I discovered philosophy as a rural, working-class, high-school drop-out. I went from working in a factory to studying and then teaching philosophy at The University of Melbourne and elsewhere. I was drawn to philosophy because I experienced its power to help us cope with life's suffering and hardships, while making things better, and becoming better. This use of philosophy might sound odd to anybody who knows only the modern, academic variant, with its focus on abstruse argument and scholarship. But there is a deeper tradition within Western philosophy that we don't see in the universities, although it has an ongoing place in elements of the culture. Rooted in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and many others up to the present day, this is philosophy as the active cultivation of wisdom and virtue, for the sake of strength, goodness, meaning, happiness, and flourishing. For many classical philosophers, this was the point of doing philosophy. Such philosophy is an art that clarifies what is good and meaningful, and then guides us in the cultivation of that.
I enjoyed teaching, but it was obvious that the university was not the place for such philosophy. So I started imagining a different way of doing it, outside of the academy: working with people one-on-one, bringing the wisdom of philosophy to their problems and goals in life. Perhaps we would meet at a cafe, or I would hire an office. At some point I came across the Philosophical Counselling movement, and knew I had found my path.
Philosophical Counselling offers a richness which cannot be found in mainstream therapy, which has a tendency to reduce life to narrow theories and psychological mechanisms. At the same time, that focus in mainstream psychotherapy offers has led to many powerful benefits. When I decided to become a philosophical counsellor, I recognised that philosophical and psychological growth depend on each other. So I decided to study Counselling and Psychotherapy, in order to combine philosophical and psychological skills.
In what follows I will describe my work in some detail. I will start with those studies in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I will then discuss classical philosophy and how its focus is so vital for a good and happy life. I go into quite a bit of detail, for people who are interested in that.
Counselling and Psychotherapy
I studied counselling and psychotherapy to masters level. I seemed to have a knack for the craft, and by the end of my training I had been offered numerous academic and counselling roles by my educators. This led to fifteen years working as a mainstream counsellor in a variety of organisations, focused on issues such as bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and a war veteran's counselling service, workplace counselling, and management coaching for interpersonal skills. In that context I developed skills across the many major approaches to therapy with the humanistic, psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioural fields. I designed and delivered training to counsellors, and was head-hunted multiple times to teach counselling at tertiary institutions (which I always turned down--my focus was on the practice). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level. I did all this while continuing to teach philosophy until 2014. In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which I conducted alongside that organisational work. Its focus was on Existential Therapy, which is a philosophical approach to counselling and psychotherapy that draws on existentialism and phenomenology. I spent the 2010s engaged in that private practice (alongside counselling in organisations), taking a deep and broad dive into that existential approach.
As an aside, many people lump Counselling and Psychotherapy, Psychology, and Psychiatry together, but they are radically different. In order to clarify these matters I will have to over-generalise. All these disciplines focus on the psychological dimensions of life. Most Psychologists and most Psychotherapists have a masters degree--they are equally well-trained. The big difference is between those that are clinical professions, and those that are personal growth professions. Psychology and Psychiatry are clinical professions. This means they use medical research and practice as their paradigm, and so focus on assessments, diagnoses, associated treatments, case management, reports, advocacy, et cetera. This is the core of most Psychologist training today. In contrast to the clinical professions, Counselling and Psychotherapy are personal growth professions. They help people to cope, improve, and flourish, by cultivating their own insight, clarity, direction, motivation, personal growth, and so on. This is where my training lies. Psychology is concerned with what diagnostic categories you fit into. Psychotherapy is concerned with the common features of our humanity, but sees each person as ultimately unique, and works closely with those individual factors. Psychology, which looks to medical science, aims at an objectified analysis of your functioning, whereas psychotherapy is concerned with the quality of your subjective experience, and is often guided by your desires. As I say, these matters are more complicated, but this is a good rule of thumb for understanding the difference. To repeat, I am a personal growth professional, I am not a clinical professional.
There are many schools of Existential Therapy. I was most drawn to "the British school", led by people like Emmy van Deurzen. At the same time, I took deep dives into a variety of other approaches, including those of Viktor Frankl, Irvin Yalom, and Betty Cannon. Many of the skills and insights I developed in Existential Therapy are carried over directly into my philosophical counselling. People who seek Existential Therapy, will find a sophisticated form of it embedded in my philosophical counselling. My work differs, however, in that it goes well beyond existentialism.
People will also receive a variety of therapeutic approaches with me. This includes Rogerian therapy, which focuses on subjective experience, psychodynamic approaches, which shed light on your psychological defenses and associated blind spots, and cognitive-behavioural therapy, which helps you become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, and teaches you skills to reshape them.
