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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1: Western Thought
Aristotle 9
Augustine of Hippo 13
Prudence 15
Thomas Aquinas 19
Anselm of Canterbury 21
Self-Acceptance 23
Jesus Christ 27
Carl Jung 33
Courage 37

Part 2: Eastern Thought
Endless Becoming 43
Confucius 47
Chuang Tzu 51
Buddha 53
Lieh Tzu 59
Lao Tzu 61
Sun Tzu 65
Honesty 67

Part 3: Modern Thought
Kant 73
Freud 77
Justice 79
Nietzsche 85
Boethius 89
Compassion 91
Sartre 95
Pavlov 97
Temperance 99

Part 4: Literature & Drama
Character and Narrative 103
Wittgenstein 109
Walker Percy 113
Epictetus 115
Marcus Aurelius 117
Epicurus 119
Shakespeare 121
Elation 123

Part 5: Case Studies
Disturbance 129
Rejection 133
Dominance 137
Deception 141
Torment 147
Harassment 151
Isolation 155
Abjection 159

Part 6: Applied Philosophy
Symbols and Patterns 165
Maieutics 171
Praxis 177
Hermeneutics 183
Moral of the Story 189

Bibliography 193

Introduction
People are creatures of habit, or at least that is one perspective.
My own experiences suggest that people behave in a manner which
becomes predictable over time. The underlying principles to which a
person adheres dictates the manner in which they behave. This view is
what has come to be known as philosophical practice. It is the study of
how reasoning leads to behavior. In a sense, it can also be viewed similarly
to behaviorism in clinical psychology, perhaps just from the other end of
the telescope. Although the two schools of thought, psychology and
philosophy, began to diverge over the past couple hundred years, they both
originate much further back, in ancient Greece. De Amina by Aristotle was
the first recorded work in psychology. Aristotle is also known simply as
the “Philosopher.”
Aristotle saw moral virtues as dispositions learned by imitation
and refined as habits. He found that all actions aim at an end, ultimately at
human flourishing. While the influence of Aristotle is quite potent as a
remedy for a lot of the questions about self and society, his brand of
perennial philosophy only penetrates so deep because the mechanics upon
which his system is built is a maker-creation relationship. While the West
has certainly ironed out the finest points of law and order, it has a few
areas of its overarching philosophy that seem to ignore the interwoven
notions that can be taken from the East. These philosophical constructs
form the core of our self-image.
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In the East, the ideas of self and of society are very different. They
are viewed as an organic fixture in the landscape. The self is almost always
considered in the context of family and a strong sense of duty. The sense
of self is not easily defined. Although the East and West both flourished
with important thinkers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into
the Renaissance, it was not until Sartre, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and
Camus that we could begin to examine the self in a phenomenological
context. This metaphysical framework allows the Existentialists to take
living life as part of the study in examining human knowledge and
understanding.
Nietzsche, in particular, flew in the face of conventional thought
with his aggressive rhetoric, but it is important to note that it is the case
that a pail of cold water can be used to douse someone who finds
themselves in philosophical malaise. Existentialism didn’t follow the
ordinary course of action that had trapped philosophy for hundreds of
years. With the magnifying glass on our action, Nietzsche and others
formed an important set of reflections that shape the individual given the
will to do so. Nietzsche’s work was based on the idea that a person is only
as strong as their philosophy. Instead of whining, he admonished doing
something about it—built on a sort of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger’ core principle.
The one thing that we all have in common is that we struggle,
particularly with basic everyday dilemmas. Our philosophical distinctions
guide our actions. We are all philosophers despite the fact that most of us
don’t recognize it. We operate from a central philosophy, a narrative about
who we are and why things should be done a certain way. The ups and
downs seems to carry us through our lives. It is because of this fact that
we revel in a good story. Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes the reader through a
disturbing satire. We treasure theatrical representations of people who lead
lives too fantastical to be real but who share the same challenges that we
all face. I think narratives are one of the most fundamental ways that we
take to new ideas.
