Meaning, Freedom to choose, Action, and How We Should Act: A Perspective on Practical Philosophy and its Relationship with the Individual

It is inherently popular, and perhaps reasonable, to accord Socrates prime position as the archetypal philosophical counsellor — the ‘head honcho’ of the modern movement to bring philosophy back onto practice, and put it usefully into the hands of the ‘ordinary’ individual. Is this reasonable? Socratic method, the method of intellectual enquiry and self-examination is certainly indispensable to any exploration of one’s life. And Socrates provides humanity with probably the best example of the ‘good death’, the very model of an individual’s ability to face, with courage and good humour, the inevitable extinction of mortal existence. In this, only Jesus is his rival; commendation in itself. Socrates’ astute logical perseverance is incomparable, and his passion to discover a deeper level of truth than the accepted or obvious is uncompromisingly persistent. But it is hard to see Socrates as a counsellor — he was no Rogerian (his unconditional positive regard is hard to detect), he joked at the expense of others, told lies about himself, did not properly earn a living and went to little or no trouble to dress smartly for the occasion.

For philosophical alternatives to Socrates, there is no better place to look than to the seven great European philosophers around which modern western philosophy is constructed. All have light to shed on the practice of life and the practicality of philosophy. The seventeenth century brought a revolution in science. Mechanistic interpretations replaced the Aristotelian explanatory use of ‘purpose’ (itself only rediscovered in the Renaissance). This is the perfect place to pick up the strongest sense of philosophical ‘freedom’, the sense of the excitement which philosophy can bring. If we want an example of the inward search (which is where the examined life must always start) we could do no better than choose Descartes. Descartes devoted himself to knowledge derived from self understanding — he was the very paragon of introspection. Or perhaps Leibniz (the least ‘rationalist’ of the rationalists) — the great polymath in the strictest sense — who, MacDonald Ross says, was ‘very much a Socrates ... always in dialogue with others, trying to sympathise with a variety of different points of view’ (MacDonald Ross, 1984, p.115). Maybe we could focus on Locke, possibly the most intellectually courageous philosopher ever, who believed not in the pursuit of pleasure but of truth. Locke, convinced that truth could be distinguished from falsehood, could be found, and when discovered pointed the way for us to live. For Locke, the philosophical pursuit was a guide for living well — he was the very essence of a practical philosopher. For Hume, the hardest nosed of the hard-nosed, every belief must be firmly fixed by experience. Neither theology nor metaphysics are immune from this testing and any revealed failures must be discarded. As he asks in conclusion to his first enquiry, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’ (Hume, 1975, p.165) What better guide for helping us face up to the reality of it all. Or possibly we might look to Berkeley, whose moral cause against Locke’s inability to show that mind was simply material, launched an all out crusade for a doctrine of the supremacy of the mental. Berkeley invoked a scepticism of Locke’s world of clocks and mechanism by the most radical step of denying the very existence of matter. In Berkeley we have a great example of the drastic medicine philosophy can spoon out. Berkeley puts human experience at the centre of the world, and in so doing points out the unsurpassable importance of ‘awareness’ — our consciousness of being — in the universal makeup. Or Kant — the greatly underrated humanist — who claimed (and is still often believed in that claim) that he had synthesised the two opposing camps of rationalism and empiricism which had gone before him. Kant maintained, like Spinoza, that judgements (‘emotions’ for Spinoza) can only justifiably be held if based on reason; reason itself, he believed, must stem from something initial. Whereas for Aristotle this prime quality was happiness, for Kant it was duty. Duty is crucial to the welfare of our own self, he claimed. Our duty to our self is the basis for acting in good faith; something any philosophical counsellor may hope to be revealed for any companion hoping to progress. And the courage to act responsibly is embedded in the call to duty. It is from this that personal courage and forbearance is born. Of this kind of Stoicism Kant is a fine example, as he recalls, ‘My left eye lost its sight approximately five years ago. It is strange that during a period, which I estimate at about three years, I did not even miss it.’ (Rabel, 1963, p.315) In addition, it is to Kant we owe the idea, so important to philosophical counselling, of the ‘will’. This idea, influential in Schopenhauer (and of course Nietzsche) who, as a philosophical purveyor of ‘things willed’, accepted Kant’s ‘transcendental self’ as the true substance (lying behind all appearance) — the will itself. But Spinoza is probably the best source of inspiration for Philosophical Counselling. If how to live freely is our concern there is no better example amongst the ‘magnificent seven’ than Spinoza. His search for the essence of human freedom leads him to dismiss our fear of death in favour of a self-checking, outward looking world of rationality. In this there is strong existential appeal, the back up of intellectual rigour and the tolerance of revelation. Here there is the recipe for true individual enlightenment.

References
Hume, D. (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals.   Ed. with an Analytical Index by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn., revised by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon.
MacDonald Ross, G. (1984) Leibniz. Oxford University Press.
Rabel, G. (1963) Kant. Oxford: Clarendon.