Please note that this page is currently undergoing a considerable re-write, and hence may appear disconnected or poorly written in places.
On the previous page I described the basic framework of my approach. On this page I speak about my journey to becoming a philosopher, a counsellor, and so a philosophical counsellor. This page began as a brief set of facts about me as a professional, but has since grown into a broader essay. In the sense that this website should be a brief and clear explanation of what I offer, the length and detail is not ideal. Though of course, what I offer is conversation that pushes further into things, so I offer this writing for people who may find it helpful in understanding what I do, and who are willing to take their time. You do not need to read this in order to see me--it is not some kind of filter or test. A fundamental reason I write as I do below, is that while I am formally trained in academic philosophy, yet my approach is different to the typical academic focus on theory. I practice philosophy as thinking which comes out of living, and which in turn enriches and guides living. So I share some personal examples, and do so as an example of how philosophy is the work of understanding and bettering of our individual life. As with philosophy, so with my approach to counselling and psychotherapy, which eschews the modern technocratic approach, and favours the older deeper orientation we often call psychotherapy. In writing as I have, I am attempting to give the reader not only a biographical overview, but also a sense, a taste, of the philosophical counselling I offer. To do that is to attempt to convey a sense of what life can mean and can be, our potential for the more meaningful life of which we are capable, which is a fundamental goal of the work I do with people, and which is an expression of some of our finest philosophy and psychotherapy.
I grew up in the Mallee--a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was a sense also of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's vision, just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. It was, however, even more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but that it is. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in many ways, but this is where I became a philosopher.
Of course, that was also to be a circuitous journey. I dropped out of high-school early and left home at 17, setting out on my own. I began to make a living as a musician in Melbourne, when one day I wandered into an old church and took home a book on Christian mysticism. I had been living in the secular culture of modernity, a consumerist culture, where the most exciting thing was an advance in technology, and whose emptiness was generally compensated for at the individual level by myriad forms of egotism. I found that worldview quite empty and depressing. Of course, I had also the existential sense of life described above, and my success as a musician (a jazz drummer) was driven by a desire to express that experience and to be in it even more. My discovery of the ancient and medieval tradition Christain mysticism came as a shock, for it was a third, whole new way of seeing and experiencing the world. Nothing had changed in the objective world, so to speak, and yet everything had changed radically in its meaning and substance. I decided to enter a monastery in Italy which was led by a celebrated Catholic mystic writer. The community occupied several locations across Italy, and the one I entered was perched on a mountainside outside of Florence. I have a print of a 500 year old painting of that building, which includes my bedroom window. Here was the beginning of a lifelong journey through religion and then into philosophy and psychotherapy, a journey which would involve an ongoing study of both spirituality and secularity, and of consciousness, value, and meaning. For here was the experience of stepping into a certain vision of life, and living it fully in the head, heart, and body.
My first night found me alone in a monastic cell, looking out a small window at a blizzard of snow whirling in the blackness of a void where the mountainside fell away. There was no heating, and the window was cracked such that ice covered the inside glass. I warmed my hands by the light globe. I slept little that night, and as dawn broke to the sounds of Gregorian chant, I looked out the chapel window across a Tuscan valley, the sun glowing through the patchworks of white and green fields far below, in a place where Dante once walked.
One of the most magical days of my life occured during this time, and I use the word "magical" because that is how it feels now, in memory, to the point that it has become almost a dream. My community travelled to La Verna, the mountain where St Francis received the stigmata. That book on mysticism which was the catalyst for this whole journey was focused on St Francis, so this was an unexpected and special exprience. The monks of my community had a meeting with the Franciscan monks who resided there, and as I was a pre-novice I was not able to join that part of the gathering. So I found myself outside the monastery buildings, wandering in a pine forest, completely alone. It was afternoon, in a northern Italian winter. The light was very different to the Mallee: it was soft, and as if everything was glowing, including the air. Gentle snow fell slowly through that chill silent air. The silence itself was palpable, as though it was a positive reality, as though it held everything. Here and there I encountered small, centuries old chapels, with their faded paintings telling sacred stories of peasants and saints. I had stepped into the mystical life of medieval Europe. Of course it was the 1990s, but the world I saw and felt was much older: older than modernity, older than Romanticism, older than The Enlightenment, older even than the Renaissance. Later, when I practiced Buddhism for a time, I heard various leading asian teachers suggest that genuine Buddhism is ill-fitted to the Western psyche, and that we should perhaps look again to our own traditions. There in that forest of pines and ancient chapels I was experiencing a vision of life that is buried deep in the Western psyche, left behind centuries ago but nonetheless a part of who we are, in the same way that our childhood never leaves us, even if we forget it, and continues always to cast its shadows. Of course, all this was a reflection equally of something I carried within me, of a training I had been undergoing in a single-minded way, to see the world in a certain way: the lens of that ancient, mystical Christianity. If I was to step back again into the world of secular modernity, and to start seeing in that way again, it would be in a way that was changed by all of this. I would not see in the same way as before, for the power of this vision, and the multiplicity of visions and experiences of the world which it would constitute when placed alongside any other worldview, would forever change me, would change my way of seeing.
There is very little time to oneself in a monastery--it is a communal life, lived on a schedule of work and prayer--and I am someone who needs time to themselves. I found that space through reading. I would steal from my sleep to read by torchlight each night. The monastery had passed through the hands of various Catholic communities, including English nuns who had left behind their books. That introduced me to a whole other world, for I had grown up in a very non-literary environment. The monastic library included all the known works of ancient Greek tragedy, translated into English. I became gripped by those plays. Tragedy is a genre, but it is also a vision of life, a tragic vision. In those archetypal stories of moral blindness, vulnerability, and suffering, I encountered an unflinching attention to the chance cruelty of life, but one suffused with compassion for such affliction. Already I had recognised that, to an important degree, "character is fate": that we each have much more power than we realise, and that our actions have far deeper consequences than we realise. In time my apprehension of this would be greatly expanded by lived experience but also through reading people like Carl Jung. On the other hand, I had seen also that life can be highly unpredictable and tragic, so that despite our best efforts everything can be stripped from us. Not only that, but human malevolence is very real, which adds a further dimension. I spent my teen years under a muscular, narcissistic and abusive step-father in a fibro house in a tiny dusty town, which amounted a certain experience of the meaning of the world, and of others, and of myself, which cast a dark shadow. Looking back, I was searching those tragic plays because I was gripped by their tragic vision of reality, and by the hope that attention to what they showed would provide me with some guidance for living in a world that includes such realities.
That searching may sound strange and perhaps distracted or confused, given that I was in a Catholic monastery with its own transformative story of suffering, grace, and salvation. In hindsight I recognise this as an early adult example of a tendency and talent I have, and at which I have just been hinting, for experiencing the world as one does an ambiguous image, such as a drawing of a duck:
On the previous page I described the basic framework of my approach. On this page I speak about my journey to becoming a philosopher, a counsellor, and so a philosophical counsellor. This page began as a brief set of facts about me as a professional, but has since grown into a broader essay. In the sense that this website should be a brief and clear explanation of what I offer, the length and detail is not ideal. Though of course, what I offer is conversation that pushes further into things, so I offer this writing for people who may find it helpful in understanding what I do, and who are willing to take their time. You do not need to read this in order to see me--it is not some kind of filter or test. A fundamental reason I write as I do below, is that while I am formally trained in academic philosophy, yet my approach is different to the typical academic focus on theory. I practice philosophy as thinking which comes out of living, and which in turn enriches and guides living. So I share some personal examples, and do so as an example of how philosophy is the work of understanding and bettering of our individual life. As with philosophy, so with my approach to counselling and psychotherapy, which eschews the modern technocratic approach, and favours the older deeper orientation we often call psychotherapy. In writing as I have, I am attempting to give the reader not only a biographical overview, but also a sense, a taste, of the philosophical counselling I offer. To do that is to attempt to convey a sense of what life can mean and can be, our potential for the more meaningful life of which we are capable, which is a fundamental goal of the work I do with people, and which is an expression of some of our finest philosophy and psychotherapy.
I grew up in the Mallee--a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was a sense also of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's vision, just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. It was, however, even more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but that it is. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in many ways, but this is where I became a philosopher.
Of course, that was also to be a circuitous journey. I dropped out of high-school early and left home at 17, setting out on my own. I began to make a living as a musician in Melbourne, when one day I wandered into an old church and took home a book on Christian mysticism. I had been living in the secular culture of modernity, a consumerist culture, where the most exciting thing was an advance in technology, and whose emptiness was generally compensated for at the individual level by myriad forms of egotism. I found that worldview quite empty and depressing. Of course, I had also the existential sense of life described above, and my success as a musician (a jazz drummer) was driven by a desire to express that experience and to be in it even more. My discovery of the ancient and medieval tradition Christain mysticism came as a shock, for it was a third, whole new way of seeing and experiencing the world. Nothing had changed in the objective world, so to speak, and yet everything had changed radically in its meaning and substance. I decided to enter a monastery in Italy which was led by a celebrated Catholic mystic writer. The community occupied several locations across Italy, and the one I entered was perched on a mountainside outside of Florence. I have a print of a 500 year old painting of that building, which includes my bedroom window. Here was the beginning of a lifelong journey through religion and then into philosophy and psychotherapy, a journey which would involve an ongoing study of both spirituality and secularity, and of consciousness, value, and meaning. For here was the experience of stepping into a certain vision of life, and living it fully in the head, heart, and body.
My first night found me alone in a monastic cell, looking out a small window at a blizzard of snow whirling in the blackness of a void where the mountainside fell away. There was no heating, and the window was cracked such that ice covered the inside glass. I warmed my hands by the light globe. I slept little that night, and as dawn broke to the sounds of Gregorian chant, I looked out the chapel window across a Tuscan valley, the sun glowing through the patchworks of white and green fields far below, in a place where Dante once walked.
One of the most magical days of my life occured during this time, and I use the word "magical" because that is how it feels now, in memory, to the point that it has become almost a dream. My community travelled to La Verna, the mountain where St Francis received the stigmata. That book on mysticism which was the catalyst for this whole journey was focused on St Francis, so this was an unexpected and special exprience. The monks of my community had a meeting with the Franciscan monks who resided there, and as I was a pre-novice I was not able to join that part of the gathering. So I found myself outside the monastery buildings, wandering in a pine forest, completely alone. It was afternoon, in a northern Italian winter. The light was very different to the Mallee: it was soft, and as if everything was glowing, including the air. Gentle snow fell slowly through that chill silent air. The silence itself was palpable, as though it was a positive reality, as though it held everything. Here and there I encountered small, centuries old chapels, with their faded paintings telling sacred stories of peasants and saints. I had stepped into the mystical life of medieval Europe. Of course it was the 1990s, but the world I saw and felt was much older: older than modernity, older than Romanticism, older than The Enlightenment, older even than the Renaissance. Later, when I practiced Buddhism for a time, I heard various leading asian teachers suggest that genuine Buddhism is ill-fitted to the Western psyche, and that we should perhaps look again to our own traditions. There in that forest of pines and ancient chapels I was experiencing a vision of life that is buried deep in the Western psyche, left behind centuries ago but nonetheless a part of who we are, in the same way that our childhood never leaves us, even if we forget it, and continues always to cast its shadows. Of course, all this was a reflection equally of something I carried within me, of a training I had been undergoing in a single-minded way, to see the world in a certain way: the lens of that ancient, mystical Christianity. If I was to step back again into the world of secular modernity, and to start seeing in that way again, it would be in a way that was changed by all of this. I would not see in the same way as before, for the power of this vision, and the multiplicity of visions and experiences of the world which it would constitute when placed alongside any other worldview, would forever change me, would change my way of seeing.
There is very little time to oneself in a monastery--it is a communal life, lived on a schedule of work and prayer--and I am someone who needs time to themselves. I found that space through reading. I would steal from my sleep to read by torchlight each night. The monastery had passed through the hands of various Catholic communities, including English nuns who had left behind their books. That introduced me to a whole other world, for I had grown up in a very non-literary environment. The monastic library included all the known works of ancient Greek tragedy, translated into English. I became gripped by those plays. Tragedy is a genre, but it is also a vision of life, a tragic vision. In those archetypal stories of moral blindness, vulnerability, and suffering, I encountered an unflinching attention to the chance cruelty of life, but one suffused with compassion for such affliction. Already I had recognised that, to an important degree, "character is fate": that we each have much more power than we realise, and that our actions have far deeper consequences than we realise. In time my apprehension of this would be greatly expanded by lived experience but also through reading people like Carl Jung. On the other hand, I had seen also that life can be highly unpredictable and tragic, so that despite our best efforts everything can be stripped from us. Not only that, but human malevolence is very real, which adds a further dimension. I spent my teen years under a muscular, narcissistic and abusive step-father in a fibro house in a tiny dusty town, which amounted a certain experience of the meaning of the world, and of others, and of myself, which cast a dark shadow. Looking back, I was searching those tragic plays because I was gripped by their tragic vision of reality, and by the hope that attention to what they showed would provide me with some guidance for living in a world that includes such realities.
