The Christian Science Monitor
July 2, 1998, Thursday
SECTION: FEATURES; IDEAS;
CULTURE; Pg. B3
LENGTH: 1296 words
HEADLINE: Let's Talk: Philosophers
Reach Out
BYLINE: David Holmstrom,
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BODY:
This is the story of a newspaper article that might
not be - how should I say? - of apparent immediate consequence.
Just like philosophy.
Yet, rooted in problem solving,
sprinkled with tension, and inherently significant,
it could therefore be useful.
Maybe.
Just like philosophy.
There is a new way of practicing
it known as "philosophical counseling" now
growing in popularity in the United States, Germany,
the Netherlands, Britain, and Israel. In shorthand,
this is problem solving through applied philosophy.
Let's say you are caught
up in a snarly ethical or moral problem at work or home,
or you want to marry someone from another faith with
differing cultural values and there is tension in the
relationship. Basically, nothing is wrong with you in
a medical or psychotherapeutic sense.
To avoid being labeled or
categorized, you don't want to visit a psychologist.
But you know, or hope, that fresh insights would help
smooth the bumpy uneasiness of your perceived dilemma.
So, sit down with a philosophical
counselor like Vaughna Feary, Paul Sharkey, Thomas Magnell,
or Lou Marinoff. Explore the logic of your thinking,
or your "self-talk," that might be clouding
your moral reasoning or straining the values of your
world view. Clarify meaning and values, philosophically
speaking.
"We explore the
ways in which clients think," says Mr. Sharkey,
professor emeritus of community health, philosophy and
Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi in
Hattiesburg, "and how their own ways of approaching
a problem could be contributing to the problem. The
main focus is that people are usually more upset than
they need to be, and we help them look at the problem
more realistically."
Fair enough. As Socrates
counseled centuries ago, always proceed empirically,
or realistically. Doing so here reveals that the introduction
of philosophical counseling in the US has not gone smoothly.
Among US philosophers, arguments
have broken out over definitions of counseling, standards
for it, motives behind it, and overall intent. How is
philosophical counseling better than, or different from,
other kinds of counseling? And any kind of counseling
can often be unsettling in a finite world, if it raises
more questions than it answers.
For philosopher Christopher
Phillips, who conducts philosophical discussions known
as "Socrates' Cafe" in many venues around
San Francisco, academics are attempting to control this
fledgling counseling movement with premature restrictions.
"They are trying to force certification in a field
that has yet to even be defined," he says, "and
in my opinion, trying to get a name for themselves."
Just as philosophy demands
rigorous logic, some philosophers insist that certification
is necessary to protect the public.
'I think it is important
to have standards of practice," says Vaughna Feary,
a philosophy professor at Farleigh Dickinson University
in Madison, N.J., and director of a philosophy program
in the Morris County Correctional Facility. "It's
not a matter of academics, but competence."
Ms. Feary has seen philosophy
at work on murderers, sex offenders, and white-collar
criminals. "Inmates usually have poor consequential
reasoning," she says. "Cognitive rigidity
is a big problem, too, and almost all of them have an
absolute inability to envision alternative courses of
action."
Feary works with captive,
emotionally hungry participants breaking out of egocentric
viewpoints. What animates Mr. Phillips is the conviction
that pure philosophy is really "co-inquiry,"
a process where there is more of a sense of inquiry
being done together, and not philosophical counseling
as an alternative to other kinds of counseling.
Unlike psychology, the emphasis
in philosophical counseling for most philosophers is
not on exploring past problems, but looking at logic
and reasoning here and now. "The whole point,"
he says, "is to bring philosophy outside of traditional
academia and bring it into everyday life."
Feary would not necessarily
disagree and contends that in society a lot of "basically
philosophical problems have been psychologized."
She says, "A lot of
depression is not some kind of psychological problem,
but comes about because people lack direction and a
sense of meaning in their lives. And here, the great
philosophical tradition, in terms of what great philosophers
have said, for instance, about happiness, can be explored."
To help identify philosophy
as accessible to anyone, Phillips founded the Society
for Philosophical Inquiry recently as a reaction to
the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling and
Psychotherapy (ASPCP), a group of academically based
philosophers advocating certification of philosophical
counselors and practitioners.
To establish the criteria
for certification, this group subsequently formed the
American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA)
in New York. It helped draft a controversial bill for
the New York State Assembly to consider licensing philosophical
practitioners. If passed, critics ask, will insurance
reimbursement for counseling be far behind?
Mr. Sharkey, who is vice
president of APPA, says there are 125 members of ASPCP,
not all of whom are philosophical counselors. "But
if they are," he says, "we want to have a
program of certification which reviews academic credentials,
gives an exam, and has letters of reference for good
character."
This is anathema to Phillips,
who cites a grass-roots, nonacademic interest now in
philosophy that has little to do with individual counseling.
"There is a burgeoning
movement of philosophical inquiry in cafes, bookstores,
senior centers, hospices, and prisons," he says.
"So many people have jobs where they don't use
their minds, and finally they have found a place to
gather that is not a church, or a typical group, and
all these individuals come together to lock heads and
hearts."
Thomas Magnell, president
elect of ASPCP and chairman of the philosophy department
at Drew University in Madison, N.J., says the argument
over certification will pass. "It's wise to have
something," he says, suggesting that 2,000 years
of philosophic tradition can endure even certification.
German philosopher Gerd
Achenbach is credited in l981 with having the first
private philosophical consultations outside of a university
setting. As part of a suicide-prevention program, he
wanted to offer a "free place" where philosophy
could help people gain insights into their lives and
decisions. Mr. Achenbach contends that good counselors
cannot be made, but are born, so he offers no training.
After his introduction,
philosophical counseling began popping up across Europe,
particularly in the Netherlands. Most countries now
have certification programs. In the US, Lou Marinoff,
philosophy professor at City College of New York and
one of the early proponents of philosophical counseling,
contends that psychology and psychiatry have all but
failed people.
In his view, the institutionalized
version of philosophy, as practiced in most universities,
is now "more or less withering on the vine."
He says, "People are
rediscovering the kind of philosophy that was most usefully
done in antiquity. Also, there is a failure of science
to explain anything intelligible to human beings about
meaning, value, purpose, and ethics. I believe that
science helps us discover objective truths about the
natural world, but cannot explain everything. So it
is the province of philosophy to deal with the questions
of meaning and value, not to answer the questions, but
to explicate them."
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION:
Showing Socrates. BY TOM BROWN - STAFF
