The Philosophers' Magazine, Summer
1998
Editor: Dr. Julian Baggini
Web Magazine Editor: Dr. Jeremy Stangroom
58 Upper Tollington Park, London N4 4BX
www.philosophers.co.uk
p.34: The Future of Philosophical Practice
in America: the leading figure in the field of philosophical
practice offers his prognosis for the future of the discipline.
Pax Nabisco: On The
Future of Philosophical Practice in America
Lou Marinoff
Philosophers have good reason to be wary
of prognostication and prophecy. The problem of naturalistic
induction--why the future should resemble the past--remains
unsolved, while the hypothesis of historicism--that the
future can be extrapolated from the past--appears discredited.
Philosophers may anticipate imminent futures with Hobbesian
prudence, and can occasionally indulge in Nietzschean
or Bergsonian revelation, but should avoid being confounded
with oracles. How possible futures become actual ones
remains a mystery. Thus I pen this invited piece with
an admixture of cautious optimism and ineluctable trepidation.
I may get some of it right, but am bound to get much of
it wrong.
The Constitution of the American Philosophical
Practitioners Association (APPA) recognizes three components
of philosophical practice: client counseling, group facilitation
and organizational consulting. A practitioner may specialize
in any of these areas, or may engage generally in them
all. For American specialists and generalists alike, the
future appears bright indeed. I shall briefly characterize
its albedo in four interacting spheres of influence: the
professional, the political, the academic and the cultural.
The professionalization of philosophy in
America is being extraordinarily well-received by the
media, by the public, and by other established professionals.
A constellation of powerful forces mostly outside the
control of philosophical practitioners has enlisted itself
unwittingly but emphatically in our cause. A moral majority
in America has become increasingly disenchanted with amoral
vicissitudes of laissez-faire economics, chief among which
is the desperately unsound proposition that the affluent
life entails the examined one. Americans are delighted
to discover that philosophers have rediscovered, and are
practicing with clients, the art of leading the examined
life. I meet many Americans these days who once took philosophy
courses but were disappointed that the material proved
inapplicable to their quotidian concerns, and moreover
who thought things should have been otherwise. People
experience daily problems involving morality, justice,
happiness, meaning, purpose, value, identity, relationships,
sex, death, and so forth--issues about which significant
philosophers and rich philosophical traditions speak volumes.
That people have such problems does not make them mentally
ill. A professor of psychology recently estimated in the
New York Times (March 8, 1997, Section 4) that philosophical
counselors could handle eighty percent of the cases currently
encountered by psychological and psychiatric counselors.
If that estimate is even remotely accurate, then philosophical
counselors will not want for clients.
The potentials for group facilitation and
organizational consulting loom equally large. Formal group
facilitation, exemplified by the refined method of Socratic
dialogue, should eventually become part of mainstream
higher education, and a required component of an undergraduate
philosophy degree. As the substantial generation of baby-boomers
progresses from middle to old age, enjoying ever increasing
life expectancy and leisure time, Socratic dialogue affords
ideal opportunities to enlist experience and reason in
stimulating group activity that is cooperative as opposed
to competitive. A group or institution can engage a trained
facilitator of Socratic dialogue for a very reasonable
price, and derive considerable benefit therefrom.
American corporations are ripe for philosophical
consultants, for at least two overarching reasons. First,
the Federal government has passed sentencing guidelines
which grant judges considerable leeway to reduce liability
claims when verdicts go against corporations that have
implemented ethics compliance programs. Similarly, judges
can increase damages in the absence of ethics compliance.
As there are no standards for ethics compliance itself,
cynics have observed that corporations can hire consulting
firms to issue "certificates" of ethicity, which
repose on little or no ethical training and amount to
nothing more than cheap insurance policies. Even so, the
sentencing guidelines potentiate a windfall for philosophical
practitioners, many of do know something about ethics.
Corporate philosophers can offer the genuine article in
terms of ethics compliance, at competitive prices, which
corporations of quality will find hard to resist. After
all, solid gold ethicity is more valuable than mere gold-plated
ethical pretence. Second, the day of the American corporate
philosopher is dawning irrespective of liability issues.
The twentieth century witnessed a fortuitous marriage
between behavioral psychology and manufacturing industry,
whose progeny--the industrial psychologist--motivated
the mechanization of human interaction with tangible structures.
The twenty-first century will witness a new marriage,
between applied philosophy and business organization,
whose progeny--the corporate philosopher--will facilitate
the systematization of human interaction with intangible
structures. The in-house corporate philosopher, and firms
of corporate philosophers on retainer, will deliver a
range of beneficial services to corporate clients, including
counseling individual employees, facilitating goal-oriented
teams or work-groups, and consulting with managers and
directors on policy formulation and decision. In sum,
the professionalization of philosophy in America is well
underway.
American political spheres are obviously
responsive to initiatives that have widespread, grass-roots
and business appeal. Moreover, they cannot afford to be
unresponsive to philosophical practice in today's climate:
our profession's nascence coincides with psychiatry in
crisis, psychology in senescence, and inability of the
American managed care industry to deliver affordable medical
services for medical problems--while delivering unaffordable
medical services for non-medical problems. Enter the philosophical
practitioner, who provides relief to both politicians
and managed care organizations alike, by allowing them
to re-interpret pseudo-medical problems as philosophical
ones. People experiencing crises over morality or meaning
or purpose are not mentally ill, and do not require medical
intervention. Hence governments and managed care providers
alike will enthusiastically embrace philosophical practice,
because it is a more appropriate and less expensive way
to manage certain kinds of prevalent problems.
Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. is sponsoring
landmark legislation to license philosophical practitioners
in New York State. His Bill A9841, recently reported in
the New York Times (March 8, 1997, Section 4), will be
closely watched by other State Assemblies. Political recognition
of philosophical practice, whether by licensing or certification
by a State, serves an important two-fold purpose: it helps
protect the public from harms wrought by charlatans, and
enhances the reputability of the profession. Political
recognition of philosophical practice will occur sooner
or later, in one state or another, and should precipitate
a domino effect. Meanwhile, politicians will also take
note as HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) and other
managed care providers begin to engage reputable philosophical
practitioners--licensed or not--as a matter of good business.
Such free-market capitalism will also serve to undermine
entrenched lobbies by psychologists, who may seek to protect
their state-sanctioned monopolies on talk-therapy. Note
that while psychological counselors are not doctors, their
services are nonetheless covered by medical insurance.
The vista of philosophical counseling suddenly reminds
people of the distinction between medical science on the
one hand, and psychological and psychiatric pseudo-science
on the other. Philosophical counselors are receiving media
attention in America far out of proportion to our actual
numbers, and thus far we are media darlings. The thoughtful
public adores us too. As a result, pseudo-medical counselors
are hoist with their own petard: if tens of thousands
of them complain about merely dozens of us, they cast
us as David to their Goliath, which reinforces our popularity.
If Americans love anything, they love an underdog. But
if pseudo-medical counselors support us (as many in fact
do), then they undercut their own monopoly, which reinforces
our position. Either way our movement gathers strength.
I believe that we will achieve symbiosis with other counseling
professions, and even practice side-by-side, perhaps under
a common shingle offering different kinds of approaches.
Philosophical practitioners are not yet very numerous
(that is British understatement), but we find ourselves
in a tenable political position (that too is British understatement).
With respect to the academic sphere, Americans
harbor few Old World pedagogic prejudices. We rather assume
that whatever can be done, can be taught. The American
academy is as entrepreneurial as can be. I have already
been approached by a number of institutions, which have
made serious inquiries about establishing M.A. and Ph.D.
programs in philosophical practice. I am currently teaching
what, to my knowledge, is the first-ever American graduate
seminar in philosophical practice, at Felician College
in New Jersey. A colleague of mine on the west coast will
do something similar at Berkeley this autumn. Indeed,
one of my primary concerns as President of the APPA is
supplying the coming demand for qualified practitioners.
While the first generation of any pioneering movement
is necessarily self-trained, subsequent generations require
training. The academy is the appropriate venue for this,
and is responding accordingly. Given the revolutions,
deconstructions and dumbings-down that have beset American
university curricula during the past generation, the prospect
of a graduate program in philosophical practice engenders
admiration, excitement and relief. We should start graduating
the next generation of philosophical practitioners within
a few years. Ruben Diaz's Bill A9841 has been solicited
for the holdings of the National Research Center for Bioethics
Literature, at the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of
Ethics (Georgetown University). That this prestigious
Institute solicited a copy of his proposed legislation
marks its entry into the highest echelons of applied ethics
and public policy studies.
The recrudescence of philosophical practice
is underdetermined by cultural evolutionary theory; that
is, one can formulate many hypotheses that account for
its re-emergence without knowing which ones are true,
or partially true, or false. It might be that the celebrity
of philosophical practice in America is the Spenglerian
death rattle of a profoundly anti-cultural culture, a
last noetic feast before the intelligentsia succumbs wholesale
to tabloids, television, and other fast-food for thoughtlessness.
It might be that philosophical practice in America marks
the inception of a humanistic-capitalistic renaissance--a
long-awaited reply to Thrasymachus--in which virtue will
prove more profitable than vice. It might also be the
case that these two hypotheses are one: that philosophical
practice is a kind of Trojan horse wheeled into the American
military-industrial-scientific-postcultural complex, to
be debased and distorted, trivialized and oversimplified,
banalized and sloganeered, glitzily packaged and slickly
hawked, advertised with subliminal sex and sold by talking
"headpieces filled with straw." Then will come
our sternest challenge: to remain philosophers in the
face of all that sound and fury, to practice our art uncorrupted
by it, and ultimately to improve the vision of a culture
that has all but blinded itself by imbibing the unexamined
life to prodigious and oft-times orgiastic excess.
America is Rome reincarnate. Like the Roman
empire, the American empire is vastly powerful and unfathomably
corrupt. Like Rome, America imposes her civilization upon
an ungrateful world. Like Rome, America needs bread, circuses
and philosopher-statesmen to forestall and yet to hasten
her demise. In Rome, temporalism metamorphosed to spiritualism:
Pax Romana became Pax Vobiscem. In America, temporalism
is metamorphosing to multinationalism: Pax Americana is
becoming Pax Nabisco. This portends new galleries for
ancient philosophical arts.
Note: Lou Marinoff is Associate Professor
of Philosophy at The City College of New York, past President
and former Executive Director of the American Society
for Philosophy, Counseling and Psychotherapy, President
of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association,
and Co-Chair of the Anglo-American Society for Philosophical
Practice.
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