That searching may sound strange and perhaps distracted or confused, given that I was in a Catholic monastery with its own transformative story of suffering, grace, and salvation. In hindsight I recognise this as an early adult example of a tendency and talent I have, and at which I have just been hinting, for experiencing the world as one does an ambiguous image, such as a drawing of a duck:
which one then sees instead as a rabbit. We can expand this metaphor or analogy by considering, for example, what it is like to shift from seeing a duck to seeing a rabbit, which may be a work of effort, or of sudden shock, and which may then envelope our vision such that we saw only duck but now see only rabbit, or which may involve an effort of will with respect to maintain the new vision, because we are pulled back by the other. We might also consider how such an image might include multiple perspectives beyond those two: say a duck, then a rabbit, then a fox, then a boat. My experience of life even by this time, now aged 20, was an experience of the world according to this analogy: the world seen and experienced existentially in my childhood, and then as cold modernity in my adolescence, and now as mystical Christianity, with something new again on the horizon. For the Greeks offered a pre-Christian view, which connected somewhat with the secular vision, though their world had more depth than our age of scientism and technocracy. Reading and being gripped by that literature would gradually draw me out of the religious world and back toward the secular, on a mission to understand and seek answers to the tragedy of life described in those plays, and associated literature like Homer's Illiad. I was being drawn out and into that worldview, while at another level of analysis we could say that I was increasingly experiencing the problem of today, of modernity, which is the grip of multiple world views. That is not a problem of experiencing multiple particular ideas within a whole, but rather an incoherence regarding the whole, for a worldview, like a rabbit or a duck, is a vision of the whole, and I was pulled between these absolute and incompatible wholes, between radically different visions and so experiences of what life is. This is fundamentally a problem of making sense, but worldviews are also contexts of action, they show us what and how to think, feel, relate, and act.
People sometimes have debates regarding whether Christianity or atheism is true or false, and likewise for other clashing worldviews. Such debates express a confusion of language and meaning. The concepts of truth and falsity get their meaning in certain forms of speaking embedded in certain forms of living. When we think critically about a work of art, for example, the concepts we use are not those of true and false. Nor do I ask if my romantic relationship is true or false, or if I do then that involves a different meaning with respect to those concepts, akin to the way I might ask whether a friend of mine "is a true friend?". I would say that the shift from one worldview to another often has more to do with being gripped by the new one, just as I suddenly see the rabbit and perhaps am gripped, when previously the world was all duck. That shift is not a product of reasoning, but of a way of seeing. With respect to a religion we might use a different notion to being gripped, for example we might say it is a case of falling in love with the new worldview, the new picture, story, vision. To be in love is to come to live inside a different kind of world. I often speak with clients who are lonely but who fear the instability that might come with falling in love, and often they are right to understand it in that way. I have worked also with many people whose partner died, and for whom the world no longer made sense, at least for a long time, even though it made fine sense before they fell in love.
To fall in love with a new picture of the world is to live inside that story. This is what I was pointing to above in my examples of different worldviews, for example how I found myself inside the story of mystical Christianity, which culminated in that experience at La Verna. It is fascinating that a thousand years ago Western Europeans--a proud and violent Germanic people--suddenly up and abandoned their old gods to become Christians, in only a few generations. That was not always for admirable spiritual reasons, and yet once this new worldview had taken hold, it became often deeply sincere. The atheist philosopher Nietzsche, who in the late nineteenth century analysed the Western loss of God and the impending problem of nihilism, made a significant point about this conversion. Western peoples achieved it by means of the distinctly Christian practices of attention which the religion taught them. They learned how to apply their minds with single-mindedness to a new worldview, such that after many thousands of years of living in a world of tree spirits and of Wodan, they abandoned the old and entered into a new story. Nietzsche pointed out that after centuries of such practices of attention they became a natural skill and capacity of these peoples, which in turn led to the downfall of Christianity, for it could now be decoupled from that story in the service of a new one. We see this in the history of the the life stages of the West: medieval Christianity, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rationality, Romanticism, and technocratic, nihilistic modernity. The capacity to be living in a duck world, and then to intuit and eventually shift wholesale into the new rabbit world, and then fox world, and eventually not only that, but to become capacle of seeing duck and rabbit and fox at the same time, which was not only the vision of those three but the experience of multiplicity and decentering as a thing in itself, ultimately had a profoundly destabilising effect. I imagine it akin to a shift from the ambiguous image I shared above, to this incoherent one below:
People sometimes have debates regarding whether Christianity or atheism is true or false, and likewise for other clashing worldviews. Such debates express a confusion of language and meaning. The concepts of truth and falsity get their meaning in certain forms of speaking embedded in certain forms of living. When we think critically about a work of art, for example, the concepts we use are not those of true and false. Nor do I ask if my romantic relationship is true or false, or if I do then that involves a different meaning with respect to those concepts, akin to the way I might ask whether a friend of mine "is a true friend?". I would say that the shift from one worldview to another often has more to do with being gripped by the new one, just as I suddenly see the rabbit and perhaps am gripped, when previously the world was all duck. That shift is not a product of reasoning, but of a way of seeing. With respect to a religion we might use a different notion to being gripped, for example we might say it is a case of falling in love with the new worldview, the new picture, story, vision. To be in love is to come to live inside a different kind of world. I often speak with clients who are lonely but who fear the instability that might come with falling in love, and often they are right to understand it in that way. I have worked also with many people whose partner died, and for whom the world no longer made sense, at least for a long time, even though it made fine sense before they fell in love.
To fall in love with a new picture of the world is to live inside that story. This is what I was pointing to above in my examples of different worldviews, for example how I found myself inside the story of mystical Christianity, which culminated in that experience at La Verna. It is fascinating that a thousand years ago Western Europeans--a proud and violent Germanic people--suddenly up and abandoned their old gods to become Christians, in only a few generations. That was not always for admirable spiritual reasons, and yet once this new worldview had taken hold, it became often deeply sincere. The atheist philosopher Nietzsche, who in the late nineteenth century analysed the Western loss of God and the impending problem of nihilism, made a significant point about this conversion. Western peoples achieved it by means of the distinctly Christian practices of attention which the religion taught them. They learned how to apply their minds with single-mindedness to a new worldview, such that after many thousands of years of living in a world of tree spirits and of Wodan, they abandoned the old and entered into a new story. Nietzsche pointed out that after centuries of such practices of attention they became a natural skill and capacity of these peoples, which in turn led to the downfall of Christianity, for it could now be decoupled from that story in the service of a new one. We see this in the history of the the life stages of the West: medieval Christianity, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rationality, Romanticism, and technocratic, nihilistic modernity. The capacity to be living in a duck world, and then to intuit and eventually shift wholesale into the new rabbit world, and then fox world, and eventually not only that, but to become capacle of seeing duck and rabbit and fox at the same time, which was not only the vision of those three but the experience of multiplicity and decentering as a thing in itself, ultimately had a profoundly destabilising effect. I imagine it akin to a shift from the ambiguous image I shared above, to this incoherent one below:
Things don't fit together. There is something wrong. I cannot quite find my way. This has become the world for many thoughtful people today. We call it nihilism, because it is the undermining of all points of solid reference, and so all values. As the atheist philosopher Nietzsche put it, in explanation to those smug, superficial atheists who did not realise what had actually happened in the West by means of the death of God:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours,
ran to the market place, and cried incessantly:
"I seek God! I seek God!"
As many of those who did not believe in God
were standing around just then,
he provoked much laughter.
Has he got lost? asked one.
Did he lose his way like a child? asked another.
Or is he hiding?
Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?
Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you.
We have killed him—-you and I.
All of us are his murderers.
But how did we do this?
How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?
Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down?
Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
The German poet Rilke replied:
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in our interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces [...].
In the last quarter of a century I have been haunted by a recurring dream. I decide to go back and re-enter the monastery, which is wonderful because I left behind something beautiful and precious. Yet, soon I am struck by the sense that this choice is not quite right, that I cannot remain there, cannot live inside that story and form of life, and so must leave again. A part of what makes that realisation so fraught, is the awareness that this is a repetition, that I am now vacillating, as though in Nietzsche's state of "plunging continually." But what exactly is it, symbolically, that I am vacillating between? The dream changes every time in terms of its particular details, including the location of the monastery and the incidental events, but the structural form is always the same: the next moment I am outside the monastery, alienated and alone, although I am nearby the monastery and am still able to step inside it if I want and am welcome. But I cannot stay, for example I cannot sleep there. I realise that I have no money, no ticket home, and no accomodation, and am in a foreign country. I start to look for accomodation or shelter--a hotel, a hole in the earth, it varies every time--but cannot find a stable place. I have no home.
I left the monastery. And so I was in Melbourne again. The sense of the mystical was being replaced with a broader wonder that was existential, and by the problem of that tragic vision. I found work in a factory, continued to read Greek tragedy as well as novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and wondered what was next. This time it was a bookstore into which I wandered, and again it was a book which provided an opening onto an answer. I took home a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the classic work of Stoic philosophy. That led me to the other stoics, especially Epictetus. These philosophers of antiquity faced the same world of those Greek tragedians. Epictetus was born a slave, and it is rumoured that his physical disability was a result of abuse by his master, who owned him as we own a material object. Stoicism offered powerful guidance for how to live with the problems of chance, tragedy, malevolence, vulnerability, and suffering. If the ancient Greek tragedians had framed the problem, the Stoics attempted an answer.
I soon discovered many other philosophers besides, including the greatest of all, Plato, with his searching for what life can mean if it is an unconditional commitment to the highest values including Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, as well as Aristotle, with his powerful analysis of the nature of wisdom, virtue, and character, and how to cultivate them, and so how to cultivate their consequences in terms of meaning, strength, happiness, and flourishing. I discovered also the power of the existential philosophers such as Albert Camus and his striking, often beautiful vision of life as captured in such works as Summer in Algiers.
Graeco-Roman-Western philosophy is a conversation and a striving spanning three millennia, which provides guidance for seeing life anew or with far greater depth, and for coping with hardship and suffering, and for cultivating goodness in ourselves and in life, and for creating greater flourishing and happiness, and for enriching our inner life, for becoming more alive. I became absorbed by the riches of this tradition and practice. I fell in love with philosophy. It became a way of productively attempting to make sense of the multiplicity of the world, especially in our age of nihilism, and it became also a world itself in which to live, for to live philosophically is to strive for that deeper orientation to life which it calls for, demands, cultivates, and constitutes. Philosophy changed me, and brought many changes to my life. After a quarter of a century I can say that my inner life would be unrcognisable without this gift. I decided to study philosophy formally, so I made my way into The University of Melbourne. I would eventually teach philosophy both there and elsewhere.
The word "philosophy" is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words which together translate as the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom. What is wisdom? I defined it on the previous page as a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues which altogether, and in turn, constitute wisdom. Wisdom includes intelligence and reason, but it is more than them. Wisdom is also the product of virtues like courage, proper pride, proper humility, attention, learning, creativity, compassion, justice, striving, and so forth. Each of these virtues listed, and the many others which are not, constitute in themselves a slice of the stuff of wisdom. This is why some of the greatest works of philosopy have very little reasoning going on, rather they are works of vision. Such a work may involve, say, an analysis of an element of human experience looked at through the lens of a more sublime form of justice, which reveals things we did not see, and which may only be seen through that lens. As a virtue such justice is something we rise to, which means it is an act of attention but also an act of will. Hence the "work" of doing such philosophy.
Philosophy is for everybody, precisely because it is that work of seeing. Wisdom relies on more than reason alone. It is not only for intellectuals, and it is much more than mere cleverness. The essayist G. K. Chesterton expressed this when he wrote that "the mad man is not the one who has lost his reason, but the one who has lost everything but his reason." We can extend Chesterton's insight to all kinds of madness and badness--the narcissist may be very clever, but as a narcissist they are very unwise, for their heart has gone bad. And that points to the main concern: wisdom involves, it draws on, our whole being--the head, the heart, and the hands. We might for example recognise a truth at an intellectual level, yet for it to become wisdom it must enter into and shape our heart and hands. Of course, to put it that way implies that reason is nonetheless sovereign, and in a top-down relationship with the head and the heart. There is, rather, at the very least an equality between the head and the heart. The heart that is compassionate, or just, or courageous, has access to wisdom in a way that mere reason does not. Consider all the virtues listed above which I said are the constitutients of wisdom.
Wisdom also relies also on the hands. For it is life that teaches us. In particular, hard necessity teaches us. People who face less necessity often become less wise, unless they are willing to voluntarily pay attention to and be shaped by necessity. That is a difficult work because we tend to recoil from necessity. This is why suffering, or parenthood, does not in itself make us wise, despitte the fact that there is a narcissistic tendency for people to say it does, and despite the fact that such experiences or responsibities are indeed excellent contexts for encountering necessity. In any kind of life a person can give themselves over to fantasy and its attendent egotism, or they can strive for lucidity, for reality, and so for the fruits of that in terms of virtue and wisdom. It is courage that makes the difference. But what generates courage? Love. Philosophy is not only the love of wisdom, it is the love of wisdom.
Plato made love primary to his conception of philosophy. He did so, for example, in one of the greatest works of Western mysticism and philosophy: The Symposium. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is the love of that which we love and pursue when we love and pursue wisdom. We pursue wisdom because we love it, and we love it because we love the things which it leads to. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is the love of truth, and the love of goodness, and the love of beauty, and the love of justice, and the love of life, and the love of the world, the love of creation and adventure, and the love of other human beings, and the love of many other things besides.
We see the centrality of love even in those hardy, rationalist Stoics. Stoic philosophy centres on amor fati, which means the love of fate, which is to say the love of reality, of how things go. The Stoics cultivated amor fati in the context of such "spiritual exercises" as premeditatio malorum, which is the contemplation of evils, of all the bad stuff that can happen in life. We instinctively recoil from looking at the bad stuff that can assail us, for that naturally arouses fear and loathing, which in turn often arouses the worst in us, in the sense of our reactive defenses which are so many variations of flight (or cowardice), or freeze (a failure to live), or fight (narcisissm, aggression). Amor fati is the work of doing the opposite of such reactions. Instead, the Stoic cultivates their capacity to respond to life's evils with what is best in them--in us--as human beings. As it says on the label, the essence of that response is amor fati: love of the world. This is love that is tempered by the other virtues: it is love that is wise. Through such love we face the world and other people in a spirit of love, which is what constitutes meaning, purpose, and courage, and we do so whether in good times, or in bad, in happiness or suffering, and even in a Greek tragedy or a modern concentration camp. The Stoic trains themselves to rise to become more than the evil or tragic circumstances which befall them, and they do so through love. That is, they do so through philosophy.
