Notes on the Philosophy of Choice

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Moving away from a retrospective, introspective thought-path towards a prospective, future-oriented position: not what has happened and what impact it has on the machine, but what is possible and the impetus to enact it by willing——

These notes help to outline a prospective philosophy of choice, tracing some of its sources and values.

(1)

The Socratic position: the unexamined life is not worth living.

The Socratic position: the supremacy of individual conscience.

The directive, to think——to cut through the thicket of reigning beliefs; to evaluate the evaluations, testing their content against the standard of individual conscience; to interrogate reigning presuppositions.

To look inside oneself and see all kinds of antecedent realities and histories and structures that play a role in shaping individual character; but not to rest in these; to see that they do not render us captive. We are agents and have the power of choice! ——

The conception of reason as powerful, as an active determining force, capable of rejecting conventional ideas and searching for new ones. ——

The gadfly executed by the democracy——a powerless man delivered to the powerful——yet his accusers, and the jury, and all the bystanders and even the mass of society itself seem weak —— pitiful ——in comparison to him. The Athenians were flighty and wavered from side to side; Socrates was unmoved and in perfect control.

From their common source in the conversations of Socrates, we may trace the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans; the humanist tradition; skeptical inquiry and the birth of science; the Enlightenment; Romanticism; and many more contemporary forms documenting what is believed, and practicing skeptical interrogation; all these asserting a concept of reason as active, powerful, commanding.

(2)

The Aristotelian position: “happiness is the full exercise of one’s powers in accord with excellence”——“happiness is activity of soul in accordance with virtue”——“happiness is virtuous activity of soul.”

Background of the argument: everything in the universe has a purpose, a function or end (telos). The end of a thing, that to which it strives and which, being fulfilled, completes it, is an expression of its “nature” or “essence”——also, for Aristotle, its highest calling. The end of an acorn is to thrive as an oak.

Aristotle held that the telos of a human being is to reason. What distinguishes human beings from inert things, plants, and other animals, is the ability to think: man is homo sapiens, the rational animal. Human beings thrive by the active exercise and cultivation of their defining characteristic, power or purpose or function or end. The thinking function is the human function——the proper human aim and excellence. The human life is the thinking life is the virtuous life ——is the fulfilling life——is the happy life.

Aristotle counts on a conception of reason as powerful, active, determining, not a passive recipient or blank mechanism.

(3)

Epictetus: “the right use of appearances” is in our power; but nothing else.

Marcus Aurelius: “These are the properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, analyzes itself, and makes itself such as it chooses.”

In this conception, there is a great deal that a human being cannot do and much that he must suffer. But a man can command his thoughts.

(4)

Socrates held that reason is “a ruling force” (Protagoras 352b). He appears to conceive of reason polemically, as opposing given beliefs or actions; when we begin to examine them, the things that men think or do may seem irrational and call for revision.

Aristotle held that “no process is set going by mere thought” but only by “thinking which aims at an end and is practical.” Practical aims are chosen; and choice is a kind of desire or reasoning with a view to an end; so that choice is either “desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire” (the provocation of desire guided by the deliberation in reasoning; also equally, the correction in desire to the dispassion of reason). Desiring reason or reasoning desire is a motive force and is always prospective——it is oriented towards the future——since “no one chooses to have sacked Troy; for no one deliberates about the past, but only about what is future and capable of being otherwise” (Nicomachean Ethics VI, II, 3).

This does not mean that no one thinks about the past or that no one is obsessed with it. But this is not deliberation —— (today we have the term 'perseveration')


Reason (or some other) is a human power or faculty, capable of elaboration or decline; in some cases men waste their power, whereas others somehow fulfill it; in some cases it appears that the character of society helps to explain why sometime fails (e.g. that they were enslaved) and typically in some cases a person is blamed for his actions (e.g. he was weak or selfish or corrupt). It is strange that we sometimes explain action, sometimes blame or praise it -- with a focus on society or on individual effort -- for Aristotle, what matters is the aim in view.

