Book Reviews

Where is philosophy when we really need it? Why is it so elusive? The last year has seen two important votes; the UK referendum and the US presidential election, and philosophically both had some alarming similarities. They, as if we need reminding, were both characterised by substituting the clarity of a discussion of policy and strategy for the mystification of serial lying, xenophobia, and blatantly undeliverable promises where the ambiguity of reality was reduced to fake news and soundbites, and legitimate questioning was reframed as fear-mongering and whinging. Perhaps Hegel was right when he described the universal human conflict as when, 'each consciousness seeks the death of the other'. The trading of personal insults is certainly not what is meant by the phrase 'the personal is political'.

The so-called debate was also aided and abetted by a press drunk on a heady cocktail of power without responsibility that reinforced the demand that the knowledge of 'experts' be rejected in favour of, what exactly? The rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'taking back control' undoubtedly has great appeal. And why not: who in their right mind would actually want less freedom and control? Except that the freedom on offer was a freedom from 'them'; the Other, that 'we'; the Subject, are alleged to be under attack from. And the 'control' promised is control over their freedom. Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, Romanians, homosexuals, trade unions – you name it – everyone is a possible target and as a result hate crime is becoming normalised. History shows us that this is how dictators get and retain power.

Terror Management Theory formalises what we all intuitively know; that defensive reactions like paranoia result when an objectified Other is seen as increasing our awareness of death; our fear of loss of a way of life. The Other, the en-soi, is as we know, the enemy of the pour-soi.

Both campaigns also invoked the myth of a secure, predictable past that we can and should return to. But Simone de Beauvoir tells us that this nostalgia for a simpler, trouble-free past is about the wish to return to an era of freedom without responsibility and the hope that more powerful others will benevolently manage our lives and protect us from randomness and chance. In other words, the security of childhood. In adults this is bad faith. She also differed with Hegel saying that because we are permanently bound up with other people the death of the other means the death of oneself. As she said, 'To will oneself free is also to will others free'; freedom is how we are with each other and is therefore a collective responsibility, and although situational it is not a commodity. Beware of people who say they can give you more freedom. We live, we are told, in a post-truth era, but unless the nature of human Being changes, we will never be in a post-existential–truth era.

This is why it is so elusive: truth is hard work and we all have to work at it, perhaps even fight for it, all the time. But like all such things it is ultimately worth it. Why do we do this? This is where faith comes in.

Existentially, philosophy is about reflecting on the way we live and all those involved in the elections votes could perhaps have benefited from going back to the works of Epicurus and Lucretius, which is where we start this issue's book reviews. We stay with our relationship with death and the way it can give meaning to life for the next three books and then move on to the important, unavoidable and rarely examined relationship between the personal and political in psychotherapy practice and then to a reflection on the role of the media in the construction of our hopes and fears. The next book looks at the boundaries of philosophy and how it can change the way we look at the world. Children are the future – they certainly change the way we think about life – but exactly what the relationship is, existentially, between childhood and adulthood is more difficult to say, and the next book argues for the value of an existential understanding of childhood. The final book reviewed in this issue is a return to theme of the conduct of the votes and is a meditation on the nature of sanity, this time from a mindfulness perspective.

Martin Adams