NOTES:
On Why I took up Philosophical Counseling
Happiness - "The happiest man is he who is king over himself.” By contrast, "the unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates
It is not enough to work to change others, as so many are so inclined. As Gandhi said, we must “be the change we want to see in the world.”
We would do well to remember why ancient “Education emphasized cultivating one’s inner sincerity. Inner sincerity reveals one’s true nature.”(I Ching, p.204) Since the world has failed in this duty, we are each and all left to revive and “preserve one’s own beautiful nature” for ourselves and others. (I Ching, p.205) As George Elliot once put it, “It’s never too late to become the person you might have been.”
We would do well to remember when and why “Education emphasized cultivating one’s inner sincerity. Inner sincerity reveals one’s true nature.”(I Ching, p.204) Failing in this duty, we are each and all left to revive and “preserve one’s own beautiful nature” for ourselves and others. (I Ching, p.205) As George Elliot once put it, “It’s never too late to become the person you might have been.”
Philosophical counseling - In short, philosophical counseling applies ancient wisdom to the problems of modern life. Lou Marinoff (author of Plato, Not Prozac) calls it, "therapy for the sane."
Hero’s Journey or Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom and Self-Knowledge: The sages of the ages understood philosophy to be a journey, a quest for self-knowledge and mutual understanding, a journey, for which we need the most practical and therapeutic of all kinds of knowledge. Philosophical Counseling: That knowledge was recognized to be the gathering of the collective wisdom of past generations, and gathering together to share hard learned lessons of human experience that was understood to be the duty of educators, which included everyone. And recovering it could still save us much suffering, if we learn from the guidance of others - before we have to learn these things the hard way. Ancestor Appreciation: Many ancient cultures (unlike some since) took seriously the responsibility to pass this practical wisdom on to their young (and just who dropped the ball, and why is itself a dialogue worth having…), Had someone, even many, not dropped the ball, and had we continued talking each generation to the next about this legacy that they best of us leave to the rest of us, all this would have had a chance of reaching us at a much younger age. Gnostic: Instead, many through the ages have lived in the 'dark' because the ancient wisdom that could have illuminate their lives and revealed their path was buried deep or hidden high on shelves in papal vaults, out of reach to most of humanity. And by threat of death for even reaching for them, there it stayed for many centuries.
Perhaps one duty we should follow up is to achieve the release of so much forgotten literature from the Vatican Libraries, but these are largely previously known texts. The church is in the process of releasing many Greek, Hebrew and * texts. But it is what we don’t know that we may need most, and this remains behind a veil of secrecy. Some purport to be protecting us from it or it from us, but it is not for them to decide: it should be up to humanity to decide what the ancient truth is worth.
Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom, and Self-Knowledge: This practical wisdom was meant for our use in solving problems, not to be kept on library shelves, but for our daily practice as we face and master the inevitable and ongoing struggles of our lives, so to move along up our path, well prepared by our dialogic education for what’s to come. The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: But the good thing about the truth is that it stays true, and so this wisdom can be discovered, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide.
Hero’s Journey: The ancients understood every life to be a journey, and while every journey follows a unique path, all journeys have challenges that are alike in form, though they are wildly idiosyncratic in content. What all hero’s journeys have in common is that they take the high road, so lead to ever greater vision, as would climbing a hillside toward the summit of our highest human potentials, from which we can see forever. We may all start in different places, with different opportunities and challenges, different skills and talents, and we may make different choices along the way. But every life will bring us to the same kinds of challenges along the way as we climb toward what is our personal excellence. Likewise, we will all face suffering and struggle in some form, just as we will find joy. Our challenge is to prove ourselves to ourselves, one way or the other, to be the hero of our own story, or live with the consequences of not being – for our happiness depends on who we ultimately know ourselves to be… consistently.
So for my part, as a longtime student and teacher of philosophy (recently retired from teaching it in the University of Wisconsin system), I have to agree with one friendly critic who recently put it something like this -- that living Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom and Self-Knowledge: As one friendly critic recently put it, Philosophers only seem to read works by other Philosophers, and what’s more, they are the ONLY ones who read them. Whereas philosophy in the ancient sense, what I’ll call small-p philosophy, is a dialogic art, a skill we all can and should develop, and ideally, make it a way of life. As they surmised, love has everything to do with how we talk to one another, and ancient philosophy (unlike its modern counterpart) is primarily concerned with good communication and healthy relationships. And not merely for those who make it a profession, but an art that may be professed as a conviction by all who will pursue and proliferate truth by dialogic process throughout life.
Philosophical Counseling: “Philosophical counseling is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of philosophy.” The modern philosophical practice movement appears to have originated in Europe in the 1980s, but it is an age old art that began with Buddha and Confucius, Lao Tsu and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In the words of Lou Marinoff, author of the international best seller, Plato, Not Prozac, and the most outspoken and tireless advocate of the practice of therapeutic philosophy in our time, the word "psychotherapy comes from two Greek words that have nothing to do with medicine: therapeuein means ‘to attend to’ something, while psukhe means ‘soul’ or ‘breath’ or ‘character.’ Psychotherapy, then, [means] attending to your soul… It can also mean attending to your character.”(p.35) This practical application of philosophy as a tool for living well is arguably precisely what ancient philosophers had in mind, and arguably ought to be the foundation of any understanding of human well being. But it has been neglected as a tool for practical wisdom since it died with free speech in the third and fourth centuries AD.
In short, philosophical counseling helps “you illuminate your personal concerns with the wisdom of the ages.”(p.50) Someone once asked Socrates, What are you good for? And he replied, “Pimping.” By which he meant, he explained, bringing people together who have something good to offer one another. Likewise, “Philosophical counselors are like matchmakers…who help our clients find a philosophical interpretation of themselves and their situation that they can live with, and prosper with, for a lifetime…”(p.50) Dialectic Thinking and the Many-sidedness of Knowledge: “Philosophers almost always work alone in the sense that humans tend to think most clearly in solitude. Yet philosophers almost never work alone in the sense that our thoughts are informed by significant insights from 2,500 years of diverse philosophical traditions.” (p.50, Marinoff) Dialogue, in the dialectic sense, does not necessarily require the actual exchange of ideas, but rather, as Socrates put it, “the ability to make connections between things.”(*) By taking all these diverse voices to be, as Plato put it, like “lines converging on a common center,” we hear the dialogue between them, and gradually come to see the different sides of all issues. In this way, we gain a depth of understanding, the same way that two eyes bring depth to what can be seen with only one. And it becomes clear that we are never finished learning, once and for all. This is the essence of Socratic humility, for Socrates knew that the wisest person is the one who knows that he knows nothing, for only such a humble person understands how much he has to learn.
Practical Wisdom: The ancients gave us principles to guide us, but it’s up to us to apply them to the challenges of our lives. And in the process will emerge the skills and insights they deemed worthy of discussing around the fire ever night. In our philosophical counseling groups, we practice our own version of these fireside chats, a long lost habit in our hectic and impersonal world. And in them, participants are able to draw on the learning experience and hard learned lessons, not only of the great souls of the past, but of everyone else in the group. For we are all teachers, just as we are all students.
The Power of Dialogue and Empathy in Learning: So it almost doesn’t matter what we might be talking about, whether that’s love or friendship, truth and justice, or politics and religion. Whatever the object of knowledge before us at any given time, everything is ultimately worth discussing, if someone feels the need. For it is not merely the objects of the world we need to know, or even the relationships between them – but rather, it is those individuals with whom we are talking who most need our understanding. For even if we could have all of the infinite outside-looking-in perspectives that are available, we could still not ‘know’ a living object without seeing through it’s eyes, from the inside looking out (so infinity, plus one!) Living things have a point of view all their own to be considered, and just as we would have others understand us, so we have something to learn from everyone else, every voice, if understanding the whole truth is our goal. For this reason, dialogue is an art we all need to understand and practice better than is our modern habit. As Socrates said, its what we don’t see that we most need to learn, and since others can see what’s in our blind spot, we have much to learn from one another. Indeed, our worst enemy might well be our best teacher!
