>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: I think a lot of philosophers try to treat their character challenges through
their ideas (laughs) and, I've probably done that as well, but I guess I don't think of
these as a separate.
I don't think philosophy can drive you to despair, but despair can drive you to philosophy
or, whatever, so...
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>>RUSSELL GOODMAN: On the question of philosophy as therapy.
It is the case that we're nervous about that partly because it sounds like all those and
in some ways is like all those self-help nostrums and therapies that are out there and that
you see written about in the bookstores.
And I guess there's a nervousness.
Are we doing any better than these self-help people?
Maybe they're doing really very well themselves.
But I think professional philosophy has in its desire to be pure and respectable and
maybe somewhat scientific has gotten away from the idea that philosophy has anything
to do with your life.
But we still study Plato and Aristotle so all of us philosophers know that it does,
at least in its ancient roots have a lot to do with how you live your life.
>>JOHN RUSSON: In some ways I don't draw a strong distinction between philosophy and
psychology and in some ways my conception of philosophy is of a kind of therapy.
But I.
Partially that's because of what my sense of philosophy is in general.
I don't think of philosophy as an isolated discipline so much as I think of it as our
most rigorous attempts to heighten and improve the quality of our perception.
So I think in a way philosophy is a grab bag, you know.
Philosophy is using whatever resources you can to improve the quality of your grasp of
your own situation, improve the quality of your ability to deal with it.
And since many of the most important issues in our lives have to do with psychology, have
to do with the intimate details of how we think, how we feel, how we relate to others,
much of the most important philosophical work is going to pertain to those issues.
My own interest is primarily in these psychological issues because I think that is where philosophy
touches us most directly and I think that's where the changes can happen that will have
the most impact on people.
So I've devoted myself to those kinds of questions so I've taken my philosophical investigations
into the domain of psychology primarily, but I don't think that's all that philosophy can
do and I don't by any means mean to diminish the importance of you know, very abstract,
very technical conceptual thinking either for the sake of that thinking-- I mean just
to improve our ability to conceptualize or in other areas.
You know, thinking about the deepest questions about the foundations of the physical universe
or anything else.
So I think all of these things are legitimate and indeed essential to philosophical inquiry.
But for me the most meaningful domain is the domain of personal, intimate, emotional life
and -- and indeed that it -- and I should say that that itself cannot be separated from
political life and all these other issues.
But that's primarily where my work has been located.
>>KEN STIKKERS: I think as philosophers we should admit that from the beginning that
there's a therapeutic dimension to philosophy.
Not that philosophy is therapy but I think there is an irreducible therapeutic dimension
to it that we should acknowledge.
I get suspicious disbelieving when I like to ask people how they got into philosophy
too for example when we interview people and I often like to ask them what got you into
it and oftentimes you get tales of well I was reading this text in Kant and this led
me to this problem and that led me to that problem and I'm puzzled.
I say that can't be why you got into philosophy.
That can't be why you're devoting your life to this subject-matter.
Doesn't it in some way come back to some form of self-understanding?
I think Gadamer had it right that all understanding is self-understanding.
I take that as a given and that that's what we're on, our quest for self-understanding.
So that's certainly part of it.
But then there's a social dimension to it too that questions of citizenship.
Philosophy can do so much more to attune us better to our world around us, to sensitize
us to the sufferings of those around us.
People throughout the world and that can be transformed into powerful motivations for
change.
I think that's how I see the return on investment, as both personal but social-political as well.
>>RUSSELL GOODMAN: Wittgenstein is the person who uses this word therapy and this is something
that Cavell picked up in his earliest writing about Wittgenstein.
And Cavell countered the professional tendency to ask the question well what's his system?
What theses is he arguing for and what's his argument for the theses?
If you think of it as that, as a kind of a treatise, or some sort of proof of some sort
of set of propositions, then therapy doesn't seem to enter into it, and it's possible to
treat Wittgenstein as setting out some sort of a system, but if you read him carefully
you'll see that he says that philosophy has different treatments of different problems
like different therapies and so Cavell took that seriously and wondered, well what kind
of therapy is going on in the work and what does this therapy look like and how is it
instantiated or encouraged by the way that Wittgenstein writes.
And if you ask that question, then you pretty soon come to pay attention to the fact that
Wittgenstein's work is full of questions, it's full of metaphors, it's full of things
that sort of hang in the air, it's full of dialogues, with these voices.
One voice that Cavell calls the voice of temptation, which is often what the philosopher is doing.
And the other voice, the voice of correction, or the voice of authority.