Not everybody rises in that way. I have a dozen newspaper articles about my maternal great-grandparents involving shootings, stabbings, and beatings. One such article is about my great-grandmother being raped, while the next is of her on trial, for she later found that man and beat him almost to death with a club studded with nails. In another report, a different man entered her kitchen and, thanks to his anxiety and so bad aim, shot her friend--a botched attempt at murdering my great-grandmother in revenge for her beating him unconscious with a frying pan. He fled, but she chased this homocidal man down the street and wrestled the gun from him. In another ,tragi-comic report, she stabbed my great-grandfather with a toasting fork, after which he returned the favour with a bread knife. This is one of numerous startling stories reported in the papers, the tip of an iceberg representing only those actions which brought my maternal great-grandparents before the courts. My other maternal great-grandmother was no different; she dated Squizzy Taylor, and violently killed one of her six husbands (after he shot at her and missed). Fortunately this mayhem did not continue. One of the most important yet often unsung achievements in a life occurs when a person decides that the familial chaos or abuse ends with them, that they will suffer it but not pass it on. As a counsellor I have many times witnessed the failure in parents to do this, yet in my work--and repeatedly in my personal life regarding those around me--I have witnessed people make great inner sacrifices for the sake of such a gift. In both cases the children--my Nan and Pop--had been removed from that drunken chaos and placed in orhpanages. It was there that they met each other. Together they escaped that life of violence to give something different to their children. Yet their lives were in turn to be very difficult and indeed tragic. My Pop, a wonderfully artistic and musical man, had his mind destroyed by the trauma of war, and died in 1964 in a mental hospital aged 42. Above my fire place is his painting of The Wreck of the Hesperus, symbolic enough in itself, but the ropes are missing because he died before he could finish. He said that he painted it as a gift for me, although my mother was only a child at the time. Afterwards, Nan struggled to feed her children and herself and became visibly malnourished. Faced with the prospect of losing her own children to the State due to poverty, and unwilling to turn to crime or worse, she had to give up her kids to family in the country so she could take work in a factory in Melbourne. Of course, that was the beginning of a further story, which left one of my aunts profoundly damaged.
Some people say that suffering makes us stronger. Often that happens, and suffering is vital to our growth, but that claim is far from necessarily true, for there is a limit to our strength. Suffering can and often does make us worse. Aside from the problem of the limitations of our strength, such outcomes are also decided by the spirit in which we respond. This is why the Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum and amor fati, and it is why many people continue the Stoic practice today including myself. It is very common to react to the evils of life in a way that is psychologically protective, but which also makes us worse as people. Freud called these the defense mechanisms, though we often think of them as so many variations of flight, freeze, or fight. The latter (fight) is particularly damaging. It takes so many forms, from the most subtle to the most egregious. This is part and parcel of a dynamic noted by the Buddha as well as Simone Weil, whereby we attempt to cope with suffering by passing it on, as though it were a hot coal. We forget that, like love, suffering does not ultimately diminish by the giving of it. Problematically, this belief and its forgetting generally exist outside of clear awareness, a problem made worse by a failure of brave and persistent self-examination. And so we are passively-aggressive, or overtly aggressive, whether in speech or action. We are aggressive in our imagination, putting people down in our habitual perception of them. Or we take revenge against the world as a whole, against existence itself. We become people who, in all decency, we would never want to be, and we become blindly that, and we make a bad situation worse for ourselves, and we make life worse for others. Really, at that point we are failing at life, whatever justifications we might use or even legitimately have.
My Nan, around whom I grew up, suffered greatly in life. More than most people do today, for that world was indeed much more harsh and cruel. Yet, she had this acceptance of life that was so striking, which has resonated in my head and heart all my life. It amounted to a deep wisdom. She died in the 1990s and has no idea what a gift she gave me in this respect, through her simple, unmoralistic statements about life. Naturally the wisdom of these statements lay, to some important degree, in their contents, but it lay equally in the way that my Nan expressed them, in the spirit which showed through. Nan's acceptance of life was more than that resignation which is a giving up, and which avoids bitterness only because it has lost the will to fight. Such resignation is understandable, and it would have been especially so in her case. It is one reason why slave owners often perceive their slaves as lazy. It is also why psychoanalysts often see in the the symptoms of depression, not the basic problem, but rather a set of defenses against the more basic problem. Instead, Nan's acceptance was based on the quality of her love, which enabled her to choose to suffer and not pass it on. It was a love that was able to look squarely at life, an amor fati, despite all her suffering. It was goodness.
The above story of my family is echoed in a different way on my father's side. My childhood memory of my paternal great-grandfather is limited to his worn hands at which I must have stared, for various parts were missing due to a lifetime on the riverbank sawmills. In my workshop I have, framed, a long newspaper interview with him aged in his 90s, about his life and what he made of life itself. His grandson--my father--was cut from the same cloth and would drop out of school at 14 to manage the farm, to maintain the threadbare livelihood of a family which included his 12 siblings, for his father (my grandfather) was an unreliable and violent alcoholic. Even during my childhood, in the place where we lived, people could work very hard as my father did and yet struggle. There were times when we had no food in the house. (My earliest memory takes place in Dad's ute, and is of watching Dad shoot an emu for our dinner). Later, when we moved to southern Tasmania, my father could not find work and so took a job for a questionable individual, felling trees on their land and cutting it for firewood, while standing in fifteen inches of snow. The pay was $50 a day: $150 in today's money. Dad speaks of how life-threatening the tree-felling was, and of how cold the work was, but he adds that he simply had to provide.
My father has always had a tendency to moralism, which hurt me as a child and so contributed to my tendency to depression which haunted me during my 20s and 30s. Yet, while he has never said such a thing, and I do not know whether he sees it this way, I understood as a child and I recognise now that the essence of my father's life is the enactment of an early decision. In the context of life under a violent, selfish, alcoholic father, who caused him so much pain and hurt--pain for his own sake, and for the sake of his mother and siblings who were also victims--my father decided without the benefit of the philosophers I encountered, or any other spiritual help, to orient himself to the best understanding of what a good man is that he could see, and to drive persistently toward that in the way he lived. I imagine that this decision was already made as a 14 year old boy when he left school to support his family. It has its shadow side in that moralism, but its core essence and larger part was love and goodness. The first book of philosophy I encountered was, as I said, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which was his private journal of Stoic "spiritual exercises." The first chapter is taken up by the exercise of reflecting on what Aurelius received from the people around whom he grew up. "From my father I learned this, from my mother I learned that, I am grateful to have been taught this by my tutor...." Well, from my father I learned the meaning of goodness. And of truthfulness, and personal responsibility, and determination and fortitude, and that there are things which are far more important than the avoidance of suffering, and of compassion for our vulnerability, and of humility and love, and of what life can be when lived by such values. I learned about our inward capacity for meaning and happiness even despite the hardship and sometimes cruelty that is an inescapable part of life. I learned about acceptance for oneself, despite our incapacities and the wounds we carry from life, and despite our moral and emotional failings which haunt us, and despite the ties that bind us in opposing directions. I learned this because I witnessed it in my father, as well as other people in my life. And I learned it through conversation with them. Questions such as what is true, what is good, and what is meaningful were not idle follies, and working alongside my father as a child on most weekends and holidays stacking timber or bricks into his truck, I remember long conversations which taught me this vision of life.
Such conversations are philosophy. The are reflection on what matters, in order to make sense of it, and to better live it, and without one's realising, to be nourished by it simply by paying attention to it. My Nan and I, and my father and I, were doing philosophy, even if Nan only read Mills and Boons and my father did not reat at all. Philosophy is not only for intellectuals, and intellectuals are not always the best philosophers. I am not being anti-intellectualist here, a mode of being for which I have nothing but contempt, but rather acknowledging the place of the head but equally the heart and also the hands in philosophy, and in making a philosopher. Philosophy is for everybody. I have among my clients respected academics and widely published psychotherapists, but also truck drivers and tradesmen. Philosophy is the effort to see and understand, and all people can make that effort. Philosophy is also many different things besides, and how I do it in coversation is always attuned to the individual. Socrates is the archetypal philosopher. Unlike most others, he was not an aristocrat, but rather a working-class craftsman. He did philosophy by stopping people in the street and asking them to give an account of what mattered. When at the trial at which he was condemned to death he gave a speech about what mattered most in life, he did not say--as most undergraduates would assume--a life of reason, but rather that what mattered most was to be a good man. He added that this was where strength and happiness came from, and that philosophy was the art of cultivating this through reflective living.
Nonetheless, to enter a university felt like a miracle--I still cannot get over it--for it was such a gift to spend my days reading the great philosophers, and speaking with so many insightful and passionate people, as well as reading widely in history, literature, anthropology, theology, art, law, and so on. I did very well academically, and in time was teaching at two universities. I was a philosopher in my bones, this was to be my life's work. However, there was a problem. I lacked any passion for an academic career. Partly the reasons were negative: I did not care for academic philosophy, insofar as it assumed that theory came first and life second, and where modernity and technology ruled the day, and where the spirit of the critic rather than the contemplative or artist defined the space, and where the anemic and cynical attitudes of the current urbane bourgeoisie held sway, with their "enlightened" condescension and implicit contempt for the world and people I had come from. More important were the positive reasons. My commitment was to the philosophy as the creative and productive love of wisdom. I sought that wisdom for my own sake, but equally I felt that philosophy is, in its truest form, a coversation which is to be shared, and shared with as many people as possible, in the sense of those who care to engage in earnest reflection, and the turning of their mind, heart, and hands to whatever is good and worthwhile. This understanding of the nature of philosophy implied that most people were capable of it. My background had equipped me to see the truth of that, to see that in its essence philosophy is not dependent on social class or education or I.Q., so much as it relies on the willingness to face life seriously, with an open heart and wondering mind and the substance of one's own being. I wanted to speak to anybody who wanted this conversation. I did not want to lock it behind academic doors.
I started to wonder about how I could do philosophy with people in general. During that time, teaching philosophy to university students, I would advise my classes that I would be at a certain cafe at a certain hour drinking coffee, and that if they had questions to discuss then they were welcome to to stop by. These would turn into group discussions. They began with the course material: I'm having trouble understanding what this week's author means when they say [---]. However, like myself, many of these students hoped for more from philosophy than merely an education in theory, and that shaped the direction of such conversations. Why philosophise about art, for example, unless you care about art, and perhaps love it? Then philosophy becomes personal, even as it is simultaneously the effort of stepping outside your self. It becomes an increase in the thing you love, for example in the depth of your perception and appreciation of art. These students rightly wanted to explore their vital questions about life and existence, questions which directly impacted on their experience of the world, and their way of being, and the potential direction of their young lives. Is there a meaning to life? Does God exist? What is genuinely good? Should I strive for such goodness--or am I being played for a fool in this kind of world? Many academic philosophers view such questions as naive, in favour of their theoretical concerns with language and logic, or their Marxist critique of structures.
Even those philosophers who worked in a much better and deeper way, and from whom I drew so much, nonetheless maintained an academic distance. As an undergraduate I used to walk with one of my lecturers back to his office, and press him with my questions about philosophical method. This man, who is one of the best philosophers I have personally encountered, and a deeply kind human being of rare learning, intelligence, and substance, was highly generous with his time. However I once posed a question about a personal struggle, which was valid in the context for it was deeply philosophical in nature. He kindly but frankly shut me down. "I cannot help you with that kind of thing." I imagine that, had this happened a decade later, he might have added: "There is a free counselling service in the university, you can speak to a psychologist about this." Sometimes in life we have a small but highly significant experience which sets something in motion, or perhaps which heightens a current within us so that it becomes more visible and pressing. This was one of those moments. I was not hurt or angry, rather I was struck by the difference between even a wonderful academic like him, and what I wanted to do as a philosopher. He was simply being faithful to his vocation and profession as he saw it, but I had studied philosophy in order to speak at this personal level about our concerns. Many of these concerns were not mainly psychological, and psychologists were not good at discussing them, even if they assumed elsewise. As a philosopher I wanted to help people enrich their understanding of themselves and of the world, and of suffering, meaning, and happiness, and I wanted to help people cultivate all that is best in their head and heart and hands, and to embody the things which make life worthwhile, especially with respect to the person's individual talents and path and contribution to life, and I wanted to engage in the kinds of conversation which clarify meaning and value and which increase their presence. I wanted to help individuals in this way, and I saw that there was something vital about philosophy which could only be done in this way. I wanted to dedicate my time and energy, my life and my work, to this. The question was how to do this, in a world where one needs to pay the bills.
Fortunately, those were the years which saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering high schools and prisons to teach, people were gathering at "philosophy cafes" to discuss love and death, and during the following decade Stoicism would explode in general popularity, while a video website called Youtube would enable new voices to step forth (for ill and for good). In this context I became aware of another relatively new movement: philosophical counselling.