The basic constructs of what it means to be happy, to have
purpose, and to be secure with the self are all philosophical principles.
While the way these principles are defined for each individual can vary,
they invariably decide the way the lines are drawn on the map of our
understanding. Since philosophy usually isn’t taught until college, a lot of
people are not fortunate enough to have a decent introduction to it, let
alone to be able to distill the over two-thousand years of wisdom into a
functional system with practical applications. Nevertheless, when we
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examine truth through a philosophical lens, it gives psychology an
enriched toolkit to work with. We cannot begin to understand our emotions
unless we look under the hood at our philosophical assumptions.
Without an ethical frame of mind, the details tend to bleed off the
page. It is hard to keep identity structured, society compartmentalized, and
problems prioritized. This is the exact scenario a person will find
themselves in if they’re not equipped to think critically. It’s all cat-and
mouse without knowing the layout. Things can end in ruin. The interesting
exceptions to this rule of thumb includes happy accidents of good fortune
which seem as random as genetic anomalies. All great stories do two
things; they tell a narrative that involves characters and setting, but they
also give the viewers a glimpse into the rulebook. Philosophical principles
are the laws of logic that govern the world as we know it.
No matter what drama plays out, the philosophical structure
remains the same or is modified based on the new information provided
by learning the most up-to-date set of facts. We diagnose problems in our
lives much like a mechanic finds the problem with an automobile. First,
we study the symptoms. Our psychological sailboat ventures as far as the
mind can dream. It is a vehicle for navigating the dark waters of our
philosophical assumptions. Those assumptions are constructed either by
deduction or induction. There is only ever one correct deductive truth
whereas induction allows for the most true answer based on present
information. It is an open system built on evidence.
If we are detectives in our own lives, solving problems, and
moving forward through the drama, it behooves us to learn the rules of the
game. My intention in designing the Dialectic Method Therapy (DMT)
system was to incorporate the most viable philosophical constructs from
the greatest minds in written history, and to apply the fruits of their lifelong
projects to the field of clinical psychology. Even Freud drew heavily on
Plato for his metaphysical assumptions. The two branches of knowledge
have been pulled in opposite directions when they have the same end: to
tell us more about what it means to be human and what it means to be
happy.
A lot of the confusion surrounding philosophy is a lack of proper
context for the information. Perhaps a lecturer will take a historical
approach to explaining changes in thought over time. It may be the case
that religion informs philosophy so much so that the latter is lost in
translation. We have underdeveloped definitions for the philosophical
assumptions that construct our reality, explain our feelings, and that help
us cope with our day-to-day challenges. DMT aims at taking the best of
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the West, the jewel of the East, the critical thinking of modern
philosophers, and the satire of storytelling—reordered as a therapeutic modality.

5
I wrote my graduate thesis on Ethics in Business according to the
Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, but my fervor for research only
intensified as every overturned stoned revealed hidden treasures, and
consequently more stones to be overturned. No one particular school of
philosophical thought seems to apply to the broad range of mental and
emotional concerns as a generic, one-size-fits-all remedy. As I developed
my ideas and understanding of the practical impacts that philosophy has
in our lives, the more I noticed that these different philosophies really do
pick up where others leave off. The fulcrum for the application of
philosophy is meaning and utility. If a philosophy is not providing either,
then it’s not practical.
Philosophical practice, also called philosophical counseling, says
that philosophy can be used as a therapeutic approach to broaden a client’s
mind to recognize the limitations of self and society. It is an examination
of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Freud pulled wisdom from past
philosophical traditions to construct his mental and emotional framework.
DMT is a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy where the client retrain
patterns of thoughts and behaviors. While the origins of stress-inducing
phenomena can vary, the anguish is the same. There are a common set of
fallacies in our reasoning. The traditional approach of psychology is to
analyze emotional distress as the aftereffect of some activating event or
traumatic scenario. Philosophical practice reconstructs the client’s
reasoning to pinpoint the source of distress.