Thus Aristotle appears to depart from the Socratic project of general elenchus for all ideas (destructive cross-examination) -- he restricts critique more to the review of intentions -- what matters is what we are trying to do -- the aim, goal, telos

Epictetus appears to restrict the application of reason to one’s own case­——to one’s own mind——and does not count reason as a ruling force or a power in the world; nor does he count on reason having this significance for the self or its projects; since there are many who “embrace philosophical opinions only in words” and cannot embody a conclusion in their lives. Even this poor thing left to us is rare. 

(5)

Kant held that Enlightenment is a kind of release——release from man’s self–incurred immaturity——a moment in history in which man finally summons the courage to use his own mind.

(6)

The Frankl position: the will to meaning; human beings have many potentialities, but which potentialities are actualized depends on human decisions, not on antecedent conditions.

Freud stressed the pleasure principle, Adler stressed the will to power, Rank stressed the death instinct; Frankl held that pleasure and power and death were ideas, i.e., products and constructions; he stressed the will to meaning.

The Frankl position: a focus on the psychology of resilience; noting the determinative impact of choices, decisions; not allowing the trauma to define one; instead taking responsibility and making choices.

The Frankl position: to be fully human is to take responsibility for creating the meaning of your existence.

Some terms in “logotherapy”——

Cognitive neuroses (existential frustration, i.e. frustration in the struggle to determine a concrete meaning in personal existence); 

cognitive dynamics (concerning the potential meaning of existence still to be fulfilled; the problem of fulfilling a chosen meaning and all the confluences that obstruct and facilitate this fulfillment); 

the existential vacuum (boredom and distress and boredom again——existential frustration in relation to compensatory strategies, e.g. the will to pleasure, power, death); 

leaving it to the self to what, for what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible; the main thing being -- to move outside the egocentric position and act. 


(7)

The existentialist position——

Existentialism is a radical voluntarism and implies that a person may choose his or her identity at any juncture in life.

The concept of nothingness, of being literally nothing, draws attention to the contrast between being a thinking being, a conscious being, and being any other kind of being——the difference between agents and mere things. A stone is what it is——it has this character. A human being sometimes sinks into passivity in order to evade the core problem of living; but the person who attempts to evade responsibility is responsible for undertaking this course. A stone does not make any decisions, yet a stonelike person has decided to be a stone.

A human being is nothing——not merely a thing——but instead a state, a condition, a process; and because a human being is nothing——not any definite thing——he can change and become something; yet ultimately a human being is nothing——not any fixed thing——but instead always changes.

The existentialist position: human beings have no character until they begin to build one through acting. There is no pre-existing human nature, no fundamental human quality or truth or soul. On the same ground, a human being has no fixed character at all, but is on-the-way, a process, a work in progress and not a completion.

Heidegger: “the essence of human reality lies in its existence.” Sartre: “existence precedes essence.” Ortega y Gasset: “to live is to decide what we are going to be.”

Heidegger says that the burden of having to act and form a character for oneself is not “chosen” but is “thrown” onto the individual human being. 

Familiar accounts of human nature stress the import of the past (of events that have already transpired) in the determination of human character; existentialist accounts stress the import of the future (the problem of formulating plans for oneself and carrying them out). Heidegger emphasizes that human beings define themselves in the projects they undertake. Human reality is projective reality. Thus one among his definitions of Dasein or human reality or human being is “thrown projection.” Sartre expresses this idea in the form of a paradox: human reality must carry “the burden of freedom” and human reality is “condemned to be free.”

Rejection of determinism —— the claim that the crucial factor in human affairs is choice.

Existentialism conceives human reality as a problem for itself, a question to itself, as consciousness of consciousness. Heidegger: “existence is that kind of being which is an issue for itself.” Existence is a problem for itself and is always in search of its own meaning. (One aspect of the problem is whether in-itself overwhelms the for-itself.)

(8)

To accept any belief uncritically, by yielding to an impulse or authority, appears to represent a surrender of reason.

Not surrendering but applying reason, mind proposes to purge itself of mere opinion and blind trust.

The Enlightenment conception of reason as a force or power or capacity counts upon an unlimited reach. Kant: “reason depends on this freedom for its every existence” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 766).

