Reflection 1
NORMALIZATION OR INNER TRANSFORMATION?
Many philosophical counselors nowadays assume that their goal is to help satisfy clients’ unsatisfied needs; or, more accurately, what clients perceive to be their needs: to help Sarah deal with her low self-confidence, to help John achieve a satisfying relationships with his wife, to help Mary overcome her loneliness, or to help Paul make a career choice that would make him satisfied.
Such goals are very common in psychotherapy, but when applied to philosophy they are, to my mind, curious. If the goal of philosophical practice is to satisfy needs, then philosophy is becoming part of the pragmatic, consumerist spirit of contemporary market economy. The philosopher is turned into a supplier of goods that are tailored to fit the client’s needs, just like the entertainer who aims at satisfying people’s need for fun, just like the drug manufacturer who sells painkilling pills to make people feel better, just like the plastic surgeon who modifies people’s noses to satisfy their need to feel admired, just like the furniture-maker who sells furniture to satisfy people’s need for convenience.
The result is that philosophy, which was to be a critic of society, now becomes just another player within society. Instead of radically examining societal values and ways of life, instead of putting into question the spirit of the market economy and of consumerism, it now plays by the rules of supply-and-demand: Philosophical practitioners now find themselves trying to sell their philosophical goods to those willing to pay, which means that they adjust themselves to the demands of the market, to the needs and goals declared by clients. They are no longer a Socrates or a Rousseau or a Nietzsche who shake people out of their smug self-satisfaction and short-sightedness, who cry out to society what society does not want to hear, but rather are domesticated professionals who seek to satisfy (and also use the opportunity to earn money).
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to make people feel better. But this is no longer philosophy, in the original sense of philo-sophia. Philo-sophia is a critic of people’s perceived needs, not a satisfier of needs. Its aim is to arouse intellectual and existential discontent, not to offer satisfaction. It seeks to evoke perplexity and awe, not to produce solutions and complacency; to encourage appreciation of the infinite complexity and richness of life, not to simplify life into solutions and bottom lines. True philo-sophia seeks to question all that is ‘normal,’ not to lead people to normality.
I find it ironic that we, philosophical practitioners, often mention the names of Socrates and Plato as our heroes. Socrates was certainly not a satisfier of needs, but a provocateur. To his ‘counselees’ he offered agitation, wonder, confusion, creative dissatisfaction. Similarly, Plato sought to pull people out of their narrow cave, out of their world of shadows—which is to say, out of their ‘normal’ conceptions and perceived needs. His aim was not to solve problems within the person’s world of shadows—how to deal with the boss, how to feel better about oneself, how to find a satisfying career—but to arouse in them a forgotten yearning to go beyond the world of shadows, beyond their superficial concerns. This is the Platonic Eros, the yearning to transcend the shadows that we take for granted towards broader and more enlightened horizons.
In this Socratic and Platonic sense, the philosopher is an agitator, a revolutionary. And for a very good reason: The search for wisdom requires questioning the obvious, forsaking our previous convictions, sacrificing our self-content and security, turning our back to our perceived needs and values, and venturing into an uncharted terrain. In contrast, a philosophical counselor who aims at developing solutions and satisfaction of needs is a normalizer. He or she in effect encourages the counselee to return happily to normal life, namely to the cave.
I suggest that in the past twenty years, we philosophical practitioners have gone too far in the direction of normalization. We believed, perhaps too naively, that we could be real philosophers—and at the same time satisfiers of needs.
I think that we have been mistaken. We now seem to be at a crucial fork in the road: One way leads to the practitioner as a normalized and normalizing philosopher. Here, philosophy is a profession with its professional training and organizations and paying counselees, not to mention financial benefits. It may be doing important work in relieving anguish and pain, but it cannot delude itself that it walks the paths of wisdom.
The other direction is the path of the true seeker, of the Platonic Eros. Here philosophers are seekers of wisdom, subversive questioners seeking to shake anything in their life—and in the lives of others—which seems normal, obvious, taken for granted. The goal here is nothing less than inner transformation, or in Plato’s allegory—stepping out of the cave.
I respect those who choose the first path, if they are motivated by a true desire to help those who suffer. But as for me, my spirit is thirsty for more than this domesticated kind of philosophy. My yearning is to grapple along the way of wisdom, of dis-normalization, and of companionship of true seekers.