Our philosophical assumptions are how we orient ourselves to the
truth and to the world at large. It is a part of our heritage that has been
pushed to the sidelines of our minds. However, the practical and tactical
advantages to using philosophy as a means of reshaping our lives cannot
be defined. Boethius personified philosophy as a lady. Like a lot of
women, philosophy has been taken for granted. Science, politics,
economics, and a lot of the literary classics blossomed from the pursuits

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and accomplishments of philosophy. It’s the real primordial soup, for the
mind anyway—the first matter of Alchemy. Our understanding of what is
true, what is good, and why we should care at all are questions that the
finest minds ever have already addressed.
What I propose with DMT is that by aligning one’s philosophical
assumptions with what is true and fair, the psyche will be alleviated and
symptoms abated. It is a hypothesis that has been tested with my clients,
and shows great promise. It is built on the shoulders of philosophical giants
from the ancient past. While philosophical assumptions powerfully
reframe the mind, there are chronic mental health conditions that demand
careful assessment and consistent treatment from licensed mental health
providers. If you or someone you know is exhibiting signs of severe mental
illness, severe emotional disability, substance use disorder or chronic co
occurring disorders, please seek the appropriate help.
On a whole, the DMT system is an easy-to-understand model
designed to be applied in cases of poor reasoning. Reasoning is exhibited
by 1) the philosophical rules to which we subscribe; 2) the way we rate an
outcome, emotion, or event; or 3) applying critical thinking to the way we
conduct ourselves. The implications of applying philosophical
practicalities are virtually endless and easily extend to other branches of
knowledge. Our approach to business, relationships, art, and education are
all due for a reappraisal. When the world begins to feel stagnant, chances
are we’re operating on bad philosophical assumptions. Regardless, life
keeps moving forward in vivid, dramatic fashion. The branch of
knowledge best equipped to redress our cognitive dissonance and
existential crisis is philosophy.
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Part 1
Western Thought
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8

Aristotle
Aristotle was a student of Plato and a teacher to Alexander the
Great. His main concern was making sense of the natural world. In doing
this, he also created an ethical framework that befits the style of the
Western mind. With his Logic and Ethics, Aristotle bridged the good with
happiness and contemplation. Aristotle thinks of happiness as originating
in virtue and goodness. He emphasized duty, obligation, and character
development as important human concerns.1 In being a student of the
Academy in Athens, Aristotle also carries the torch of Socrates and the
Socratic method of dialectic distillation.
The desire for philosophical knowledge of which Aristotle spoke
cannot be pursued in the attitude of the common sense, but instead in an
effort to decide what can be known in any given realm. The first step
toward the kind of knowledge that Aristotle had in mind is the Socratic
realization that we do not yet know the self. Socrates affirmed our
universal ignorance as the predicament of man with his maxim “know
thyself.” The self, however, like the virtues can be slippery; they evade
1Lou Marinoff, Plato not Prozac (New York: HarperCollins Publishing,
1999), 58.
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being pinned down, but these definitions are of crucial importance in how
a person structures their mental image of the world.
The virtuous course of action, for Aristotle, is the middle ground,
a mean between excess and deficiency. His golden mean is not the same
for every act. Each mean is relative to each person’s circumstances.
Learning what this middle ground means requires abstract thought since it
is not a definition to be retained or even a principle to be observed.
Aristotle maintained that the lived experience of social life allowed each
citizen to have access to the true order of things. Aristotle offered a
coherent account of practical philosophy that has appealed to Christians
because it is designed to answer existential questions about man’s place in
the world and to reduce associated emotions of worry and self-doubt.
It allowed for the gentleman to be the exemplar of moral agency.
