Service to Man

A presentation delivered 11/ 16/ 2017 at a conference on the theme Creating a Philosophy for the Future at the University of Macau (abbreviated here)

I have been inspired by the vision of cosmopolitanism that is taught in thinkers like Zeno and Tagore and Tu Weiming. 

I have also been instructed by the likes of Kant, Nietzsche and Feuerbach, who warn philosophers not to repeat the mistakes of the past -- not to mistake conditions of experience for realities, or replace thinking with moral judgment, or fly away to mysteries when we still have real, material problems to solve here on earth.

In my remarks today, rather than inspire or warn, I thought I would just to go on practicing philosophy, and show what that is like -- but more narrowly, as Plato teaches, not philosophy but to philosophize.  Thus I am not proposing to identify philosophy with any of its aspects or to dictate what philosophy can and cannot be.  My whole focus is to accept the reality of pluralism in philosophy and accept that there is more than one way to conduct the project of philosophy. 

Yet for me philosophy is criticism, without which it becomes the lesser thing of mere talk fearful of having to face opposition and questioning.  I am not saying that philosophy is only this -- philosophy is also creation -- for example, philosophy is constructive mapping -- proposing trial mind-maps and maps of reality.  What I am saying is that philosophy may be many things but must be criticism. 

And so for many years I have tried to square my universalist ideal of philosophy -- thinking that philosophy happens everywhere and among all people, and that it cannot be hemmed in as only one tradition -- with the other side of this inequation, which is that the essence of philosophy is skepticism. 

cultural universal of philosophical thinking < cultural rarity of skepticism

This dilemma got me to searching.  So I made philosophical literature from around the world my study, looking for new ways of conceiving criticism -- and in truth we do see criticism in many traditions, in Kaibara Ekken, for example, or Dharmakirti, or Kwasi Wiredu-- but not in every world tradition or every example, since we often see conformity instead -- dogmatism rather than inquiry.  In many cases, going on with the tradition seems more important than inquiry, experiment or truth.

In the midst of all this, in my own searches, I discovered that the idea of philosophy as therapy is deeply evocative and powerful.  This is the kind of practice that I want to talk about today.

Therapy like philosophy is an examination.  It is a kind of criticism that we have volunteered for and one that we know that we need.  Noting the very wide latitude in practice -- that there is very little uniformity in practice -- still everyone looks for this help in some general sense -- many are asked and many offer this kind service.  The therapy I am talking about is a kind of healing that is a harsh scrutiny of belief and desire and a way of calling a person to account.  It sees falsity and calls it out.

This is a kind of work that a person does, which has to be one’s own work -- this is work on oneself and who one deeply is as a person -- the whole point of doing this is that you do it yourself -- it’s yours -- no one can take this over or make it easier. 

Just as true, this is something one does with other people -- you learn it from others, practice it with others, and teach it to others -- part of doing this for oneself is listening to what other people have to say -- and when we all get get back to working on ourselves, we are bringing back what we have learned from the world.

That is: philosophy like therapy is a kind of reality-testing -- in both we are making more room for reality -- and both are ‘verified’ thinking in that in both you bring things to light and see how they test out.  This is not just contemplation of the world but action and observation -- learning from mistakes, disciplines, experience. 

Both are like listening -- also both are like saying -- getting it out there and seeing.

Philosophy is perhaps most like therapy in that both exist to address suffering.

So for quite some time I have been pursuing the metaphor of philosophy as therapy.  I have tried to think of philosophy not as a subject that makes progress over time -- instead I am thinking about philosophy as a way of helping a person make progress. 

Philosophy is a guide (as it were) for pursuing the human project.  Philosophy is the art of life.

