The best philosophy books for dealing with difficult emotions

Anger is a seemingly recalcitrant emotion – hard to avoid and difficult to manage. De Ira is the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s attempt to show us otherwise. To Seneca, anger is a wicked emotion. Yet a life free both of the turmoil of anger and of the desire for vengeance that Seneca thought defined anger is possible, he argued. Not only does anger lead us to lash out at others, it corrodes us from the inside – in Seneca’s image, like vinegar stored in a clay pot. While I find Seneca’s conclusion that we should eliminate all anger hard to swallow, his description of the dangers of anger, both to ourselves and to others, never fails to impress.

I enjoy being surprised by philosophical work on emotions. Kurth’s The Anxious Mind is full of unexpected insights into anxiety, an emotion that seems to have little to recommend it. But Kurth manages to persuade readers that we should actually be glad for the presence of anxiety in our lives. He explains how anxiety can enhance our performance and contribute to moral progress both individually and collectively. 

Like many emotions, shame seems like a double-edged sword. Shame seems to notify us that we haven’t lived up to our own ideals – that we’re not the people we thought or hoped we were. But shame has, as Thomason carefully delineates, a dark side: Shame can lead us to withdraw from the world in order not to be seen, and too often shame is a precursor to self-destructive behaviors. Naked ultimately argues that we need shame despite these drawbacks. Thomason’s book is also among the very best of recent books to use philosophical tools to investigate social media; her discussion of online shaming should not be missed.

A Grief Observed falls into a rare genre: a philosophical memoir on grief. Lewis, the well-known defender of Christianity and author of the children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia, recounts the days after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis seems to be drowning in an emotional tidal wave in the book’s opening pages, facing an array of emotions he did not expect to undergo in grief: sadness of course, but also fear, disorientation, and anomie. I find Lewis’ nuanced and vivid picture of grief more compelling than his theological tribulations, but the power of A Grief Observed is undeniable. (And it’s hard not to speculate on why Lewis did not publish this under his own name during his lifetime: Was the great C.S. Lewis embarrassed by his grief?)

We live in a very interconnected world, and yet loneliness is rampant. How can that be? Gaffney’s Political Loneliness helps us see that today’s loneliness is the byproduct of our specific political moment. Modern political life, she argues, alienates us from one other and fosters anonymity while also priming us to value belonging and inclusion. Gaffney’s purpose is less to offer us advice about how we can overcome this ‘political loneliness’ on an individual level. Rather, her uncomfortable message is that, with respect to loneliness at least, the personal is indeed the political, and she warns us that many will find totalitarianism an appealing antidote to the loneliness endemic to contemporary life.