What I am offering you is Philosophical Counselling. However, as I said, philosophical and psychological growth go hand in hand, so I work on both, at least for those who want that. As an experienced therapist, who is also a philosopher, and who has worked with thousands of people, I have concluded that philosophical growth is even more important than psychological growth. Of course, our dominant culture gets that backwards, but this is because it sees us as mechanisms, to be assessed and straightened out by some technology (such as psychological techniques or chemicals). I strongly disagree. Such deterministic, limited biology and psychology are important and often need work, but they are only a part of us. The higher part is the mind and the heart. Or in technical terms, the intellect and will. We refer to this also as consciousness, and it is a reality which no philosopher or scientist has genuinely succeeded in explaining away. This is where our dignity and meaning lie, as conscious beings, beings of mind and heart, who see and choose. We need to work on ourselves at this level if we are to cultivate the things which matter most: love, meaning, value, but also strength, happiness, and flourishing. Classical philosophy is a corrective to modernity's reductive, and indeed nihilistic, vision of ourselves. Classical philosophy sees life as a mystery to be lived, not a technocratic problem to be solved. A mystery to be lived by cultivating our deeper capacities for strength, goodness, meaning, happiness, and flourishing. I turn now to such philosophy, which is the essence of my philosphical counselling.
Philosophy
As a philosopher, I am rooted above all in the classical Western tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, which continues through Stoicism (Epictetus, Aurelius), Neoplatonism (Plotinus), through Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and up to our time among certain philosophers. This is philosophy as the pursuit of, and training in, wisdom and virtue.
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words, philos and sophia, which translates as love of wisdom. To do philosophy is to love wisdom, and by extension virtue. It is to contemplate them, and pursue them. It is to become like them, or to become them. Philosophy is a way of living. A way of interpreting and facing daily life.
What is wisdom? Here are three answers that are highly relevant to Philosophical Counselling:
1) Wisdom is a more true and good vision of life, reality, the world....
2) Wisdom is the ability to understand life's different situations, and to make good decisions in response to them.
3) Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues.
Wisdom as a more true and good vision of life, reality, the world....
With respect to the first form of wisdom, most people are dissatisfied with being deluded. They want a picture of life that is as true as possible. Of course, it also needs to be as good as possible. We are nourished by the things that are true and good. Also, to quote the one of my favourite philosophers, Iris Murdoch: "Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture." An adequately true and good picture of life is a roadmap to meaning and strength. It steers us in good and bad times. It transforms us.
Wisdom as the ability to understand life's different situations, and to make good decisions in response to them.
With respect to the second aspect of wisdom, we need the wisdom to steer ourselves well at a practical, daily level. We need to navigate people and situations, and to make good decisions that lead to good outcomes. In short, we need to know what to do, and why, and how. We need to know how to lessen the bad and increase the good. Aristotle called this "practical wisdom."
Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues.
But what is wisdom made of? In modernity we tend to reduce everything to rationality and technique, but the classical vision of wisdom is much richer. Wisdom is a virtue, or rather it is a collection of virtues. I define a virtue as:
1) Any good personal quality
2) Which you cultivate
3) Which makes you a better person
4) And which makes your life better.
According to Aristotle there are two main categories of virtue: intellectual virtues, and character virtues. Wisdom is the exercise of the intellectual virtues. That is, wisdom is all those good qualities of mind which a person might cultivate. That includes reason, but also mental courage, creativity, compassion, fortitude, focus, fairness, and so on. Wisdom is the ability to see things clearly and to judge well, which means to exercise those and various other intellectual virtues.
Alongside the intellectual virtues, we have the character virtues. Interestingly, these are mostly the same qualities, but emobodied at the level of emotion and action: courage, compassion, fortitude, temperance, justice, and so on.
The intellectual and the character virtues are interdependent. A good mind leads to a good character, and a good character leads to a good mind. It is important to recognise that the virtues involve many qualities, and not only moral--or moralistic--ones. Courage and "proper pride" are virtues. A tradesperson, firefighter, surgeon, artist, parent, may each need different virtues. To reiterate, a virtue is any quality which makes you and your life better, which means that some of the virtues you need are universal, while others are particular to you and your context.
Philosophy is the work of understanding the virtues in general--both the intellectual and character virtues--while gaining insight into their presence (and absence) in you. You take stock of your life in terms of the qualities you need as a person, which show themselves through your life and context: your relationships, work, passions, hopes.... Philosophy is then about cultivating these virtues in yourself. You make yourself into a person who is more wise and virtuous. This is the goal in itself, and it leads to many good outcomes in life.
The benefits of wisdom and virtue
The benefits of cultivating wisdom and virtue include increased:
Wisdom, as I have described above: a more true and good vision of things, which provides meaning, and which steers us well in life to avoid the bad and increase the good, and which transforms us as people.
