The question – “What is Philosophy?” is contained within the broader context of questions in this section of the website by questions regarding psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis. It is appropriate to address this as a process of questioning rather than an explanation or answer to a question. A question which is answered by way of a praxis. The term ‘praxis’ like so many philosophically related terms originates from an Ancient Greek word describing the process by which a lesson or skill is acquired or realised – in this context a clinical practice informed by theory. Aristotle indeed asserted that free human beings engaged in three core activities which essentially represent what it means to be human. These are Theoria (thinking), Poiesis (making) and Praxis (doing). Karl Marx twenty four centuries later took a swipe at the philosophical tradition and Aristotle and the philosophical tradition when he controversially foregrounded ‘praxis’ in his 11th thesis – “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.
Socrates back in 5th Century BC ancient Greece devised a method of apprehending truth embodied in his self description as a ‘gadfly to the truth’. He devised a method of assisting a subject to come to a realisation of truths that existed below the lure of superficial self delusory and consolatory explanations. Socrates’ application of praxis was directed at the level of the individual subject embodied in existence and not the macro themes of history or society as the outworking of a process. Socrates scrutinised deep existential truths, the apprehension of which involved a confrontation with the self and one’s biases or conditioning. This unearthing was termed the ‘Socratic method’ and Socrates described himself as being like a gadfly confronting persons with the truth. For this he was termed the wisest living person by the oracle at Delphi, and for this uncompromising position he was also condemned to death on the trumped up charge of corrupting the Athenian youth and dishonouring the Gods by his irreverent scrutiny of norms, power and privilege. It has to be said that the sentence of death made against Socrates could have been easily avoided if he recanted and apologised. However he took the principalled decision not to compromise his integrity by apologising and standing down in the face of coercion and threat. We can see a similar moral principle playing out in many of the Greek myths principally Sophocles’ play Antigone, where the eponymous heroine choses death rather than accede to the demands of legal duress. She refuses to renounce her affiliation to a ‘higher law’ and acts upon her desire and refusal to see her decomposing brother Polynices without a grave, despite the flouting of social convention and regal law These plays are exemplary didactic vehicles where the mettle of a person’s character is tested and refined in the furnace of suffering, opposition and extremis. One often gets the impression in reading Greek tragedy that the various personages are akin to individual particles in the Large Hadron Collider, accelerated by circumstance to terrifying speeds on a collision course with other persons and situations. Some are superdense fragmenting into rich layers of exotic sub-particles while some are light wispy ghostlike entities leaving no trace. The aphorism regarding circumstances being the making or breaking of a subject in extremis is as appropriate now as it was in ancient Greece. Indeed it is what brings many people into therapy.
This processed pursuit of existential interrogation is a core feature of psychotherapy as a practice and theory, a questioning often going down narratively through layers of memory, associations, identifications and dreams. Such an unflinching excavation has a philosophical foundational view of the human subject represented by a theory of consciousness and the ethical question of what is the good life, the happy flourishing life and the right way of living.
Psychotherapy or counselling is characterised by three principle paradigms of therapeutic intervention. These can be pictured as broad brush titles with a family or lineage of variants contained within each title.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Person Centred Therapy
Psychodynamic Therapy
In approaching the philosophical underpinnings, presuppositions and ethical foundations which underwrite each of these therapeutic paradigms it is worth initially giving consideration to the overarching phenomenon of consciousness. After all without embodied thought and cognition there would be no thinking subject to either philosophise, cogitate or ruminate. This is represented by a branch of philosophy known as ‘philosophy of mind’ which is best expressed by Descartes dictum ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ – ‘I think therefore I am’. By examining and drilling down into this assertion, light can be shed upon the distinctiveness of each of the three positions. Almost a compare and contrast type first year undergrad essay title defining terms by highlighting the key features by which the three counselling paradigms can be examined.