Nietzsche claims in his Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future that nothing with a history can be defined -- but philosophy has a history -- philosophy has myriad histories in traditions and languages around the world.  Therefore philosophy is indefinable.  Yet philosophy is defined over and over again, obsessively, incessantly --- as the love of wisdom, as the world comprehended in thought, as a fight against bewitchment, as clarifying the nature of evidence, as promoting the good, as upholding freedom, or envisioning human thriving -- as a search for happiness, humaneness, justice -- as practice of death, as the intellectual conscience, as the dream of a universal calculus, as thinking oneself free, as a search for moral competence, as irrepressible aspiration beyond the given, as wrestling with fate -- as countless successions paths teachings sects disciplines schools doctrines and ways -- readings, genealogies, critiques -- a thousand origins and archetypes -- as wonder, computation, the desire to find out -- as the voice of doubt, reason, the poor, the Other, the universal, history, community, science, posterity -- the study of Being, the critique of belief, the founding of scientific method -- it seems there is no limit to the shapes it may take -- philosophy is the mind at work in thinking. 

So I will greatly overgeneralize and make the bold claim that the background situation for philosophy, read from these many names and tasks and schools, is threefold:

that we are playthings of fate -- we are thrown into the world, as Heidegger says;

that we feel the dizziness of freedom -- to use Kierkegaard’s mind-altering phrase; and

that we look for truth -- we look for a way forward by trying to discover what is real.

Philosophy is committed to argument and conceives the disease that impedes human thriving as a problem especially with the way people think and believe.  We can think of arguments as ways of addressing these kinds of problems -- the same way we think about drugs, treatments, therapeutics, exercises -- as various kinds of remedies.  We can think of the thing we are trying to cure as ignorance; we can also think of it as confusion and following bungled action; as fantasy worry shame anxiety resistance repression regression inattention imprint laziness surrender -- as an inheritance from an unresponsive parent -- as an impact from a traumatic event -- as a chemical imbalance -- as denial, defense, fragmentation; as not forgiving; as bias fear selfishness weakness irresponsibility corruption -- as attachment; as exclusion; as repetition-compulsion; roughly, in my terms, as borrowed functioning.  We can also think of what we are doing as the search for meaning -- so a therapeutic intervention is a moral lesson is a thought experiment -- a test. We can think of ‘truth’ as the secret -- the thing behind the pain -- the agitating cause of the symptom.

The world is the origin of meaning, but meaning has no form without human beings to shape it. People do not do this in isolation but socially and interactively with others.  Culture provides not just raw materials but deep patterns and structures for stitching meaning together.  Thus philosophy goes on in a context -- diagnosis takes place in a context -- healing goes on in a context -- families inheritances geographies histories images rituals texts idioms languages-in-use -- roughly: shared traditions.  Thus the key problem of psychological integration varies with the elements we identify as out of sync and needing to get back together -- which means that self-regulation takes off from the underlying mind-map into which one is born -- thus we look for the ‘secret’ and the cause of the symptom in culture, through culture, and by culture -- we are internalizing resources from society for remaking the self. 

Real philosophy has to accuse itself of being a sham, as Kołakowski argued.  When we think about philosophy through therapy, and we look for the ‘secret’ and the cause of our pain in culture, we see immediately the problem of self-deception -- mauvaise foi, bad faith, uneigenlichkeit, inauthenticity -- the false self -- thus we have to wonder who is doing the ‘philosophizing’ we are talking about and where we should look to find the philosopher -- and so we raise huge questions about the topology of the self and how the life-context one is born into informs identity. 

Thinking about the problem this way, philosophy has minimally two moments: history; and criticism.  That is, there is the background into which one is born.  First there is something like cultural identity and then there is a kind of distancing / questioning project that takes off from this beginning.  A human being exists in history and, like a people or a race, can be occupied, colonized, dehumanized.  This is the deep truth in conceptions of philosophy from thinkers like Fanon and Dussel and Amartya Sen -- philosophy is de-colonizing the mind. Thus philosophy is ‘context and therapy’; ‘tradition and criticism’; ‘worldview’ and ‘departure from the natural standpoint.’ 

Thus philosophy speaks initially from and to a community, but a philosophy that speaks only to one people -- that sets itself part -- is falling back to ideology, worldview, culture, the natural attitude -- tradition.  I am saying that philosophy that is philosophy must break free from tradition and narrow parochialism. 