Inner strength, resilience, the ability to cope. We gain this through the virtues we cultivate, such as courage, fortitude, practical wisdom, reason, perspective, and so forth, and we gain it through the increased sense of meaning, value, and purpose that we have developed ("the person who can find a Why, can find a How"). As an aside, we can see here that there is a unity to the virtues, each increasing the other.
Courage, which in conjunction with other virtues (creativity, truth, love) enables us to stand up and to put our best foot forward.
Goodness, which is the heart of a meaningful and worthwhile life. We all want to experience goodness, in its myriad forms, and most of us want to be a source of goodness for others, whatever that amounts to. My personal measure of a meaningful life is that the world was a better place, in whatever small ways, because I was in it. Goodness also has a broad meaning in classical philosophy--there are many goods of life.
Meaning: a life of wisdom and virtue is a more meaningful way of living, and so it is a way being in which we experience a genuine, robust sense of meaning. We discern more meaning and value, and we create more of it, and we become more able to appreciate such good things, and more confident that we can create or find them in future. Life becomes more interesting, and we experience more hope.
Happiness: happiness is partly a matter of chance--things can go wrong, no matter what you do--but it is also a consequence of your capacity for it. Your way of being will naturally lead to happiness or misery, depending on its qualities. The virtues constitute that capacity for genuine happiness. Their lack (or opposites) render us less capable of happiness. A kind, and confident, and grateful, and courageous, and so on, person will typically be a happier person.
Flourishing, which is to say doing well in life, regarding the things we care about. For some people that is a life of stability. For others it is a life of creativity. Or adventure. Or mission. Like happiness, flourishing is partly a matter of chance, but also it is made far, far more likely by the virtues. And it is rendered much less likely through their absence. An ancient Greek philosopher was right when he said that character is fate.
To develop your wisdom and virtue is to become a person who is naturally stronger, more decent, and happier. It is to become a person who finds life more good and meaningful, and who does better in life (flourishing). To cultivate wisdom and virtue is likewise to become less despondent, fearful, resentful, angry, aggrieved, bored, insecure, and so on. When it comes to improving your life, to creating a good life for yourself, this philosophical work is more powerful than anything else you can do. Unlike so many things in life, it is always in your power to do this work. As I noted above, the virtues are qualities you intentionally cultivate. You can transform your life in this way.
A further point about the first aspect of wisdom: forms of contemplation
While I am rooted in classical philosophy, Western philosophy is a 2500 year old tradition and there is richness to be found throughout that history. For example, an area to which I have given much time is the modern Platonists, such as Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, as well as the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner. Furthermore, Existential Therapy is, for me, Philosophical Counselling as the practice of existentialism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, the practice of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and others associated with him. Again, another strong influence on me is Ludwig Wittgenstein. I name these examples because they are highly influential on me, and because here we are are dealing here with a more contemplative side to philosophy. A side that brings a richness to our capacity to gain wisdom at the level of the big picture, but through an analysis of the depths of what is before us: in the reality, people, struggles, and self, that we encounter.
Such philosophy articulates the depths of the implicit in our experience. I am speaking of the meaning and value which is before our eyes but which we fail to see. Which implicity moves us and which, when made explicit, can do more than that: can enlighten and nourish us. Can give us clarity, and give life greater meaning. In describing his psychoanalytic method, Freud wrote that "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." My philosophical education taught me a similar method. Thanks to philosophers like Christopher Cordner, I learned to pay careful attention to the difference between what people say, and what they show. We could also frame that as a discernment of the implicit in what people say. We are often blind to the ethical richness in our lives. We are like a person starving to death because we do not recognise the food growing around us. Or we are like a fish who does not see the water in which it swims, and despairs at the lack of its perceived presence. Much of the despair and nihilism which infects people can be overcome through the work of changing ourselves in terms of wisdom and virtue--living in a higher way--but that begins with a higher vision. Such a vision must be good, but also true. This is the work of truth: we discern meaning and reality here in our concrete lives. That becomes the groundwork of a higher vision. I often have clients say, "I don't know how you do this!" Well, this is how I do it. We are blind. There is more in front of our eyes, if only we would learn to look. Philosophy is guidance and training in such looking. It makes the implicit explicit. It gives voice, it speaks reality, it speaks the greater fullness.
