Can philosophy possibly be
interpreted as therapy? The big questions about life and meaning belong to, and
must be explored within, our culture as a whole and not just within groups of
medical or counselling specialists. Talking treatments would thus benefit from
drawing insights from other affiliate intellectual and artistic traditions. Philosophers,
for instance, have labored over questions/ issues of identity, meaning and
purpose since time immemorial. Given that moral development has in no way kept
pace with technological advances in the 20th century, we would be unwise to
draw only from contemporary thinkers in our effort to make sense of our
predicament/ existence. We cannot escape from philosophy; so, when people say
that they do not know anything about philosophy, what they really mean is that
they know only one philosophy, but they have no means of locating or assessing
it.
As a result, this “hidden philosophy” imbues and
shapes everything that people say, do or care about. Humans are also prevented from
considering alternatives or placing immediate preoccupations into a larger
perspective. Seeing philosophy as therapy is an ancient idea. In the antiquity
practising philosophy used to be a way of life; what is more, knowledge in
general was viewed as having substantial therapeutic effect. The Ancient Greek
Philosophical Dialogue, as a means of theoretically analyzing and comprehending
the aims of human actions, dealt on the one hand with the incentives, the
values, the moral limitations of the fragile human nature; while on the other
hand this miraculous dialogue both at the interpersonal and at the
interpersonal level presented numerous nourishing and supporting possibilities
for potential personal self-fulfilment, self –expression and self-knowledge. Furthermore,
Ancient Greek Philosophy was the first to raise all those major issues that
have always and at all times preoccupied men. By giving answers to the
all-important issues that have always troubled the human spirit, the ancient
Greeks, unlike modern men, were able to give a widely acceptable interpretation
of reality on the basis of their creative knowledge.
The ancient Greek spirit has also laid the foundations
of all scientific disciplines; Physics, Mathematics, Psychology, Aesthetics,
Ethics, Sociology, Political Science, to name but a few, have their origins in
the ancient Greek Philosophers. In a similar vein, P.B.Raabe mentions that:
«Therefore, by studying ancient Greek Philosophical Counseling we study the
origins and principles of the civilization of modern people, namely we get to
know one of the dimensions of our being. Wisdom can have no other origin or
locus than the personal way of living of this or that philosopher here and now.
Support for this position can be found in ancient Greece
This dimension of praxis that is lived through and
seen through focuses on the immediate experience of this or that philosopher
who is philosophizing as a way of life rather than on “Philosophy” understood
vaguely and imprecisely as a subject matter to be grasped and comprehended by
an unaffected knower...”
Further, Pierre Halot, in his book “Philosophy as a
way of life” examines how philosophy made its appearance “as a therapeutic
passion’’ meant to bring about profound transformation of the individual’s mode
of viewing things and of being in general, on the one hand; and a
transformation of our vision of the world and a metamorphosis of our
personality on the other hand. Consequently, philosophical counselling does not
constitute a new method neither in the field of therapy nor in the domain of
philopsophy.
As a result, Ontoanalysis always sets off with the
analysis of the familiar, the quotidian and the mundane, through the spectacles
of our own experience. Reality, language, values, needs, labour etc are all
seen as constructs and they shape and specify in each society, via their
particularity, the organization of the physical, the emotional and the social
world. The Ontoanalysis supports that man is an unconsciously philosophical
animal, who has posed the questions of philosophy in actual fact long before
philosophy existed as explicit reflection; and he is a poetic animal, who has
provided answers to these questions in the imaginary.
The Ontoanalysis provides
answers to the current crisis. Today we have constructed an economic
psychology, the role of ontoanalysis is imminent. How is it possible to claim
that the meanings, motivations and values created by each culture have no
function, perform no action other than to veil an economic psychology that is
held always to have been there? This is not just the paradoxical postulate of
an inalterable human nature. It is the no less paradoxical attempt to treat
human lives, as they are actually lived (consciously as well as unconsciously)
as a mere illusion with respect to the 'real' (economic) forces that govern it.
It is the invention of another unconscious beneath the unconscious, the
unconscious of the unconscious, which would beat once 'objective' (because
totally independent of the history of subjects and of their action) and
'rational' (because constantly directed towards a definable and even measurable
end, the economic end).
But if we do not want to believe in magic, the action
of individuals, consciously or unconsciously motivated, is obviously an
indispensable relay for any action of 'forces' or of 'laws' in history. It
would therefore be necessary to construct an 'economic psychoanalysis' which
would reveal as the cause of human actions, their 'true' (economic) latent
sense, and in which 'economic impulse' would take the place of the libido. To
be sure, a latent economic sense can often be discovered in acts that appear
not to possess it. But this does not mean either that it is the only one or
that it is the primary one. It certainly does not mean that its content is always
and in every instance the maximalization of 'economic satisfaction' in the
sense of western capitalism. The fact that the 'economic impulse' -- the
'pleasure principle', if you like, turned towards consumption or appropriation
-- takes this or that direction, fixes itself on a particular objective, and is
orchestrated in a given mode of conduct, this depends on all of the factors in
play. This depends, in particular, on its relation to the sexual drive (the way
in which this drive becomes 'specified' in the society considered) and to the
world of meanings and values created by the culture in which the individual
lives.
Apostolos Apostolou
Professor of Philosophy.
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