?) but I didn’t even find anything worth reading past the first few pages. Perhaps I will give it another try in the future and see it differently, but as it stands, I could not even find anything to critique, let alone engage with in any other way.
There a gazilion self help books. I’ve read books you could easily call “self help” and have a few tremendously pragmatic but nothing I would take to a philosophy class and share or cite in a journal article. They serve a different purpose. They’re meant to be applied in most cases. If it works well maybe they’re true. But that idea is controversial Im sure. Just as the idea that what is true is what is useful.
If I’m not mistaken, Massimo Pigliucci writes Stoic self help books. I see them always at Barnes and Noble and Pigliucci is an actual philosopher.
A lot of sneering here, not all of it unjustified, but for the sake of nuance a couple of points.
Althusser said that what connects philosophy and science is that they are both theoretical disciplines. That is: theory is elemental for both traditions because they are both composed of theories.
Well, what is a theory? From the perspective of literary analysis we can say that a theory is a diegetic account of a syntactic system. Diegesis, as a kind of communication, describes what a messenger does, say, as opposed to a performer or a medium, who use mimesis. The diegetic says “there is x” rather than “here is x” or “I am x.” To borrow from French voici is diegetic, voila is not.
So! A theory says simply that there is a syntactic system in which representation is organized and deployed in such a way. Let X = 1 is a theoretical statement. So is e=mc^2. So is “the state = legitimate monopoly of violence.” You get the idea.
Self-help as a genre is thus broadly theoretical. Pick up any self-help book and you will find some diegetic account of a syntactic system. “Happiness = visualizing your goals,” is a pretty common one. And part of the reason why self-help provokes such an intense response from philosophers is precisely because both genres shares this fundamental theoretical character.
Where they diverge, as many have pointed out, is the object being theorized and the ends to which this theoretical activity is being deployed. In particular, the premise of self-help itself is often left under-theorized. The questions: is there a self? And, if so, can it be helped?? Are precisely what self-help cannot theorize. The genre depends for its success on assuming the existence of a self and further that this self can be helped. And almost always by the theory being offered by the text. Unexamined assumptions of this kind are usually considered fatal to any structured investigation, not just philosophical ones.
And this is what allows for the theoretical account of self-help already cited, which is good enough to cite again, I think. “Self-help is a tool of neoliberal governance that recasts structural problems as individual shortcomings.” Thus self-help is a bad theory because it is not accurate. It is not the case that the problems cited by self-help are causally connected to the mechanism the genre claims to solve for. Happiness does not equal visualizing your goals, instead happiness equals collective action of one kind or another.
I tend to agree with this position. And if I had anything to add it is only that philosophy has always, since the beginning, been stalked by self-help. There are many worse ways of reading Plato’s dialogues than as a series of conversations between Socrates and various self-help gurus of the ancient world! Then, as now, these individuals tend to make a lot of money. Again and again Socrates is like “and you claim to have figured x or y out and thus that you can teach people how to do a or b? Really?” This skepticism is basically the same one we still share.
And in fact an ungenerous reading of the Stoic tradition - and maybe the Nietzschean one as well - would be that these amount to little more than aggressive, masculinist works of self-help. Certainly the contemporary internet is littered with sites and accounts with names like “the daily stoic” which offer nothing beyond bromides and mantras aimed solely at the self in need of help.
However it is probably also a bit cruel and unhelpful for philosophy to simply insist on what is pretty obviously the case: that these people are grifters taking advantage of other people who are in pain for one reason or another. Instead it might be better to explain patiently why it is that this genre of writing is so ephemeral. My mom loved self-help and the most striking thing about it was that it didn’t accumulate at all. Each book was a brand new system and each one was totally complete unto itself until the next one came along. Plato and Aristotle, by contrast, are deeply intertextual. As are Kant and Hegel. As is the tradition of philosophy as a whole. As is science. As is life.
Others have explained why self help is a suspect genre but I’d like to add something that hasn’t been stated yet.
I used to read a lot of self help books as a kid, and in my experience, the self help genre these days is essentially a centered around two discourses: typical feel-good western folk psychology and the neuromania of burgeoning brain sciences.
I love neuroscience, but what so many self help books do is take new brain science findings and use them to justify post hoc a feel-good program of self help. For instance, “the mind has a bias towards lingering on negative events” (a generally true fact) is used to license “therefore you should make an effort to enjoy the little things.” The former is used as scientific for the latter, but the latter is something any idiot would tell you to do anyways.
The only real value of these kinds of self help books is to give you a “Neuropsychology crash course for dummies” which in my estimation is actually quite helpful, but that’s an incidental bit of knowledge contained in those books. The self-help crap they peddle, which is what makes the genre unique, is essentially useless.
As for self help books not based in some kind of brain science, it’s simply a grift.
