Here’s an interesting observation about philosophy in “our time”:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200114-why-philosophers-could-be-the-ones-to-transform-your-2020
Since my college days, when I first discovered the schools of Hellenistic philosophy, I have been fascinated by the ways in which those philosophers — the Stoics and Epicureans — addressed their theorizing to problems of living well. For that period, it was mainly about living well in “dark times,” as Angie Hobbs points out. And I have found that focus and the approaches they developed very useful. And comforting.
So have my clients. In many cases, people turn to philosophical counseling when psychotherapy doesn’t seem to meet their needs and institutional forms of religion don’t speak to them. The methods of philosophy can become tools for finding one’s way, and those “long-dead thinkers” can serve as trail-blazers in uncertain territory.
This article gives us one caution about philosophy “self-help” books: Philosophy Lite should indeed be understood merely as the foothills of philosophy. I’ve been deeply engaged in the study of our philosophical forebears for more than forty years, and from my vantage, I’ve only made a good start.
Another caution, however, is that reading philosophy isn’t likely to be that much help. Rather, “doing philosophy” is a way of finding one’s way in the world, and that is an active process that requires intellectual and emotional work. It’s only the novice who thinks of philosophy as a set of doctrines that will also work as recipes for a Good Life. It’s up to each of us, and while it’s good to have a guide, it takes work. Consider Aristotle, for instance.
The pursuit of the Good Life is a never-ending intellectual and moral quest for excellence, a quest that is mainly about making good judgments and about making good-judgment-making habitual. Why does he emphasize forming the right habits more than believing the right doctrines as the path to a Good Life? Because he recognized that we are “rational animals,” and that is another way of saying that we are impulsive, back-sliding, self-justifying animals who happen also to have the capacity of reason. There’s no guarantee that reason gets the upper hand.
Philosophy as a method can help us develop intellectual tools, but it’s up to us to make the use of those tools habitual — and that is what he means by character. In a play on the Greek word ἦθος, Aristotle makes a connection between character and habit. Oversimplifying a bit, he is saying that one’s character is the sum of all the habits one has cultivated (or allowed oneself to adopt).
People sometimes criticize this view as naively holding that we are completely transparent to ourselves, as if we are capable of perfect self-awareness, but that’s not the only way to read Aristotle. Suppose we take his “rational animal” literally, as I do above: In that case, our primate nature is, to some degree, at odds with our rational nature. Much has been made recently of these “two systems” of thinking, but one moral we can draw is that we must find ways to live with our primate nature without becoming brutish and without pretending it isn’t there.
Read in this way, Aristotle’s solution, in much more modern language, is to treat our primate nature as a chronic condition that cannot be cured but can be ameliorated by life-style choices. In other words, by developing the right habits.
And he gives us a nice start on answering what those habits might be. He calls them intellectual and moral virtues. Want to know more? Aristotle is ready for you.