Therefore philosophy is criticism -- skepticism and the struggle against dogmatism.  It has to join the fight against ethnocentrism and seek impartiality -- it must break with the local paradigm, break or expand it far beyond its familiar and home ground.  Otherwise this is merely belief, merely culture, and not actually thinking at all.

Ultimately philosophy in order to be philosophy must seek a global perspective and a planetary scrutiny of ideas.  We are just beginning to imagine what this this kind of scrutiny might be like.

Seeking criticism does not mean accepting criticism -- sometimes the problem is to defend what is so, but in other cases the criticism is good and has to be taken in -- there is no formula for telling things apart -- it takes a while to see your way around. 

Philosophy feels the “dizziness of freedom” -- as Wittgenstein says, it’s a kind of itch -- an impulse or torment or anxiety we cannot settle, a fundamental stance towards everything -- what cynics probably would call an adolescent quest for truth. There is a sense of crisis, high stakes, a hunger, a thirst, a spell, a deep unrelenting need, a nagging sense that time is elapsing, that our hour is brief.  Philosophy confronts the dizzying shipwreck -- shame, utter failure, getting it wrong, a place where control breaks down -- circumstances force us to learn something completely unexpected.   Maybe with some practice with dizziness we find our way back from failure -- recovering, getting over it -- learning something like resilience and steadiness while trying to make sense of the noisy, crazy-making, irreversible festival of life. 

When we begin to look at philosophy as therapy, we can think of therapy as the elenchus -- Socrates’ method of critical cross-examination -- as controversy, debate, challenge, free speech, frank speech -- as confession, truth telling, stripping bare -- what Foucault (or was it Paul Ricouer?) called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”  This is a dislodging, uncovering, breaking the chain, a subversion, disloyalty, betrayal, even a treason -- also getting pushed out, ejected, exiled -- but then getting situated in a new place, or even many places -- no longer living merely in the home ideology, but moving to the truth procedure itself -- finding a home in the questions. 

At the heart of therapy is transference -- roughly, overwriting an old situation within a new one.  In therapy there are lots of ideas about transference -- lots of kinds -- e.g. positive (creating affection), negative (creating hostility), and erotic (creating desire) -- which represent different kinds of strategies for rewiring a faulty circuit.  People also talk about something called the ‘selfobject’ transference, which is a way of finding the thing that you were always looking for.  I think this is true for the ‘philosophical’ transference as well -- e.g. philosophy that inspires, challenges and seduces -- also philosophy that offers a completely new way of looking at things. 

But ultimately we see that ‘insight’ is never enough to alter a person’s behavior since it is possible to ‘know’ something without deeply knowing it.  In therapy the ‘something-to-be-added’ is emotional working through -- what the analytic theorist Franz Alexander called an “encounter” in which a person undergoes a “corrective emotional experience” -- helping to bring insights to a place in a person’s mind where he can use them.  Philosophy tries to get at this idea in calling a person to account.  Just as the patient’s life gets enlisted as an ally in the struggle against neurosis -- when the daily actions that fill a person’s life begin to be a source of change rather than perpetuating the problem -- so philosophy tries to get a person into a mind frame where the change is beginning to take.  This means that life has to be more powerful than therapy -- more powerful than philosophy -- life is not about philosophy but instead philosophy is about life and how we go about living it. 

Therapeia originally meant ‘service to the gods’ -- a kind of holy practice -- but Plato famously reimagined this idea as a new kind of ‘service to man’ -- having no aim to treat the gods but only mere people.  His proposal for this service is to get things out into the open where we can see them and talk about them.  We are trying to get to what is real and to own up to the truth about ourselves.  Somehow it is healing just to see the truth -- also to say it -- it’s a great release to get out from under illusion -- and people have a capacity to get hold of difficult truths and live with them. 

In therapy and in philosophy people do this together -- philosophy has to be your own work, but you do it with other people -- both a kind of ‘owning up’ with people.

