Table Of Content

“Hämäläinen’s book is unique in bringing out how popular self-help literature not only reflects but also shapes contemporary forms and i deals of moral personhood, being a place of constant moral renegotiation; an insight bought in dialogue with her clear analysis of philosophical concerns with self-transformation.” Anne-Marie S. Christensen, University of Southern Denmark The Making of the Good Person This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress, and profundity. Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they work to shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conducive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat different argumentative strategies. Part 1 consists of an overview and reassessment of popular self-help literature and its sociological and journalistic critics, written from a moral philosophical perspective. Part 2 opens with discussion of the current attrac- tion, among a range of philosophers, to self-transformative themes. The chapters assess the strand of self-transformative philosophy found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell, and Iris Murdoch. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the theme of social change and moral renegotiation in contemporary societies, which is a central but underestimated undercurrent in discus- sions on contemporary self-transformative practices. The book’s dual perspective – on both popular self-help and self-transformative currents in philosophy – enables a cultural and moral philosophical analysis of contemporary ethical ideals of personhood, as well as reflection on the literatures available for its development. The Making of the Good Person will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral philosophy, history of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literary studies. Nora Hämäläinen is Docent and University Researcher at the Univer- sity of Helsinki, Finland. She is the author of Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality? (2016) and Literature and Moral Theory (2015). Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory Incomparable Values Analysis, Axiomatics and Applications John Nolt Value Incommensurability Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making Edited by Henrik Andersson and Anders Herlitz A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy Toby Svoboda The Ethics of Attention Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil Silvia Caprioglio Panizza The Transcendent Character of the Good Philosophical and Theological Perspectives Edited by Petruschka Schaafsma Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty Edited by Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and Nigel Pleasants The Guise of the Good A Philosophical History Francesco Orsi The Making of the Good Person Self-Help, Ethics and Philosophy Nora Hämäläinen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/ book-series/SE0423 The Making of the Good Person Self-Help, Ethics and Philosophy Nora Hämäläinen First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Nora Hämäläinen The right of Nora Hämäläinen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-39010-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39011-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34796-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003347965 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Acknowledgments ix Epigraph xiii 1 Introduction 1 PART I Reading the self-help culture 21 2 What is self-help? 23 3 Plural histories of self-help 62 4 Self-help and governmentality 87 5 We have always been governed 106 PART II Philosophy as a self-transformative practice 117 6 Transformative hopes in philosophy 119 7 Pierre Hadot – philosophy as a spiritual practice 135 8 Foucault’s two faces? 148 9 Murdoch’s platonic ascent 164 10 Wittgenstein’s therapy 182 11 Cavell’s ethics of becoming 205 12 Ways forward 228 Index 249 Acknowledgments This book project has been in the making for some time and is thus connected to numerous places and people. The first sketches of parts of this book were written when I was a visiting post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago in the first half of 2012. My warmest thanks to Professor James Conant for making this visit possible. Between 2013 and 2016 I had the great luck to work on this topic as a fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS). My deepest thanks to director Sami Pihlström for believing in the project and yet always in his inimitable style reminding us fellows that we were at the collegium to pursue free intellectual work, not to slavishly follow our research proposals. I both did and did not follow this advice. Other paths were followed along the way, but in the end this book is surpris- ingly faithful to my original aims. I also want to thank deputy director and my immediate superior Sari Kivistö for her support and her keen awareness of the pressures of young academic life. I will never forget how she perceptively asked me out for a cup of tea and therapeutic con- versation at a point when I was becoming increasingly unhinged due to a major deadline. Thanks also to all the numerous colleagues who made each year at the collegium a new intellectual adventure. In the academic year of 2016–2017 I was awarded an Erik Allardt stipend to work at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, where important parts of the manuscript of this book were written. My deepest thanks go to director Björn Wittrock, the lovely SCAS staff who took such good care of us, and all my co-fellows of that year who made the experience both academically and socially memorable. These four years of research in the interdisciplinary environments of two research collegiums were uniquely formative for my work and taught me about places in academia where intellectual appetite is a more important guide than disciplinary boundaries. A grant from the Kone Foundation enabled me to continue my research in the academic year of 2017–2018. In the past four years I have had the benefit of working at the Cen- tre for Ethics at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. I thank