But empathy too is a critical element of healthy dialogue, because we can understand other’s point of view without them having to actually put it into words for us. We can put ourselves in their place, and so shouldn’t need to be told what we could easily discern by simply stepping out of our own shoes. So even in a world that suffers a dearth of dialogue, there is nothing to stop us but lack of imagination to see the world through other eyes. So it is in our own interest to learn to see things as they really are, and both empathy and dialogue are skills we develop in the exercise of deliberate listening for the connections.
Dialectic Thinking: The ancients called this dialectic thinking, and understood that anything can be seen from many points of view (indeed, even an infinite number), and that the whole truth about anything requires our stretching to include as many of those perspectives as are relevant and necessary to reach understanding. Seeing through other windows requires stepping out of our comfort zone, which is why we call it the principle of generosity…even though its for our good as well.
Golden Rule: So this is the reason to put the golden rule into practice, if our self-interest is enlightened, and why it shows up in every genuine wisdom tradition…because anyone and everyone can and should consider their own actions from the receiving end, for therein lies the truth about whether something would be right or wrong – whether we would be ok with it being done to us. This is the source of justice as well, and why even very small children know when ‘That’s not fair!”
Classism and Justice: Justice, the Few and the Many: As John Rawls makes clear in his Theory of Justice, it’s easy enough to see what we would not want others to do to us if the tables were turned, and we found ourselves in the position of least advantaged. Would that the powerful would make laws, rules, and procedures according to this golden rule logic, rather than, as Martin Luther King laments in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, to suit the interests of those who have the advantage of making them. A law is just when it follows moral law, and those who enforce it would be willing to be bound by it. By contrast, a law is unjust when it is made to bind others only. This is the golden rule at work on an institutional level.
The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: Perhaps this is where truth matters most – because the truth stays true (indeed, that’s the good thing about it, that it can be trusted not to change). It is solid, it stands to reason, can answer to questions, and is thus what helps us figure everything else out. Intrinsic Motivation: The intrinsic motivation to understand is the reason learning is so enjoyable – that click, that revelation, that joy that ultimately comes with understanding – the reason why the love of learning should be returned to centrality in education. And it’s also what makes philosophical counseling effective, The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: because the world makes sense, we can figure it out, and even make things right -- though we’d scarcely know it, without the insights that come with ancient dialectic and complementary thinking.
So we can see why dialogue, what the ancients called the living word, was understood to be critical to for living things to use carefully in a healthy life. Biologic, Learning from Nature and Aristotle: Because anything living is always changing, they knew, always either getting better or getting worse. Divine Potential and Ideals of Human Excellence: So it’s in our survival and well being interest to keep an eye on the ideal of our better selves, and to take whatever guidance this ideal has to offer.
Learning From the Best of Them, Not the Rest of Them: What the ancients called the dialectic art, or dialectic complementary, did not originate in one culture, and spread to other as a domino effect. Rather, each and all learned it independently from their own experience, and ultimately passed it down to their young so that future generations would receive it from their ancestors. Not every culture took it equally seriously, and so our challenge is to discover the best of them among the rest of them. Socrates Humility: Socrates was always careful to make clear that he had learned from other first - from kings and slaves, men and women, citizens and foreigners, greybeards and children – and only then offered his opinion, if he could add to what he’d learned.
Metaphor: They captured this divine skill by way of careful reasoning, but also by way of metaphors (such as that there are many paths to he same summit), and parables and mythology, because these served as effective stimulants to insight and aids for memory. The Manysidedness of Truth: And it’s in our interest to make the most of all these tools they passed on to us. For just as the body grows, so too does the mind by gradual inclusion of what is revealed in understanding the cumulative nature of truth.
Gnosis: And so many have lived, and sometimes died, to pass this wisdom forward to generations to come, that is, to us. And they warned of what would befall humanity (i.e. ignorance), should it be forgotten (which it arguably couldn’t be, once and for all – for, as we’ve said, the truth stays true, like it or not, and can be found time and again…but a truly diligent searcher, with or without a guide.) We can all find gnosis by looking inward, but it’s very difficult in a world where we all are searching alone. But they knew we would be in trouble if the inward search for truth were discouraged, or God forbid, actually punished. On the Spoken and Written Word: Once literate cultures began putting their wisdom into writing, intuitive understanding was easily lost, if only because it was then so easy to destroy, or at least to put high on the library shelves. And all it would take is one malevolent tyrant, or any few who could enforce silence over the others, to plunge humanity into darkness. It takes hardly more than one generation for the great forgetting to take place, before what was once clear becomes only a vague memory…if that. Add to this the power of rhetoric to demonize the past (take the word pagan, for instance), and the brainwashing is complete, as the baby goes out with the bathwater.
Gnosis: Hence, the reason free speech and democracy are so important – because truth can be too easily hidden for very long periods of time, and almost (though not quite) lost, when people are not free to question authority and search for truth by way of dialogic learning and dialectic question and answer. And though it will likely be found again in the unfolding of time, how much ignorance and suffering must be endured in its absence in the meantime?
Socratic Method and Arguing to Understand: So these discussions are rarely inclined toward argument, for participants are not inclined toward winning, but rather arguing in the philosophical sense, that is, to understanding one another and the truth itself. Because the good thing about the truth is, again, that it stays true! And having access to multi-perspectival voices means that all together give us access to whatever it is we need to learn. As we’ve said, bringing depth to our understanding the way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one. In this way, the truth can be found, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide. Certainly it helps to have the voices of those who’ve been up and down the mountain a few times by way of paths we ourselves cannot have traveled, and this guidance can help us avoid predictable obstacles and potholes along the way. But with or without help, we find truth by recognition and recall, not by having it out pointed out to us. In any case, we still have to figure out for ourselves what is and is not true.
Original Sources / Game of Telephone: And my job is to bring the voices of those long dead philosophers into our daily dialogues. Philosophical counseling would encourage us to read and study more of the original sources, rather than to participate in what can too easily become a game of telephone. Philosophers call this bibliotherapy.
Belief in Human Goodness and Inner Voice: At any rate, you can see why the ancients never asked us to believe in anything, except in human goodness (as arguably too many modern forms of religion do not), for our own good depends on it. By believing in the good within us, we are unlikely to be misguided by those who would lead us astray. Rather, we must listen inward so to be able to hear and follow our own true inner voice, which is more likely to hit the mark of true good because it has less reason to lie to us.
Good and Bad Pleasures: But too often we follow the temptation of pleasures, without taking time to consider which are good pleasures, and which are not – that is, which will bring good consequences, and which will bring consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Figuring out the difference in mere pleasure and true pleasure, or true good, is the first lesson the ancient taught their young. For what good is getting what we want, if what we wanted turns out not to be good for us? (*put pleasure/good quote)
Socratic Relationships and the Inner Voice: Others can help us to learn well, not by inducing us to follow them, but by educing us to think well and critically enough to see what’s really good for us, or as Socrates says, what’s worth trading for what. And this is why, he said, that his inner voice never told him what to do, but only ever told him what NOT to do. For doing things we know to be wrong is what sets us up for consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Which is why it behooves those who love us to help us learn listen inward when still young so to be careful what we wish for throughout life, lest we set ourselves up for consequences we don’t really want.