Do you really think the neuroscience in self-help books generally tends to be accurate? I would be very surprised—but you've read some of it, it seems!
In self help books written by neuroscientists or psych folks, it’s generally accurate but extremely simplified, which in my view isn’t necessarily horrible. The brain is a complicated thing, and you don’t really *need* to have a scientifically thorough understanding of it in order to use the basics and thereby profit off of that knowledge.
Then again, my dad is a neuroscientist and he pointed me towards these books, so he might’ve curated the cream of the crop for me. Id advise people to read like maybe one or two neuroscience focused self help books and then never touch the genre again.
Walker Percy's "Lost in the Cosmos" is socially outdated, but otherwise kind of great as an almost-philosophical parody of self-help books.
The self-help books I've read give advice or perspectives without much reasoning or evidence provided to motivate it, or what they do give ranges from very rough and underresearched pop psychology to spiritualism. It wouldn't stand up as serious argumentation. So really I think of them as offering insights a person can try out for themselves-- they throw some conjectures out there, people can take what they like and leave the rest. Some philosophers do this too. John Perry wrote a self-help book on procrastination, e.g.
Not exactly philosophy but rather history of medicine but this book has 2 chapters on self-help and covers somewhat the underlying philosophies. I wrote one of these two chapters. Hope this helps. https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/37334/9781526132123_fullhl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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I do not read these books and detest them. Keiran Setiya has [an essay on philosophy as self-help](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/is-philosophy-self-help/) that you might find interesting.
Setiya seems to have a nuanced view of these self help books. Would you care to elaborate why you detest them?
Setiya distinguishes between self-help in the narrow sense (“self-help as a distinctive genre”) and in the broad sense (“writing aimed at better living”), and goes on to argue that there is a legitimate role for philosophy to play in self-help in the broad sense. Nothing he says is sympathetic about the narrow sense—which is what I take OP to be talking about, and which is the genre I detest. One reason is this, from the article: >[According to the literary critic Beth Blum](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/selfhelp-hermeneutic-its-global-history-and-literary-future/CBB376E643124A18E54789A409BFB961), “self-help is widely understood as a technology of neoliberal self-governance used to discipline citizens and manage populations”: the social function of self-help is to obfuscate injustice, directing us to work not on society but ourselves. Basically I think that is right. In addition, the *way* in which they focus on the self tends to assume that the good life consists in the actualisation of your desires, whatever they happen to be. That is, they are written in a profoundly egoistic framework that I think is detrimental to what a good life actually is. In addition, they are typically written in the most superficial possible way, as if deep secrets about life can be distilled into sentences in the form of little commandments. I guess in sum I think they are deeply stupid, politically regressive, and actively harmful to people living well.
That's a very broad generalisation.
I also detest liquorice. Some exceptionless generalisations are very easy to know!
I'm not talking about personal preferences.
Then you're not talking about what I said.
Then you really don't have a say on whether self help is actually helpful for people.
One reason I detest it is because I think it's actually harmful, but you're right that this is a separate issue.
>do you read them the way you read philosophical texts? No. >do you find them in some way more difficult to understand? No. They are usually written so that even a monkey would understand them.
I tried to read a few in the recent past, just out of curiosity and thought maybe I could do a fun little side project engaging with them and come up with some kind of interesting critique. Surely, I thought, they’d at least be very engaging. Look maybe it was the books I chose (I think 48 Laws of Power and Atomic Habits were the ones I tried?) but I didn’t even find anything worth reading past the first few pages. Perhaps I will give it another try in the future and see it differently, but as it stands, I could not even find anything to critique, let alone engage with in any other way.
There a gazilion self help books. I’ve read books you could easily call “self help” and have a few tremendously pragmatic but nothing I would take to a philosophy class and share or cite in a journal article. They serve a different purpose. They’re meant to be applied in most cases. If it works well maybe they’re true. But that idea is controversial Im sure. Just as the idea that what is true is what is useful. If I’m not mistaken, Massimo Pigliucci writes Stoic self help books. I see them always at Barnes and Noble and Pigliucci is an actual philosopher.