I explored the few books available on philosophical counselling at the university library at that time (this was before the internet became the resource it now is). I noticed two distinct problems which I wanted to avoid. Among some of the authors I found a tendency to devalue mainstream therapy by means of straw man arguments, as if this gave validity to the idea of philosophical counselling (i.e. psychological therapy is bad, which means that philosophical counselling is good). Then when it came to the description of the actual practice of philosophical counselling, it appeared to be merely a dumbed-down form of academic philosophy (that hypothetical mindset, focused on trading in theories), and not only that, but the theories and ideas were offered like supermarket items: "You are depressed? Here is what Nietzsche said about that, and what Kierkegaard said. Choose whichever of these worldviews appeals more to you, and adopt it as your view of life, so that it may serve as a cure to your depression." This ceases to be philosophy, and is instead the reduction of thought to its instrumental value. That is, what matters is not truth, but how you feel when you hold this idea. Philosophy is the search for truth, and without that it ceases to be philosophy. We do philosophy--we love and pursue wisdom--because we thirst for and love truth. This, more than any instrumental (e.g. consequentialist) justification, or any metaphysical claim about us, is the value which truth has: our love and thirst for it, which is seen for example in its necessity to the kind of life we consider worthwhile and meaningful. This love and thirst takes many forms in our lives, which show themselves in the many struggles which people take to counsellors or friends. Does my partner love me for myself? Are they faithful?--I want to know, even if the truth makes life very hard. Am I basically a decent person, or am I a blind and deluded narcisisst? We have been taught to blind ourselves and see all these as psychological questions, when in fact most of our struggles regard questions of meaning and value. Philosophical counselling must be a lucid pursuit of truth. Only in that way can it be also the lucid search for wisdom, goodness, beauty, happiness and all the things which we care about for themselves and which make life worthwhile.
Here was a curious pairing in the literature on philosophical counselling: psychological therapy is apparently rubbish and we need instead a philosophical therapy, however philosophical counselling turns out to be merely one more form of psychological therapy. It is merely a novel form of cognitive therapy or CBT. Even when the writers avoided such psychological reductivism, they favoured the modern and academic reduction of philosophy to reason and logic, which as therapy is a pretty thin soup. You are taught to reason your way out of problems. Reason matters, it matters greatly, but we are much more than reason, as I have pointed out above. Socrates made this clear, as did Plato and Aristotle. I was left with a sense that I would need to develop my own conception of philosophical counselling which was expressive of the far richer, and more lived, sense of what philosophy is. Philosophy is thinking which comes out of living, and which feeds back into it. Such philosophy had deepened and transformed my life. It had enabled me to find and create a far greater happiness than I could have found merely through the resources of modernity--science, reason, technology-- or through the superficial values of mainstream culture.
The work of developing my own conception of philosophical counselling would require further exploration of what philosophy is, with respect to what a therapeutic form of an irreducible form of philosophy might be. It would also require a deeper exploration of "the psychological," and that invited an an exploration of mainstream therapy itself. Fortunately, I happened at that time to suffer a bout of depression. It was fortunate timing because it led me to enter therapy with a good therapist, where I was able to learn about mainstream therapy from the perspective of experiencing it. There were problems here, too, however. I first noticed something was awry because my therapist, who was existential in orientation and so concerned with value and meaning, was insistent on correcting me whenever I spoke of "finding meaning." You do not find meaning, you create it, you invent it. There seemed to be an unspoken belief that my therapist's denial of the reality of meaning and value would somehow liberate me from my depressive loss of meaning and value. What was going on here?
The great virtue of mainstream therapy lies in its psychological focus. The cause of the great vice of mainstream therapy is precisely this same focus. The reduction of the therapist's and client's focus to a psychological lens has a certain pragmatic value, but if one fails to pump the brakes then one can slide into seeing nothing else, to seeing everything as psychological, and so this vision becomes a totalitarian ideology. This is often called "psychological reductivism" or "psychologism." It is as though you can only see the rabbit, and so you insist that rabbit is all there is, that everything is reducible to rabbit, and that anybody who sees a duck is a fool. Consciousness, which careful and hard reflection reveals to be impenetrable, irreducible, mysterious, as well as a fundamentally ethical reality, a source or at least dispersive prism of meaning and value, becomes nothing more than a mechanism, an epiphenomenon of a mechanistic theory of the brain. We can see through it, boil it down, there is nothing to it that goes beyond that which we completely understand. Again, if you think otherwise, it is because you are too much of a coward to be scientific. The absurd fact that any attempt to stand outside of and objectify and reduce consciousness is itself an action of, from, and within consciousness is ignored, for that contradicts the ideology and so we do not have to think about it. Here is that Western capacity Nietzsche spoke of, to focus our minds in so singular way that we become lost in a new way of seeig. There is something deeper and darker that emerges in this specific context, however, where the world is reduced to mechanisms, for many intellectuals in the twentieth century became gleeful about reducing to meaningless mechanisms everything that made life meaningful and worthwhile. We are "nothing but" mechanical objects and have no value. It is interesting to consider the link between this, and the fact that the twentieth century was the most bloody in history, and less out of idealistic passion than out of an ideologically-possessed drive to reduce people to objects to be sorted and manipulated, or eliminated, through the prolifertion of systems of gulags, concentration camps, and "re-education" prisons around the world.
This problem of psychological reductivism, of the reduction of life to a meaningless machine, has been growing since the 16th century in Europe. It reached its energetic zenith in the twentieth century, which included psychiatry's debunking medicalisation of all life, and of the mechanical reductions of Skinner's psychological behaviourism, and to some degree of Freud's psychoanalysis. All this is an expression of modernity. Modernity is the doctrine that all of life is reducible to the mathematical and mechanical. We have discovered the literal truth about reality, and it just happens to be exactly, and no more than, our favoured current conceptual constructs: Cartesian mathematics, Newtonian physics, the world as mechanical and manipulable. There is no meaning or value. To disagree with these claims is to be ridiculous. Indeed, it is to be an enemy of truth and reason (which, note, is the catchcry of totalitarian ideologies everywhere). This is what the atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch called "the Luciferian intellect": we tend to worship our intellects, and so also their creations, as if they were divine, as if they are the whole, the total reality (hence, "totalitarianism"). Modernity assumes that it is the master and judge of reality. Some philosophers and anthropologists point out that "we were never modern," that most people's inner and outer lives express a different picture than modernity. This is true, thankfully, if we consider what a person would be like who fully embodies the ideology of modernity: who sees and treats others as meaningless objects to be psychologically, mechanically manipulated. The matter is complicated, however. Many people live inside the story that is modernity, just as I lived inside the story that is Christianity for a time. It is reality, for it is all they know, or it is a myth they have fallen in love with, and even become fanatical about. When I worked as a counsellor in organisations I saw a significant minority of people who had swallowed this worldview, for example who were frustrated with me because, having come home to find their child hanging, they wanted me to give them a psychological technique--a technology--which would stop the mechanism in them that was their grief, so they would no longer have to feel grief. These people were desperately distraught, which makes partial sense of their sometimes aggressive insistence that their grief had a mechanical, technological solution, but it was also the expression of their picture of themselves as machines. They lived, in some significant sense and to some significant degree, inside the picture that is reductive modernity.
Psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, are many things, but to some degree they are merely expressions of modernity, as applied to the mind and suffering. In this regard, therapy is too often merely the ritual enactment of modernity. In that sense, it can be a force for enculturation, educated people to see themselves in a new way: as mechanisms. Modernity is...nihilism. Therapy, which aims to treat the madness and suffering which arises from such nihilism, is itself at risk of being the reinforcement of that nihilism. The reductivism can take an overt form, for example in a behaiourist's reduction of us to no more than a biological machine, a body, or it may be dressed up in hippy linen, as when a humanistic therapist insists we stop thinking--that is bad--and just feel. Even the existential therapist I saw, who practiced healing through the generation of meaning, assumed the presuppositions of modernity. He appeared to see his task as that of helping me to construct my own, fabricated meanings, which would hopefully buttress me and my psyche. That might work, kind of, depending on how easy your life is, for example depending on how much of life's negative forces are placed on you and so on your fabrications. Or depending on how good you are at convincing (hypnotising) yourself. My therapist's assumptions and actions represented a broader problem in therapy. The cure carried the disease.
My point is not to bash therapists, which like anti-intellectualism seems to be a moronic hobby in our society. Many therapist's recognise the issues I am talking about, and practice in a better way, despite how they were trained. The training itself is complicated: is Carl Rogers reductive, or does he present a profound human vision? I would say both. Many therapists do not see these issues--they are not good philosophers, though they are very good in other respects--but out of the riches of their own instincts and humanity they do therapy in a way which is much better. But I have also encountered many technocrats. I have worked alongside perhaps a hundred psychologists, social worker therapists, and counsellors, during my years counselling in organisations, and the technocratic view is held with certainty among a certain too large percentage. The problem I am pointing to in this and recent paragraphs was not simply an intellectual objection and criticism, but one rooted in life experience and what that calls for. For my depression was not a disorder. My depression was a response to reality. It was a response to existing in a world whose nature and meaning were shaped by the experience of life under an abusive step-father, in that fibro house in that tiny, dusty town, with all that such an experience meant in terms of the world as cruel and abandoning. More than that, the depression was one of those "crunch time" experiences which drew together a lot of negative experiences of being alive. Such crunch-time-experiences are often painful, and so they can be damaging, depending on our strenth and attitude, but they are also often the context of our greatest growth. The "crunch" is the distillation of things within us and our lives which need to be worked through, sorted out, grieved, and made productive. As an experience of existential despair in a very concrete and painful sense, my depression was a philosophical problem at its very root: a problem of what is true, and where goodness is to be found. The fact that my depression naturally had a psychological corollary--that it also manifested as a range of psychological and behavioural symptoms--was of a piece with the fact that it had biological corrollaries, and social and economic dimensions, but none of that justified the reduction of the depression to my one of those lenses, including the lens of psychology.
I have used the image of seeing only the rabbit to point to the problem of modernity, and more specifically the problem of psychological reductivism. If this is the rabbit perspective, then what might the duck-perspective look like? After all, we are looking at the same thing, but seeing it very differently. We are seeing aspects to which we were blind. Here is one suggestion; here is how I see human nature. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that "All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter." She added that "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him." I invite you to suspend your commitment to the mechanistic picture of modernity for a moment, and to imagine that in fact we as a people have not penetrated reality, that we may know many things, but that fundamentally we do not really know what reality is, or what or who we are. Neither do we really understand consciousness. Imagine, therefore, that we are inexplicable beings and that a description of experience is often the best we can achieve. Consider that Weil is offering such a description, of the kind that cuts to the essence: you thirst for goodness (in whatever of its myriad forms--love, meaning, peace, adventure, freedom from all that makes life terrible, and the presence of all that makes like worthwhile and good), and that there is this expectation in you that evil and not good will be done to you, and so you are constantly shocked and so afraid or depressed or angered or self-numbing when you experience that side of life. When I say "goodness" or "the good" I am using the word as the category for all that is desirable and in some way good for us, from healthy pleasure to the highest forms of love. To thirst for the good is to desire any relevant thing which, at least in the moment, embody that good. A roof over your head is one such example. A life of meaning is another. It makes sense in this picture to say something like: consciousness in its very essence is ethically oriented. This does not mean that we always do good, though it may suggest that those who do evil believe in some sense that they are right, that it is good to do as they do. On this picture, a person's depression might be the obstruction of that which they thirst for, that which they need, which is a subset of "the good," a form of the good. The task of therapy needs is the pursuit of the relevant missing goods, whether we consider them in more practical terms--I want to find a partner, or become able to work again--or more abstract, for example the wisdom to live meaningfully, or to be able in time to live productively with the death of my child. These are not psychological problems at their heart, they are problems of the pursuit of the good, of working with reality and the fullness of our own being.
Philosophy and (psychological) therapy are different. Philosophy as the love of wisdom, is different to therapy as psychological analysis and improvement. Philosophy is the cultivation of who you are (or how you are) as a conscious being, and of how you see the world, and so how you live, while therapy is the cultivation of a part of you: the psychological part or structure of your being, just as personal training is the cultivation of the bodily part of your being. To oversimplify in a way which is nonetheless importantly true, philosophy works with who you are, while psychological therapy works on something you have. To do philosophy is to step into a certain way of being, while to do psychological therapy is to work on an element within your being. (It is important to note here that when I speak of "psychology," I am using the word in its general sense, and not in the sense of a particular (medicalised) profession called Psychology. Furthermore, I acknowledge that if I were reading what I have written from the perspective of another philosopher--one who wanted merely to criticise--I could tear holes in what I have said, for I have left much un-argued because this is not a thesis, plus many of my distinctions regard common real-world tendencies rather than necessary or universal patterns or distinctions.) In contrast to those books on philosophical counselling, I could see that there was no real incompatibility or competition between philosophy and therapy, at least when it came to philosophy as I define and practice it, and therapy as a non-ideological, non-reductive practice. It struck me that my philosophical counselling might combine both philosophy and therapy, to offer the best of both in one practice.
The philosophical aspect of my philosophical counselling would be philosophy as I have described it: the Stoic work of resilience, the Aristotelian work of cultivating wisdom, virtue, and character and the more happy and flourishing life which follows from that, and the Platonic (i.e. Plato) work of exploring and cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty in its myriad forms, some of which are vital to each of us. Of course there is more to philosophy than these people. For example, a couple of years after my loss of Christian belief I had engaged in two years of rather intensive Buddhist practice and study, which included meditating for two hours every morning, and which also involved so much study of the subject that I eventually wrote an Honours thesis arguing for an internal coherence between Platonism and Buddhism, in the mode of the perennial philosophy movement, and all of this had taught me much. I had found my own way to Greek tragedy, and then Stoicism, and then Plato and Aristotle, but my university studies introduced me to many other philosophers who would become essential to my work as a philosophical counsellor. These included Ludwig Wittgenstein and the philosophers in his train, and the existential-phenomenologists following on from Martin Heidegger, and especially the modern "platonists" such as Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner.