Wants: The ancient Vedic Hindus taught their young that the universe is like the magic wishing tree, they called Kalpatura - It will give you everything you wish for, they told them, along with ALL of the consequences of those wishes! Wouldn’t it have made a difference if we too had learned when we were young to be careful what we wish for, because we not only will get it, but more than we bargained for! Wants and values become actions, and actions have consequences that we will live with, like it or not! So it’s in our best interest to wish instead for what IS really good for us, rather than the mere appearance of it. For if we choose badly, even when we get what we want, we will not be happy with it. And appearing happy is not the same thing as actually being happy. It’s the real thing that we truly want, even if we sometimes wish for the mere semblance, what that’s all we’ve learned to hope for. Aim higher! Because it stands to reason that we can’t hit a target we don’t aim at!
Want: But instead of helping our young to want what’s good for them, we teach them, indeed condition them, to want all manner of things that will cost them a higher price than they know – and not because it’s good for them, but because it’s good for our economy. In effect, we’re sacrificing the well-being of our young as a mean to the well-being of institutions that were originally intended to serve the good of people. Go figure. And we’ve built an education system that serves as a mere means to money, rather than to pursue happiness itself. Learning itself is happiness, not merely a means to money that, we are told, can buy us happiness. We are too often deliberately confused so that we cannot see when we’re being used.
Appearance and the Real Thing: The mere appearance of confidence, or intelligence, or beauty, or power…these are not the same as being truly confident, intelligent, beautiful or powerful. But when we settle for the mere pretense of something, it doesn’t satisfy, and it doesn’t fool us for very long. (*put can tell ourselves we’re happy, but…)
So go for the real deal – the genuine article – realize the ideals that are possible in this life…but only if we understand and aim at them! Nobody really wants unhealthy relationships, for instance, but we settle for them when we don’t even conceive of, let alone aim for better. For this reason, it’s worth talking more than we do about what these things really mean, especially with our young, who will only actualize true happiness, friendship, love, and all the rest if they have a well-developed idea of what these things mean. Only then, can we learn to want what’s good for us. After all, if what we want is artificial to begin with, then getting it will never really satisfy us. As the ancients understood, “We can never get enough of what we don’t really want to begin with.”(Smith) If we chase the means only, we will never reach the ends they are means to. (*put strategy) If getting what we want doesn’t also get us what we need and what is good for us, then it just leaves us wanting more. We may have thought it was real, if we’ve never had anything better to compare it to, and won’t realize until we get it that it doesn’t bring us what we thought it would, and doesn’t feel the way we thought or were led to believe it would.
Happiness: Hence, the reason the ancients taught their young the golden rule and the concept of karma (action), and its compliment, wu wei (non-action). Because happiness isn’t in having everything we want, but in wanting what we have, and in actually becoming and ultimately just being a person we can truly respect. For happiness is more about quality of time and the meaning of one’s existence, than about possession, ownership, and quantity of goods.
Kalpatura and Want: Like it our not, in the end (as many happy paupers and miserable tyrants indicates) we own our actions and their consequences. So why want what’s not actually good for us? Why not act with care and intelligence to figure out what that is?
Words, Questions, and Understanding: So what is real? What is true? What is good? What is right? There actually are answers to these questions…and we know something is true when and because it can answer to the hard questions. And with both reason and feelings, we have the dialogic tools we need to figure all this out, to think it through and to figure out the right thing at the right time for the right reason. And understanding starts by seeking the true meaning of these words in our discussions – not settling for the loose and lesser sense of words – such as the way we call relative strangers on facebook ‘friends’. Certainly they can become so, but we need higher standards for true friends, that is, if we hope to have them in this life.
Words and Appearances: So lets us ask instead, what is a true friend? How many of those we call friend are true? And to how many of them are we true to? We sometimes say we love everything from our new car, to our hearts desire – but what, after all, is real love? How does it differ from lessor senses in which we use the word love? And we can ask the same thing of happiness, wealth, power, and other ideals whose mark we miss if we haven’t given thought to the difference between the mere appearances of something, and the real thing.
Socratic Relationships and Love: “Love is the only thing,” Socrates said, “that I ever claimed to know anything about.” And yet he spent his whole life just talking with and bring out the good in as many people as he could, sometimes only with a good hearted jibe aimed to nudge them out of their ignorance (which, if you think about it, is nothing but the noun consequent of the verb ‘to ignore.’) This art of learning to talk to one another in a way that brings out the good in us all, THIS IS the heart of loving.
Whole Mind: Being raised to be one-sided, we become too good at seeing only what we want to see. But if we were ever to see how easy and enjoyable it is, dialectic thinking could heal this gap between what is and what could be. In this way, we recover our love of learning and remember the intrinsic good and actual joy that comes with the progressive revelation that follows thoughtful questioning, and self-expression, gathering and processing points of view, other than our own, i.e. learning.
Whole Mind: And so by combining our windows with those of others, a whole picture begins to emerge, one that is ultimately so intrinsically interesting that we would never want to be finished learning, if such a thing were even possible. There is always more to learn, and only by doing so do we see the true joy of learning itself, something many of us have long forgotten. And in the process of developing such healthy relationships, we might come to remember and understand the meaning of real friendship, real love, real wealth, real power, and real happiness.
Socratic Relationships: So that’s what philosophy, and philosophical counseling is good for – the practice of healthy relationships – what I’m going to call Socratic relationships, those that are dialogic, indeed, dialectic, in a way that can be put into practice throughout one’s life. So the hope is, as it was for Socrates, that you too will pass it on.
Socratic relationships: Regardless of internet misconceptions, “A Socratic relationship,” is NOT one in which “you ask a lot of really difficult questions of the other person until they get annoyed and want to poison you.” (The author who wrote this admits, “I have a lot of those.“) Socratic relationships are those that aim to ask the best questions at the best time…which turns out to be welcome and therapeutic by those who are active learners, good students of truth in life. Socratic relationships bring out the best in both participants.
Socratic teaching: A good teacher, as Socrates says, is a person who understands and can use words well, that is, truthfully, well enough to help others see whatever they don’t see and need to, including the good they may be missing all around them, inside them, and in others. This includes the willingness to ask the hard questions, and to help find truthful answers. For sometimes this good exists only potentially, and the challenge is for us to actualize that potential, using the mind for all it’s worth in that pursuit. We have this power to help others actualize their potential. Indeed, we might be the critical variable…for a friend can make all the difference, for better or for worse. (Remember Sam in Lord of the Rings?!)
So that’s our challenge – to help bring out the good that is potential in one another, and – importantly – stop purposely bringing out the worst,, whether by advertising to increase our insecurities, or treating others with undue distain because we think everyone is underhanded (which only says something clearly about us, btw) To ‘see’ what is still and always possible in one another, any given life, and ultimately in this world, begins by seeing what it is that we can do, that needs doing, and probably won’t get done if we don’t do it.
Words and Ideals: So it’s worth our time to take up the dialogue about what these words truly mean – justice, wisdom, happiness, friendship, love, beauty, temperance… And this is why ideals of good character are so important -- after all, it’s almost impossible to hit a target you don’t even aim at. So believing in one’s own and others’ goodness is quite a valuable quality of character to have and gift to give, and one that can be learned by the doing. True power is the ability to actualize these potentials in our lives, and to help others do the same. Whereas getting what we think we want wasn’t any real power to begin with, if it turns out to not have been good for us. So the wise person begins and ends by asking, what is good? And distinguishes this, the Vedic Upanishads say up front, from mere pleasure, which is only sometimes good. And since bad pleasures can backfire, it’s in our interest to tell the difference. For he is a fool who plants the seeds of his own destruction by choosing bad pleasures. Of course, we do it all the time, if only because everything in our culture encourages, indeed, conditions us to regularly confuse mere pleasure, what feels good, with the truer or fuller understanding of what is good, which we need more than feelings to find. This doesn’t deny the value of feelings, it just puts them in balance with better and worse reasons. We may well have good reasons that might actually justify having to do ‘harm’ in a sense to other living beings. But that reason damn well not be “because I felt like it.” THAT level of self-absorption that considers only one’s own feelings, would have to be the very heart of selfishness and source of human evil. As would be the calculated deduction that we could and should benefit at others cost. Neither emotions or intellect should rule by themselves, but be weighed out in the process of deliberation toward the good.