Alongside its capacity for articulating the implicit forms of goodness and meaning in life, my philosophy also makes a place for an understanding the darker sides of life. For life can be profoundly good, and that is central to my work, but life is also tragic and cruel. Sometimes we can make heroic changes, but we cannot always "overcome." For to be human is to be vulnerable, blind, and limited. It is to suffer, and sometimes to be degraded, or corrupted. To do philosophy as I do it, is to pay attention to this too, and to understand and respond to it in meaningful ways. Such responses are manifold in their possibilities, but here is one example. Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Elsewhere she speaks of such attention as "a just and loving gaze." We need to pay attention for the reasons I spoke of above--to see and be nourished by the good stuff, and to navigate life well--but we can also emphasise the value of attention as an ethical and healing agent not only in good times but also in bad. People matter. You and I matter. When we suffer, as we all do, then we need to see, and to be seen, and to find words, and to make meaning, and to take heart--whether or not we are able to change anything. To do philosophy in the context of suffering is to move from aloneness to a recognition and felt sense of our common humanity. It is to shine the light of consciousness as intelligence, but also as compassion. It is to seek, and hopefully find, a transcendent point of view that can sustain us. Philosophical Counselling addresses the full spectrum of life, seeking inspiration to live better, challenging us to step onto our hero's journey, while also working at depth with our vulnerability, grief, and suffering.
Philosophy as a library, and a cultural inheritance
I would like to end by adding that philosophy also constitutes a written resource. It is a library of ideas. To quote Mortimer J. Adler, it is "the great conversation." I often recommend clients read Plato or the Stoics or secondary literature on a range of philosophical topics. I do that with respect to the client's specific challenges, and with a view to the broader work and benefits of this wisdom-tradition. Philosophical Counselling is in a sense a form of tutoring: I am teaching you to be a philosopher. I do not mean an academic, rather I mean what it says on the label: a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. They live in a certain way, in the love of wisdom, in its pursuit, in the cultivation of virtue. This is a meaningful life to live. Philosophy is a literary framework, almost a rational spirituality, around which you can build a practice of reading and reflection, which flows into your effort and action of daily life. People who cannot find their way to reading can see me anyway, for the core of philosophy is conversation. However, this further element is also on offer.
I recommend that people read, for the above reasons. I also often recommend activities which appear relevant for the individual and their improvement, whether that be spending time in nature, or attending social gatherings, or creating a personal retreat at certain intervals. Beyond this, there is another reason for recommending philosophical reading, and wider forms of reading and cultural engagement. Philosophy is a cultural practice. We find a version of philosophy in all great traditional civilisations. For example, one of my closest friends has dedicated her working life to activities grounded in Hindu philosophy and spirituality. In my case, as I say, I am embedded in, and in love with, the tradition which is native to me, which flows from ancient Greece, through Rome, into Western Europe. I love its traditional philosophy, but also its tradition of great and beautiful literature, art, music, and spirituality. This wider dimension is has pressed itself on me as important, especially because many people lack of a rich inner life, and while that is not a problem for all people, for many it is an absolute lack, a void in their life. Often this void is their normal state, so while they suffer from this lack, they do not recognise the problem. A lack of a rich inner life can include the absence of an inner culture, a word which in Middle English denotes a cultivated piece of land. A good garden in which to live. A mind that is a good place to be inside. I encourage people to engage with the wider riches of the Western inheritance. In a sense that is compatible even with a secular commitement, we can say that these riches have a spiritual value. They enrich and strengthen, they console and give meaning, they warn and enlighten, they orient and reveal. Consider the heroic and tragic poetry of Homer's Iliad, or the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the ethical vision of the New Testament, or the rational spirituality of Roman Stoicism, or the mystical beauty of Plotinus' Neoplatonism, or the sacred architecture of the middle ages--which is mirrored in the cathedral-like philosophical achievements of Thomas Aquinas--or the sublime sculpture of the Renaissance, or the tragic self-awareness of Shakespeare, or the transcendent beauty of Bach, or the glowing world of Romantic poetry, or the psychological richness of the nineteenth century novel, or the over-view of the twentieth century historian. Life looks and feels very different when you feed yourself on a diet of such an inheritance. I am a student of Plato, who spoke of truth, and of goodness, but equally of beauty, as food for the soul.
The combination: Philosophical Counselling
Philosophical Counselling as I practice it, is philosophical guidance within the framework of counselling. Based on what I have said above, we can list some of the ingrediants of this approach. I am listing these in the order I discussed them above, though of course 4, 5, and 6 are the most important ingrediants.
1) Counselling's conversational skills, which elicit insight, motivation, growth, and change.
2) A therapeutic relationship that is empathetic, non-judgemental, and truth-seeking.
3) A rich background of psychological know-how, from my years as a psychotherapist.
4) The philosophical pursuit of wisdom: a transformation of how you see.
5) The cultivation of virtue: a transformation of your way of being.
6) The work of making the implicit explicit, with respect to meaning and value.
7) A rich cultural inheritance that is on offer to clients in terms of recommendations.