And so Wittgenstein's work has the multiple voice, it has the multiple styles in it.
And how does this produce therapy or how does this encourage or how is this therapeutic?
I think Wittgenstein's view is that a lot of philosophy results from certain kinds of
fixation, as Dewey said, like the quest for certainty.
Or a feeling that there has to be a rule out there in nature that tells us how words are
used.
Things that have to be.
We have these fixations and unexamined assumptions and so all these dialogues, all these questions
are meant to bring us up short, and to make the reader do some work in.
If philosophy is therapy then it's not just the passive receiving of some ideas.
It invites you to do some work on yourself and on your own conceptions.
And I think he sees that Wittgenstein is up that.
And I think Emerson is really very much up to this as well.
>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: I think the great philosophers, and I would, perhaps with some reservations,
but I would count ... Wittgenstein.
As he grew older and suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, various, very
bad experiences, not just in the trenches on the German side, during the first world
war but the whole issue of his homosexuality dogged him, and he quite clearly in his last
work talks about what he called the Ethical.
I think it would be better to call it the holy or the sacred, even.
His early picture theory of meaning, atomic facts and molecular facts and picturing say
the affairs of the world, he rejects because if the picture theory of meaning is complete,
it's sweeping, then we should be able to picture the way the picturing happens, but we can't
do that.
We can't picture the picturing.
And when the positivists invited him to the Vienna Circle in the 30s, they were mainly
relying upon his earlier book, the famous Tractatus, but what he did when he got to
Vienna was to read poetry such as Rabindranath Tagore and they thought that he had gone soft
in the head and prematurely senile or whatever and dismissed him.
But he also had this Socratic, what to call it, turn at the end of his, towards the end
of his life.
>>RUSSELL GOODMAN: I guess that's Wittgenstein's view...that philosophy has some kind of obsessive/compulsive
disorder, that's true.
What he thinks of as false necessities, partly in Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein is correcting his own earlier work in the Tractatus.
This view of philosophy as therapy comes out in his later work, the Philosophical Investigations.
I'm trying to think of some example of how this works.
Well, every word must stand for something and so you ask what does each word stand for.
Well, the word table stands for table, or maybe this table.
You already start having problems but it seems so obvious that every word has a meaning and
then the meaning is some sort of object so you go looking for the object and then you
have a real puzzle because you get a word like ╘if' and you ask, well what's the object
that if stands for and you can ╨ actually William James does this ╨ you can think,
well if stands for a certain feeling of hesitation.
Actually James introspects and says that feeling of hesitation is just between my throat and
my neck or something like that and that's where it is.
And by the time you back up and you're a Wittgensteinian philosopher or a certain kind of philosopher
and you think, the meaning of the word is a little feeling in your neck?!
That's really bizarre and it raises further questions about how my feeling and your feeling
line up and you're off on the high seas of philosophy.
And you could answer all of these questions.
I think Wittgenstein is part of the tradition that includes Kant which is putting forward
a critique of philosophy, a treatment for philosophical problems.
And in some cases anyway, rather than taking the problem at its face value and saying well
here's how you solve it, the critique says well let's get to the place before where we
get off the ground with the problem.
In this case, you would get to question, well do you really think that a word's meaning
really is some sort of object and do you really think that every word stands for something?
So Wittgenstein's therapy is the treatment of certain philosophical compulsions.
They're not just taught to you in graduate school, or to philosophers in graduate school,
according to Wittgenstein, and I think he's right about this.
They're natural human compulsions and that's where part of the interest lies.
If we could only just change our curriculum, then we'd get rid of these problems.
That would be easy.
But the kinds of losing of your way that you find in philosophy just keeps coming up again
and again and that's why you need this therapy sort of continuously.
One of the paradoxes of Wittgenstein's approach is that he says both that philosophy is a
form of therapy, but it's a form of therapy that treats philosophical problems.
So philosophy is both the disease, well, philosophy names a disease and names a cure for the disease,
and that does sound paradoxical.
I guess you could remove the paradox by saying good effective philosophy enables you not
to catch the bad philosophical disease.
Another way I like to think about this is that's suggested by what he says.
Wittgenstein says that his methods, his therapies have as a goal the achieving of a certain
kind of peace, so that you're no longer tormented by problems that would otherwise torment you.
So I see his method as not trying to end even the philosophy that's kind of diseased, but
as allowing you to release it and get the fantasy out, get the compulsion out, and look
at it, but then not to be bound by it, to give you some sort of freedom from it.
Philosophy as a form of therapy is the treatment of itself.
It contains both the cure and the problems.
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