Wu Wei: To get what is truly good for us, it is sometimes necessary to let the universe steer, for it may know better than us what’s good for us, and might offer us better opportunities than we would find for ourselves or even dream of, if we don’t push or rush it. The ancients did not confuse self-control with trying to control the world around us or the future. They knew the wisdom of living wu wei – that is, going with the flow, floating as much as possible on the natural buoyancy of optimism, being open to the direction the universe takes us, while not relinquishing our innate ability to navigate, deliberate, and choose which way to go. And along the way, recognizing the potential good of every turn, even if it’s not where we thought we wanted to go. Because the universe undoubtedly knows what it’s doing, indeed, knows much that we cannot…like about what’s around the corner…what good we might find or do there....
Karma: So this is why the ancients were sensitive to karma – for every action reverberates, and we will live with the consequences, even butterfly effects, of our actions, like it or not. So imagine how much difference it could make in a life that learns early on that memory and mindfulness of future consequences is what will either reward or punish us in the end, as we become either self-respecting or self-loathing in response to our own actions. For we will - like it or not - live with the memories we have given ourselves as we grow older. And the best favor we can do our future selves is to make those memories now that will render the person we want to be genuine – not the mere appearance of a happy you, but the real thing!
Hero’s Journey and Self-Knowledge: What gives rise to a happy hero is that we know ourselves to be just that. When you have proved yourself to yourself to be the person you truly want and can be proud to be, you are someone you can respect because you have actualized what was once only potentially, i.e. the ideal of your better self. What karma has earned in self-respect cannot be faked by any means. As Aristotle put it simply, “the pleasure of a just person can never be experienced by one who is not just.”
Karma and Justice in the Soul: Socrates asked his aging friends (in the first pages of Plato’s Republic) what they have learned about how to be truly happy in old age? The answer (seven or eight chapters later) was that we must live up to our higher potentials for justice in the soul which can be done…if we aren’t misguided by bad lessons early on. For if we learn to be good only when others are looking, we’re not likely to be happy with the view of ourselves from inside.
Nature/Bad Habit: The good news though is that it is not our nature to be ignorant, after all – only a bad habit that comes of bad education, which is to say, that which habituates us to ignoring what we don’t want to see, which we tend to learn early on in some modern cultures. But the good thing about habits is that they can be broken! We can unlearn early errors in our learning! Indeed, as John Stuart Mill put it, “the good thing…that is can be put right when it’s wrong…” but only by self-direction and good steering.*
Love and Gnosis: And the real beauty of it is that the getting is in the giving. In other words, love is its own reward…so can very easily be contagious, since it feeds on itself in such a way that it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy, a positive feedback loop. For this reason, as George Elliot once said, “It’s never too late to become the person we might have been.” We need only experience it to truly understand that we’ve had this capacity all along. Like love – we may have difficulty putting ideals and concepts like true character, virtue, intelligence, wealth, and power into words, but we know it when we experience it. This kind of knowledge that is beyond words is what the ancients called gnosis, and according to recently discovered texts, it was the kind of knowledge that Jesus came to restore. I’ll let you be the judge of that (and weather ‘the Church’ and others who have the equivalent of the papal vaults have a responsibility to release those long hidden texts to humanity, for whom they were written… But to that end, we might rightly wonder how much better off we’d all be…if we’d heard THIS message from Jesus, instead of those voices that have been put into his mouth. It would have reduced our suffering in just the way Buddha meant to. And not only do we typically miss their message, but we are even willing to induce suffering in their names.
Suffering: Good will likely come of it too because good can come of everything. And as Wordsworth put it, “more awake to suffering and distress, more alive to tenderness.” But that certainly does not excuse causing it where it otherwise wouldn’t have been, and where the deliberate exercise of the golden rule would have us do otherwise. The golden rule teaches empathy by experience, by concern for the others good as our own. It simply broadens the field of self-interest to include others, not only because it’s good for them, but also because it’s good for us. And it doesn’t matter if we believe in it or not, only those who do will experience it anyway.
Socratic Relationships: At any rate, we at least can see the need for Socratic relationships by way of their absence in our experience. (Certainly our educational experience… In fact, it was the complete dearth of dialogue in Capital-P Philosophy that brings me to write this at all…for what chance do our young, and our young democracy, have if education does not exercise our voices?) And this is why it’s worth writing that book about what Socratic relationships are, and how they differ from what we’ve been taught the Socratic method is. Socratic method: For rather than cause distress (like the Paper Chase law professor who purported to be using the Socratic method, but not in any sense that Socrates would endorse), a true Socratic teacher relieves distress and builds confidence in the other, so to help develop and bring out the good in them. Teaching by way of authoritarian methods is not actually teaching at all. At best, it conditions by exploiting need and fear, and at worse, it provokes defensive resistance, as is rampant in our modern schools. And a mind bent on self-defense cannot simultaneously hear the wisdom worth taking from a given discussion. And what is lost when dialectic discussion isn’t used is nothing less than mutual understanding, which given the quality it brings to life, must be the ultimate objective. Authoritarian Education: So imposed education is one of the habits we would do well to unlearn.
Defensive Selfishness: Even justified defense comes across as selfishness, and is so widespread these days that it can easily be cast as ‘human nature’ – though it is only one potential among many…indeed, our lower potential when rationalized, and among many higher ones when justified. The quality of one’s reasons is everything. Learning to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason is what living well is all about.
Karma and Higher Ideals for Happiness: But those higher potentials are there to be actualized too – if we can see them and use them to guide us upward. For the self-respect of a successful hero’s journey is critical to the happiness that is integral to a life lived well. And that’s where karma really matters – not in what you own, or have created the mere appearance of, but in who you know yourself to be.
Be lamps onto yourselves… -And for this reason, we are warned by them not to merely follow commandments or blind beliefs, or let any forms of dictated education or spiritual guidance persuade us that something is true, if its not. In fact, no matter what others may say, the simple truth is that “the only way to be a good person is to be a good person.” So “be lamps onto yourself,” as Buddha said. Choosing our path intelligently is an art worth remembering, because (as Aristotle said Plato and Socrates were the first to teach) – “to be good is to be happy.”
Existentialism and Self-Knowledge, maybe Conclusion: And complimentarily, as the existentialists of this past century made clear, living in bad faith, bad conscience, is it’s own punishment. “Hell is your life gone wrong.” And try as we might, we can never escape this truth of our karma. We may get away with lying to others, for a time – but we can never ‘get away’ with lying to ourselves. This is what puts self-knowledge at the heart of all knowledge. If we don’t respect our better selves, no amount of pretense can change who we are or help us actualize what is truly potential for us. If we’re not happy, it’s not going to help to tell ourselves that we are. We simply know the difference deep inside. And even if we don’t pay attention to it, we cannot escape that it limits all else we can ‘pay attention’ to – or psychological capital, the heart of the moral economy.
It’s for this reason that we must let our inner voice guide us, never telling us what to do, as Socrates says, but only ever telling us what not to do. How do we know what is the right thing to do? By a process of elimination – for when we stop doing what we know in our hearts we shouldn’t (if only because we wouldn’t want it done to us) then everything else, all other options that remain, would be right – and which to choose is up to us.
It’s in this way that we are said to create ourselves and destine our lives, and in this sense that we are potentially divine – for one who is free of bad karma has sometimes miraculous skills of navigation and power of self-control and self-determination. It is such a person who might experience what some call apotheosis. But this is available to all, who first set the stage for such a life by making their karma welcoming to good fortune… even as it may come in a form that appears to be bad luck at first. Every challenge and struggle and suffering brings a learning experience, if we receive it with grace.
