Abstract
This paper investigates the uses that self-help literature makes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Some specific concepts of his philosophy, as well as his choices in terms of expression, made Nietzsche a topmost reference for self-help authors in the U.S. and in France. As a philosopher and a nearly legendary figure, Nietzsche, in a strange way, fits more easily than other philosophers in the self-help project of leading people, through practical advices, to peace and happiness. Through examples taken from American and French self-help literature, and with comparisons made with other philosophers, this paper shows how self-help functions when it comes to borrowing from other people’s works.
Highlights
It has become very clear that self-help literature is an enormous business
Again, most professional philosophers agree that their field should not remain the restricted area of academic or trained philosophers, and most recognize that transmission is a key task for those who place philosophy at the core of their life and/or work, thereby stressing that public access to critical thinking is of primary importance
Shouldn’t everyone be able to read and love philosophy, and to talk about it without having followed an academic training in the field? Why, do professional philosophers so often find it annoying to watch, hear, or even read self-help authors who often do seem to be doing their best to make abstract ideas accessible to a wider audience? Surely, a sentiment akin to jealousy is not the only issue in this persistent feeling that something is wrong in the way that authors of
Summary
Let us start by thinking about self-help literature’s use of philosophy with the most possible benevolence. Self-help does not openly choose one of these approaches, and it usually seems to lack any interest in the distinction Rather, it mixes them: it offers a translation of a technical knowledge (unintelligible to ordinary mortals) by “experts” who are able to undertake it, while at the same time being very critical of an academic philosophy that is purportedly obscure and abstruse because it has lost its only true mission, that of improving the fate of human beings by making suffering stop. (In this literature, suffering is generally understood as the direct report made by individuals who say they suffer, i.e. as a personal feeling immediately identifiable and describable.) It appears that the “experts” of the self-help movement, in most cases, want to distinguish themselves at the same time from the professional philosophers (deemed too abstract) and from the public (judged unable to understand the texts independently of an expert approach to them) This gap is the site of a privileged position regarding the two groups that are to be reconciled. On what grounds do their claims rest? Is there a conceptual background that allows the authors of philosophical self-help to create their own space and business?
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