The principle of free inquiry subjects every doctrine to critical examination and possible rejection. Free inquiry seeks to replace mere belief with strict knowledge and so to quiet the stirrings of doubt. Yet the principle of free inquiry is itself believed. The thinker cannot stop short but must examine critically this critical principle itself.

On the strength of this reasoning, new generations of thinkers have discovered hidden recesses of presumption, even in the concept of reason; which goes to the further development of a radical philosophy of choice -- confirmation bias, heuristics, rules of thumb, stereotypes -- turning the thinking machine to the 'off' position

Some themes in the critique of doubt are: the logical equivalence of belief and doubt; the ‘fiduciary content’ of doubt; uncovering the basis of assertion in ungrounded assumptions; presumptive, pre-structuring, pre-conceptual, pre-formative aspects of belief -- believing before we believe; the historic, contingent, parochial ‘situation’ of the believer -- all the forces that work together to make a 'believer' --; the determinative power of family, tradition and culture; ontological relativity, incommensurability, the inscrutability of reference -- questions about standards; conceptual pragmatism -- most recently, some ideas about the neurology of truth

Some thinkers cast doubt on reason itself, arguing that there is no special faculty of reasoning; the thinking process is a given, and use of the term reason should be adverbial——e.g., ‘He argued reasonably.’

(But surely) I cannot avoid the burden of having to define myself by my choices via any recourse to neutrality; it is not clear what anything like 'neutrality' would mean in a case like this. (Our choices are embarrassing -- ?  It is hard to parade them around.  This is comic since everyone can see them just by looking.)

The pretense of applying a mathematical, mechanical and universal logic here is a futile way out -- trying to obviate the need of making a choice —— this is vain.

The upshot of the critique of doubt is to remove the determination of belief from any sphere of strict necessity and return it back to its home in individual responsibility.

(9)

Humor

The significance of humor is that it can signal that a person’s devotion to his ideal is not that of a fanatic but is accompanied by a sense of reality or maturity or proportion.

You admit that you have beliefs; and you show some sense of the precariousness of having them.

Humor as wisdom: the emotional acceptance impermanence and limitation; of the transience of existence.

Socrates: the object of humor is really oneself; and the touchstone is the relation between one’s own idealism and the ability one has to look at this idealism with a due sense of proportion.

Freud: You come into your beliefs by way of enormous ambitions and grandiose designs; the humor is, that what you held as an narcissistic demand (at first, and in an extreme form) is now held as a realistic goal (after much experience, and with some humility).

Psychologically: developing a sense of humor about one’s beliefs signifies a good deal of reality testing. Narcissistic cathexes are tamed, neutralized, rationalized, so that they follow an aim-inhibited course; the machinery of the ego, its narcissism, its power fantasies and grandiose fantasies, its exhibitionism, pretended omnipotence, idealized parental images and magical perfections are restructured within a reality-based ego; they are integrated into the ego’s realistic goals.

You assemble materials for a sky-shattering tower. But the tower falls under its own weight. From its shattered fragments you build a little hut in the woods (Thoreau).

The funny thing is that you have to be your own basis——that is, you have a basis (you are not nothing, even if, sometimes, you would like to be); your basis is not god (you thought you were god, and you may sometime still want to be); but instead of all this -- just you, merely you, fallible you, you have to be your own basis.

(10)

The term ‘choice’

Trace the word back to its ultimate Indo-European root: geus-. This has the sense: to taste, to test, to choose.

Oldest form, eus-, becoming geus- in centum languages (Italian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek).

Old English cosan, cesan, to choose, from Germanic keusan; choice, from Germanic, akin to Gothic kausjan, to test, taste.

Zero-grade form gus-. Compare Valkyrie, from Old Norse Valkyrja, “chooser of the slain,” Valkyrie (valr, the slain), from Germanic kuz-.

Suffixed zero-grade form gus-tu-, gusto; ragout, from Latin gustus, to taste, to try something out.

Suffixed zero-grade form gus-to-, whence further suffixed form *gus-t-, e.g. gustation; degust, disgust, from Latin gustre, to taste.

Choice: to taste, to test, to select, to try something out, to prepare for a reaction like disgust (revulsion, repugnance, aversion, pain), or a sense of gusto (enjoyment, pleasure, passion, zest). 