On Why I took up Philosophical Counseling
Happiness - "The happiest man is he who is king over himself.” By contrast, "the unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates
It is not enough to work to change others, as so many are so inclined. As Gandhi said, we must “be the change we want to see in the world.”
We would do well to remember why ancient “Education emphasized cultivating one’s inner sincerity. Inner sincerity reveals one’s true nature.”(I Ching, p.204) Since the world has failed in this duty, we are each and all left to revive and “preserve one’s own beautiful nature” for ourselves and others. (I Ching, p.205) As George Elliot once put it, “It’s never too late to become the person you might have been.”
We would do well to remember when and why “Education emphasized cultivating one’s inner sincerity. Inner sincerity reveals one’s true nature.”(I Ching, p.204) Failing in this duty, we are each and all left to revive and “preserve one’s own beautiful nature” for ourselves and others. (I Ching, p.205) As George Elliot once put it, “It’s never too late to become the person you might have been.”
Philosophical counseling - In short, philosophical counseling applies ancient wisdom to the problems of modern life. Lou Marinoff (author of Plato, Not Prozac) calls it, "therapy for the sane."
Hero’s Journey or Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom and Self-Knowledge: The sages of the ages understood philosophy to be a journey, a quest for self-knowledge and mutual understanding, a journey, for which we need the most practical and therapeutic of all kinds of knowledge. Philosophical Counseling: That knowledge was recognized to be the gathering of the collective wisdom of past generations, and gathering together to share hard learned lessons of human experience that was understood to be the duty of educators, which included everyone. And recovering it could still save us much suffering, if we learn from the guidance of others - before we have to learn these things the hard way. Ancestor Appreciation: Many ancient cultures (unlike some since) took seriously the responsibility to pass this practical wisdom on to their young (and just who dropped the ball, and why is itself a dialogue worth having…), Had someone, even many, not dropped the ball, and had we continued talking each generation to the next about this legacy that they best of us leave to the rest of us, all this would have had a chance of reaching us at a much younger age. Gnostic: Instead, many through the ages have lived in the 'dark' because the ancient wisdom that could have illuminate their lives and revealed their path was buried deep or hidden high on shelves in papal vaults, out of reach to most of humanity. And by threat of death for even reaching for them, there it stayed for many centuries.
Perhaps one duty we should follow up is to achieve the release of so much forgotten literature from the Vatican Libraries, but these are largely previously known texts. The church is in the process of releasing many Greek, Hebrew and * texts. But it is what we don’t know that we may need most, and this remains behind a veil of secrecy. Some purport to be protecting us from it or it from us, but it is not for them to decide: it should be up to humanity to decide what the ancient truth is worth.
Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom, and Self-Knowledge: This practical wisdom was meant for our use in solving problems, not to be kept on library shelves, but for our daily practice as we face and master the inevitable and ongoing struggles of our lives, so to move along up our path, well prepared by our dialogic education for what’s to come. The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: But the good thing about the truth is that it stays true, and so this wisdom can be discovered, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide.
Hero’s Journey: The ancients understood every life to be a journey, and while every journey follows a unique path, all journeys have challenges that are alike in form, though they are wildly idiosyncratic in content. What all hero’s journeys have in common is that they take the high road, so lead to ever greater vision, as would climbing a hillside toward the summit of our highest human potentials, from which we can see forever. We may all start in different places, with different opportunities and challenges, different skills and talents, and we may make different choices along the way. But every life will bring us to the same kinds of challenges along the way as we climb toward what is our personal excellence. Likewise, we will all face suffering and struggle in some form, just as we will find joy. Our challenge is to prove ourselves to ourselves, one way or the other, to be the hero of our own story, or live with the consequences of not being – for our happiness depends on who we ultimately know ourselves to be… consistently.
So for my part, as a longtime student and teacher of philosophy (recently retired from teaching it in the University of Wisconsin system), I have to agree with one friendly critic who recently put it something like this -- that living Small-p philosophy, Practical Wisdom and Self-Knowledge: As one friendly critic recently put it, Philosophers only seem to read works by other Philosophers, and what’s more, they are the ONLY ones who read them. Whereas philosophy in the ancient sense, what I’ll call small-p philosophy, is a dialogic art, a skill we all can and should develop, and ideally, make it a way of life. As they surmised, love has everything to do with how we talk to one another, and ancient philosophy (unlike its modern counterpart) is primarily concerned with good communication and healthy relationships. And not merely for those who make it a profession, but an art that may be professed as a conviction by all who will pursue and proliferate truth by dialogic process throughout life.
Philosophical Counseling: “Philosophical counseling is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of philosophy.” The modern philosophical practice movement appears to have originated in Europe in the 1980s, but it is an age old art that began with Buddha and Confucius, Lao Tsu and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In the words of Lou Marinoff, author of the international best seller, Plato, Not Prozac, and the most outspoken and tireless advocate of the practice of therapeutic philosophy in our time, the word "psychotherapy comes from two Greek words that have nothing to do with medicine: therapeuein means ‘to attend to’ something, while psukhe means ‘soul’ or ‘breath’ or ‘character.’ Psychotherapy, then, [means] attending to your soul… It can also mean attending to your character.”(p.35) This practical application of philosophy as a tool for living well is arguably precisely what ancient philosophers had in mind, and arguably ought to be the foundation of any understanding of human well being. But it has been neglected as a tool for practical wisdom since it died with free speech in the third and fourth centuries AD.
In short, philosophical counseling helps “you illuminate your personal concerns with the wisdom of the ages.”(p.50) Someone once asked Socrates, What are you good for? And he replied, “Pimping.” By which he meant, he explained, bringing people together who have something good to offer one another. Likewise, “Philosophical counselors are like matchmakers…who help our clients find a philosophical interpretation of themselves and their situation that they can live with, and prosper with, for a lifetime…”(p.50) Dialectic Thinking and the Many-sidedness of Knowledge: “Philosophers almost always work alone in the sense that humans tend to think most clearly in solitude. Yet philosophers almost never work alone in the sense that our thoughts are informed by significant insights from 2,500 years of diverse philosophical traditions.” (p.50, Marinoff) Dialogue, in the dialectic sense, does not necessarily require the actual exchange of ideas, but rather, as Socrates put it, “the ability to make connections between things.”(*) By taking all these diverse voices to be, as Plato put it, like “lines converging on a common center,” we hear the dialogue between them, and gradually come to see the different sides of all issues. In this way, we gain a depth of understanding, the same way that two eyes bring depth to what can be seen with only one. And it becomes clear that we are never finished learning, once and for all. This is the essence of Socratic humility, for Socrates knew that the wisest person is the one who knows that he knows nothing, for only such a humble person understands how much he has to learn.
Practical Wisdom: The ancients gave us principles to guide us, but it’s up to us to apply them to the challenges of our lives. And in the process will emerge the skills and insights they deemed worthy of discussing around the fire ever night. In our philosophical counseling groups, we practice our own version of these fireside chats, a long lost habit in our hectic and impersonal world. And in them, participants are able to draw on the learning experience and hard learned lessons, not only of the great souls of the past, but of everyone else in the group. For we are all teachers, just as we are all students.
The Power of Dialogue and Empathy in Learning: So it almost doesn’t matter what we might be talking about, whether that’s love or friendship, truth and justice, or politics and religion. Whatever the object of knowledge before us at any given time, everything is ultimately worth discussing, if someone feels the need. For it is not merely the objects of the world we need to know, or even the relationships between them – but rather, it is those individuals with whom we are talking who most need our understanding. For even if we could have all of the infinite outside-looking-in perspectives that are available, we could still not ‘know’ a living object without seeing through it’s eyes, from the inside looking out (so infinity, plus one!) Living things have a point of view all their own to be considered, and just as we would have others understand us, so we have something to learn from everyone else, every voice, if understanding the whole truth is our goal. For this reason, dialogue is an art we all need to understand and practice better than is our modern habit. As Socrates said, its what we don’t see that we most need to learn, and since others can see what’s in our blind spot, we have much to learn from one another. Indeed, our worst enemy might well be our best teacher!
