3 philosophy classics that are better than self-help books

Self-help often distills philosophical ideas for the modern ear. Sometimes, its better to go back to the source.

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There are two ways to write a bestseller. The first is to imagine something truly original. You need to invent a world or coin a new idea — an idea that changes the reader. The second way is to rewrite and refresh something. You put Shakespeare in an American high school or give a modern spin to the ancient myths. And one of the most popular, and lucrative, versions of this is found in the modern self-help industry. Of course, some self-help books are original and fresh. But the bulk of it is philosophy in a new set of clothes. It’s Aristotle in podcast form, or Lao Tzu giving a TED talk.

There is nothing wrong with this. Big ideas wrapped in big words often take a lot of chewing. I used to teach Nietzsche to 16-year-olds and they often took to him. And so, I told them to go and read On The Genealogy of Morals. They didn’t love him then. Almost all philosophical ideas come nested in a backdrop of neologisms, foreign concepts, and alternative worldviews. Philosophy is one of the most important disciplines in the world — it can change lives and define them. But it’s often difficult. So it makes sense that millionaires are made by explaining or condensing complex philosophical ideas for a modern ear.

The problem is that anytime you simplify, you lose nuance. If you simplify it again, you lose a bit of meaning. When you simplify it too many times, it becomes so diluted and dumbed-down that it becomes worthless. So, here are three examples where philosophy is richest at its source. Here are three books worth more than a bookshop full of self-help manuals.

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

One of the hallmarks of genius is to be not thought of as a genius. It’s to create something so obvious, clear, and straightforward that when you first meet it, it feels like you knew it long before. An inventor, for example, will become rich thanks to billions of people saying, “I can’t believe no one thought about this before.” Likewise, a novelist, a writer, or an artist will create something so immersive that you often won’t see the effort in the planning, the execution, and the edits. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a genius piece of work because you do not see the genius.

When I first read Aristotle as a young adult, I read it as I would any book or article. I was swept away by the argument. Everything he said seemed obvious. It felt like I was being pulled along a path, and I could imagine no other route to walk. I drew wisdom from his ideas and followed his conclusions, but I felt as if there was something far greater lurking beneath the surface. It was as if I were sailing with the breeze but beneath the sea lurked some huge, philosophical leviathan, because Aristotle’s work is so well-crafted. This was not some rushed work of an all-nighter marching to the drum of an angry editor. As the philosopher Michael Pakaluk puts it, “The density and concentration of Aristotle’s thought is difficult for a beginning student to appreciate, not least because hardly anyone else writes in this way; nearly every sentence plays a role in some argument or other, and every word plays a specific role in the sentence, as in a carefully crafted poem.”

So, what’s Aristotle’s book about? Well, the “Ethics” in his book is an older version of the word. Today, it means right and wrong — synonymous with morality. But in ancient Greece, ethics was more about a way of life. It was how you behaved and your entire character. So, Aristotle’s book is literally a guidebook or argument about how to be a human being. It’s how to live well, how to be virtuous, and, most importantly of all, how to be happy. The book starts with the question, “What’s the ultimate purpose in life?” Aristotle believes it’s eudaimonia, or profound, existential happiness. And so the entire book is a manual about how to be happy. It’s the work of decades of philosophical study and debate from one of history’s greatest minds. It says, “Okay, if happiness is the destination, how do we get there?” And the path Aristotle leads us on is an act of genius. You’ll think you’ve heard it before, but it will change how you view life.

Essays by Michel de Montaigne

There are only a handful of people in history who you can say literally started an entire genre. You could say Mary Shelley with science fiction, Jane Austen with romance novels, and J.R.R. Tolkien with modern fantasy. And the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne is widely considered to be the father of the essay. Today, essays are everywhere. Almost all long-form, non-fiction you read online comes in essay form. There is no easy way to define a literary essay, but broadly, it’s when you explore a theme in a philosophical and contemplative style while weaving in autobiographical details and fascinating asides. Montaigne was the first to do it.

Essai in 16th-century France meant literally a “trial,” and the idea with Montaigne’s Essays was that he would take a “trial” — a question, an issue, a problem — and pen his reflections on the topic. Of course, the art of an essay comes in the degree of reflection and the style in which it’s written. A good essay needs wit, erudition, and relatability.

There are two reasons why Montaigne’s essays are such a great example of “self-help.”

The first is that Montaigne is quite literally talking us through his solutions to common problems. Here, we have a hugely intelligent human being talking about topics that are just as relevant today as they were four hundred years ago. He talks about feeling lazy, dealing with liars, and the best way to apologize. He explains the joys of solitude but the dangers of loneliness. He even gives advice on how to get a good night’s sleep. Montaigne explores over a hundred topics, with only a few being limited to his time and place.

This relatability is also what makes the Essays so helpful. Reading Montaigne’s reflections is like stretching back in time and finding someone with just as many quirks and quandaries as we have. Montaigne doesn’t seem to present himself in an especially noble or faultless way. He is happy to let it all hang out. When we read his Essays, we see a complex, whole, and flawed character but always genial, witty, and likable. Montaigne might be saying something trivial, as when he writes, “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me, or I with her?” or it could be something poignant and profound, as in his essay on the death of his best friend. But he always comes across as human — as human as you and me. James Baldwin put it perfectly when he said:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

That’s what I get when reading Montaigne.

Dao de Jing by Lao Tzu

There are some people who are reluctant to call books like the Dao de Jing “philosophy” at all. They argue that philosophy is a narrowly defined discipline that involves premise, conclusions, and a grounding in rational discussion. If that’s how we define philosophy, then the Dao de Jing is very much not philosophy. The Dao de Jing is very different from both Aristotle and Montaigne — different from almost all academic work in the Western tradition. It’s a collection of aphorisms and pithy nuggets that are so vague it’s hard to even make sense of them at times. Not only do they refuse to give you any straight answers, but they make you question whether there even are any straight answers to be found.

But the reason it’s important to self-development is that books like the Dao de Jing appeal to an element of the human condition in a way that more rational texts cannot. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Dao de Jing is not philosophy, but it is certainly a very different beast from most philosophy. In many ways, the Dao de Jing is closer to poetry than philosophy, but in the way that poetry can also be deeply philosophical, too. Daoist students reading the Dao de Jing would sometimes spend months reflecting on a single line from Lao Tzu’s work. They would meditate on whatever the words revealed, often sharing their interpretations — many copies of the Dao de Jing we find throughout the centuries come crammed with marginalia.

The Dao de Jing gives us two key insights. The first is to accept that some things are beyond our comprehension and will likely remain so forever. There are mystical forces and answers that cannot be labeled, but which are no less important for it. Whether you prefer to call that the Dao, fate, the unconscious, socio-economic forces, the will, or whatever, the central idea is the same: Some things exist but cannot be named.

The second is what the Dao de Jing is about. It’s about listening to these nameless forces. It’s about following the river of your life — waterfalls and rapids too, if it comes to that. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” (I quote Pascal because “listen to your heart” is too saccharine and clichéd even for me.)

I do not know entirely what the Dao de Jing is about. Some of it does appear to be paradoxical nonsense. But the experience of reading the Dao de Jing is an act of meditation. Sometimes, the best thing about philosophy is not the ideas themselves, but the process of considering them.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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