In classical philosophy we have a profound resource for living with strength and meaning and goodness. Philosophical Counselling as I practice it, makes this great tradition available to people today, in a sophisticated form which draws on psychotherapy as well. It is for people who want more than mere satisfaction or functioning or materialist success. Philosophical Counselling is for people who want to see life with far greater richness and depth, and to cultivate their better possibilities as human beings, and to deal with their problems and to make life better in that way.
I enjoyed teaching, but it was obvious that the university was not the place for such philosophy. So I started imagining a different way of doing it, outside of the academy: working with people one-on-one, bringing the wisdom of philosophy to their problems and goals in life. Perhaps we would meet at a cafe, or I would hire an office. At some point I came across the Philosophical Counselling movement, and knew I had found my path.
Philosophical Counselling offers a richness which cannot be found in mainstream therapy, which has a tendency to reduce life to narrow theories and psychological mechanisms. At the same time, that focus in mainstream psychotherapy offers has led to many powerful benefits. When I decided to become a philosophical counsellor, I recognised that philosophical and psychological growth depend on each other. So I decided to study Counselling and Psychotherapy, in order to combine philosophical and psychological skills.
In what follows I will describe my work in some detail. I will start with those studies in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I will then discuss classical philosophy and how its focus is so vital for a good and happy life. I go into quite a bit of detail, for people who are interested in that.
Counselling and Psychotherapy
I studied counselling and psychotherapy to masters level. I seemed to have a knack for the craft, and by the end of my training I had been offered numerous academic and counselling roles by my educators. This led to fifteen years working as a mainstream counsellor in a variety of organisations, focused on issues such as bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and a war veteran's counselling service, workplace counselling, and management coaching for interpersonal skills. In that context I developed skills across the many major approaches to therapy with the humanistic, psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioural fields. I designed and delivered training to counsellors, and was head-hunted multiple times to teach counselling at tertiary institutions (which I always turned down--my focus was on the practice). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level. I did all this while continuing to teach philosophy until 2014. In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which I conducted alongside that organisational work. Its focus was on Existential Therapy, which is a philosophical approach to counselling and psychotherapy that draws on existentialism and phenomenology. I spent the 2010s engaged in that private practice (alongside counselling in organisations), taking a deep and broad dive into that existential approach.
As an aside, many people lump Counselling and Psychotherapy, Psychology, and Psychiatry together, but they are radically different. In order to clarify these matters I will have to over-generalise. All these disciplines focus on the psychological dimensions of life. Most Psychologists and most Psychotherapists have a masters degree--they are equally well-trained. The big difference is between those that are clinical professions, and those that are personal growth professions. Psychology and Psychiatry are clinical professions. This means they use medical research and practice as their paradigm, and so focus on assessments, diagnoses, associated treatments, case management, reports, advocacy, et cetera. This is the core of most Psychologist training today. In contrast to the clinical professions, Counselling and Psychotherapy are personal growth professions. They help people to cope, improve, and flourish, by cultivating their own insight, clarity, direction, motivation, personal growth, and so on. This is where my training lies. Psychology is concerned with what diagnostic categories you fit into. Psychotherapy is concerned with the common features of our humanity, but sees each person as ultimately unique, and works closely with those individual factors. Psychology, which looks to medical science, aims at an objectified analysis of your functioning, whereas psychotherapy is concerned with the quality of your subjective experience, and is often guided by your desires. As I say, these matters are more complicated, but this is a good rule of thumb for understanding the difference. To repeat, I am a personal growth professional, I am not a clinical professional.
There are many schools of Existential Therapy. I was most drawn to "the British school", led by people like Emmy van Deurzen. At the same time, I took deep dives into a variety of other approaches, including those of Viktor Frankl, Irvin Yalom, and Betty Cannon. Many of the skills and insights I developed in Existential Therapy are carried over directly into my philosophical counselling. People who seek Existential Therapy, will find a sophisticated form of it embedded in my philosophical counselling. My work differs, however, in that it goes well beyond existentialism.
People will also receive a variety of therapeutic approaches with me. This includes Rogerian therapy, which focuses on subjective experience, psychodynamic approaches, which shed light on your psychological defenses and associated blind spots, and cognitive-behavioural therapy, which helps you become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, and teaches you skills to reshape them.
