By way of introduction to the philosophy, I would like to begin by providing a map of the problematic that afflicts our culture today. To my mind, the central thread of this problem concerns our collective misunderstandings of meaning-making as a practice, how it can be performed with more or less expertise, and the ways our social institutions can either facilitate or inhibit our capacity to do so. This problem can be brought into sharp relief in the context of both education and healthcare. A key distinction about dialectical holism is that it implies the interdependence of therapy and academic philosophy. This is because in functional terms, they are both aiming for the same end, which is wisdom.
As I understand it, wisdom involves being about the limit of a given conceptual domain. When applied to oneself, wisdom means bringing one’s attention to the biographical context and physical constraints that give rise to any given perception, reaction, or mode of being in the world. This eventually results in an alleviation of suffering via self-understanding and the capacity to make meaning of what lies within or beyond one’s control. On an interpersonal level, wisdom manifests as an effort to grasp the experiences of others and to see the conditions of their limits, which helps to further clarify one’s own identity within a wider space of human-being. As will be discussed below, both of these enactments of wisdom are essential for philosophy and mental health. In a more technical context, this definition of wisdom can be seen in the efforts to map out the limit of a given scientific discipline, which inevitably leads to increasing interdisciplinary dialogue at the interface between disciplines and the development of new fields of study.
If philosophy is to be about wisdom, then it must be about the facilitation of interdisciplinary discussions and the mapping of intersubjective phenomenological spaces. An interesting correlate of this commonality is that both appear to achieve their end through the practice of friendship. In a therapeutic context, the therapist serves as what I call ‘mindfulness training wheels’, bringing the client’s attention to the context that gives rise to their reactions and some tools for changing the context into something more desirable. In the case of philosophy, the philosopher provides scaffolding for the construction and arrangement of ideas, one that serves as both an anvil for testing new ideas and maps congruence with a common language across perspectives. Empathy, I claim, is required for success in each of these endeavors. This is because in either case of therapist or philosopher, they achieve their end by being able to recognize where an individual is located within a phenomenological landscape that has different valuations and logical structures from their own.
This point concerning the importance of empathy brings us to the core of our meaning-making problem: if all perspectives are granted equal value a priori, then we have undermined any possible motivation for learning from or synthesizing the perspectives of others. This is because such an equal valuation presumes that there is no better or worse way to behold or engage with a common world. Consequently, all differences across perspectives become reducible to idiosyncratic emotional reactions. Quite concerningly, these emotional reactions have been taken to be indicative of reality in both therapeutic and philosophical contexts. In the therapeutic domain, the individual’s emotional response is often taken to be indicative of whether they ought to move towards or away from a given stimulus because the individual is often assumed to have sufficient knowledge of themselves and the values that guide their meaning-making practices (e.g. feminist and CBT approaches). Doing so avoids the challenge of uprooting the unconscious associations that form one’s worldview. Philosophically speaking, recent critical theories have asserted a priori knowledge of an oppressive bias in all human practices, which ultimately undermine our ability to posit an objective world through scientific discourse and thereby dispenses with any capacity to build a knowledge of our relations to others. As we can see, both problems result from an assertion of unquestionable valuation: therapeutically, this is the positive assumption of the free agency and self-knowledge of the individual, while critical philosophies assert the negative assumption of our collective participation in oppressive forces.
The consequence of either of these mistakes will be a state of increasing narcissism on an individual scale and a relativism about truth and morality on a collective scale. Indeed these trends are being exacerbated by our use of social media and the mind-numbing polarization narratives that have been fed to the public in recent years. Interestingly, this problem can be formulated as a lack of critical philosophical reflection on part of the therapy and a lack of a positive trajectory of thriving for the philosophy. If the practices of therapy and philosophy are to be about wisdom, then they thus converge on an exercise of navigating towards increasing coherence. By coherence I mean an integration of one’s unconscious intentions into our conscious practices on the one hand and an ongoing synthesis of perspectives with scientifically rigorous analysis on the other. However, the interdependence of therapy and philosophy can be made even more clear when we examine emotions as a context to our beliefs.
Here, I part company from analytic philosophers who hold out hope for achieving a deep sense of truth about the world through a pure method of linguistic analysis. I claim, the aims of any academic study of philosophy typically articulated as wisdom, can only be achieved insofar as the emotional context of one’s beliefs can be sufficiently reflected. If emotions are co-arising with values and values dictate our phenomenological landscape, then analyzing our beliefs about this landscape will be insufficient to understand or alter its dynamics. This must be done in and through living one’s values and emotions, for they are not mere propositions, but a multidimensional process of meaning-making. This implies that the tools of psychotherapy and phenomenology are eventually required during the development of one’s philosophy, since this involves interpersonal communication of the worldview and reflection of one’s own motivations in sustaining it. However, it appears these reflective capacities would inevitably develop as cognitive capacities of self-reflection if the practice of philosophy were to be rigorous in maintaining multi-scale investigations. In the interest of facilitating wisdom then, it is suggested that philosophers embrace this role as phenomenological guide, thereby obliging us to articulate a trajectory by which emotional intelligence can advance in tandem with the development of one’s worldview.
If the aim of psychotherapy is the mental well-being of an individual and if ‘well-being’ depends upon the capacity to develop a sufficiently complex and personally satisfactory worldview, then the aims of psychotherapy depend upon philosophy. An implication of this position is that contrary to many theories on offer, the client is not sufficiently capable of setting their own developmental trajectory through life, since part of their problem may be that their logical and self-reflective capacities have been insufficient to establish a worldview that can respond to the actual complexities of our world. The consequence is that rather than attempting to avoid the possibility of indoctrinating a client in some theory or another, this bias must be embraced. Doing so means we recognize the theory as a tool and offer it willingly, while also providing the skills to evaluate any theory by looking for its limitations. Such an addition of therapy would inevitably involve incorporating philosophical methods into the process to help a client acquire the skills necessary for building their world-view with increasing rigor.
Though there are many practices that integrate the common processes in therapy and philosophy into a single process, I offer one example in an artistic context. Surrealism is a means of uprooting one’s unconscious value structures and non-conscious intentionality. Under the guise of the paranoiac critical method, one can produce icons of mythos for an individual or a culture’s developmental biography. In doing so, surrealism simultaneously provides tools for self-reflection and meaning-making, which are the two primary aims shared by both therapy and philosophy. A further feature to note is that surrealism exists as a polar opposite of mindfulness and both appear as methods within a phenomenological space of investigation: mindfulness aims to recognize and see past respective associations, while surrealism aims to recognize and magnify associations ad absurdum. What all of the above appears to suggest is that the practice of phenomenology, as a means of recognizing and representing one’s emotional associations within an interpersonal context, is currently underappreciated in philosophy and therapy. The skills that this method of investigation facilitates appear to be essential for cultivating empathy, self-reflection, and navigating the limits of one’s sense-of-self. Phenomenology, I suggest, can provide the missing philosophical ingredient in therapy and the missing emotional ingredient in philosophical practice. Taking these lessons together, our capacity to develop wisdom is necessarily interdependent with an increasing self-awareness and the integration of other’s perspectives. Cultivating wisdom in this way appears as a parameter of health as it develops along a trajectory of thriving, while also implies an intellectual process of constructing an increasingly coherent worldview.
Dialectical Holism 