But empathy too is a critical element of healthy dialogue, because we can understand other’s point of view without them having to actually put it into words for us. We can put ourselves in their place, and so shouldn’t need to be told what we could easily discern by simply stepping out of our own shoes. So even in a world that suffers a dearth of dialogue, there is nothing to stop us but lack of imagination to see the world through other eyes. So it is in our own interest to learn to see things as they really are, and both empathy and dialogue are skills we develop in the exercise of deliberate listening for the connections.
Dialectic Thinking: The ancients called this dialectic thinking, and understood that anything can be seen from many points of view (indeed, even an infinite number), and that the whole truth about anything requires our stretching to include as many of those perspectives as are relevant and necessary to reach understanding. Seeing through other windows requires stepping out of our comfort zone, which is why we call it the principle of generosity…even though its for our good as well.
Golden Rule: So this is the reason to put the golden rule into practice, if our self-interest is enlightened, and why it shows up in every genuine wisdom tradition…because anyone and everyone can and should consider their own actions from the receiving end, for therein lies the truth about whether something would be right or wrong – whether we would be ok with it being done to us. This is the source of justice as well, and why even very small children know when ‘That’s not fair!”
Classism and Justice: Justice, the Few and the Many: As John Rawls makes clear in his Theory of Justice, it’s easy enough to see what we would not want others to do to us if the tables were turned, and we found ourselves in the position of least advantaged. Would that the powerful would make laws, rules, and procedures according to this golden rule logic, rather than, as Martin Luther King laments in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, to suit the interests of those who have the advantage of making them. A law is just when it follows moral law, and those who enforce it would be willing to be bound by it. By contrast, a law is unjust when it is made to bind others only. This is the golden rule at work on an institutional level.
The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: Perhaps this is where truth matters most – because the truth stays true (indeed, that’s the good thing about it, that it can be trusted not to change). It is solid, it stands to reason, can answer to questions, and is thus what helps us figure everything else out. Intrinsic Motivation: The intrinsic motivation to understand is the reason learning is so enjoyable – that click, that revelation, that joy that ultimately comes with understanding – the reason why the love of learning should be returned to centrality in education. And it’s also what makes philosophical counseling effective, The Wave of the Future, A Return to the Past, and/or Reasons for Optimism About the Human Soul: because the world makes sense, we can figure it out, and even make things right -- though we’d scarcely know it, without the insights that come with ancient dialectic and complementary thinking.
So we can see why dialogue, what the ancients called the living word, was understood to be critical to for living things to use carefully in a healthy life. Biologic, Learning from Nature and Aristotle: Because anything living is always changing, they knew, always either getting better or getting worse. Divine Potential and Ideals of Human Excellence: So it’s in our survival and well being interest to keep an eye on the ideal of our better selves, and to take whatever guidance this ideal has to offer.
Learning From the Best of Them, Not the Rest of Them: What the ancients called the dialectic art, or dialectic complementary, did not originate in one culture, and spread to other as a domino effect. Rather, each and all learned it independently from their own experience, and ultimately passed it down to their young so that future generations would receive it from their ancestors. Not every culture took it equally seriously, and so our challenge is to discover the best of them among the rest of them. Socrates Humility: Socrates was always careful to make clear that he had learned from other first - from kings and slaves, men and women, citizens and foreigners, greybeards and children – and only then offered his opinion, if he could add to what he’d learned.
Metaphor: They captured this divine skill by way of careful reasoning, but also by way of metaphors (such as that there are many paths to he same summit), and parables and mythology, because these served as effective stimulants to insight and aids for memory. The Manysidedness of Truth: And it’s in our interest to make the most of all these tools they passed on to us. For just as the body grows, so too does the mind by gradual inclusion of what is revealed in understanding the cumulative nature of truth.
Gnosis: And so many have lived, and sometimes died, to pass this wisdom forward to generations to come, that is, to us. And they warned of what would befall humanity (i.e. ignorance), should it be forgotten (which it arguably couldn’t be, once and for all – for, as we’ve said, the truth stays true, like it or not, and can be found time and again…but a truly diligent searcher, with or without a guide.) We can all find gnosis by looking inward, but it’s very difficult in a world where we all are searching alone. But they knew we would be in trouble if the inward search for truth were discouraged, or God forbid, actually punished. On the Spoken and Written Word: Once literate cultures began putting their wisdom into writing, intuitive understanding was easily lost, if only because it was then so easy to destroy, or at least to put high on the library shelves. And all it would take is one malevolent tyrant, or any few who could enforce silence over the others, to plunge humanity into darkness. It takes hardly more than one generation for the great forgetting to take place, before what was once clear becomes only a vague memory…if that. Add to this the power of rhetoric to demonize the past (take the word pagan, for instance), and the brainwashing is complete, as the baby goes out with the bathwater.
Gnosis: Hence, the reason free speech and democracy are so important – because truth can be too easily hidden for very long periods of time, and almost (though not quite) lost, when people are not free to question authority and search for truth by way of dialogic learning and dialectic question and answer. And though it will likely be found again in the unfolding of time, how much ignorance and suffering must be endured in its absence in the meantime?
Socratic Method and Arguing to Understand: So these discussions are rarely inclined toward argument, for participants are not inclined toward winning, but rather arguing in the philosophical sense, that is, to understanding one another and the truth itself. Because the good thing about the truth is, again, that it stays true! And having access to multi-perspectival voices means that all together give us access to whatever it is we need to learn. As we’ve said, bringing depth to our understanding the way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one. In this way, the truth can be found, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide. Certainly it helps to have the voices of those who’ve been up and down the mountain a few times by way of paths we ourselves cannot have traveled, and this guidance can help us avoid predictable obstacles and potholes along the way. But with or without help, we find truth by recognition and recall, not by having it out pointed out to us. In any case, we still have to figure out for ourselves what is and is not true.
Original Sources / Game of Telephone: And my job is to bring the voices of those long dead philosophers into our daily dialogues. Philosophical counseling would encourage us to read and study more of the original sources, rather than to participate in what can too easily become a game of telephone. Philosophers call this bibliotherapy.
Belief in Human Goodness and Inner Voice: At any rate, you can see why the ancients never asked us to believe in anything, except in human goodness (as arguably too many modern forms of religion do not), for our own good depends on it. By believing in the good within us, we are unlikely to be misguided by those who would lead us astray. Rather, we must listen inward so to be able to hear and follow our own true inner voice, which is more likely to hit the mark of true good because it has less reason to lie to us.
Good and Bad Pleasures: But too often we follow the temptation of pleasures, without taking time to consider which are good pleasures, and which are not – that is, which will bring good consequences, and which will bring consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Figuring out the difference in mere pleasure and true pleasure, or true good, is the first lesson the ancient taught their young. For what good is getting what we want, if what we wanted turns out not to be good for us? (*put pleasure/good quote)
Socratic Relationships and the Inner Voice: Others can help us to learn well, not by inducing us to follow them, but by educing us to think well and critically enough to see what’s really good for us, or as Socrates says, what’s worth trading for what. And this is why, he said, that his inner voice never told him what to do, but only ever told him what NOT to do. For doing things we know to be wrong is what sets us up for consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Which is why it behooves those who love us to help us learn listen inward when still young so to be careful what we wish for throughout life, lest we set ourselves up for consequences we don’t really want.