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The significance of this reasoning is not that Socrates held it, or the slave Epictetus, or the Emperor Marcus Annius Verus, or Viktor Frankl, who was also Auschwitz prisoner no. 119104. Perhaps these thinkers help to establish its lineage. Its real significance lies in the power it offers to anyone who holds it in consideration and applies it in the instant case.

recent musings

dialogue

Confucius +/- Criticism

All over the world there are people like me who teach basic logic, critical thinking, introduction to reasoning, and beginning kinds of math, philosophy and science classes that help students get some practice in the fundamentals of objective reasoning. 

After my travels to China last year, it occurred to me to stick with the question a while and look deeper into the relation between culture and criticism.  How is teaching critical thinking handled in different cultural contexts? -- How is critical thinking taught in China, for example? 

A recent column by Steven Pinker has a beautiful quote on this subject from Anton Chekhov: “there is no national multiplication table.”  This is my yardstick -- reason has to have the same significance in all cultures -- and researching the question I have found the Pythagorean theorem, for example, in ancient Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian texts. 

Mathematics is pure reason whereas philosophy has to contend with culture and express itself in cultural, not mathematical, variables.  Philosophy looks somewhat different in Germany, France, England, Greece, Argentina, Japan, and New York City. 

Criticism really only makes sense culturally if it emerges in a cultural context and then responds: like the critique of slavery in a slave society; like the critique of masculinity in a sexist society.  So it needs a cultural context as a starting point, as Peter Bodunrin has argued.  Going on with the argument, I came to the idea that philosophy can be many things, but philosophy ceases to be philosophy without criticism.  Thus even in a culture in which the tradition is not to outdo the master or add to the sum of knowledge or to attack argument in order to test it -- for example, in a culture like that of ancient China, in which the tradition is to cherish the ancestors rather than attacking them -- even in a culture like this, there must be criticism -- otherwise, this is not philosophy.  Let us say that this is the hypothesis --then let us take a look at this in the case of ancient China. 

So I want to argue with myself whether e.g. Confucian philosophy is critical philosophy -- just to see what I am able to see -- to keep thinking by sticking with this problem.  In effect, I am testing the idea of universal reason and researching whether we can discover any “empirical” element instead (as Kant would say) -- in effect this would rule out this or that culture, this or that standard, this or that cultural icon -- which would leave us with the new hypothesis that we cannot count on every people to have developed criticism -- so philosophy only emerges in some cultures -- not in all. 

Ø What is the place of a truly critical perspective in traditional Confucian thinking? 

I am trying to ask the question, whether learning Confucianism will help a student become a critical thinker -- thinking of this merely as an example (and not as a universal proposition about cultural influence on pure abstract rationality -- supposing. there is one -- supposing that local influence outweighs very strict mathematical reasoning).

Let us argue the negative -- then there are fundamentally different patterns of thinking at work in the West and in ancient China -- so that any (supposed) absence of logic and criticism in Chinese philosophy need not be thought of as problematic in itself -- it is merely cultural prejudice and a power-wielding privileging of one system over another that makes this kind of judgment seem right -- and this amounts to a kind of intellectual colonialism and arrogation -- thus no longer argument but merely a dominant imprint. 

But -- if we are arguing for more similarity between traditions rather than differences -- Confucian “ritual propriety” (礼, li) seems very close to the Western idea of correct judgment (and good judgment, discriminating taste, sensitivity, rendering justice, demonstrating wise judgment).  Aristotle’s discussion of equity (επιείκεια, epieikeia) from NE 5 seems to call on the same personal kind of characteristics and a sense of the balance of all of one’s faculties -- reaching beyond mere adherence to basic routines and laws -- that Confucius hopes to instill.

Confucianism defines archetypes, first originating in the distant past, that are spelled out in classic writings, and in the biographies of renowned sages.  Thus the attitude that we are looking for — critical thinking — is described (as it were) from the outside.

The process involves looking at acts, feelings, at a person’s mindset, and his overall bearing in life.  This mindset is not really private but instead communal -- it shows itself in adhering to cultural forms and making them work -- also carrying forward, treasuring and extending the great inheritance from the past.  There is the sense of having noble ancestors to whom one returns — setting standards of aspiration — the project is to try not to shame them, to try to equal them, to try to extend their vision to the present.  

