Welcome to Wisdom NOTES: A short transcript summary capturing three insights from conversations on In Search of Wisdom. This edition comes from my interview with Kieran Setiya, the author of Life is Hard.
Life is Hard — Finding Our Way
On today’s episode, my guest is Kieran Setiya, the author of the new book Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Kieran teaches philosophy at MIT, working mainly in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. He is also the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and has a philosophy podcast called Five Questions.
In the conversation, Kieran and I discuss:
Finding Our Way
Philosophy and Temperament
Philosophy as Self-Help
Loneliness and Grief
Hope and Despair
How to live a good life and much more
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1. The Difficult Aspects of Life
Wisdom Note #1: Your book looks at some of the difficulties of life, things like loneliness and grief. How does that help us to live a good life?
Kieran: I think there's a tendency in contemporary self-help culture and social media to encourage people to focus on living their best life. Living the dream and conveying a kind of false impression of how attainable that is. But it also has deep philosophical roots. So there's a kind of way of thinking about how to live that goes back to Plato and Aristotle theorizing a utopian just city, or the ideal life on which you start with this ideal.
And then you think, okay, I'll aim for that. But actually, for most of us, most of the time, an ideal life is not a realistic aspiration. So it's kind of demoralizing to have that as your goal. And it also doesn't give you that much guidance. If you start by thinking about the ideal life, it's not that likely that that template is going to tell you what to do when you're lonely, when you've lost someone you love or when you're failing, or when things are going wrong.
And my sense is that when I have ethical conversations with people, the kind of conversations I have with friends about how to live almost always start from a problem, they almost always start from something going wrong in our lives. […]
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