Wittgenstein releases us from bewitchment by language and theory, for example the way that modernity bewitches us. This matters, because modernity as reductive is nihilistic, which means that our whole culture is becoming ever more nihilistic: technically clever and safe, inwardly dead. Here in late modernity, that nihilism is becoming felt as a painful weight within people's hearts and minds, in ways that are ever more explicit. Our intellects, trained from birth to be bewitched by this reductive, nihilistic, totalitarian ideology, lack the tools to find our way out. Wittgenstein "shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle." We need to move beyond this ideology (which includes moving beyond "post" modernity, which is merely late-stage modernity when it throws the acid even on itself), but this involve untangling our mental knots. These knots keep us from seeing what is actually there, and so from being with it, and being nourished by it. Philosophy in the light of Wittgenstein is thinking which clears away our bewitchment and places us again in the midst of life, including all that is good to which we had become blind.
Phenomenology is a discipline for exploring and understanding our consciousness. In therapy it does a similar work to psychoanalysis: providing us with insight into our minds, and so providing ways of working with that, or at least providing the information needed so that we can use other therapeutic tools to work with that. However, while psychoanalysis looks through the lens of its theory, which is sometimes very helpful and sometimes quite distorting, phenomenology is the work of more purely seeing what is actually there: the phenomena as it manifests itself. Phenomenology eschews theory and so the hypothetical mindset I referred to, and is instead a discipline of radical description. Of note, when we pay open-minded attention to what is actually there, we discover that consciousness is ethical as I suggested: perception is structured primarly by meaning(s) and value(s), through which we see and move and have our being. Phenomenology maps our conscious life, and it reveals meaning and value. It is insight, and it is contact with that which makes life meaningful.
The work of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner, is one attention, in the form of making explicit the implicit forms of meaning and value which run through our lives. I quoted Weil above; she was in many ways an unbalanced person, and this affects her philosophy, however she is also possibly the more insightful thinker I have come across, cutting so often to the essence of our lives. I said also that here, in late modernity, we feel the weight of modernity's nihilism inside us. Such emptiness leads to pathologies in many directions, whether in the form(s) of despair, or fear, or addiction, or anger, or shut-down, or narcissism, or other forms. Insofar as our problems are rooted in nihilism, or in other essential problems of value and meaning, in these philosophers we find an antidote, not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of thinking which can reveal things, if we too engage in it.
Such are the various philosophers and approaches which would become vital to my philosophical counselling, and there are more besides. With respect to the element of counselling or psychotherapy which I would combine with philosophy to make philosophical counselling, I had no interest in the clinical form of mental health therapy which dominates today, which is based on the medicalised concepts of psychiatry and of behavioural psychology, which is a somewhat direct expression of modernity, and so which too often becomes an expression and mere exercise of the rituals of scientism, rationalism, and technocracy. Rather, I decided to study Counselling. Counselling is different to psychology or psychiatry or any other clinical way of working with "mental health." In the main, counselling is humanistic rather than clinical. Life is not a disease to cure, a disorder to correct, but rather a mystery to live. The focus is not on a psychiatric schema of pathologies, but rather on exploration and working with the problems of life as challenges of living, as features of the human condition, to be faced with all that is best in our head, heart, and hands. Such counselling involves only those core practices which are therapeutic in their essence, without appeal to an ideology. There are no assessments or diagnoses or appeals "the research," which is to say to whatever is currently fashionable in "expert" circles and so treated as authoritative. Rather, when a client comes to me, I invite them to tell me their story, usually focused on their current concerns, and I listen to this, but I am also paying attention to what it is like to be them, subjectively, and how they are in the world--their way of being--including those dimensions of their being to which they are blind, and those elements of their subjectivity to which they may have blinded themselves. I am paying attention the forms of meaning and value in this person's life, and the strengths and problems involved, and the possibilities these point to. I am educated in many classical elements of psychotherapy and so I am reading the client's psyche, but unlike the therapist who is paying attention to "what makes them tick," my greater concern is what makes them alive. What are the motive forces within them, the flames which can be fanned, which we will fan in terms of the good they seek, and the unseen good which they might, or perhaps ought to, seek. That seeking may involve an array of therapeutic techniques, though fundamentally my counselling is transformation through seeing, through paying attention. As the existential therapist Viktor Frankl wrote, "The person who can find a why, can find a how." Frankl drew this conclusion from his years as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps.
While clinical psychology is a three-way relationship: (1) you, (2) the psychologist, and (3) third parties such as the mental health system, peak bodies and their commercial or tribal interests, the courts, employers, insurance bodies, other "experts," and the like, some of whom are likely to have a stake in your therapy in ways that define the therapy, often in radical ways. By contrast, counselling as I am trained and practice it is purely between you and I. You attend insofar as you find it valuable, and stop attending when it is not: counselling stands or falls on the actual helpfulness of the therapy. My only third party commitment is to professional and ethical values, and legal constraints.
My point here is to show what counselling is. It is not to malign clinical therapy. Just as science is good and scientism bad, scientism being what happens when science ceases to be a tool and becomes a totalitarian ideology. So clinical therapy is good, but problematic and even bad when it becomes a totalitarian ideology: the only view, or a view which in some respect arbitrarily over-rides other important views. Sometimes I am all that a client needs for their therapeutic needs, at that point in time. At other times I suggest they also see a clinical therapist, for there can be great benefit in that scientific, technological, behavioural way of working on problems, which is based on careful empirical research. Sometimes I am wrong for a client, whose being has become so chaotic and even dangerous that they need reductively psychological, technical therapy for the time being. Life is more a both/and situation than an either/or one, and what is good and how that is balanced may change often depending on other factors. If I discuss clinical therapy quite a bit, it is because of the increasingly totalitarian force it has in therapy, and it is because I have to work hard at times not to be confused with a clinical therapist, a confusion which in more extreme cases can be very problematic. Therapists encounter the extremes, and so have to guard against omissions.
The decision to study counselling became step one of a plan which would unfold across almost two decades. Step two would involve working professionally in mainstream counselling roles, becoming competent in the ways of the mainstream counsellor. Step three, the final step, would bring it all together, stepping purely into the role of a philosophical counsellor, probably in private practice. My philosophical counselling would be the work of philosophy in its many dimensions as I have described it above, while bringing mainstream therapeutic knowledge and skill into the same work. Clients would receive both, for the sake of finding strength in life, and improving the quality and success of their lives, while growing as human beings.
I studied counselling, eventually to masters level. Across fifteen years I worked in counselling organisations which included: a suicide prevention service focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges); a service focused on rural and isolated men and their relationships; an Australian Defense Force and a combat veteran's counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP) providing mainstream counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to mangers. During these years I was also a voracious learner, taking deep dives into many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, both by doing further (informal) study and applying that in my work, and by entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. This included various humanistic forms of therapy--I always come back to the deceptively simple but profound work of Carl Rogers. It included also the informal study of psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, and two periods spent in therapy with two different kinds of analytic therapist. The psychoanalytic mindset can be conceited and even cultish, among other problems, indeed my experience with the second analytic therapist became an experience of an abusive therapist, which despite its personal harm to me it was professionally helpful, for such therapists are real, and I see some clients who have experienced that. Yet the fundamental insights into our unconscious--or at least unseen--defenses and how they shape our inner and outer lives are incredibly helpful. Many confusing social interactions became much, much clearer, and I was able to understand much in myself, and later on much in my clients. Indeed, while I am not an analytic therapist but rather am "humanistically" oriented, I use numerous analytic perspective and tools in my work, reading the "unconscious" aspects of my clients alongside paying attention to many other dimensions. I explored many other therapeutic approaches besides, as well as other fields of helping such as personal coaching, and positive psychology which is social science research into how things go well in life. While my counsellor training, and so skills and orientation, are not clinical, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with many psychologists and clinical social workers and gained much insight into their concepts and ways of working, which has enriched my understanding even as I eschew the clinical/medical model.
In 2012 I began a private practice as a space to focus on existential therapy, which is a philosophically-oriented form of psychotherapy (hence the URL of this website). This enabled me to enter deeply into the work of people like Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. I did that part-time, while also working in the above organisations, and while continuing to teach university philosophy for some years (eventually I had to let that go for the sake of time). I also wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to multiple offers of academic teaching in counselling, and more importantly created a flow of clients for that existential approach. Existential therapy did not become my final professional focus, for I find it narrow in certain ways, for example it is too much an expression of the questionable ideological assumptions of modernity which are, in the end, nihilistic. A therapy focused on meaning and value, but which assumes modernity and so its nihilism, is a cure which risks deepening the disease even as it helps. Here, in late modernity (often called "post" modernity, which is simply that stage where modernity throws the acid even on itself) many people feel that nihilism of modernity as a weight within them. As a philosopher I present a way out of the arbitrary, blind nihilism of modernity as a lived ideology, and so my work goes well beyond the existentialism of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, existential therapy greatly enriched how I work today, especially through its emphasis on phenomenology which is a vital discipline for recognising the implicit and making it explicit.
These days I am on the other side of this long project, and now work purely in private practice as a philosophical counsellor. This experiment of almost twenty years, of exlporing and combining both therapy and philosophy, has taught me that philosophy is more powerful than therapy when it comes to many of our personal problems, especially when philosophy is practiced through the framework of counselling. For it engages our head and heart, which is the real engine of skill, strength, change and goodness in our lives. It is deeper because it is a change in how we are toward the world and in the world, whereas psychological therapy works on a part of our being. At the same time, psychological therapy is incredibly helpful for everybody (similar to how improvements in strength and fitness and health can be somewhat life-changing). Therapy is also a part of Socrates' liberating challenge to know thyself. With some clients my work is almost purely philosophical, while with others there is as much psychological work as there is philosophical work.
That's enough about me. After twenty years in the inner-city, I moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest on the western edge of central Victoria, to be back in that landscape that I love. During Covid I left behind my Carlton counselling office, and today now see people purely by phone and video. Outside of work I perform regularly as a musician (jazz drummer) and restore and tour on old motorcycles.
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours,
ran to the market place, and cried incessantly:
"I seek God! I seek God!"
As many of those who did not believe in God
were standing around just then,
he provoked much laughter.
Has he got lost? asked one.
Did he lose his way like a child? asked another.
Or is he hiding?
Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?
Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you.
We have killed him—-you and I.
All of us are his murderers.
But how did we do this?
How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?
Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down?
Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
The German poet Rilke replied:
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in our interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces [...].
In the last quarter of a century I have been haunted by a recurring dream. I decide to go back and re-enter the monastery, which is wonderful because I left behind something beautiful and precious. Yet, soon I am struck by the sense that this choice is not quite right, that I cannot remain there, cannot live inside that story and form of life, and so must leave again. A part of what makes that realisation so fraught, is the awareness that this is a repetition, that I am now vacillating, as though in Nietzsche's state of "plunging continually." But what exactly is it, symbolically, that I am vacillating between? The dream changes every time in terms of its particular details, including the location of the monastery and the incidental events, but the structural form is always the same: the next moment I am outside the monastery, alienated and alone, although I am nearby the monastery and am still able to step inside it if I want and am welcome. But I cannot stay, for example I cannot sleep there. I realise that I have no money, no ticket home, and no accomodation, and am in a foreign country. I start to look for accomodation or shelter--a hotel, a hole in the earth, it varies every time--but cannot find a stable place. I have no home.
I left the monastery. And so I was in Melbourne again. The sense of the mystical was being replaced with a broader wonder that was existential, and by the problem of that tragic vision. I found work in a factory, continued to read Greek tragedy as well as novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and wondered what was next. This time it was a bookstore into which I wandered, and again it was a book which provided an opening onto an answer. I took home a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the classic work of Stoic philosophy. That led me to the other stoics, especially Epictetus. These philosophers of antiquity faced the same world of those Greek tragedians. Epictetus was born a slave, and it is rumoured that his physical disability was a result of abuse by his master, who owned him as we own a material object. Stoicism offered powerful guidance for how to live with the problems of chance, tragedy, malevolence, vulnerability, and suffering. If the ancient Greek tragedians had framed the problem, the Stoics attempted an answer.
I soon discovered many other philosophers besides, including the greatest of all, Plato, with his searching for what life can mean if it is an unconditional commitment to the highest values including Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, as well as Aristotle, with his powerful analysis of the nature of wisdom, virtue, and character, and how to cultivate them, and so how to cultivate their consequences in terms of meaning, strength, happiness, and flourishing. I discovered also the power of the existential philosophers such as Albert Camus and his striking, often beautiful vision of life as captured in such works as Summer in Algiers.
Graeco-Roman-Western philosophy is a conversation and a striving spanning three millennia, which provides guidance for seeing life anew or with far greater depth, and for coping with hardship and suffering, and for cultivating goodness in ourselves and in life, and for creating greater flourishing and happiness, and for enriching our inner life, for becoming more alive. I became absorbed by the riches of this tradition and practice. I fell in love with philosophy. It became a way of productively attempting to make sense of the multiplicity of the world, especially in our age of nihilism, and it became also a world itself in which to live, for to live philosophically is to strive for that deeper orientation to life which it calls for, demands, cultivates, and constitutes. Philosophy changed me, and brought many changes to my life. After a quarter of a century I can say that my inner life would be unrcognisable without this gift. I decided to study philosophy formally, so I made my way into The University of Melbourne. I would eventually teach philosophy both there and elsewhere.