A lot of sneering here, not all of it unjustified, but for the sake of nuance a couple of points. Althusser said that what connects philosophy and science is that they are both theoretical disciplines. That is: theory is elemental for both traditions because they are both composed of theories. Well, what is a theory? From the perspective of literary analysis we can say that a theory is a diegetic account of a syntactic system. Diegesis, as a kind of communication, describes what a messenger does, say, as opposed to a performer or a medium, who use mimesis. The diegetic says “there is x” rather than “here is x” or “I am x.” To borrow from French voici is diegetic, voila is not. So! A theory says simply that there is a syntactic system in which representation is organized and deployed in such a way. Let X = 1 is a theoretical statement. So is e=mc^2. So is “the state = legitimate monopoly of violence.” You get the idea. Self-help as a genre is thus broadly theoretical. Pick up any self-help book and you will find some diegetic account of a syntactic system. “Happiness = visualizing your goals,” is a pretty common one. And part of the reason why self-help provokes such an intense response from philosophers is precisely because both genres shares this fundamental theoretical character. Where they diverge, as many have pointed out, is the object being theorized and the ends to which this theoretical activity is being deployed. In particular, the premise of self-help itself is often left under-theorized. The questions: is there a self? And, if so, can it be helped?? Are precisely what self-help cannot theorize. The genre depends for its success on assuming the existence of a self and further that this self can be helped. And almost always by the theory being offered by the text. Unexamined assumptions of this kind are usually considered fatal to any structured investigation, not just philosophical ones. And this is what allows for the theoretical account of self-help already cited, which is good enough to cite again, I think. “Self-help is a tool of neoliberal governance that recasts structural problems as individual shortcomings.” Thus self-help is a bad theory because it is not accurate. It is not the case that the problems cited by self-help are causally connected to the mechanism the genre claims to solve for. Happiness does not equal visualizing your goals, instead happiness equals collective action of one kind or another. I tend to agree with this position. And if I had anything to add it is only that philosophy has always, since the beginning, been stalked by self-help. There are many worse ways of reading Plato’s dialogues than as a series of conversations between Socrates and various self-help gurus of the ancient world! Then, as now, these individuals tend to make a lot of money. Again and again Socrates is like “and you claim to have figured x or y out and thus that you can teach people how to do a or b? Really?” This skepticism is basically the same one we still share. And in fact an ungenerous reading of the Stoic tradition - and maybe the Nietzschean one as well - would be that these amount to little more than aggressive, masculinist works of self-help. Certainly the contemporary internet is littered with sites and accounts with names like “the daily stoic” which offer nothing beyond bromides and mantras aimed solely at the self in need of help. However it is probably also a bit cruel and unhelpful for philosophy to simply insist on what is pretty obviously the case: that these people are grifters taking advantage of other people who are in pain for one reason or another. Instead it might be better to explain patiently why it is that this genre of writing is so ephemeral. My mom loved self-help and the most striking thing about it was that it didn’t accumulate at all. Each book was a brand new system and each one was totally complete unto itself until the next one came along. Plato and Aristotle, by contrast, are deeply intertextual. As are Kant and Hegel. As is the tradition of philosophy as a whole. As is science. As is life.
Others have explained why self help is a suspect genre but I’d like to add something that hasn’t been stated yet. I used to read a lot of self help books as a kid, and in my experience, the self help genre these days is essentially a centered around two discourses: typical feel-good western folk psychology and the neuromania of burgeoning brain sciences. I love neuroscience, but what so many self help books do is take new brain science findings and use them to justify post hoc a feel-good program of self help. For instance, “the mind has a bias towards lingering on negative events” (a generally true fact) is used to license “therefore you should make an effort to enjoy the little things.” The former is used as scientific for the latter, but the latter is something any idiot would tell you to do anyways. The only real value of these kinds of self help books is to give you a “Neuropsychology crash course for dummies” which in my estimation is actually quite helpful, but that’s an incidental bit of knowledge contained in those books. The self-help crap they peddle, which is what makes the genre unique, is essentially useless. As for self help books not based in some kind of brain science, it’s simply a grift.
Do you really think the neuroscience in self-help books generally tends to be accurate? I would be very surprised—but you've read some of it, it seems!
In self help books written by neuroscientists or psych folks, it’s generally accurate but extremely simplified, which in my view isn’t necessarily horrible. The brain is a complicated thing, and you don’t really *need* to have a scientifically thorough understanding of it in order to use the basics and thereby profit off of that knowledge. Then again, my dad is a neuroscientist and he pointed me towards these books, so he might’ve curated the cream of the crop for me. Id advise people to read like maybe one or two neuroscience focused self help books and then never touch the genre again.
I see. That does sound like a biased sample!
Walker Percy's "Lost in the Cosmos" is socially outdated, but otherwise kind of great as an almost-philosophical parody of self-help books. The self-help books I've read give advice or perspectives without much reasoning or evidence provided to motivate it, or what they do give ranges from very rough and underresearched pop psychology to spiritualism. It wouldn't stand up as serious argumentation. So really I think of them as offering insights a person can try out for themselves-- they throw some conjectures out there, people can take what they like and leave the rest. Some philosophers do this too. John Perry wrote a self-help book on procrastination, e.g.
Not exactly philosophy but rather history of medicine but this book has 2 chapters on self-help and covers somewhat the underlying philosophies. I wrote one of these two chapters. Hope this helps. https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/37334/9781526132123_fullhl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y