What I am offering you is Philosophical Counselling. However, as I said, philosophical and psychological growth go hand in hand, so I work on both, at least for those who want that. As an experienced therapist, who is also a philosopher, and who has worked with thousands of people, I have concluded that philosophical growth is even more important than psychological growth. Of course, our dominant culture gets that backwards, but this is because it sees us as mechanisms, to be assessed and straightened out by some technology (such as psychological techniques or chemicals). I strongly disagree. Such deterministic, limited biology and psychology are important and often need work, but they are only a part of us. The higher part is the mind and the heart. Or in technical terms, the intellect and will. We refer to this also as consciousness, and it is a reality which no philosopher or scientist has genuinely succeeded in explaining away. This is where our dignity and meaning lie, as conscious beings, beings of mind and heart, who see and choose. We need to work on ourselves at this level if we are to cultivate the things which matter most: love, meaning, value, but also strength, happiness, and flourishing. Classical philosophy is a corrective to modernity's reductive, and indeed nihilistic, vision of ourselves. Classical philosophy sees life as a mystery to be lived, not a technocratic problem to be solved. A mystery to be lived by cultivating our deeper capacities for strength, goodness, meaning, happiness, and flourishing. I turn now to such philosophy, which is the essence of my philosphical counselling.
Philosophy
As a philosopher, I am rooted above all in the classical Western tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, which continues through Stoicism (Epictetus, Aurelius), Neoplatonism (Plotinus), through Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and up to our time among certain philosophers. This is philosophy as the pursuit of, and training in, wisdom and virtue.
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words, philos and sophia, which translates as love of wisdom. To do philosophy is to love wisdom, and by extension virtue. It is to contemplate them, and pursue them. It is to become like them, or to become them. Philosophy is a way of living. A way of interpreting and facing daily life.
What is wisdom? Here are three answers that are highly relevant to Philosophical Counselling:
1) Wisdom is a more true and good vision of life, reality, the world....
2) Wisdom is the ability to understand life's different situations, and to make good decisions in response to them.
3) Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues.
Wisdom as a more true and good vision of life, reality, the world....
With respect to the first form of wisdom, most people are dissatisfied with being deluded. They want a picture of life that is as true as possible. Of course, it also needs to be as good as possible. We are nourished by the things that are true and good. Also, to quote the one of my favourite philosophers, Iris Murdoch: "Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture." An adequately true and good picture of life is a roadmap to meaning and strength. It steers us in good and bad times. It transforms us.
Wisdom as the ability to understand life's different situations, and to make good decisions in response to them.
With respect to the second aspect of wisdom, we need the wisdom to steer ourselves well at a practical, daily level. We need to navigate people and situations, and to make good decisions that lead to good outcomes. In short, we need to know what to do, and why, and how. We need to know how to lessen the bad and increase the good. Aristotle called this "practical wisdom."
Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues.
But what is wisdom made of? In modernity we tend to reduce everything to rationality and technique, but the classical vision of wisdom is much richer. Wisdom is a virtue, or rather it is a collection of virtues. I define a virtue as:
1) Any good personal quality
2) Which you cultivate
3) Which makes you a better person
4) And which makes your life better.
According to Aristotle there are two main categories of virtue: intellectual virtues, and character virtues. Wisdom is the exercise of the intellectual virtues. That is, wisdom is all those good qualities of mind which a person might cultivate. That includes reason, but also mental courage, creativity, compassion, fortitude, focus, fairness, and so on. Wisdom is the ability to see things clearly and to judge well, which means to exercise those and various other intellectual virtues.
Alongside the intellectual virtues, we have the character virtues. Interestingly, these are mostly the same qualities, but emobodied at the level of emotion and action: courage, compassion, fortitude, temperance, justice, and so on.
The intellectual and the character virtues are interdependent. A good mind leads to a good character, and a good character leads to a good mind. It is important to recognise that the virtues involve many qualities, and not only moral--or moralistic--ones. Courage and "proper pride" are virtues. A tradesperson, firefighter, surgeon, artist, parent, may each need different virtues. To reiterate, a virtue is any quality which makes you and your life better, which means that some of the virtues you need are universal, while others are particular to you and your context.
Philosophy is the work of understanding the virtues in general--both the intellectual and character virtues--while gaining insight into their presence (and absence) in you. You take stock of your life in terms of the qualities you need as a person, which show themselves through your life and context: your relationships, work, passions, hopes.... Philosophy is then about cultivating these virtues in yourself. You make yourself into a person who is more wise and virtuous. This is the goal in itself, and it leads to many good outcomes in life.
The benefits of wisdom and virtue
The benefits of cultivating wisdom and virtue include increased:
Wisdom, as I have described above: a more true and good vision of things, which provides meaning, and which steers us well in life to avoid the bad and increase the good, and which transforms us as people.
Inner strength, resilience, the ability to cope. We gain this through the virtues we cultivate, such as courage, fortitude, practical wisdom, reason, perspective, and so forth, and we gain it through the increased sense of meaning, value, and purpose that we have developed ("the person who can find a Why, can find a How"). As an aside, we can see here that there is a unity to the virtues, each increasing the other.
