A review by Michael Sayeau
Illness by Havi Carel, Sport by Colin McGinn, Hunger by Raymond Tallis, (Acumen), £9.99/$18.95 (pb).
There's no shame in wanting to sell books, even – or especially – philosophy books. And it's no great mystery that one way of trying to sell these books would be to try to meet the potential customer where she or he lives. Acumen's new series The Art of Living represents an effort to do just that. Having drafted in a group of philosophers and philosophically-minded literary scholars, as well as a freelance writer or two, Acumen has set them to work on themes that are at once close to the classical roots of philosophy and relatively distant from most of the philosophical work that issues from academia today.
The promotional literature for the series states that philosophy ‘is the great untapped resource of our generation.’ These books tap that resource in order to probe issues that are ostensibly of concern to everyone – issues like Work, Wellbeing, Illness, and Clothes. Saving the best for last, Sex and Death are slotted for publication early next year.
Even the cover designs of the books signal that these volumes are meant to be impulse-buys in a way that The Critique of Pure Reason is not. The forthcoming Sex by Seiriol Morgan features a photograph of a hand orgasmically clenching the bedsheets, while Havi Carel's Illness, a decidedly unsexy book, features a woman facing away from us clothed only in a hospital gown that has fallen open to reveal more than we'd usually want our fellow patients to see.
The guiding idea of the series is that the various authors would entwine philosophical erudition with, again in the words used in the publisher's description, “their own personal reflections” in order to compose readable and accessible answers to the age-old question “how should we live?”In Carel's Illness, Colin McGinn's Sport, and Raymond Tallis's Hunger, the author was chosen because he or she has a personal interest or investment in the topic at hand. Carel suffers from an incurable lung disease, McGinn is an enthusiastic sportsman, and Tallis is a medical doctor and researcher.
The three taken together demonstrate both the promise and the limitations of the series as a whole. On the one hand, and particularly in the case of Tallis's book, the blend of personal interest and philosophical work gives rise to a valuable and persuasively readable text. On the other hand, there is a threat that the mandate of the series would give rise to pseudo-philosophical and idiosyncratic memoirs written by people who aren't by nature or practice memoirists. To an extent, both McGinn's book on sport and Carel's offering on illness fall into this category.
Colin McGinn's entry in the series, Sport, is by far the most disappointing of the three. You might find yourself, as I did, thinking that you really need to buy a gym membership after reading this book. You might also find yourself extremely impressed with the raw amount of athletic activity that McGinn somehow folds into his life – tennis and windsurfing, skiing and weightlifting, ice hockey and kiteboarding. But what you won't be, I venture to guess, is overwhelmed by the philosophical import of McGinn's book.
Over the course of it, we learn a bit about what phenomenology is, about Descartes' formulation of the mind-body split and its shortcomings, the political philosophy of libertarianism, and “ethical egotism”. But when the boldest truths presented by McGinn are truths that he himself can't help but label “obvious”, it is easy to start to wonder about the value of the work as a whole. “Here's the obvious truth: it's not worth winning if you do it by fouling, cheating, risking your health or that of your opponent, or even trading on his psychological weaknesses [...] Intimidation, trash-talking, cheap shots: none of its is morally acceptable.” McGinn's book is full of “truths” like this one – received ideas most of us learned long ago on the playgrounds of our childhoods and reinforced every other year during the inspirational features that fill the space on the Olympic broadcasts between the actual events.
If the superficiality of McGinn's theme leads him to advance banal conclusions and suggestions in his work, at least Havi Carel is in no danger of falling into the same trap. Her entry in the series, focused on illness, begins with the description of her discovery in 2006 that she, along with only 120 other women in the UK and 250,000 women worldwide, suffers from an untreatable, terminal lung disease – Lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM for short. The doctors give her only ten years to live.
Her book is captivating reading on the level of the very dire story that she tells about herself as she negotiates a world in which it is an aberration to be in your thirties and gravely ill, to be talked down to by couples who have children that you can't have, and friends who can't bring themselves to respond to the email in which you inform them that you are dying. But again, as with McGinn's book, Carel's work leads with the autobiographical anecdotes – the philosophical material and import follow several steps behind. There is an attempt to reconcile Heidegger's concept of “being-toward-death” with Epicurus's hedonistic philosophy that works only when we allow ourselves to squint and to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Carel's polemic in favor of a phenomenological approach to medicine, which would establish the experience of the patient as a counterweight to the distanced, scientific treatment of the disease favoured by the doctors themselves, is persuasive, but as a whole her book suffers from a tendency to go with personal resentment where philosophical argument or even description would do.
It is significant, I think, that the only one of the three works in the series that I honestly enjoyed was the one whose author had the least personal stake in the topic that he had chosen to explore. Raymond Tallis's Hunger, while written by a trained medical doctor and researcher, takes an authentically philosophical view of its topic – privileging intelligent argument and the paraphrasis of philosophers to the memoiristic, gut-aimed writing that we find in both McGinn and Carel. Hunger contains vivid and pertinent condensations of such issues as Hegel’s and Sartre's different but related takes on the question of desire, the difference between the hungers of humans and those of animals, and John Stuart Mill's negotiation with his father's philosophy of distributed happiness.
Especially persuasive is Tallis's chapter on what he calls the “fourth hunger”, the “hunger that still remains after other hungers have been met” – a spiritual, artistic, or idealistic hunger that seems at once superfluous in the face of other, more concrete hungers and a hunger that we, if we are to remain human, would just as soon not do without.
The only real disappointment with Hunger comes at the very end of the volume, when Tallis rounds the corner toward a suggestion of what might be done to deal with the hunger problems of the first and especially the third world. While he derides as “a politics derived from envy” the possibility of a socialist or communist response to hunger, he himself has little more to offer as far as a solution goes than the suggestions that we consider “downsizing” our hungers, and that we take the question of hunger seriously – as he has clearly done in writing this book.
But despite the letdown at the end, Tallis's Hunger demonstrates the promise of a project of the sort that Acumen has taken up in planning and publishing this series. Honest and well-informed approaches to the relationship between the issues that we face as individuals and the wider problems of the world can in fact accomplish the twin goals of the Art of Living series: to “reinvigorate philosophy and open up the subject's riches to a wider public once again.”
Michael Sayeau is a lecturer in the English Department at University College London.