So the patient looks for an encounter with the therapist (-- e.g. to be forgiven)

and

the therapist sees in the patient everything he has failed in himself (-- e.g. to forgive)

-- the therapist is a screen for the patient’s exploration of himself

-- the patient is a screen for projecting the therapist’s sins

-- this gives the patient a chance to get things out in the open and look at them

-- this gives the therapist another chance to let go

-- another chance to keep working on himself and also do someone else some good. 

So in philosophy my partner in conversation and especially the person who disagrees with me and challenges me is my irreplaceable corrective and reality-check. 

Therefore self-realization without social involvement is morally bankrupt

-- for the same reason philosophy is fundamentally dialogue, exchange, love --

philosophy as a need and willingness to engage and search with another person. 

How can we be sure that what we think is ‘critical’ -- how do we know that ‘critical thinking’ really is ‘critical thinking’? -- Philosophy must confront itself if it is not a sham. -- If philosophy is criticism, then how do we know that criticism is valid criticism? How do we know what to think, what to believe, how to act, what to do?

I think we can read some signs that the philosophical therapy is working and is healing and curative -- for example, in a powerful sense of agency, in self-responsibility -- a zest for life, an interest in life, an engagement in life, a fundamental openness and emotional availability -- an opening to criticism -- not so much mythologizing about the past but more imagining about what is possible. 

To be able to see that -- if I keep learning -- that my own point of view will in time cede to something new -- this will be a defeat of the way I currently think -- means that I have to go on with looking for new ways of getting at a problem, new language -- I have to resist collapsing everything I care about into what I am certain of right now. 

This means upsetting my own arrogance, hubris, narcissism, grandiosity, certainty -- less Id and Superego and more Self -- more jumping in, seeing what happens, making room for compassion -- for irony too -- making a huge space where we can make mistakes yet still come back from them -- making room for the Other, for what one does not see and perhaps cannot see.  

Freedom is meaningless if the other person stays enslaved -- though we don’t see it, we need the other person to be free

Ignorance (hubris, uncaring) is a kind of sickness that degrades us -- this is what rigorous scrutiny of belief, and calling a person to account, is trying to get at. 

I am saying something like this: philosophy is commitment to the human project -- the art of life -- this is commitment to virtue -- to human excellence -- also including intellectual virtue, whose essence is impartiality.  Impartiality underlies the moral idea itself and arouses its expansion -- which is why mere belief is never enough. 

I am talking about approaching something like wisdom, in which a person comes to terms with his past and finds a way to laugh and outgrow his mistakes -- not with the sense that every problem has been solved or that all conflict has been done away with, but by gaining a sense of composure and a desire to offer one’s service. 

On this model, there is no once-and-for all, ultimate problem, fundamental problem, or final problem for philosophy, whose solution would put human beings in a completely new position in life -- instead the idea is to go on with philosophy, to go on doing the work -- conceiving of philosophy not as a way of solving the problem of life but as practice the doing of which keeps us human.  This is practice getting back to the questions. 

I can see that that there is a danger of degrading philosophy by this strategy -- making it into a kind of self-help advice -- or adding to the tendency to pathologize completely ordinary human behavior -- or tranquillize our dizzying human freedom.  I see that this happens, but in my thinking, philosophy is not a way of helping a person escape from the moral consequences of life actions -- nor help anyone escape from dizzy freedom -- I don’t think real therapy is like this either.

Thinking about the philosophy of the future, my result is not that philosophy is in danger.  The problem is that people are.

Roughly: the search for truth and the search for moral competence ultimately are the same search -- necessitating an examination of Being and a duty to treat the sickness that keeps us from thinking. 

Many of us find our way to philosophy and begin the critical, life-altering, curative process, which in our time breaks out from parochial limits and is impatient with bias. I am here today to represent this idea for our conference -- to get it out in front of us where we can see it, to discuss and test it and see if it makes any sense. 

Badiou, Logics of Worlds

A recent philosopher to argue with Plato -- someone who is frequently
thinking about the history of philosophy, but also the development of
mathematics and the long history of psychology -- add film, music, and
especially painting -- is Alain Badiou, whose 2006 Logic of Worlds
has inspired me to write this appreciation.