Perhaps the Greeks too felt this way about their Homeric ancestors and about the generation who defeated the Persians.

Question: can we teach criticism by teaching ‘bearing’? (A related question might be: How does one teach aspiration?) (Note: Plato says, begin to love learning a bit, and then you will begin learning.)

The humanistic Confucian worldview, deeply felt and applied, can never be mechanical but must be adapted creatively in action (again, like Aristotle’s idea of equity).  

I wonder if the Confucian worldview can help with the enormous problem of resisting falling into a mechanical way of thinking and living -- via deeply felt ritual propriety -- as a parallel with Aristotle’s conception of equity? -- In effect Aristotle represents the West in saying that there is something higher than the dull application of the law -- there is the possibility of making an exception of the law when the case demands it -- rather than applying a mechanism without any consideration of the particular case (at the opposite pole from Kant’s insistence on strictly universally exceptionless rule-following).

It seems unlikely that a people who developed a secular and observational view of the world in very ancient times, who constructed enormous building projects, who adjudicated social disputes within ideas about rational investigation and fairness, whose society made huge jumps forward in science, engineering, medicine and the arts -- a society which also did normal things -- farmed and fished and hunted -- could be deficient at reasoning. Basic facts of history seem to argue a baseline of rationality and causal thinking underlying all these achievements -- but what of probing criticism?

Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, p. 1-3, argues that the logical theme is underdeveloped in ancient Chinese thinking, which is why we do not see explicit criticism in Confucian sources. 

The distinction seems too binary and caught up in cultural rivalry.

Consider, as counterarguments, these passages from the Analects, which suggest a critical consciousness in Confucius’ thinking:

“The Master said, That I have not cultivated virtue, that I have learned but not explained, that I have heard what is right but failed to align with it, that what is not good in me I have been unable to change – these are my worries.” 7.3

“How dare I claim to be a sage or a benevolent man?  At best it may be said of me that I learn without flagging and teach without growing weary.” 7.34

“Zilu appointed Zigao to be the steward of Bi. The Master said, “You are stealing another man’s son!” Zilu said, “There are people there; there are altars of state there – why must one first read texts and only then be considered learned?” The Master said, “This is why I detest glib talkers!” 11.25

“The exemplary person seeks harmony but not conformity.” 13.23

“If you love ren, but you do not love learning, the flaw is ignorance.” 17.8

“Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.”  The Great Learning

Note use of the terms dun 惇 (deeply sincere) and chun 淳 (simple and honest).

I think Confucius would be confused by the modern idea that young people should learn ‘critical thinking’ – he held that learning happens in stages and that rote learning is important at the beginning, to get a grasp of what great thinkers have said in former ages; when we have a good grasp of what our ancestors have said, we can begin to think critically and evaluate ideas from times past.  Thus there is a baseline of learning that precedes the critical process.  This does not mean that there is no critical process.  It just means that there is something like a qualification of age or experience.  In effect we have to learn our culture before we can take it apart -- thus: fluency before critique. 

Note the term Heart/Mind (xin 心) -- a single word to refer both to the function of our minds as a cognitive, reasoning organ and a function of an affective, or emotionally responsive, organ. The word, xin, was originally represented in written form by a sketch of the heart. The heart/mind thinks rationally, feels emotionally, passes value judgments on all objects of thought and feeling, and initiates active responses in line with these judgments. Sometimes, the heart/mind is contrasted with “unthinking” aspects of people, such as basic desires and instinctual responses, but other times, these are pictured as part of the heart/mind.  There is something in us to get over and master -- this takes time -- this is something one develops -- the picture here (arguably) is something like critical thinking as a long form of self-cultivation. 

Ritual righteousness (义, yi) was initially about the family, then the larger political unit, finally the Empire.  This is roughly the pattern for Greece also.  The focus on logic comes after the breakup of the defining political state (Zhou, Athens) -- it merges in a context of lessened political influence on the part of the individual.  The later Mohists and the Stoics run parallel as investigators of logic after the norm-defining political unit fell apart.  Confucian metaphysics from later times seems to take the universe as the basic unit and thus makes progress on purely abstract questions such as inference. 

