What’s the point of philosophy?

It’s an old question, maybe one of the oldest in the history of philosophy, and there has never been a consensus answer. Some people think the point of philosophy is to make the world make sense, to show how everything hangs together. For others, philosophy is a practical tool that ought to tell us how to live.

If you’re in the latter camp, then it’s fair to say that you think of philosophy as a form of self-help. It’s a tradition of thought that — in theory, at least — can guide you to a better life, or something like that. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask of philosophy. What good is all that ruminating if it can’t offer you something useful when you’re anxious or depressed or mired in one of those dreaded midlife crises?

Kieran Setiya is a philosopher at MIT and the author of several books, most recently Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way and Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. Setiya’s work is uncommonly accessible and a great example of philosophy that really tries to wrestle with the concrete problems of everyday life.

I recently invited Setiya on The Gray Area to talk about the perils of middle age and how philosophy has helped pull us out of the dark. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing

You wrote a book called Life Is Hard. Not that your philosophy of life can be summed up in three words, but if you had to sum it up in three words, is that it?

Kieran Setiya

I think it is. Ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle thought about the ideal life and they tried to provide a blueprint for — and a map toward — it. And that can be both unrealistic and in a certain way self-punitive. Often the right way to approach the ideal life is to think, “That’s not available. I shouldn’t beat myself up about the fact that that’s not available.” Really living well, or living as well as you can, is about dealing with the ways in which life is hard.

Sean Illing

How do you define a midlife crisis?

Kieran Setiya

The midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural phenomena that has a particular date of origin. In 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques writes a paper, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” and that’s the origin of the phrase. Jacques was looking at patients and the lives of artists who experienced midlife creative crises. These were mostly people in their 30s and it........

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