“Hope is a precondition of what matters”

Kieran Setiya, like Oliver Burkeman, calls for "acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have" as the prerequisite of genuine and not merely delusional hope--the sort of hope that, as Rebecca Solnit points out, needs to act and not just lazily wish for a winning lottery ticket. I highly recommend Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help...

"…It is much easier to say why despair is bad than why hope is good. We despair when things are hopeless, but we remain attached to them. "The relationship is over; she is gone forever," cries the jilted lover. The terminal patient weeps: "There is no cure." What they feel is grief or something like it. The pain of passion for a possibility that has died...

Hope coexists with quiescence. If there's courage in hoping, it's the courage to face the fear of disappointment that hope creates. When things turn out badly, hope is more harrowing than despair.

So Hesiod has a point. Hope can be deceptive, docile, daunting. Why celebrate its role in life? In a book she wrote in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit rose to hope's defense: "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky," she wrote. Instead,

hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

The problem is that hope can be like clutching a lottery ticket and it needn't shove you out the door: as I know too well, you can hope intently as you stretch out on the sofa watching the news. The call for action comes from somewhere else.

Solnit may be right that action is impossible without hope: you cannot strive for what you care about, when success is not assured, without hoping to succeed or at least make progress. This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change…"

...

This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the possibility of flourishing with disability or disease, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief. The question, then, is not whether to hope but what we should hope for. In the spirit of this book, the answer’s not an ideal life. What we need is acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have… For who are we? Not just the living but humankind, and there is hope for humanity, and so for us… Other concepts we should leave behind: the concept of the best life as a guideline or a goal, of being happy as the human good, of self-interest divorced from the good of others… Human life is not inevitably absurd; there is room for hope.

— Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

“Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize. He describes a situation many of us have experienced: We tell someone about an illness or a fight we had; they try to convince us not to worry so much, or to focus on the bright side. Worse still, they might tell us that “everything happens for a reason.” This grotesque bromide is, explains Setiya, “theodicy,” an attempt to justify suffering as part of God’s plan. The problem is not that it cannot be true — theologians can extend divine providence to anything, even childhood leukemia — but that such thinking can easily serve as an excuse to avoid compassion.

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths. Happiness is a matter of definition; Setiya cites Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor and psychologist who writes about not only happiness but also the importance of accepting reality. Plato, too, he reminds us, held that true happiness lies in recognizing the lies of ordinary life, famously imagined as a cave filled with shadows. If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way... 

And what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one. Setiya’s liveliest writing is on the subject of infirmity, no doubt because of the chronic pain he has suffered for years...

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies. Ideally, it also helps us imagine what it is like to inhabit the bodies of others, imbuing us with “presumptive compassion for everyone else.” By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them...

“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. Irina Dumitrescu