The word "philosophy" is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words which together translate as the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom. What is wisdom? I defined it on the previous page as a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues which altogether, and in turn, constitute wisdom. Wisdom includes intelligence and reason, but it is more than them. Wisdom is also the product of virtues like courage, proper pride, proper humility, attention, learning, creativity, compassion, justice, striving, and so forth. Each of these virtues listed, and the many others which are not, constitute in themselves a slice of the stuff of wisdom. This is why some of the greatest works of philosopy have very little reasoning going on, rather they are works of vision. Such a work may involve, say, an analysis of an element of human experience looked at through the lens of a more sublime form of justice, which reveals things we did not see, and which may only be seen through that lens. As a virtue such justice is something we rise to, which means it is an act of attention but also an act of will. Hence the "work" of doing such philosophy.
Philosophy is for everybody, precisely because it is that work of seeing. Wisdom relies on more than reason alone. It is not only for intellectuals, and it is much more than mere cleverness. The essayist G. K. Chesterton expressed this when he wrote that "the mad man is not the one who has lost his reason, but the one who has lost everything but his reason." We can extend Chesterton's insight to all kinds of madness and badness--the narcissist may be very clever, but as a narcissist they are very unwise, for their heart has gone bad. And that points to the main concern: wisdom involves, it draws on, our whole being--the head, the heart, and the hands. We might for example recognise a truth at an intellectual level, yet for it to become wisdom it must enter into and shape our heart and hands. Of course, to put it that way implies that reason is nonetheless sovereign, and in a top-down relationship with the head and the heart. There is, rather, at the very least an equality between the head and the heart. The heart that is compassionate, or just, or courageous, has access to wisdom in a way that mere reason does not. Consider all the virtues listed above which I said are the constitutients of wisdom.
Wisdom also relies also on the hands. For it is life that teaches us. In particular, hard necessity teaches us. People who face less necessity often become less wise, unless they are willing to voluntarily pay attention to and be shaped by necessity. That is a difficult work because we tend to recoil from necessity. This is why suffering, or parenthood, does not in itself make us wise, despitte the fact that there is a narcissistic tendency for people to say it does, and despite the fact that such experiences or responsibities are indeed excellent contexts for encountering necessity. In any kind of life a person can give themselves over to fantasy and its attendent egotism, or they can strive for lucidity, for reality, and so for the fruits of that in terms of virtue and wisdom. It is courage that makes the difference. But what generates courage? Love. Philosophy is not only the love of wisdom, it is the love of wisdom.
Plato made love primary to his conception of philosophy. He did so, for example, in one of the greatest works of Western mysticism and philosophy: The Symposium. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is the love of that which we love and pursue when we love and pursue wisdom. We pursue wisdom because we love it, and we love it because we love the things which it leads to. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is the love of truth, and the love of goodness, and the love of beauty, and the love of justice, and the love of life, and the love of the world, the love of creation and adventure, and the love of other human beings, and the love of many other things besides.
We see the centrality of love even in those hardy, rationalist Stoics. Stoic philosophy centres on amor fati, which means the love of fate, which is to say the love of reality, of how things go. The Stoics cultivated amor fati in the context of such "spiritual exercises" as premeditatio malorum, which is the contemplation of evils, of all the bad stuff that can happen in life. We instinctively recoil from looking at the bad stuff that can assail us, for that naturally arouses fear and loathing, which in turn often arouses the worst in us, in the sense of our reactive defenses which are so many variations of flight (or cowardice), or freeze (a failure to live), or fight (narcisissm, aggression). Amor fati is the work of doing the opposite of such reactions. Instead, the Stoic cultivates their capacity to respond to life's evils with what is best in them--in us--as human beings. As it says on the label, the essence of that response is amor fati: love of the world. This is love that is tempered by the other virtues: it is love that is wise. Through such love we face the world and other people in a spirit of love, which is what constitutes meaning, purpose, and courage, and we do so whether in good times, or in bad, in happiness or suffering, and even in a Greek tragedy or a modern concentration camp. The Stoic trains themselves to rise to become more than the evil or tragic circumstances which befall them, and they do so through love. That is, they do so through philosophy.
Not everybody rises in that way. I have a dozen newspaper articles about my maternal great-grandparents involving shootings, stabbings, and beatings. One such article is about my great-grandmother being raped, while the next is of her on trial, for she later found that man and beat him almost to death with a club studded with nails. In another report, a different man entered her kitchen and, thanks to his anxiety and so bad aim, shot her friend--a botched attempt at murdering my great-grandmother in revenge for her beating him unconscious with a frying pan. He fled, but she chased this homocidal man down the street and wrestled the gun from him. In another ,tragi-comic report, she stabbed my great-grandfather with a toasting fork, after which he returned the favour with a bread knife. This is one of numerous startling stories reported in the papers, the tip of an iceberg representing only those actions which brought my maternal great-grandparents before the courts. My other maternal great-grandmother was no different; she dated Squizzy Taylor, and violently killed one of her six husbands (after he shot at her and missed). Fortunately this mayhem did not continue. One of the most important yet often unsung achievements in a life occurs when a person decides that the familial chaos or abuse ends with them, that they will suffer it but not pass it on. As a counsellor I have many times witnessed the failure in parents to do this, yet in my work--and repeatedly in my personal life regarding those around me--I have witnessed people make great inner sacrifices for the sake of such a gift. In both cases the children--my Nan and Pop--had been removed from that drunken chaos and placed in orhpanages. It was there that they met each other. Together they escaped that life of violence to give something different to their children. Yet their lives were in turn to be very difficult and indeed tragic. My Pop, a wonderfully artistic and musical man, had his mind destroyed by the trauma of war, and died in 1964 in a mental hospital aged 42. Above my fire place is his painting of The Wreck of the Hesperus, symbolic enough in itself, but the ropes are missing because he died before he could finish. He said that he painted it as a gift for me, although my mother was only a child at the time. Afterwards, Nan struggled to feed her children and herself and became visibly malnourished. Faced with the prospect of losing her own children to the State due to poverty, and unwilling to turn to crime or worse, she had to give up her kids to family in the country so she could take work in a factory in Melbourne. Of course, that was the beginning of a further story, which left one of my aunts profoundly damaged.
Some people say that suffering makes us stronger. Often that happens, and suffering is vital to our growth, but that claim is far from necessarily true, for there is a limit to our strength. Suffering can and often does make us worse. Aside from the problem of the limitations of our strength, such outcomes are also decided by the spirit in which we respond. This is why the Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum and amor fati, and it is why many people continue the Stoic practice today including myself. It is very common to react to the evils of life in a way that is psychologically protective, but which also makes us worse as people. Freud called these the defense mechanisms, though we often think of them as so many variations of flight, freeze, or fight. The latter (fight) is particularly damaging. It takes so many forms, from the most subtle to the most egregious. This is part and parcel of a dynamic noted by the Buddha as well as Simone Weil, whereby we attempt to cope with suffering by passing it on, as though it were a hot coal. We forget that, like love, suffering does not ultimately diminish by the giving of it. Problematically, this belief and its forgetting generally exist outside of clear awareness, a problem made worse by a failure of brave and persistent self-examination. And so we are passively-aggressive, or overtly aggressive, whether in speech or action. We are aggressive in our imagination, putting people down in our habitual perception of them. Or we take revenge against the world as a whole, against existence itself. We become people who, in all decency, we would never want to be, and we become blindly that, and we make a bad situation worse for ourselves, and we make life worse for others. Really, at that point we are failing at life, whatever justifications we might use or even legitimately have.
My Nan, around whom I grew up, suffered greatly in life. More than most people do today, for that world was indeed much more harsh and cruel. Yet, she had this acceptance of life that was so striking, which has resonated in my head and heart all my life. It amounted to a deep wisdom. She died in the 1990s and has no idea what a gift she gave me in this respect, through her simple, unmoralistic statements about life. Naturally the wisdom of these statements lay, to some important degree, in their contents, but it lay equally in the way that my Nan expressed them, in the spirit which showed through. Nan's acceptance of life was more than that resignation which is a giving up, and which avoids bitterness only because it has lost the will to fight. Such resignation is understandable, and it would have been especially so in her case. It is one reason why slave owners often perceive their slaves as lazy. It is also why psychoanalysts often see in the the symptoms of depression, not the basic problem, but rather a set of defenses against the more basic problem. Instead, Nan's acceptance was based on the quality of her love, which enabled her to choose to suffer and not pass it on. It was a love that was able to look squarely at life, an amor fati, despite all her suffering. It was goodness.
The above story of my family is echoed in a different way on my father's side. My childhood memory of my paternal great-grandfather is limited to his worn hands at which I must have stared, for various parts were missing due to a lifetime on the riverbank sawmills. In my workshop I have, framed, a long newspaper interview with him aged in his 90s, about his life and what he made of life itself. His grandson--my father--was cut from the same cloth and would drop out of school at 14 to manage the farm, to maintain the threadbare livelihood of a family which included his 12 siblings, for his father (my grandfather) was an unreliable and violent alcoholic. Even during my childhood, in the place where we lived, people could work very hard as my father did and yet struggle. There were times when we had no food in the house. (My earliest memory takes place in Dad's ute, and is of watching Dad shoot an emu for our dinner). Later, when we moved to southern Tasmania, my father could not find work and so took a job for a questionable individual, felling trees on their land and cutting it for firewood, while standing in fifteen inches of snow. The pay was $50 a day: $150 in today's money. Dad speaks of how life-threatening the tree-felling was, and of how cold the work was, but he adds that he simply had to provide.
My father has always had a tendency to moralism, which hurt me as a child and so contributed to my tendency to depression which haunted me during my 20s and 30s. Yet, while he has never said such a thing, and I do not know whether he sees it this way, I understood as a child and I recognise now that the essence of my father's life is the enactment of an early decision. In the context of life under a violent, selfish, alcoholic father, who caused him so much pain and hurt--pain for his own sake, and for the sake of his mother and siblings who were also victims--my father decided without the benefit of the philosophers I encountered, or any other spiritual help, to orient himself to the best understanding of what a good man is that he could see, and to drive persistently toward that in the way he lived. I imagine that this decision was already made as a 14 year old boy when he left school to support his family. It has its shadow side in that moralism, but its core essence and larger part was love and goodness. The first book of philosophy I encountered was, as I said, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which was his private journal of Stoic "spiritual exercises." The first chapter is taken up by the exercise of reflecting on what Aurelius received from the people around whom he grew up. "From my father I learned this, from my mother I learned that, I am grateful to have been taught this by my tutor...." Well, from my father I learned the meaning of goodness. And of truthfulness, and personal responsibility, and determination and fortitude, and that there are things which are far more important than the avoidance of suffering, and of compassion for our vulnerability, and of humility and love, and of what life can be when lived by such values. I learned about our inward capacity for meaning and happiness even despite the hardship and sometimes cruelty that is an inescapable part of life. I learned about acceptance for oneself, despite our incapacities and the wounds we carry from life, and despite our moral and emotional failings which haunt us, and despite the ties that bind us in opposing directions. I learned this because I witnessed it in my father, as well as other people in my life. And I learned it through conversation with them. Questions such as what is true, what is good, and what is meaningful were not idle follies, and working alongside my father as a child on most weekends and holidays stacking timber or bricks into his truck, I remember long conversations which taught me this vision of life.
Such conversations are philosophy. The are reflection on what matters, in order to make sense of it, and to better live it, and without one's realising, to be nourished by it simply by paying attention to it. My Nan and I, and my father and I, were doing philosophy, even if Nan only read Mills and Boons and my father did not reat at all. Philosophy is not only for intellectuals, and intellectuals are not always the best philosophers. I am not being anti-intellectualist here, a mode of being for which I have nothing but contempt, but rather acknowledging the place of the head but equally the heart and also the hands in philosophy, and in making a philosopher. Philosophy is for everybody. I have among my clients respected academics and widely published psychotherapists, but also truck drivers and tradesmen. Philosophy is the effort to see and understand, and all people can make that effort. Philosophy is also many different things besides, and how I do it in coversation is always attuned to the individual. Socrates is the archetypal philosopher. Unlike most others, he was not an aristocrat, but rather a working-class craftsman. He did philosophy by stopping people in the street and asking them to give an account of what mattered. When at the trial at which he was condemned to death he gave a speech about what mattered most in life, he did not say--as most undergraduates would assume--a life of reason, but rather that what mattered most was to be a good man. He added that this was where strength and happiness came from, and that philosophy was the art of cultivating this through reflective living.
Nonetheless, to enter a university felt like a miracle--I still cannot get over it--for it was such a gift to spend my days reading the great philosophers, and speaking with so many insightful and passionate people, as well as reading widely in history, literature, anthropology, theology, art, law, and so on. I did very well academically, and in time was teaching at two universities. I was a philosopher in my bones, this was to be my life's work. However, there was a problem. I lacked any passion for an academic career. Partly the reasons were negative: I did not care for academic philosophy, insofar as it assumed that theory came first and life second, and where modernity and technology ruled the day, and where the spirit of the critic rather than the contemplative or artist defined the space, and where the anemic and cynical attitudes of the current urbane bourgeoisie held sway, with their "enlightened" condescension and implicit contempt for the world and people I had come from. More important were the positive reasons. My commitment was to the philosophy as the creative and productive love of wisdom. I sought that wisdom for my own sake, but equally I felt that philosophy is, in its truest form, a coversation which is to be shared, and shared with as many people as possible, in the sense of those who care to engage in earnest reflection, and the turning of their mind, heart, and hands to whatever is good and worthwhile. This understanding of the nature of philosophy implied that most people were capable of it. My background had equipped me to see the truth of that, to see that in its essence philosophy is not dependent on social class or education or I.Q., so much as it relies on the willingness to face life seriously, with an open heart and wondering mind and the substance of one's own being. I wanted to speak to anybody who wanted this conversation. I did not want to lock it behind academic doors.
