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.