Courage, which in conjunction with other virtues (creativity, truth, love) enables us to stand up and to put our best foot forward.
Goodness, which is the heart of a meaningful and worthwhile life. We all want to experience goodness, in its myriad forms, and most of us want to be a source of goodness for others, whatever that amounts to. My personal measure of a meaningful life is that the world was a better place, in whatever small ways, because I was in it. Goodness also has a broad meaning in classical philosophy--there are many goods of life.
Meaning: a life of wisdom and virtue is a more meaningful way of living, and so it is a way being in which we experience a genuine, robust sense of meaning. We discern more meaning and value, and we create more of it, and we become more able to appreciate such good things, and more confident that we can create or find them in future. Life becomes more interesting, and we experience more hope.
Happiness: happiness is partly a matter of chance--things can go wrong, no matter what you do--but it is also a consequence of your capacity for it. Your way of being will naturally lead to happiness or misery, depending on its qualities. The virtues constitute that capacity for genuine happiness. Their lack (or opposites) render us less capable of happiness. A kind, and confident, and grateful, and courageous, and so on, person will typically be a happier person.
Flourishing, which is to say doing well in life, regarding the things we care about. For some people that is a life of stability. For others it is a life of creativity. Or adventure. Or mission. Like happiness, flourishing is partly a matter of chance, but also it is made far, far more likely by the virtues. And it is rendered much less likely through their absence. An ancient Greek philosopher was right when he said that character is fate.
To develop your wisdom and virtue is to become a person who is naturally stronger, more decent, and happier. It is to become a person who finds life more good and meaningful, and who does better in life (flourishing). To cultivate wisdom and virtue is likewise to become less despondent, fearful, resentful, angry, aggrieved, bored, insecure, and so on. When it comes to improving your life, to creating a good life for yourself, this philosophical work is more powerful than anything else you can do. Unlike so many things in life, it is always in your power to do this work. As I noted above, the virtues are qualities you intentionally cultivate. You can transform your life in this way.
A further point about the first aspect of wisdom: forms of contemplation
While I am rooted in classical philosophy, Western philosophy is a 2500 year old tradition and there is richness to be found throughout that history. For example, an area to which I have given much time is the modern Platonists, such as Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, as well as the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner. Furthermore, Existential Therapy is, for me, Philosophical Counselling as the practice of existentialism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, the practice of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and others associated with him. Again, another strong influence on me is Ludwig Wittgenstein. I name these examples because they are highly influential on me, and because here we are are dealing here with a more contemplative side to philosophy. A side that brings a richness to our capacity to gain wisdom at the level of the big picture, but through an analysis of the depths of what is before us: in the reality, people, struggles, and self, that we encounter.
Such philosophy articulates the depths of the implicit in our experience. I am speaking of the meaning and value which is before our eyes but which we fail to see. Which implicity moves us and which, when made explicit, can do more than that: can enlighten and nourish us. Can give us clarity, and give life greater meaning. In describing his psychoanalytic method, Freud wrote that "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." My philosophical education taught me a similar method. Thanks to philosophers like Christopher Cordner, I learned to pay careful attention to the difference between what people say, and what they show. We could also frame that as a discernment of the implicit in what people say. We are often blind to the ethical richness in our lives. We are like a person starving to death because we do not recognise the food growing around us. Or we are like a fish who does not see the water in which it swims, and despairs at the lack of its perceived presence. Much of the despair and nihilism which infects people can be overcome through the work of changing ourselves in terms of wisdom and virtue--living in a higher way--but that begins with a higher vision. Such a vision must be good, but also true. This is the work of truth: we discern meaning and reality here in our concrete lives. That becomes the groundwork of a higher vision. I often have clients say, "I don't know how you do this!" Well, this is how I do it. We are blind. There is more in front of our eyes, if only we would learn to look. Philosophy is guidance and training in such looking. It makes the implicit explicit. It gives voice, it speaks reality, it speaks the greater fullness.
Alongside its capacity for articulating the implicit forms of goodness and meaning in life, my philosophy also makes a place for an understanding the darker sides of life. For life can be profoundly good, and that is central to my work, but life is also tragic and cruel. Sometimes we can make heroic changes, but we cannot always "overcome." For to be human is to be vulnerable, blind, and limited. It is to suffer, and sometimes to be degraded, or corrupted. To do philosophy as I do it, is to pay attention to this too, and to understand and respond to it in meaningful ways. Such responses are manifold in their possibilities, but here is one example. Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Elsewhere she speaks of such attention as "a just and loving gaze." We need to pay attention for the reasons I spoke of above--to see and be nourished by the good stuff, and to navigate life well--but we can also emphasise the value of attention as an ethical and healing agent not only in good times but also in bad. People matter. You and I matter. When we suffer, as we all do, then we need to see, and to be seen, and to find words, and to make meaning, and to take heart--whether or not we are able to change anything. To do philosophy in the context of suffering is to move from aloneness to a recognition and felt sense of our common humanity. It is to shine the light of consciousness as intelligence, but also as compassion. It is to seek, and hopefully find, a transcendent point of view that can sustain us. Philosophical Counselling addresses the full spectrum of life, seeking inspiration to live better, challenging us to step onto our hero's journey, while also working at depth with our vulnerability, grief, and suffering.