Wants: The ancient Vedic Hindus taught their young that the universe is like the magic wishing tree, they called Kalpatura - It will give you everything you wish for, they told them, along with ALL of the consequences of those wishes! Wouldn’t it have made a difference if we too had learned when we were young to be careful what we wish for, because we not only will get it, but more than we bargained for! Wants and values become actions, and actions have consequences that we will live with, like it or not! So it’s in our best interest to wish instead for what IS really good for us, rather than the mere appearance of it. For if we choose badly, even when we get what we want, we will not be happy with it. And appearing happy is not the same thing as actually being happy. It’s the real thing that we truly want, even if we sometimes wish for the mere semblance, what that’s all we’ve learned to hope for. Aim higher! Because it stands to reason that we can’t hit a target we don’t aim at!
Want: But instead of helping our young to want what’s good for them, we teach them, indeed condition them, to want all manner of things that will cost them a higher price than they know – and not because it’s good for them, but because it’s good for our economy. In effect, we’re sacrificing the well-being of our young as a mean to the well-being of institutions that were originally intended to serve the good of people. Go figure. And we’ve built an education system that serves as a mere means to money, rather than to pursue happiness itself. Learning itself is happiness, not merely a means to money that, we are told, can buy us happiness. We are too often deliberately confused so that we cannot see when we’re being used.
Appearance and the Real Thing: The mere appearance of confidence, or intelligence, or beauty, or power…these are not the same as being truly confident, intelligent, beautiful or powerful. But when we settle for the mere pretense of something, it doesn’t satisfy, and it doesn’t fool us for very long. (*put can tell ourselves we’re happy, but…)
So go for the real deal – the genuine article – realize the ideals that are possible in this life…but only if we understand and aim at them! Nobody really wants unhealthy relationships, for instance, but we settle for them when we don’t even conceive of, let alone aim for better. For this reason, it’s worth talking more than we do about what these things really mean, especially with our young, who will only actualize true happiness, friendship, love, and all the rest if they have a well-developed idea of what these things mean. Only then, can we learn to want what’s good for us. After all, if what we want is artificial to begin with, then getting it will never really satisfy us. As the ancients understood, “We can never get enough of what we don’t really want to begin with.”(Smith) If we chase the means only, we will never reach the ends they are means to. (*put strategy) If getting what we want doesn’t also get us what we need and what is good for us, then it just leaves us wanting more. We may have thought it was real, if we’ve never had anything better to compare it to, and won’t realize until we get it that it doesn’t bring us what we thought it would, and doesn’t feel the way we thought or were led to believe it would.
Happiness: Hence, the reason the ancients taught their young the golden rule and the concept of karma (action), and its compliment, wu wei (non-action). Because happiness isn’t in having everything we want, but in wanting what we have, and in actually becoming and ultimately just being a person we can truly respect. For happiness is more about quality of time and the meaning of one’s existence, than about possession, ownership, and quantity of goods.
Kalpatura and Want: Like it our not, in the end (as many happy paupers and miserable tyrants indicates) we own our actions and their consequences. So why want what’s not actually good for us? Why not act with care and intelligence to figure out what that is?
Words, Questions, and Understanding: So what is real? What is true? What is good? What is right? There actually are answers to these questions…and we know something is true when and because it can answer to the hard questions. And with both reason and feelings, we have the dialogic tools we need to figure all this out, to think it through and to figure out the right thing at the right time for the right reason. And understanding starts by seeking the true meaning of these words in our discussions – not settling for the loose and lesser sense of words – such as the way we call relative strangers on facebook ‘friends’. Certainly they can become so, but we need higher standards for true friends, that is, if we hope to have them in this life.
Words and Appearances: So lets us ask instead, what is a true friend? How many of those we call friend are true? And to how many of them are we true to? We sometimes say we love everything from our new car, to our hearts desire – but what, after all, is real love? How does it differ from lessor senses in which we use the word love? And we can ask the same thing of happiness, wealth, power, and other ideals whose mark we miss if we haven’t given thought to the difference between the mere appearances of something, and the real thing.
Socratic Relationships and Love: “Love is the only thing,” Socrates said, “that I ever claimed to know anything about.” And yet he spent his whole life just talking with and bring out the good in as many people as he could, sometimes only with a good hearted jibe aimed to nudge them out of their ignorance (which, if you think about it, is nothing but the noun consequent of the verb ‘to ignore.’) This art of learning to talk to one another in a way that brings out the good in us all, THIS IS the heart of loving.
Whole Mind: Being raised to be one-sided, we become too good at seeing only what we want to see. But if we were ever to see how easy and enjoyable it is, dialectic thinking could heal this gap between what is and what could be. In this way, we recover our love of learning and remember the intrinsic good and actual joy that comes with the progressive revelation that follows thoughtful questioning, and self-expression, gathering and processing points of view, other than our own, i.e. learning.
Whole Mind: And so by combining our windows with those of others, a whole picture begins to emerge, one that is ultimately so intrinsically interesting that we would never want to be finished learning, if such a thing were even possible. There is always more to learn, and only by doing so do we see the true joy of learning itself, something many of us have long forgotten. And in the process of developing such healthy relationships, we might come to remember and understand the meaning of real friendship, real love, real wealth, real power, and real happiness.
Socratic Relationships: So that’s what philosophy, and philosophical counseling is good for – the practice of healthy relationships – what I’m going to call Socratic relationships, those that are dialogic, indeed, dialectic, in a way that can be put into practice throughout one’s life. So the hope is, as it was for Socrates, that you too will pass it on.
Socratic relationships: Regardless of internet misconceptions, “A Socratic relationship,” is NOT one in which “you ask a lot of really difficult questions of the other person until they get annoyed and want to poison you.” (The author who wrote this admits, “I have a lot of those.“) Socratic relationships are those that aim to ask the best questions at the best time…which turns out to be welcome and therapeutic by those who are active learners, good students of truth in life. Socratic relationships bring out the best in both participants.
Socratic teaching: A good teacher, as Socrates says, is a person who understands and can use words well, that is, truthfully, well enough to help others see whatever they don’t see and need to, including the good they may be missing all around them, inside them, and in others. This includes the willingness to ask the hard questions, and to help find truthful answers. For sometimes this good exists only potentially, and the challenge is for us to actualize that potential, using the mind for all it’s worth in that pursuit. We have this power to help others actualize their potential. Indeed, we might be the critical variable…for a friend can make all the difference, for better or for worse. (Remember Sam in Lord of the Rings?!)
So that’s our challenge – to help bring out the good that is potential in one another, and – importantly – stop purposely bringing out the worst,, whether by advertising to increase our insecurities, or treating others with undue distain because we think everyone is underhanded (which only says something clearly about us, btw) To ‘see’ what is still and always possible in one another, any given life, and ultimately in this world, begins by seeing what it is that we can do, that needs doing, and probably won’t get done if we don’t do it.
Words and Ideals: So it’s worth our time to take up the dialogue about what these words truly mean – justice, wisdom, happiness, friendship, love, beauty, temperance… And this is why ideals of good character are so important -- after all, it’s almost impossible to hit a target you don’t even aim at. So believing in one’s own and others’ goodness is quite a valuable quality of character to have and gift to give, and one that can be learned by the doing. True power is the ability to actualize these potentials in our lives, and to help others do the same. Whereas getting what we think we want wasn’t any real power to begin with, if it turns out to not have been good for us. So the wise person begins and ends by asking, what is good? And distinguishes this, the Vedic Upanishads say up front, from mere pleasure, which is only sometimes good. And since bad pleasures can backfire, it’s in our interest to tell the difference. For he is a fool who plants the seeds of his own destruction by choosing bad pleasures. Of course, we do it all the time, if only because everything in our culture encourages, indeed, conditions us to regularly confuse mere pleasure, what feels good, with the truer or fuller understanding of what is good, which we need more than feelings to find. This doesn’t deny the value of feelings, it just puts them in balance with better and worse reasons. We may well have good reasons that might actually justify having to do ‘harm’ in a sense to other living beings. But that reason damn well not be “because I felt like it.” THAT level of self-absorption that considers only one’s own feelings, would have to be the very heart of selfishness and source of human evil. As would be the calculated deduction that we could and should benefit at others cost. Neither emotions or intellect should rule by themselves, but be weighed out in the process of deliberation toward the good.
