Middle Age

"This is one of the very few books by a philosopher about midlife. I think it’s a really interesting, audacious book. It appears in a series – called Art of Living – of popular philosophical introductions to topics like happiness or death or failure. But it really isn’t a work of philosophical argument. It’s the memoir of an examined life. Naturally, being a philosopher, the things that Hamilton draws on to examine his life are philosophical. The result is a sort of commonplace book, which cites Hannah Arendt and Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot and Woody Allen, Montaigne and Nietzsche. In this respect, Middle Age is like another great memoir that might have been on my list: Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause , which ranges from Edith Wharton to Colette to Carl Jung. It’s hard to discus Hamilton’s book without a spoiler, but the spoiler comes very early, which is that he discovers in midlife – I think he was thirty-eight – that the man he thought was his biological father actually isn’t. Everyone else in his family knew this but kept it from him. “I feel that there are too few examples of philosophers taking their lives and actually trying to come to terms with them, especially in the recent western tradition” When he finds out, he has a crisis of identity. In many ways, it’s idiosyncratic. It’s a quite distinctive and unusual experience – it doesn’t happen to most of us – but Hamilton’s reflection on the importance of a sense of identity and the challenges of forming and maintaining one connects with larger themes. It’s a really unusual book for a philosopher to have written and I really value it. I feel that there are too few examples of philosophers taking their lives and actually trying to come to terms with them, especially in the recent western tradition. Mill’s Autobiography is one. That’s an incredible instance of a philosopher saying, ‘I had a nervous breakdown, let me try to figure out philosophically what was going on.’ The Christopher Hamilton book is like that. It’s an attempt by a philosopher who has at his disposal the literature and tools of philosophy to figure out how to cope with a very difficult midlife experience. I think so. One thing Hamilton does that is in the spirit of Montaigne and Nietzsche is to try out aphorisms. He draws general morals about middle age. Like all aphorisms, some seem exactly on target; some don’t. But there are many that I love. For instance, he writes: ‘By middle age most people grasp, I think, how little one can get of what really matters in life by doing anything other than waiting for it.’ I think that’s a great aphorism. I don’t know if it’s true, but it has the character of one of those Nietzschean aphorisms where you think, ‘that might be a deep insight into human life, or it may be completely one-sided .’ Yes. So, it’s unclear whether it’s a counsel for a tolerant patience or the despairing sense that action is futile and that you shouldn’t try to do anything. Yes. Another thing Hamilton is very good on is the constant struggle in many people’s lives between, on the one hand, the striving to achieve things and, on the other hand, a desire to stop striving; a desire for stasis and peace. Neither of them is really easy to relinquish and at different points in life, one is more emphatic than the other. Hamilton doesn’t write as someone who thinks that the problems of life are soluble. The book is very much about the way in which we still can’t rest and we have to be constantly striving but, at the same time, we want peace and relief from that. Tough. The human condition is one in which you just have to struggle with that duality. Yes. I think you get this more agonistic picture of the human condition in Hamilton’s book. I don’t ultimately embrace it and I at least hope for something more, some intellectual and emotional picture of life that enables us to rest in the moment more satisfactorily and not to feel this constant drive towards the future. And I think, in different ways, you do get that in the Stoics and in Montaigne’s idea of attention to the present. A theme that underlies all of his essays is simply attending to what is happening right now. That theme links up with ideas of mindfulness that come out of the Buddhist tradition . So, there is a kind of convergence between threads of western and non-western philosophy on the idea that there might be a consoling truth in some interpretation of the idea of living in the present. That is something I develop in my book. But it has to be said that Hamilton is not on board. He’s much more of a pessimist about the human condition. That certainly seems right about one kind of midlife crisis. What you’re describing sounds quite well-adjusted. There’s also the stereotype in which you buy a Ferrari, leave your wife, and have an affair. There are ways of reaching for a kind of vivacity in the present that are less salubrious than retiring to your garden. But I think they have in common a desire to step back from the rat race and be engrossed in what you’re doing right now. That might be driving your Ferrari or it might be spending more time with your family. There are a lot of things going on. One is the sense of life as having been constrained – having to pay the mortgage and basically be subordinate to the demands of family responsibility and so on – and then wanting to do something that is just for you. The other thing about driving fast cars is that there is a way in which it’s paradigmatically non-goal-directed. You don’t buy the fast car in order to get to places more efficiently. The point is to be driving. My attitude to the Socratic edict that the unexamined life is not worth living has always been sceptical. There are plenty of people I know who are not interested in philosophy or philosophical reflection who seem to be doing much better than many of my philosopher friends. More than that, I think that the question whether philosophical reflection is going to be consoling is initially open. When you reflect on midlife, maybe the results will be consoling and maybe they won’t be. As it happens – and this comes out in the book I wrote – I think philosophical ideas can provide consolation for some of the many midlife crises. But that’s just how it happened to be. I don’t think it was inevitable from the start that reflecting on my life was bound to be consoling. There are situations in which not thinking about it might be the best advice."