Philosophy as a library, and a cultural inheritance
I would like to end by adding that philosophy also constitutes a written resource. It is a library of ideas. To quote Mortimer J. Adler, it is "the great conversation." I often recommend clients read Plato or the Stoics or secondary literature on a range of philosophical topics. I do that with respect to the client's specific challenges, and with a view to the broader work and benefits of this wisdom-tradition. Philosophical Counselling is in a sense a form of tutoring: I am teaching you to be a philosopher. I do not mean an academic, rather I mean what it says on the label: a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. They live in a certain way, in the love of wisdom, in its pursuit, in the cultivation of virtue. This is a meaningful life to live. Philosophy is a literary framework, almost a rational spirituality, around which you can build a practice of reading and reflection, which flows into your effort and action of daily life. People who cannot find their way to reading can see me anyway, for the core of philosophy is conversation. However, this further element is also on offer.
I recommend that people read, for the above reasons. I also often recommend activities which appear relevant for the individual and their improvement, whether that be spending time in nature, or attending social gatherings, or creating a personal retreat at certain intervals. Beyond this, there is another reason for recommending philosophical reading, and wider forms of reading and cultural engagement. Philosophy is a cultural practice. We find a version of philosophy in all great traditional civilisations. For example, one of my closest friends has dedicated her working life to activities grounded in Hindu philosophy and spirituality. In my case, as I say, I am embedded in, and in love with, the tradition which is native to me, which flows from ancient Greece, through Rome, into Western Europe. I love its traditional philosophy, but also its tradition of great and beautiful literature, art, music, and spirituality. This wider dimension is has pressed itself on me as important, especially because many people lack of a rich inner life, and while that is not a problem for all people, for many it is an absolute lack, a void in their life. Often this void is their normal state, so while they suffer from this lack, they do not recognise the problem. A lack of a rich inner life can include the absence of an inner culture, a word which in Middle English denotes a cultivated piece of land. A good garden in which to live. A mind that is a good place to be inside. I encourage people to engage with the wider riches of the Western inheritance. In a sense that is compatible even with a secular commitement, we can say that these riches have a spiritual value. They enrich and strengthen, they console and give meaning, they warn and enlighten, they orient and reveal. Consider the heroic and tragic poetry of Homer's Iliad, or the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the ethical vision of the New Testament, or the rational spirituality of Roman Stoicism, or the mystical beauty of Plotinus' Neoplatonism, or the sacred architecture of the middle ages--which is mirrored in the cathedral-like philosophical achievements of Thomas Aquinas--or the sublime sculpture of the Renaissance, or the tragic self-awareness of Shakespeare, or the transcendent beauty of Bach, or the glowing world of Romantic poetry, or the psychological richness of the nineteenth century novel, or the over-view of the twentieth century historian. Life looks and feels very different when you feed yourself on a diet of such an inheritance. I am a student of Plato, who spoke of truth, and of goodness, but equally of beauty, as food for the soul.
The combination: Philosophical Counselling
Philosophical Counselling as I practice it, is philosophical guidance within the framework of counselling. Based on what I have said above, we can list some of the ingrediants of this approach. I am listing these in the order I discussed them above, though of course 4, 5, and 6 are the most important ingrediants.
1) Counselling's conversational skills, which elicit insight, motivation, growth, and change.
2) A therapeutic relationship that is empathetic, non-judgemental, and truth-seeking.
3) A rich background of psychological know-how, from my years as a psychotherapist.
4) The philosophical pursuit of wisdom: a transformation of how you see.
5) The cultivation of virtue: a transformation of your way of being.
6) The work of making the implicit explicit, with respect to meaning and value.
7) A rich cultural inheritance that is on offer to clients in terms of recommendations.
In classical philosophy we have a profound resource for living with strength and meaning and goodness. Philosophical Counselling as I practice it, makes this great tradition available to people today, in a sophisticated form which draws on psychotherapy as well. It is for people who want more than mere satisfaction or functioning or materialist success. Philosophical Counselling is for people who want to see life with far greater richness and depth, and to cultivate their better possibilities as human beings, and to deal with their problems and to make life better in that way.