Plato famously hated the written word and saw real philosophy as
discussion.  Yet philosophy sometimes finds a way to be a written text
that inspires a discussion in the reader -- the reader becomes the
discussion and enters in to the argument and thus gets to offer and
sort through good and bad hypotheses, not perhaps arriving at truth
but certainly engaged in looking for it.  Plato’s dialogues are the
preeminent example of written work that can work this kind of alchemy
in the reader’s mind.  Nietzsche and Kierkegaard sink and float many
kinds of ideas before the reader’s judgment and bring the excitement
of their thinking vividly and emotionally into play.  Hegel and
Heidegger are modern masters who use a different technique, which is
something like bald arrogation, constructing vast landscapes of
thinking with let us say ‘made up’ words which -- if the reader will
begin reading them and taking them seriously -- soon provoke
objections and force the thinker to think.  Badiou is a builder like
Hegel -- not a playwright or critic -- he is another writer who
attempts to weave a spell which will become absorbed and then provoke
thought.

Perhaps Socrates is behind all of these figures with his method of
cross-examination.  Some say that Socrates only teaches negative
lessons and that he never concludes anything, but probably this is the
wrong way of looking at it.  We have to take the Socratic project more
personally -- so the two lessons are not just ‘negative’ and
‘inconclusive,’ but: I don’t know what I think I know -- a kind of
humiliation and bitter knowledge; and, further, I actually do know
more than I thought (or something different from I what I thought) --
a kind of surprising understanding.  Elenchus leads to disillusion --
uncovering one’s eyes -- as dialectic leads to recollection -- a
method whereby latent knowledge is recovered.  The therapy or
recollection of dialectic is conversation -- acknowledging ignorance
drives the conversation -- not knowing makes us try to know -- and of
course Socrates and everyone else who begins to take part in
conversation already knows an enormous amount about life.  Socrates is
certainly not an ‘ordinary language philosopher’ who sees anything
sacrosanct in a mere word, but is probably more an essentialist about
meaning, who sees everyday language as a ‘first draft’ of genuine
philosophical discourse -- we have to get some distance from everyday
life and try to dig deep to the foundations.  Eventually we may
discover something like the underlying assumptions we are making when
we talk about things, which gives us a new chance to see things
clearly -- we are trying to get to the root form of our way of
projecting ideas into life, including ideas so basic that we can’t see
them because we are always using them.

Bitter, demoralizing personal defeats + deepening renewals from the
joy of practice

What I am talking about here is the Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian
project of human excellence through practice of philosophical
engagement in every moment of life -- Socrates’ signal idea that the
unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

Logic of Worlds is a 500+ page attempted demonstration of Socrates’
foundational claim for philosophy that “the unexamined life is not
worth living for a human being.”

Here are some steps in his thinking.

“Make yourself, patiently or impatiently, into the most irreplaceable
of beings.”  Gide, Fruits of the Earth

Beginning question -- what are we thinking?  What are we thinking
today?  What are we thinking when we are not monitoring ourselves?
This appears to be the natural belief state.  But this state is
brought about in keeping with the rule of an inculcated nature.  And
the current inculcated nature negates that there is anything like
truth -- especially eternal truth -- it merely projects a screen over
an unexamined staging.  But this is not enough -- Badiou is for
eternal truths, truths worth lots of trouble -- he says that there is
something demanded of us and this is “the Platonic gesture.”

So he begins by rejecting the idea that there are only bodies and
languages.  The third term is truth -- there are truths.  Truths may
not be eternal -- but a truth can be eternal in the sense that
believing it configures a present, so that a moment congeals and

comes to be.  But again a real truth shines through its contexts and  

instances as an invariant principle -- truths outlive the multiplicity of                        

worlds constructed of and recreated in them.  So: examples from art,

mathematics, politics, love relations, histories and psychologies.

Truths presuppose traces upon which they are based and which make them
possible -- traces imply an operative figure or subject for whom the
trace appears and is true.