For Aristotle, nature sometimes fails in achieving its ends. The ethical
system involved in Aristotle’s work grants the contemplative person the
deliberation of contingencies that occur within the mind and a system for
taming its unkempt recesses. Aristotle’s criteria for virtues consists of 1)
being an activity; 2) being able to be a command; 3) being the most
simplistic notion of well-being in a certain respect; and 4) being able to be
practiced throughout the course of life.2 The definition of well-being is a
consensus view, and at the same time, improves upon it to form not only
ideas but ideals.
Well-being is an activity in accord with virtue. “Virtue is the
spring from which good activity flows, pleasure its natural
accompaniment, and prosperity its normal precondition; though Aristotle
is careful to add that fine character may ‘shine through’ adverse
circumstances.”3 Part of the self builds an argument or a plan, and another
part follows that plan or rule. The two types of virtues, for Aristotle, are
the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues. If the moral agent is virtuous,
the conclusion of its moral reasoning is a good act. If morality is
determined and can be explained without a list of non-fundamental
principles that assess the rightness and wrongness of actions and practices,
then applied ethics can move forward without an appeal to normative
ethics.
Aristotle classified three different types of knowledge: 1)
theoretical (episteme); 2) productive (techne); and 3) practical (phronesis).
2Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1097b13.
3Sir David Ross, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 1995), 202.
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Episteme is knowledge “pursued for its own sake.”4 Epistemology is
derived from episteme. Techne is productive; it signifies doing something
rather than understanding anything. As a therapeutic modality, techne
would be “a technique or instrument for reducing stress.”5 Phronesis
means practical knowledge pursued “as a means to conduct.”6
The main ideas behind ethics which Aristotle characterized
include knowing how to act in a particular situation (phronesis), knowing
how to be virtuous (arete), and knowing how to practice goodwill
(eunoia). Phronesis, for Aristotle, is for being virtuous. The attributes of
phronesis consist of deliberation about values with reference to praxis, that
which is oriented toward action. In order to practice phronesis, Aristotle
argued that a practical value-based rationality is required along with a
social awareness. For the purposes of exploring ethics, it is necessary to
look to scientific reasoning.
Aristotle says choice is desire pursuing what reason asserts to be
good.7 To be ethical, a person should be congruent with prudence and
moral virtues. Aristotle’s moral choice (proairesis) depends on a scientific
level of moral reasoning first which corresponds to Aquinas’s concepts of
first principles and synderesis; and secondly it depends on a prudential
level of practical reasoning that corresponds to Aquinas’s concept of
prudence. Ethical virtues are the excellence of the appetite—moral desire
grounded in thought. Practical knowledge cannot be separated from the
concrete action.
Ethics is a practical activity; it cannot persist without the
excellence of desire. The moral virtues perfect the appetite, rendering
people able to live in harmony with their desires to achieve the best moral
good and the highest pleasure. In order to evaluate a decision, it is first
necessary to examine the formula for such an outcome. For Aristotle,
prudential reasoning (proairesis), the efficient cause of moral action,
consists of desire (orexis) and thought (logos). Logos, reasoning with an
end in sight,8 is generally used for calculative reasoning. Aristotle says a
4Ross, Aristotle, 197.
5Warren Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind: Thomistic Prudence and
Contemporary Mindfulness Practices,” Journal of the Society of Christian
Ethics 35 (2015), 96.
6Ross, Aristotle, 197.
7Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” 1139a33.
8Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” 1139a31.
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decision (logos) is a desire (orexis) informed by deliberation.9 His notion
of prudential reasoning leads to right action (recta ratio).
In Aristotelian virtue ethics, having sound moral judgment means
being disposed to living a characteristically human life. A virtue ethics
criterion of right action in the context of ethics would be directed toward
the proper goal. If a person seeks to examine their own moral standing,
they can assess their particular actions for desirable features that serve the
good. Aristotle affirmed the supremacy of philosophic life. Aristotle’s
notion of nature resisted being fully adoption by the Western mind until
Thomas Aquinas.
9Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,”1139a23-24.
