On Philosophical Style

“While there’s a role for philosophy written in this way, Setiya’s specific subject seems to me to demand something else. When someone’s trying to make me feel better about the dead-serious subject of life’s shittiness, I want them fully engaged in the task, and I want the delivery to recall to me what isn’t shitty about life: what’s beautiful, vivid, and free. The most beloved philosophical pessimists — Schopenhauer, Aurelius, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus — paradoxically pull this off. They’re each distinctively themselves on the page, and their conviction that the world is shot through with ugliness and futility is conveyed in such artful, unfettered language that the medium serves, at least partly, to undermine the message. Reading them is like watching someone teeter on the edge of a crater, then dart back at the last minute, with a skip and a chuckle. The abyss is still there, they’re already sliding back toward it, we know it’ll get them, get us all, in the end — but what a line, what a moment, what a flex! It makes you glad to be alive, just to have witnessed it. ”

Helena de Bres, “The Philosophy of Shittiness: On Kieran Setiya’s ‘Life is Hard,’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-philosophy-of-shittiness-on-kieran-setiyas-life-is-hard/. Interesting summary of the recent “Life is Hard.” The reviewer echoes a sentiment that arises in the Suffering: Comparative Studies course I have been teaching this semester. It compares similar philosophers in a way that allows students to delve deeply into their respective talent for facing the edge of the cliff, but pull back to affirm life’s beauty and freedom.