Thus it becomes important to work through all the above ideas and
deploy them as the main parts of the exposition of human being that
Badiou is proposing to offer. Following Kant this is a kind of catalog
of the transcendental organization of the situations of being.
Following Hegel this is also a way of looking at human history.
Subsequently we are looking for a kind of algebra; for a kind of
logic; an ontology.

All this goes to bettering our understanding of what is meant by a
‘world’ -- a classical world is one in which the principles of
identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle holds -- a
non-standard world emerges from conflicted principles.  As it turns
out, we have to be open to and in fact are constituted in virtual
infinities of worlds.  Therefore ending and beginning again is
fundamental to the life process.  There is a heroism and affirmative
joy in following through to a true completion.  The desire to live,
the heroic sense, the power of self-discipline is the true weapon
against meaninglessness, but this sense has to be invented and lived
and redone.  “We will only be consigned to the form of a disenchanted
animal for whom the commodity is the only reference point if we
consent to it. But we are shielded from this consent by the Idea, our
underlying making, the secret of the pure present.”

At the end of the text (in my edition p. 578), we get to this last denouement:

To live supposes that some trace has been given
To live supposes that some fidelity engenders a present
‘To live’ and ‘to live for an idea’ are identical
Several times in its life, every human is granted the possibility of living
Since it is possible, commencing and recommencing to live is the only imperative

Thus we have to contemplate the notion of unforeseeable change --
radical novelty -- something we did not and could not see -- the Event
-- moving from what was obvious and to an underlying pattern not
evident at the outset -- truths are denied or suppressed in the
ordinary condition -- the central aspect of truth is its exit to break
with an existing regime -- a breaking out which leads to a reordering.

The formal burden of the text and its 500+ page reasoning is an
end-run around the subject object dichotomy and all its attendant
biases, problems and confusions.

Logics of Worlds turns instead to category theory to model the domain
of appearing.

In general, a category can be understood as a structure of relations;
the identity of the objects thus structured is irrelevant, as long as
this structure of relations is preserved. Most significantly for
Badiou's project, however, it is also possible to use a special kind
of categorical structures, known as topoi, to model logical ones; for
instance, we can use topos theory to model algebraically all of the
axioms and relations of standard, classical propositional logic --
Grothendieck rescues Russell.

But then it is a further consequence of this categorical method that
the logics modeled need not be classical ones; indeed, we can use
topoi to model any number of non-classical logics, including
intuitionist and many-valued ones, to capture more of the ‘irrational’
lying within worlds constructed of traces -- e.g. non-classical logics
can uniformly be understood as determined by structures called                               

Heyting algebras (pp. 173-190).

Using this category-theoretical framework, Badiou can thus define the
underlying structures determining the "logic" or relations of
appearance -- the logic of worlds -- determining what is treated as
existent in each world, including various degrees of existence
correspondent to the degrees of truth allowed by that world's specific
categorical architecture. He terms the specific structure determining
these logical relationships and intensities of existence for a
particular world its "transcendental.”

The paradoxical structure of the event, the "evental site," the trace
that undergirds a world, is such that it is immediately possible for
it to be taken up in a variety of different ways, corresponding to
different degrees and intensities of change in the world. In the most
radical case, a subject's faithful tracing of the implications of the
structure of the evental site results in the element which was
formerly minimal in its degree of existence -- what had earlier
literally "in-existed" in that particular world, not counted, not
included in the count, being present in its being but completely
invisible to that particular world's logic -- suddenly to attain a
maximal degree of existence, bringing with it all the changes in the
existing structure that this implies (pp. 374-79). This is paradigm
change as Kuhn thinks of it and revolution as Marx thinks of it and
also of course the History of Being as Heidegger thinks of it -- an
overarching view of change emanating from beginnings…

In this sense the book is part of a project like Gödel’s (an author
Badiou often cites) who is trying to draw conclusions about what we
can do in our thinking and even regarding ‘being’ itself from
reflection on formalisms and limits of formal structures.

-- ? --