12
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine was a North African philosopher and theologian. He
preached that redemption is not in this world, but awaits in the next. He is
best known for Confessions and City of God. Augustine, the Bishop of
Hippo, was a Platonist. Augustine invented the doctrine of original sin. He
reconciled scripture with Aristotle’s philosophy. He thought that
Aristotle’s works were the best in describing human reason and saw that
the triumphs of philosophic reason could be transformed and transcended
by faith without negating them. He commended Aristotle for speaking on
happiness as the goal, but he also showed that the ancient Greeks were
ultimately ineffective in charting a course to achieve it.
Augustine recognized that philosophy could be used to make the
Christian faith intelligible to those who were not Christian. But just as he
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was effective in using sacred writings as a philosophical framework, he
also championed for Aristotle’s arguments in defending faith. He
recognized that the temporal and spiritual realms often intersect in daily
life. Augustine saw the deficiency and pride in Aristotle’s claim to self
sufficiency while remaining respectful of the philosophical achievements.
He did this by viewing it as a part of the revealed teachings of faith.
Augustine boiled man’s existential dilemma down to choosing between
the goods that Aristotle offered and the promises of Heaven. His solution
to the problem of human goodness was that it required faith.
Human reason alone, he thought, could not grasp the subtle
dimensions of the Christian doctrine. Augustine brought the larger whole
of philosophic reason into sharper focus. He spoke of Christian values in
terms of their supernatural foundations in charity. He believed Christianity
demanded rigorous civil contribution and positive relations. He positioned
the City of God as the highest order, but he acknowledged the value of the
earthly city regardless of its temporal nature. “Because he had identified
the Church with his civitas Dei, Augustine clearly implied the need for a
theocracy, a state in which secular power, symbolizing civitas terrena,
would be subordinate to spiritual powers derived from God.”10
The Church offered reconciliation, a permanent end to humanity’s
general sense of perturbation. “Aristotle claims that the City of Man is a
“perfect community,” a comprehensive partnership in the good life,
ordered by justice.”3 Augustine vocalized an apostolic vision. The
concession of Aristotle’s City of Man for Augustine’s City of God is a
point Aquinas drives home from the opening of his Summa Theologica.
“It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge
revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason.
Firstly, indeed, because man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses
the grasp of his reason.”11
10 William A. Manchester, World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind.
Little, Brown & Co (1992), 10.
11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Benziger Bros (1947), 1.
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Prudence
Moral virtue is primarily acquired through habit and practice
rather than reasoning per se. The moral virtues themselves take a particular
form in the life of the agent. Aristotle posits that the development of the
intellect abides by the same processes as pleasure of the flesh. Pleasure is
not the goal, but rather there are certain activities that produce pleasure.
Aristotle’s view is that leading a life of contemplation results in the
primary pleasure of the intellect. Individuals naturally find their way to
pleasure. Likewise, a middle state is naturally reached after deficiency and
excess are exhausted. Moral virtues like prudence are rational states of
character.
15
Aristotle and Aquinas agree that there must be some end to which
human life is ordered. The various internal goods remain disordered and
potentially subversive if the self is not organized to a proper end. Without
the shared end, there is no way of signifying the overriding good by which
various internal goods may be evaluated and qualified. Prudence and the
moral virtues are deeply intertwined. The moral virtues, which are
embodied dispositions to act toward that which is good, require the act of
prudence. Prudence sets the proximate ends toward which the moral
virtues are properly directed.
Prudence and the moral virtues—justice, fortitude, and
temperance—are interdependent. The moral virtues require prudence to
specify the goods worth pursuing. These moral virtues cannot exist
without prudence, but prudence can also not exist without the moral
virtues. Prudence is not a technique for improving success in relationships
that leaves the self unchanged. It is a properly ethical, formational practice
that requires other moral virtues. Prudence aims not only at the flourishing
of an individual but the flourishing of family and the community. A
prudent choice is necessarily virtuous. Prudence integrates the speculative
and practical intellect and the moral and intellectual virtues.