I started to wonder about how I could do philosophy with people in general. During that time, teaching philosophy to university students, I would advise my classes that I would be at a certain cafe at a certain hour drinking coffee, and that if they had questions to discuss then they were welcome to to stop by. These would turn into group discussions. They began with the course material: I'm having trouble understanding what this week's author means when they say [---]. However, like myself, many of these students hoped for more from philosophy than merely an education in theory, and that shaped the direction of such conversations. Why philosophise about art, for example, unless you care about art, and perhaps love it? Then philosophy becomes personal, even as it is simultaneously the effort of stepping outside your self. It becomes an increase in the thing you love, for example in the depth of your perception and appreciation of art. These students rightly wanted to explore their vital questions about life and existence, questions which directly impacted on their experience of the world, and their way of being, and the potential direction of their young lives. Is there a meaning to life? Does God exist? What is genuinely good? Should I strive for such goodness--or am I being played for a fool in this kind of world? Many academic philosophers view such questions as naive, in favour of their theoretical concerns with language and logic, or their Marxist critique of structures.
Even those philosophers who worked in a much better and deeper way, and from whom I drew so much, nonetheless maintained an academic distance. As an undergraduate I used to walk with one of my lecturers back to his office, and press him with my questions about philosophical method. This man, who is one of the best philosophers I have personally encountered, and a deeply kind human being of rare learning, intelligence, and substance, was highly generous with his time. However I once posed a question about a personal struggle, which was valid in the context for it was deeply philosophical in nature. He kindly but frankly shut me down. "I cannot help you with that kind of thing." I imagine that, had this happened a decade later, he might have added: "There is a free counselling service in the university, you can speak to a psychologist about this." Sometimes in life we have a small but highly significant experience which sets something in motion, or perhaps which heightens a current within us so that it becomes more visible and pressing. This was one of those moments. I was not hurt or angry, rather I was struck by the difference between even a wonderful academic like him, and what I wanted to do as a philosopher. He was simply being faithful to his vocation and profession as he saw it, but I had studied philosophy in order to speak at this personal level about our concerns. Many of these concerns were not mainly psychological, and psychologists were not good at discussing them, even if they assumed elsewise. As a philosopher I wanted to help people enrich their understanding of themselves and of the world, and of suffering, meaning, and happiness, and I wanted to help people cultivate all that is best in their head and heart and hands, and to embody the things which make life worthwhile, especially with respect to the person's individual talents and path and contribution to life, and I wanted to engage in the kinds of conversation which clarify meaning and value and which increase their presence. I wanted to help individuals in this way, and I saw that there was something vital about philosophy which could only be done in this way. I wanted to dedicate my time and energy, my life and my work, to this. The question was how to do this, in a world where one needs to pay the bills.
Fortunately, those were the years which saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering high schools and prisons to teach, people were gathering at "philosophy cafes" to discuss love and death, and during the following decade Stoicism would explode in general popularity, while a video website called Youtube would enable new voices to step forth (for ill and for good). In this context I became aware of another relatively new movement: philosophical counselling.
I explored the few books available on philosophical counselling at the university library at that time (this was before the internet became the resource it now is). I noticed two distinct problems which I wanted to avoid. Among some of the authors I found a tendency to devalue mainstream therapy by means of straw man arguments, as if this gave validity to the idea of philosophical counselling (i.e. psychological therapy is bad, which means that philosophical counselling is good). Then when it came to the description of the actual practice of philosophical counselling, it appeared to be merely a dumbed-down form of academic philosophy (that hypothetical mindset, focused on trading in theories), and not only that, but the theories and ideas were offered like supermarket items: "You are depressed? Here is what Nietzsche said about that, and what Kierkegaard said. Choose whichever of these worldviews appeals more to you, and adopt it as your view of life, so that it may serve as a cure to your depression." This ceases to be philosophy, and is instead the reduction of thought to its instrumental value. That is, what matters is not truth, but how you feel when you hold this idea. Philosophy is the search for truth, and without that it ceases to be philosophy. We do philosophy--we love and pursue wisdom--because we thirst for and love truth. This, more than any instrumental (e.g. consequentialist) justification, or any metaphysical claim about us, is the value which truth has: our love and thirst for it, which is seen for example in its necessity to the kind of life we consider worthwhile and meaningful. This love and thirst takes many forms in our lives, which show themselves in the many struggles which people take to counsellors or friends. Does my partner love me for myself? Are they faithful?--I want to know, even if the truth makes life very hard. Am I basically a decent person, or am I a blind and deluded narcisisst? We have been taught to blind ourselves and see all these as psychological questions, when in fact most of our struggles regard questions of meaning and value. Philosophical counselling must be a lucid pursuit of truth. Only in that way can it be also the lucid search for wisdom, goodness, beauty, happiness and all the things which we care about for themselves and which make life worthwhile.
Here was a curious pairing in the literature on philosophical counselling: psychological therapy is apparently rubbish and we need instead a philosophical therapy, however philosophical counselling turns out to be merely one more form of psychological therapy. It is merely a novel form of cognitive therapy or CBT. Even when the writers avoided such psychological reductivism, they favoured the modern and academic reduction of philosophy to reason and logic, which as therapy is a pretty thin soup. You are taught to reason your way out of problems. Reason matters, it matters greatly, but we are much more than reason, as I have pointed out above. Socrates made this clear, as did Plato and Aristotle. I was left with a sense that I would need to develop my own conception of philosophical counselling which was expressive of the far richer, and more lived, sense of what philosophy is. Philosophy is thinking which comes out of living, and which feeds back into it. Such philosophy had deepened and transformed my life. It had enabled me to find and create a far greater happiness than I could have found merely through the resources of modernity--science, reason, technology-- or through the superficial values of mainstream culture.
The work of developing my own conception of philosophical counselling would require further exploration of what philosophy is, with respect to what a therapeutic form of an irreducible form of philosophy might be. It would also require a deeper exploration of "the psychological," and that invited an an exploration of mainstream therapy itself. Fortunately, I happened at that time to suffer a bout of depression. It was fortunate timing because it led me to enter therapy with a good therapist, where I was able to learn about mainstream therapy from the perspective of experiencing it. There were problems here, too, however. I first noticed something was awry because my therapist, who was existential in orientation and so concerned with value and meaning, was insistent on correcting me whenever I spoke of "finding meaning." You do not find meaning, you create it, you invent it. There seemed to be an unspoken belief that my therapist's denial of the reality of meaning and value would somehow liberate me from my depressive loss of meaning and value. What was going on here?
The great virtue of mainstream therapy lies in its psychological focus. The cause of the great vice of mainstream therapy is precisely this same focus. The reduction of the therapist's and client's focus to a psychological lens has a certain pragmatic value, but if one fails to pump the brakes then one can slide into seeing nothing else, to seeing everything as psychological, and so this vision becomes a totalitarian ideology. This is often called "psychological reductivism" or "psychologism." It is as though you can only see the rabbit, and so you insist that rabbit is all there is, that everything is reducible to rabbit, and that anybody who sees a duck is a fool. Consciousness, which careful and hard reflection reveals to be impenetrable, irreducible, mysterious, as well as a fundamentally ethical reality, a source or at least dispersive prism of meaning and value, becomes nothing more than a mechanism, an epiphenomenon of a mechanistic theory of the brain. We can see through it, boil it down, there is nothing to it that goes beyond that which we completely understand. Again, if you think otherwise, it is because you are too much of a coward to be scientific. The absurd fact that any attempt to stand outside of and objectify and reduce consciousness is itself an action of, from, and within consciousness is ignored, for that contradicts the ideology and so we do not have to think about it. Here is that Western capacity Nietzsche spoke of, to focus our minds in so singular way that we become lost in a new way of seeig. There is something deeper and darker that emerges in this specific context, however, where the world is reduced to mechanisms, for many intellectuals in the twentieth century became gleeful about reducing to meaningless mechanisms everything that made life meaningful and worthwhile. We are "nothing but" mechanical objects and have no value. It is interesting to consider the link between this, and the fact that the twentieth century was the most bloody in history, and less out of idealistic passion than out of an ideologically-possessed drive to reduce people to objects to be sorted and manipulated, or eliminated, through the prolifertion of systems of gulags, concentration camps, and "re-education" prisons around the world.
This problem of psychological reductivism, of the reduction of life to a meaningless machine, has been growing since the 16th century in Europe. It reached its energetic zenith in the twentieth century, which included psychiatry's debunking medicalisation of all life, and of the mechanical reductions of Skinner's psychological behaviourism, and to some degree of Freud's psychoanalysis. All this is an expression of modernity. Modernity is the doctrine that all of life is reducible to the mathematical and mechanical. We have discovered the literal truth about reality, and it just happens to be exactly, and no more than, our favoured current conceptual constructs: Cartesian mathematics, Newtonian physics, the world as mechanical and manipulable. There is no meaning or value. To disagree with these claims is to be ridiculous. Indeed, it is to be an enemy of truth and reason (which, note, is the catchcry of totalitarian ideologies everywhere). This is what the atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch called "the Luciferian intellect": we tend to worship our intellects, and so also their creations, as if they were divine, as if they are the whole, the total reality (hence, "totalitarianism"). Modernity assumes that it is the master and judge of reality. Some philosophers and anthropologists point out that "we were never modern," that most people's inner and outer lives express a different picture than modernity. This is true, thankfully, if we consider what a person would be like who fully embodies the ideology of modernity: who sees and treats others as meaningless objects to be psychologically, mechanically manipulated. The matter is complicated, however. Many people live inside the story that is modernity, just as I lived inside the story that is Christianity for a time. It is reality, for it is all they know, or it is a myth they have fallen in love with, and even become fanatical about. When I worked as a counsellor in organisations I saw a significant minority of people who had swallowed this worldview, for example who were frustrated with me because, having come home to find their child hanging, they wanted me to give them a psychological technique--a technology--which would stop the mechanism in them that was their grief, so they would no longer have to feel grief. These people were desperately distraught, which makes partial sense of their sometimes aggressive insistence that their grief had a mechanical, technological solution, but it was also the expression of their picture of themselves as machines. They lived, in some significant sense and to some significant degree, inside the picture that is reductive modernity.
Psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, are many things, but to some degree they are merely expressions of modernity, as applied to the mind and suffering. In this regard, therapy is too often merely the ritual enactment of modernity. In that sense, it can be a force for enculturation, educated people to see themselves in a new way: as mechanisms. Modernity is...nihilism. Therapy, which aims to treat the madness and suffering which arises from such nihilism, is itself at risk of being the reinforcement of that nihilism. The reductivism can take an overt form, for example in a behaiourist's reduction of us to no more than a biological machine, a body, or it may be dressed up in hippy linen, as when a humanistic therapist insists we stop thinking--that is bad--and just feel. Even the existential therapist I saw, who practiced healing through the generation of meaning, assumed the presuppositions of modernity. He appeared to see his task as that of helping me to construct my own, fabricated meanings, which would hopefully buttress me and my psyche. That might work, kind of, depending on how easy your life is, for example depending on how much of life's negative forces are placed on you and so on your fabrications. Or depending on how good you are at convincing (hypnotising) yourself. My therapist's assumptions and actions represented a broader problem in therapy. The cure carried the disease.
My point is not to bash therapists, which like anti-intellectualism seems to be a moronic hobby in our society. Many therapist's recognise the issues I am talking about, and practice in a better way, despite how they were trained. The training itself is complicated: is Carl Rogers reductive, or does he present a profound human vision? I would say both. Many therapists do not see these issues--they are not good philosophers, though they are very good in other respects--but out of the riches of their own instincts and humanity they do therapy in a way which is much better. But I have also encountered many technocrats. I have worked alongside perhaps a hundred psychologists, social worker therapists, and counsellors, during my years counselling in organisations, and the technocratic view is held with certainty among a certain too large percentage. The problem I am pointing to in this and recent paragraphs was not simply an intellectual objection and criticism, but one rooted in life experience and what that calls for. For my depression was not a disorder. My depression was a response to reality. It was a response to existing in a world whose nature and meaning were shaped by the experience of life under an abusive step-father, in that fibro house in that tiny, dusty town, with all that such an experience meant in terms of the world as cruel and abandoning. More than that, the depression was one of those "crunch time" experiences which drew together a lot of negative experiences of being alive. Such crunch-time-experiences are often painful, and so they can be damaging, depending on our strenth and attitude, but they are also often the context of our greatest growth. The "crunch" is the distillation of things within us and our lives which need to be worked through, sorted out, grieved, and made productive. As an experience of existential despair in a very concrete and painful sense, my depression was a philosophical problem at its very root: a problem of what is true, and where goodness is to be found. The fact that my depression naturally had a psychological corollary--that it also manifested as a range of psychological and behavioural symptoms--was of a piece with the fact that it had biological corrollaries, and social and economic dimensions, but none of that justified the reduction of the depression to my one of those lenses, including the lens of psychology.
