The Economist
June 24, 2000
Socrates, For Pleasure and Profit
Company executives in search
of wisdom are turning from psychotherapy and religion
to the cleverest thinkers of all: ancient philosophers.
For corporations, philosophy has become the latest management
fad. Tom Morris, author of If Aristotle Ran General
Motors: The New Soul of Business, earns $30,000 an
hour - one of the highest fees for a non-celebrity speaker
in America - for teaching Socrates and Hegel to the likes
if IBM, Campbell Soup, General Electric, and Ford.
Lou Marinoff, who wrote a popular
book published last autumn, called Plato, Not Prozac!
Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems, is spearheading
the rise of "philosophy counselling", which
has roots in Europe in the early 1980s but is new to America.
Mr. Marinoff has founded the grand-sounding American Philosophical
Practitioners Association, which has trained around 70
philosophy counsellors so far and has backing form a local
assemblyman to certify the practice in New York State.
Mr. Marinoff, who charges $100 an hour (in line with clinical-psychology
rates), says many of his clients are "refugees"
from psychology and psychiatry. "Philosophy deals
with big questions - purpose, ethics, moral quandaries
- without messing up their emotions."
In Britain, Alain de Botton's
best-seller, How Proust Can Change Your Life,
has spawned an agony column in a Sunday newspaper. His
latest book, The Consolations of Philosophy,
pops philosophers like pills: take Socrates for unpopularity,
Epicurus for lack of money, Seneca for frustration and
Montaigne for inadequacy. Mr de Botton, being a cerebral
sort of chap (and much consoled by making a successful
television series on his book), has not yet moved seriously
into the business of management counselling.
When he does, he will find
that there is now a brand-new market for the sages: failed
Internet entrepreneurs. Christopher McCullough, a self-styled
"clinical philosopher" based in San Francisco,
says that half his practice consists of "manic start-up
types who can smell the money, but see it disappearing
fast". Mr. McCullough, who runs a philosophy café
in a local Barnes and Noble Bookshop and is opening his
own café in June, prescribes the example of Epictetus,
a noted Stoic philosopher, to teach people how to stay
serene when they have lost everything.
Epictetus is just the thing
for those with underwater stock options. He led a life
of exemplary contentment, simplicity and virtue, living
in a small but furnished with only a bed and a lamp. Mr.
McCullough's success in prescribing him suggests that
high-achieving entrepreneurs prefer intellectual discussion
to treatment for depression or anxiety. " There is
much less tissue and couch use in philosophy counselling,"
says Mr. McCullough. "And I have more room to be
funny." As for Socrates, he must be guffawing in
his tomb.
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