A prudent person is trustworthy, fair, and honest, and combines
thoughtfulness with an ability to act decisively. The agent is respectful of
rules but is not bound by them. Prudence integrates reason and emotion,
and plays a regulative role to find the mean for moral virtues. Aquinas
argues prudence is not innate but must be acquired from education and
experience. Prudence requires prior knowledge of proper ends and proper
training of the emotions. “Virtue is cultivated by repeatedly and
consistently performing virtuous acts.”12 Prudence depends on ethical
scientific knowledge. Aristotle’s Ethics is a scientific treatment to assist in
the decision-making process with respect to speech and action.
Prudence deals with contingent truths similar to other intellectual
virtues of art, but prudence operates with regard to action, not just in
making external things. Art can exist without moral virtue whereas
prudence cannot. In the Thomistic view, prudence integrates the agent
with the action and the individual with the community. “[Prudence] always
regards the flourishing of others.”13 Prudential knowledge is directed
toward practical reasoning which identifies the right action. As an
12 Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind,” 97.
13 Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind,” 94.
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intellectual virtue, it is directed toward action rather than contemplation.14
Prudence is an intellectual virtue that requires concurrent moral virtue for
its sustainability. It demonstrates a way of living in which intellect, desire,
and emotion are harmoniously integrated. “Prudence promotes and allows
for stable self-identity and fulfilling interpersonal relationships.”15
Prudential reasoning is the combined work of desire and thought
to form a practical syllogism. Particulars require the universal knowledge
which generates the major premise. This results in scientific knowledge
and ethical virtues. It only exists relative to an agent. Prudence bridges
speculative and practical reasoning as well as the intellectual and moral
virtues. Prudence takes a particular form. The moral virtues require
prudence for direction. The intellect can only be rightly disposed to ends
if the intellectual appetite, the will, is rightly directed toward the good.
The practice of good habits is more than a strategy; it forms the
core principles of its ethics. Ethics is a philosophical practice that
examines activity. The moral virtues and prudence form an ethical
standard by which actions are examined. They inform judgments. The
practical syllogism is a method of reconstruction. It orders the emotional
reasoning behind decisions that become habits. This ethical practice, or
praxis, developmentally changes the moral agent and the external world.
People have a moral status, and are, as moral agents, obligated to reconcile
individual goals with society’s best interest.
Prudence undergirds these intentional acts that shape the self
internally and reframe the world externally. The application of ethics is an
examination of mental rules to which activity conforms. Prudence leads to
flourishing when the rule of reasoning and the case agree. The constant
practice of accountability and mindfulness of purpose encourages coherent
choices and gets at moral excellence by avoiding wrong action. The
practice of ethics comports with the Western sentiment of charity; those
elements come together to make a code of conduct that promotes a
healthier psychology.
14 Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind,” 89.
15 Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind,” 83.
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Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas emphasizes the unity of thought and will in action.
Aquinas considers the passions to be rooted in desires for particular goods
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as mediated by the senses; therefore, passions are rational. They are caused
and partly constituted by sense desires that come under the influence of
the rational appetite via the will. Passionate desires that are not properly
integrated into the agent’s overall commitments tend to evade evaluation
which leads to cognitive dissonance. Passionate desires that are in accord
with the agent’s overall commitment to doing good reinforce the agent’s
perception of moral duty.
On Aquinas’s view, human behavior is conditioned by the agent’s
beliefs and emotional dispositions. Aquinas’s virtue ethics provides a way
of reflecting on the moral significance of beliefs, emotional reactions, and
intentional acts. Moral agents act toward a purpose. This end instantiates
the notion of a moral good. The agent determines concrete goals or ends
for particular situations. The moral agent determines which actions would
be good to achieve in each scenario. Having decided what would be good
to achieve, the agent recognizes the need to will it into being and
coordinates with the intellect to accomplish just that.
