Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way - Softcover

Setiya, Kieran

 
9780593538227: Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593538226 ISBN 13: 9780593538227
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND THE ECONOMIST

“Life Is Hard is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.” —The New York Times Book Review

There is no cure for the human condition: life is hard. But Kieran Setiya believes philosophy can help. He offers us a map for navigating rough terrain, from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world. 

In this profound and personal book, Setiya shows how the tools of philosophy can help us find our way. Drawing on ancient and modern philosophy as well as fiction, history, memoir, film, comedy, social science, and stories from Setiya’s own experience, Life Is Hard is a book for this moment—a work of solace and compassion.

Warm, accessible, and good-humored, this book is about making the best of a bad lot. It offers guidance for coping with pain and making new friends, for grieving the lost and failing with grace, for confronting injustice and searching for meaning in life. Countering pop psychologists and online influencers who admonish us to “find our bliss” and “live our best lives,” Setiya acknowledges that the best is often out of reach. Instead, he asks how we can weather life’s adversities, finding hope and living well when life is hard.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, the Boston Review, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review.

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Chapter One: Infirmity


You never forget the first time a doctor gives up: when they tell you that they don't know what to do-they have no further tests to run, no treatments to offer-and that you're on your own. It happened to me at the age of twenty-seven, with chronic pain, but it will happen to many of us at some point, with conditions that may be disabling or eventually fatal. The vulnerability of bodies belongs to the human condition.

I don't remember what movie we had gone to see, but I know we were at The Oaks, an old arts cinema on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, when pain stabbed me in the side, followed by an urgent need to urinate. After bolting for the bathroom, I felt better, but with a band of tension running through my groin. As the hours went by, the pain resolved into a need to pee, again, which woke me up at one or two a.m. I went to the bathroom-but as if in some bad dream, urinating made no difference. The band of sensation remained, insusceptible to feedback from my body. I spent a night of hallucinatory sleeplessness sprawled on the bathroom floor, peeing from time to time in a vain attempt to snooze the somatic alarm.

The next day started sensibly, with a trip to my primary care doctor, who guessed that I had a urinary tract infection and prescribed a course of antibiotics. But the test came back negative, as did tests for more abstruse conditions. The pain did not abate. From that point on, the time line is hazy. My memory is poor and medical bureaucracy defeated any attempt to have my records transferred from Pittsburgh to MIT when I moved eleven years later.

But I won't forget the principal episodes. First, a urodynamic study in which I was catheterized, asked to drink a vat of fluids, and made to piss into a machine that measured rate and flow and function. Normal. Second, a cystoscopy in which an apparently teenage urologist projected an old-fashioned cystoscope through my urethra in agonizing increments, like a telescopic radio antenna. It certainly felt like something was wrong, but the report again was negative: nothing of clinical interest; no visible lesion or infection in the bladder or along the way. It must have been a busy morning in the clinic, because the doctor and nurse forgot about me after the null result. I gingerly restored my clothes and let myself out, hobbling awkwardly down Forbes Avenue back to the ludicrous Gothic skyscraper in which I worked, the turgid penis of Pitt's Cathedral of Learning looming over me as blood dripped into my underwear from mine.

The final consultation in Pittsburgh was with another urologist. At that point, I was getting used to what I called "my symptoms"—able to sleep through the discomfort. I was living my life, more or less, with the hum of pain as background noise. The urologist advised me to keep it up. "I don't know what explains the sensation," he said. "There doesn't seem to be a definite cause. Unfortunately, that's not uncommon. Try to ignore it if you can." He prescribed low-dose Neurontin, an anticonvulsant and nerve pain medication, intended as a sleep aid, and sent me on my way. I'm still not sure if the drug was a placebo. It seemed to help, but I stopped taking it, without discernible effects, a few years later.

And that was that, for roughly thirteen years. No diagnosis; no treatment. I ignored the pain when I could and threw myself into work, nervously enduring flare-ups that would decimate sleep, along with daily life, from time to time. Meanwhile, the rest of my family had their own travails. In 2008, my wife's mother was diagnosed with Stage III ovarian cancer. My mother-in-law is the writer and critic Susan Gubar, who with Sandra Gilbert wrote The Madwoman in the Attic, a feminist classic that asked "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?" A force of nature, she metabolized her illness through writing, describing with brutal precision the tortuous "debulking" surgery to remove the most visible tumors, followed by chemotherapy, the painful insertion of drains that failed to relieve a postoperative infection, and her subsequent ileostomy. Her Memoir of a Debulked Woman cites writers and artists who have grappled with illness, including a nod to Virginia Woolf, who censured literature's silence on the subject in her essay "On Being Ill." Woolf herself was characteristically decorous: "She may as well not have had bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book," the novelist Hilary Mantel complained, recounting her own brutal surgery in "Meeting the Devil." Susan's book rectifies Woolf's omission, with frank descriptions of struggling to shit after the debulking that removed more than a foot of intestine, her fear of soiling herself in public, the "bed of pain" to which she was attached for seventeen days as the drains failed to do their job, the excrement that dribbles from the stoma of her "ostomy," and the persisting disabilities of cancer and its treatment. "More than half a year after the last chemotherapy," she wrote, "my feet were still dead and I could not stand up for more than a few minutes without aches and fatigue setting in." Despite all this, she has survived so far, against all odds, thanks to a drug trial that worked when a third round of chemo did not.

Meanwhile, her daughter, my wife Marah, was found to have a dermoid cyst on her left ovary—"dermoid" meaning the kind of cyst that can grow teeth and hair—which had to be surgically removed. She is high risk for breast and ovarian cancer, having inherited the BRCA2 gene from her mother, and is regularly screened. My father-in-law survived open-heart surgery, and back in England, my mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

I document these trials not because we are unusually stricken—a family of Jobs—but because I'm sure we're not. We all face transient illness and incapacity. And everyone knows someone with cancer, heart disease, chronic pain. In the time of Covid-19, we have friends and relatives who have suffered or died, often in isolation. The fragility of health and everything that depends on it is impossible to ignore. Even the most robust are bound to age, capacities fading as they leave the demographic once dubbed by disability activists "the temporarily able-bodied"; disability should matter to anyone who is hoping to get old. A non-ideal approach to life does not wish these facts away, leaving the body behind. Instead, it asks how we should live with the malfunctioning bodies we have.


One of the most basic lessons of recent work in the philosophy of medicine is the need to take care with words. Beginning with the idea of health as the proper functioning of the body and its parts, an emerging consensus contrasts disease—a category of malfunction—with illness, which is the negative impact of disease on lived experience. Disease is biological; illness is, at least in part, "phenomenological," a matter of how life feels. It is, as philosophers say, "contingent" whether or not disease makes life go worse. In general, how well you are able to live when your body malfunctions depends on the effects, which are mediated everywhere by luck and social circumstance. If you have free access to medication, a serious disease like type 1 diabetes may not involve much illness; if you have no health care, a minor infection or dysentery may kill you. The result is that illness is distributed even more inequitably than disease, following lines of wealth, race, and nationality.

Matters are more subtle still with disability, both long-term and the incremental disabilities of aging. In the last few decades, disability theorists have argued for a social understanding of what it means to be physically disabled. Thus, in Extraordinary Bodies, the critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson aimed "to move disability away from the realm of...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593538226
ISBN 13 
9780593538227
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
RIVERHEAD
https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
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USA
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