I have used the image of seeing only the rabbit to point to the problem of modernity, and more specifically the problem of psychological reductivism. If this is the rabbit perspective, then what might the duck-perspective look like? After all, we are looking at the same thing, but seeing it very differently. We are seeing aspects to which we were blind. Here is one suggestion; here is how I see human nature. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that "All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter." She added that "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him." I invite you to suspend your commitment to the mechanistic picture of modernity for a moment, and to imagine that in fact we as a people have not penetrated reality, that we may know many things, but that fundamentally we do not really know what reality is, or what or who we are. Neither do we really understand consciousness. Imagine, therefore, that we are inexplicable beings and that a description of experience is often the best we can achieve. Consider that Weil is offering such a description, of the kind that cuts to the essence: you thirst for goodness (in whatever of its myriad forms--love, meaning, peace, adventure, freedom from all that makes life terrible, and the presence of all that makes like worthwhile and good), and that there is this expectation in you that evil and not good will be done to you, and so you are constantly shocked and so afraid or depressed or angered or self-numbing when you experience that side of life. When I say "goodness" or "the good" I am using the word as the category for all that is desirable and in some way good for us, from healthy pleasure to the highest forms of love. To thirst for the good is to desire any relevant thing which, at least in the moment, embody that good. A roof over your head is one such example. A life of meaning is another. It makes sense in this picture to say something like: consciousness in its very essence is ethically oriented. This does not mean that we always do good, though it may suggest that those who do evil believe in some sense that they are right, that it is good to do as they do. On this picture, a person's depression might be the obstruction of that which they thirst for, that which they need, which is a subset of "the good," a form of the good. The task of therapy needs is the pursuit of the relevant missing goods, whether we consider them in more practical terms--I want to find a partner, or become able to work again--or more abstract, for example the wisdom to live meaningfully, or to be able in time to live productively with the death of my child. These are not psychological problems at their heart, they are problems of the pursuit of the good, of working with reality and the fullness of our own being.
Philosophy and (psychological) therapy are different. Philosophy as the love of wisdom, is different to therapy as psychological analysis and improvement. Philosophy is the cultivation of who you are (or how you are) as a conscious being, and of how you see the world, and so how you live, while therapy is the cultivation of a part of you: the psychological part or structure of your being, just as personal training is the cultivation of the bodily part of your being. To oversimplify in a way which is nonetheless importantly true, philosophy works with who you are, while psychological therapy works on something you have. To do philosophy is to step into a certain way of being, while to do psychological therapy is to work on an element within your being. (It is important to note here that when I speak of "psychology," I am using the word in its general sense, and not in the sense of a particular (medicalised) profession called Psychology. Furthermore, I acknowledge that if I were reading what I have written from the perspective of another philosopher--one who wanted merely to criticise--I could tear holes in what I have said, for I have left much un-argued because this is not a thesis, plus many of my distinctions regard common real-world tendencies rather than necessary or universal patterns or distinctions.) In contrast to those books on philosophical counselling, I could see that there was no real incompatibility or competition between philosophy and therapy, at least when it came to philosophy as I define and practice it, and therapy as a non-ideological, non-reductive practice. It struck me that my philosophical counselling might combine both philosophy and therapy, to offer the best of both in one practice.
The philosophical aspect of my philosophical counselling would be philosophy as I have described it: the Stoic work of resilience, the Aristotelian work of cultivating wisdom, virtue, and character and the more happy and flourishing life which follows from that, and the Platonic (i.e. Plato) work of exploring and cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty in its myriad forms, some of which are vital to each of us. Of course there is more to philosophy than these people. For example, a couple of years after my loss of Christian belief I had engaged in two years of rather intensive Buddhist practice and study, which included meditating for two hours every morning, and which also involved so much study of the subject that I eventually wrote an Honours thesis arguing for an internal coherence between Platonism and Buddhism, in the mode of the perennial philosophy movement, and all of this had taught me much. I had found my own way to Greek tragedy, and then Stoicism, and then Plato and Aristotle, but my university studies introduced me to many other philosophers who would become essential to my work as a philosophical counsellor. These included Ludwig Wittgenstein and the philosophers in his train, and the existential-phenomenologists following on from Martin Heidegger, and especially the modern "platonists" such as Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner.
Wittgenstein releases us from bewitchment by language and theory, for example the way that modernity bewitches us. This matters, because modernity as reductive is nihilistic, which means that our whole culture is becoming ever more nihilistic: technically clever and safe, inwardly dead. Here in late modernity, that nihilism is becoming felt as a painful weight within people's hearts and minds, in ways that are ever more explicit. Our intellects, trained from birth to be bewitched by this reductive, nihilistic, totalitarian ideology, lack the tools to find our way out. Wittgenstein "shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle." We need to move beyond this ideology (which includes moving beyond "post" modernity, which is merely late-stage modernity when it throws the acid even on itself), but this involve untangling our mental knots. These knots keep us from seeing what is actually there, and so from being with it, and being nourished by it. Philosophy in the light of Wittgenstein is thinking which clears away our bewitchment and places us again in the midst of life, including all that is good to which we had become blind.
Phenomenology is a discipline for exploring and understanding our consciousness. In therapy it does a similar work to psychoanalysis: providing us with insight into our minds, and so providing ways of working with that, or at least providing the information needed so that we can use other therapeutic tools to work with that. However, while psychoanalysis looks through the lens of its theory, which is sometimes very helpful and sometimes quite distorting, phenomenology is the work of more purely seeing what is actually there: the phenomena as it manifests itself. Phenomenology eschews theory and so the hypothetical mindset I referred to, and is instead a discipline of radical description. Of note, when we pay open-minded attention to what is actually there, we discover that consciousness is ethical as I suggested: perception is structured primarly by meaning(s) and value(s), through which we see and move and have our being. Phenomenology maps our conscious life, and it reveals meaning and value. It is insight, and it is contact with that which makes life meaningful.
The work of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner, is one attention, in the form of making explicit the implicit forms of meaning and value which run through our lives. I quoted Weil above; she was in many ways an unbalanced person, and this affects her philosophy, however she is also possibly the more insightful thinker I have come across, cutting so often to the essence of our lives. I said also that here, in late modernity, we feel the weight of modernity's nihilism inside us. Such emptiness leads to pathologies in many directions, whether in the form(s) of despair, or fear, or addiction, or anger, or shut-down, or narcissism, or other forms. Insofar as our problems are rooted in nihilism, or in other essential problems of value and meaning, in these philosophers we find an antidote, not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of thinking which can reveal things, if we too engage in it.
Such are the various philosophers and approaches which would become vital to my philosophical counselling, and there are more besides. With respect to the element of counselling or psychotherapy which I would combine with philosophy to make philosophical counselling, I had no interest in the clinical form of mental health therapy which dominates today, which is based on the medicalised concepts of psychiatry and of behavioural psychology, which is a somewhat direct expression of modernity, and so which too often becomes an expression and mere exercise of the rituals of scientism, rationalism, and technocracy. Rather, I decided to study Counselling. Counselling is different to psychology or psychiatry or any other clinical way of working with "mental health." In the main, counselling is humanistic rather than clinical. Life is not a disease to cure, a disorder to correct, but rather a mystery to live. The focus is not on a psychiatric schema of pathologies, but rather on exploration and working with the problems of life as challenges of living, as features of the human condition, to be faced with all that is best in our head, heart, and hands. Such counselling involves only those core practices which are therapeutic in their essence, without appeal to an ideology. There are no assessments or diagnoses or appeals "the research," which is to say to whatever is currently fashionable in "expert" circles and so treated as authoritative. Rather, when a client comes to me, I invite them to tell me their story, usually focused on their current concerns, and I listen to this, but I am also paying attention to what it is like to be them, subjectively, and how they are in the world--their way of being--including those dimensions of their being to which they are blind, and those elements of their subjectivity to which they may have blinded themselves. I am paying attention the forms of meaning and value in this person's life, and the strengths and problems involved, and the possibilities these point to. I am educated in many classical elements of psychotherapy and so I am reading the client's psyche, but unlike the therapist who is paying attention to "what makes them tick," my greater concern is what makes them alive. What are the motive forces within them, the flames which can be fanned, which we will fan in terms of the good they seek, and the unseen good which they might, or perhaps ought to, seek. That seeking may involve an array of therapeutic techniques, though fundamentally my counselling is transformation through seeing, through paying attention. As the existential therapist Viktor Frankl wrote, "The person who can find a why, can find a how." Frankl drew this conclusion from his years as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps.
While clinical psychology is a three-way relationship: (1) you, (2) the psychologist, and (3) third parties such as the mental health system, peak bodies and their commercial or tribal interests, the courts, employers, insurance bodies, other "experts," and the like, some of whom are likely to have a stake in your therapy in ways that define the therapy, often in radical ways. By contrast, counselling as I am trained and practice it is purely between you and I. You attend insofar as you find it valuable, and stop attending when it is not: counselling stands or falls on the actual helpfulness of the therapy. My only third party commitment is to professional and ethical values, and legal constraints.
My point here is to show what counselling is. It is not to malign clinical therapy. Just as science is good and scientism bad, scientism being what happens when science ceases to be a tool and becomes a totalitarian ideology. So clinical therapy is good, but problematic and even bad when it becomes a totalitarian ideology: the only view, or a view which in some respect arbitrarily over-rides other important views. Sometimes I am all that a client needs for their therapeutic needs, at that point in time. At other times I suggest they also see a clinical therapist, for there can be great benefit in that scientific, technological, behavioural way of working on problems, which is based on careful empirical research. Sometimes I am wrong for a client, whose being has become so chaotic and even dangerous that they need reductively psychological, technical therapy for the time being. Life is more a both/and situation than an either/or one, and what is good and how that is balanced may change often depending on other factors. If I discuss clinical therapy quite a bit, it is because of the increasingly totalitarian force it has in therapy, and it is because I have to work hard at times not to be confused with a clinical therapist, a confusion which in more extreme cases can be very problematic. Therapists encounter the extremes, and so have to guard against omissions.
The decision to study counselling became step one of a plan which would unfold across almost two decades. Step two would involve working professionally in mainstream counselling roles, becoming competent in the ways of the mainstream counsellor. Step three, the final step, would bring it all together, stepping purely into the role of a philosophical counsellor, probably in private practice. My philosophical counselling would be the work of philosophy in its many dimensions as I have described it above, while bringing mainstream therapeutic knowledge and skill into the same work. Clients would receive both, for the sake of finding strength in life, and improving the quality and success of their lives, while growing as human beings.
I studied counselling, eventually to masters level. Across fifteen years I worked in counselling organisations which included: a suicide prevention service focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges); a service focused on rural and isolated men and their relationships; an Australian Defense Force and a combat veteran's counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP) providing mainstream counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to mangers. During these years I was also a voracious learner, taking deep dives into many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, both by doing further (informal) study and applying that in my work, and by entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. This included various humanistic forms of therapy--I always come back to the deceptively simple but profound work of Carl Rogers. It included also the informal study of psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, and two periods spent in therapy with two different kinds of analytic therapist. The psychoanalytic mindset can be conceited and even cultish, among other problems, indeed my experience with the second analytic therapist became an experience of an abusive therapist, which despite its personal harm to me it was professionally helpful, for such therapists are real, and I see some clients who have experienced that. Yet the fundamental insights into our unconscious--or at least unseen--defenses and how they shape our inner and outer lives are incredibly helpful. Many confusing social interactions became much, much clearer, and I was able to understand much in myself, and later on much in my clients. Indeed, while I am not an analytic therapist but rather am "humanistically" oriented, I use numerous analytic perspective and tools in my work, reading the "unconscious" aspects of my clients alongside paying attention to many other dimensions. I explored many other therapeutic approaches besides, as well as other fields of helping such as personal coaching, and positive psychology which is social science research into how things go well in life. While my counsellor training, and so skills and orientation, are not clinical, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with many psychologists and clinical social workers and gained much insight into their concepts and ways of working, which has enriched my understanding even as I eschew the clinical/medical model.
In 2012 I began a private practice as a space to focus on existential therapy, which is a philosophically-oriented form of psychotherapy (hence the URL of this website). This enabled me to enter deeply into the work of people like Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. I did that part-time, while also working in the above organisations, and while continuing to teach university philosophy for some years (eventually I had to let that go for the sake of time). I also wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to multiple offers of academic teaching in counselling, and more importantly created a flow of clients for that existential approach. Existential therapy did not become my final professional focus, for I find it narrow in certain ways, for example it is too much an expression of the questionable ideological assumptions of modernity which are, in the end, nihilistic. A therapy focused on meaning and value, but which assumes modernity and so its nihilism, is a cure which risks deepening the disease even as it helps. Here, in late modernity (often called "post" modernity, which is simply that stage where modernity throws the acid even on itself) many people feel that nihilism of modernity as a weight within them. As a philosopher I present a way out of the arbitrary, blind nihilism of modernity as a lived ideology, and so my work goes well beyond the existentialism of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, existential therapy greatly enriched how I work today, especially through its emphasis on phenomenology which is a vital discipline for recognising the implicit and making it explicit.
These days I am on the other side of this long project, and now work purely in private practice as a philosophical counsellor. This experiment of almost twenty years, of exlporing and combining both therapy and philosophy, has taught me that philosophy is more powerful than therapy when it comes to many of our personal problems, especially when philosophy is practiced through the framework of counselling. For it engages our head and heart, which is the real engine of skill, strength, change and goodness in our lives. It is deeper because it is a change in how we are toward the world and in the world, whereas psychological therapy works on a part of our being. At the same time, psychological therapy is incredibly helpful for everybody (similar to how improvements in strength and fitness and health can be somewhat life-changing). Therapy is also a part of Socrates' liberating challenge to know thyself. With some clients my work is almost purely philosophical, while with others there is as much psychological work as there is philosophical work.
That's enough about me. After twenty years in the inner-city, I moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest on the western edge of central Victoria, to be back in that landscape that I love. During Covid I left behind my Carlton counselling office, and today now see people purely by phone and video. Outside of work I perform regularly as a musician (jazz drummer) and restore and tour on old motorcycles.