Wu Wei: To get what is truly good for us, it is sometimes necessary to let the universe steer, for it may know better than us what’s good for us, and might offer us better opportunities than we would find for ourselves or even dream of, if we don’t push or rush it. The ancients did not confuse self-control with trying to control the world around us or the future. They knew the wisdom of living wu wei – that is, going with the flow, floating as much as possible on the natural buoyancy of optimism, being open to the direction the universe takes us, while not relinquishing our innate ability to navigate, deliberate, and choose which way to go. And along the way, recognizing the potential good of every turn, even if it’s not where we thought we wanted to go. Because the universe undoubtedly knows what it’s doing, indeed, knows much that we cannot…like about what’s around the corner…what good we might find or do there....
Karma: So this is why the ancients were sensitive to karma – for every action reverberates, and we will live with the consequences, even butterfly effects, of our actions, like it or not. So imagine how much difference it could make in a life that learns early on that memory and mindfulness of future consequences is what will either reward or punish us in the end, as we become either self-respecting or self-loathing in response to our own actions. For we will - like it or not - live with the memories we have given ourselves as we grow older. And the best favor we can do our future selves is to make those memories now that will render the person we want to be genuine – not the mere appearance of a happy you, but the real thing!
Hero’s Journey and Self-Knowledge: What gives rise to a happy hero is that we know ourselves to be just that. When you have proved yourself to yourself to be the person you truly want and can be proud to be, you are someone you can respect because you have actualized what was once only potentially, i.e. the ideal of your better self. What karma has earned in self-respect cannot be faked by any means. As Aristotle put it simply, “the pleasure of a just person can never be experienced by one who is not just.”
Karma and Justice in the Soul: Socrates asked his aging friends (in the first pages of Plato’s Republic) what they have learned about how to be truly happy in old age? The answer (seven or eight chapters later) was that we must live up to our higher potentials for justice in the soul which can be done…if we aren’t misguided by bad lessons early on. For if we learn to be good only when others are looking, we’re not likely to be happy with the view of ourselves from inside.
Nature/Bad Habit: The good news though is that it is not our nature to be ignorant, after all – only a bad habit that comes of bad education, which is to say, that which habituates us to ignoring what we don’t want to see, which we tend to learn early on in some modern cultures. But the good thing about habits is that they can be broken! We can unlearn early errors in our learning! Indeed, as John Stuart Mill put it, “the good thing…that is can be put right when it’s wrong…” but only by self-direction and good steering.*
Love and Gnosis: And the real beauty of it is that the getting is in the giving. In other words, love is its own reward…so can very easily be contagious, since it feeds on itself in such a way that it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy, a positive feedback loop. For this reason, as George Elliot once said, “It’s never too late to become the person we might have been.” We need only experience it to truly understand that we’ve had this capacity all along. Like love – we may have difficulty putting ideals and concepts like true character, virtue, intelligence, wealth, and power into words, but we know it when we experience it. This kind of knowledge that is beyond words is what the ancients called gnosis, and according to recently discovered texts, it was the kind of knowledge that Jesus came to restore. I’ll let you be the judge of that (and weather ‘the Church’ and others who have the equivalent of the papal vaults have a responsibility to release those long hidden texts to humanity, for whom they were written… But to that end, we might rightly wonder how much better off we’d all be…if we’d heard THIS message from Jesus, instead of those voices that have been put into his mouth. It would have reduced our suffering in just the way Buddha meant to. And not only do we typically miss their message, but we are even willing to induce suffering in their names.
Suffering: Good will likely come of it too because good can come of everything. And as Wordsworth put it, “more awake to suffering and distress, more alive to tenderness.” But that certainly does not excuse causing it where it otherwise wouldn’t have been, and where the deliberate exercise of the golden rule would have us do otherwise. The golden rule teaches empathy by experience, by concern for the others good as our own. It simply broadens the field of self-interest to include others, not only because it’s good for them, but also because it’s good for us. And it doesn’t matter if we believe in it or not, only those who do will experience it anyway.
Socratic Relationships: At any rate, we at least can see the need for Socratic relationships by way of their absence in our experience. (Certainly our educational experience… In fact, it was the complete dearth of dialogue in Capital-P Philosophy that brings me to write this at all…for what chance do our young, and our young democracy, have if education does not exercise our voices?) And this is why it’s worth writing that book about what Socratic relationships are, and how they differ from what we’ve been taught the Socratic method is. Socratic method: For rather than cause distress (like the Paper Chase law professor who purported to be using the Socratic method, but not in any sense that Socrates would endorse), a true Socratic teacher relieves distress and builds confidence in the other, so to help develop and bring out the good in them. Teaching by way of authoritarian methods is not actually teaching at all. At best, it conditions by exploiting need and fear, and at worse, it provokes defensive resistance, as is rampant in our modern schools. And a mind bent on self-defense cannot simultaneously hear the wisdom worth taking from a given discussion. And what is lost when dialectic discussion isn’t used is nothing less than mutual understanding, which given the quality it brings to life, must be the ultimate objective. Authoritarian Education: So imposed education is one of the habits we would do well to unlearn.
Defensive Selfishness: Even justified defense comes across as selfishness, and is so widespread these days that it can easily be cast as ‘human nature’ – though it is only one potential among many…indeed, our lower potential when rationalized, and among many higher ones when justified. The quality of one’s reasons is everything. Learning to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason is what living well is all about.
Karma and Higher Ideals for Happiness: But those higher potentials are there to be actualized too – if we can see them and use them to guide us upward. For the self-respect of a successful hero’s journey is critical to the happiness that is integral to a life lived well. And that’s where karma really matters – not in what you own, or have created the mere appearance of, but in who you know yourself to be.
Be lamps onto yourselves… -And for this reason, we are warned by them not to merely follow commandments or blind beliefs, or let any forms of dictated education or spiritual guidance persuade us that something is true, if its not. In fact, no matter what others may say, the simple truth is that “the only way to be a good person is to be a good person.” So “be lamps onto yourself,” as Buddha said. Choosing our path intelligently is an art worth remembering, because (as Aristotle said Plato and Socrates were the first to teach) – “to be good is to be happy.”
Existentialism and Self-Knowledge, maybe Conclusion: And complimentarily, as the existentialists of this past century made clear, living in bad faith, bad conscience, is it’s own punishment. “Hell is your life gone wrong.” And try as we might, we can never escape this truth of our karma. We may get away with lying to others, for a time – but we can never ‘get away’ with lying to ourselves. This is what puts self-knowledge at the heart of all knowledge. If we don’t respect our better selves, no amount of pretense can change who we are or help us actualize what is truly potential for us. If we’re not happy, it’s not going to help to tell ourselves that we are. We simply know the difference deep inside. And even if we don’t pay attention to it, we cannot escape that it limits all else we can ‘pay attention’ to – or psychological capital, the heart of the moral economy.
It’s for this reason that we must let our inner voice guide us, never telling us what to do, as Socrates says, but only ever telling us what not to do. How do we know what is the right thing to do? By a process of elimination – for when we stop doing what we know in our hearts we shouldn’t (if only because we wouldn’t want it done to us) then everything else, all other options that remain, would be right – and which to choose is up to us.
It’s in this way that we are said to create ourselves and destine our lives, and in this sense that we are potentially divine – for one who is free of bad karma has sometimes miraculous skills of navigation and power of self-control and self-determination. It is such a person who might experience what some call apotheosis. But this is available to all, who first set the stage for such a life by making their karma welcoming to good fortune… even as it may come in a form that appears to be bad luck at first. Every challenge and struggle and suffering brings a learning experience, if we receive it with grace.