Building on Aristotle’s theory of action, Aquinas conceived of his
natural law also as a practical guide of moral action. For Aquinas,
prudence is an integrative virtue—integrating intellect and will, theory and
context, action and agent, reason and emotion, and the ultimate ends of
human existence. With the reintroduction of Aristotle to the West, Aquinas
had at his disposal the philosophic resources to claim not only that
socialization is natural to man, but that it was also necessary for his
temporal felicity. Aquinas, like Aristotle, viewed moral excellence simply
as the perfection of human reasoning.
Aquinas shows that morality is rooted in the natural order. Moral
virtue, he thought, was acquired precisely by habitual living. He argues
that laws were rules or measures by which an agent is led to or restrained
from acting a particular way. He put natural law within the context of
eternal law—timeless universal rational orderliness—and divine law. He
describes a practical virtue that renders people more attentive to context,
more aware of body and emotion, and more capable of confronting
challenges of living and developing secure relationships. He called it
prudentia. His description of prudence draws on Aristotle. Aquinas’s
prudentia echoes Aristotle’s practical wisdom (phronesis), the “truthful
rational characteristic of acting in matters involving what is good for
man.”16
16 Kinghorn, “Presence of Mind,” 88.
20
The will, according to Aquinas, is the intellectual appetite. A
corollary is that the sense appetite is directed by reason. Reason refers to
the intellect and the will put together. Sense appetites are blind powers.
Even animals possess a common sense which is capable of sensing a
unified entity on the outskirts of their perception. This integrated product
is called a percept. “[It is] present to the sensing subject only when the
sensed object which is its originating source is actually being sensed by
the subject.”17
Aquinas says, “There is no reason why those things which may be
learned from philosophical science, so far as they can be known by natural
reason, may not also be taught [to] us by another science so far as they fall
within revelation.”18 Thomistic virtue ethics says that if a person seeks the
good, they should look at what they mean by good and also how they relate
to the world. With the purpose of sound judgement, philosophy teaches
and explains the reasons behind the way things are. By virtue of aligning
the intellect and the will, we can take back control of our emotions.
Logic informs us that we have an opportunity to embrace the
divine through human laws. It still takes the willingness to follow through.
Our moral evolution doesn’t require further divine intervention. Instead,
we need to embrace the law of the land—the natural order inscribed on
our very hearts. Negative emotions are rough and rugged like the Wild
West. But the mind connects the self with social conditions to create a
shared experience built on positive emotions that disarm self-limiting
assumptions.
17 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 77.
18 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 1.
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Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm’s argument something-that-which-nothing-greater-can
be-thought is phrased the way it is to be accessible to someone who
otherwise may be utterly in the dark about a term like ‘God’ which is at
least ambiguous and at the very worst equivocal, in which God is possibly
responsible for the cause or allowance of the evils in the world. God is
great by nature and the logically necessary entity who propagates all that
is good and sentient.
Anselm’s Proslogion in its entirety is a valuable piece of
philosophy. Anselm is trying to prove that which is self-evident. There are
pros and cons to this and it’s articulated no better than in the opening of
his reply to Gaunilo. Anselm says that his appeal is to the Christian and
not to the fool. Once Gaunilo, who is playing devil’s advocate, starts in,
you instantly see what’s happening, and that is a combat match of rhetoric.
But arguing with a fool can and will make you feel foolish.
Anselm’s Proslogion is as beautiful as the Tao te Ching. The
chapters on God’s goodness, justice and mercy are comforting. Anselm’s
notion of humanity being a part of God is a heartwarming sentiment.
Choosing the bread of angels over the bread of sorrow, Anselm’s work
resounds tones of ‘this over that.’ We get closest to prayer when we
stumble and say, “My heart is made bitter by its desolation; I beseech You,
Lord, sweeten it by Your consolation.” A message of glory is at the core
of Anselm’s ontological argument.