Does it make sense to teach critical thinking from Confucius? -- yes and no. 

If Confucius, who was bent on learning, had a modern textbook of logic available, he would use it.  On the face of it, it seems counterintuitive to try to teach someone to think without actually working through explicit arguments -- yet reports of Confucian conversations from the Analects and other traditions appear to show principles like identity, non-contradiction and inference, without calling specific attention to them. 

To me it seems wrong to associate logic with one people (the Greeks) and to relegate all other historical peoples to some backwater where people reasoned poorly.  It is truer to say that the Greeks explicitly called this out as a subject and made great progress with it.  Other peoples followed the patterns that the Greeks investigated in their daily routines,

but may not have made the subject so explicit or thought about thinking with the same abstract universalism -- or with the same success.  Roughly: all peoples have blood types, but not all people developed the idea of a blood type -- or have categorized blood types in modern terms.  But we should not abandon blood typing for an alternative view of blood that associates it with less definable qualities or which disputes the point of view and the political reality behind the history that creates this scientific advance.  Rivalry doesn’t make sense in a context like this -- we are simply seeing what is the case. 

Critical thinking is (in a word) skepticism.  The issue is Confucian skepticism -- as see e.g. in the Tokugawa era Japanese philosopher and Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekken (1630-1715), in his work Tigiroku (Record of Major Doubts), dated 1713:

“The gentleman-scholar of novice learning cannot immediately get to the heart of things.  The way of learning must include doubt, for when one has doubt, advancement is sure to follow. Major doubts bring major progress, minor doubts bring minor progress; and when there is no doubt, then there is no progress.  This is how the way of inquisitive learning or scholarship (学問, gakumon) comes to be.”

Readings in Tokugawa Thought, third edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago, Center for East Asian Studies, Select Papers No. 9, 1998), pp. 69-71. 

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The importance of ritual.  When offered a first cup of tea, the guest should assume a grave attitude; when offered a second, an air of respectful contentment.  “Sacrifice implies presence; sacrifice to the gods as if they were right in front of you.” “If you do not sacrifice with your whole heart, it is better not to sacrifice at all.”  “Humaneness is, to subdue oneself and return to ritual.”  But ritual can degrade and become mere ceremoniousness – mere words with no meaning and no heart – “If a man is not humane, he no longer hears any music” (I, 3). 

Over relying on ritual.   Confucian thinking degrades over time into an arch-conservatism.  Family relationships and existing power hierarchies are endowed with magical qualities and transcendental significance – thus to oppose the father or the ruler is to fight Heaven and make oneself an outcast.  Confucianism has too often been the apologist for the existing order and thus has seemed the enemy of progressive thinking – despite Confucius’ emphasis on education, breaking down class distinctions, and progressive social agenda. 

Confucius’ ideas did not catch on until nearly 500 years after his death.  This fact may help to explain why his recommendations are so different than the actual policies adopted in his name centuries later.   

Harmony requires differences – as with music that explores various contrasting sonic ingredients, any of which might in isolation seem flat or out of tune, but together resound; as with opposite traits in the personality, that help to offset one another; as with different regions of the nation -- so that wind can correct water, north can correct south, and each tendency can be matched and steadied by its counterpart. 

The progressive attitude veers towards conservatism when people lose the confidence that they can respond to change and find new ways to create harmony; instead, they try to preserve harmony by opposing virtually everything that happens.  We cannot find harmony with or properly react to a new thing, if we do not allow ourselves to see it. 

square, ellipse

recent projects

Lecture on the Good -- essay, January 2018
What is Mathematics? -- essay, March 2018

Reading theology, mathematics, philosophy, economics, history, communication studies

Jan Patočka, Boethius, Turing, Austin Farrer, Bishop Spong, Vienna Studies in mathematical modeling, Michel Valentin, Wittgenstein -- my old teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method

Reading with my colleagues in EPIS -- Badiou, Lacan, Foucault, Spinelli

Teaching the philosophy of education, business ethics, aesthetics

Studying Hannah Arendt's ideas about mathematics in The Human Condition

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.