Father of the scholastics, Anselm was exiled from England twice
during his life for fighting for the separation of an individual’s spiritual
practice from civil obedience. His legacy was his work in reconciling the
work of ancient Greek ideas with Christian ideology. Anselm’s
ontological argument accomplished this objective. The psychological
implication is that our dispositions are only as fortified as the philosophical
ideas supporting them.
The cautionary tale that can be gleaned from the conclusion of
Anselm’s work on will, power, and necessity offers an interesting
perspective. His ideas are considered philosophical fragments that
represent an incomplete treatise on our “doing” and “being able.” It is
thought that Anselm didn’t have access to Aristotle’s work on power and
action which, it can only be speculated, would have led to substantially
different findings. It seems, as a general maxim, that ideas are meant to be
22
shared, and liberally used as a basis for further refining our everyday
ethical perimeters.
23
Self-Acceptance
Aquinas is known as the patron saint of teachers. He is a symbol
of wisdom. His great legacy is that he reconciled philosophy and religion
at a time of fanaticism. He espoused the notion that people come upon the
same truths. Although he was firmly grounded in his faith, Aquinas made
it his mission to spread the message that philosophy was useful in
understanding the self and the world. While the approach is different, the
truths are the same as those found in religion, at least in reference to the
metaphysics. Both philosophy and religion are anchored in the abstract.
They argue for the delta factor, as Walker Percy calls it—that an idea or
image calls meaning and value into existence. In a world with everything,
we can, ironically, feel as though we have nothing, and worse, that we are
nothing.
This view that we are outcasts, rejects, abandoned, forgotten, and
unsupported is a logical fallacy. Our value is boundless. According to
Aquinas, “The human soul is incorruptible.” This is evident due to the fact
that a human body cannot exist without a soul, yet a soul can exist as such
outside of the body. Aquinas makes the case that it is truer to our nature
that the body is in the soul as opposed to the inverse. This is a distinction
upon which our very identity rests. The placement of the body as dominant
over the soul is rooted in Cartesian philosophy. This reflects modern man’s
internal struggle. Self-acceptance is a personal choice. It sculpts the
dimensions of value within which the self operates. Developing self
acceptance can have a profound impact on our psychological health.
There are times when we feel like we are at the end of our rope.
We may have lost everything we were working toward, and feel that we
have no back-up plan. When our value is derived from accomplishments,
our ability to feel satisfied is impaired. There is a core principle that the
great works emulate—a simple answer to life’s most perplexing queries.
The will is the act; it happens. We can watch it, and in that sense, its
objective. We can talk about free will or having the will to do or not do
something. It’s a power we can grasp. It’s also a power we can lose. We
might lose the will to go on. Viewed in either a cognition or an intention
frame of reference, our philosophy directs our feelings and rational
thought processes. The mind itself is subjective. It paints the landscapes in
24
which the action happens. Our philosophical framework defines the
relationship of the self to the world beyond.
This web of relationships creates a safety net. You can’t see it, but
you can feel it. Self-acceptance houses our rational faculty. It protects us
from the pitfalls of reasoning that lead us to believe we’re even capable of
being rejected. We naturally conjure rules to tell us if we like the person,
place or thing in question, the primary function of which is to divide value
into good and evil, better and worse, and so on until we determine a set of
virtues worth striving for. The fulcrum is emotion. Wired into us too is our
innate need for connection. Our animal instincts are propelled by desire,
but we also have intellectual affections. These are not the same as the
passions, but you could say the two are connected by emotion. Aquinas
said that well-ordered self-love is right and natural.
While Aquinas considers the passions to be rooted in desires for
particular goods, they are also rational in nature. However, if our desires
are not properly integrated into our commitments, we can experience
unnerving emotional responses. We experience loss and relief, yet we tend
to forget that we possess the latter—the ability to reformulate ourselves
and our view of the world no matter the severity of the tragedy. Aristotle
said logos is a state of knowledge (hexis). These rational states are neither
innate in a determinate form nor developed from other, higher states of
knowledge, but instead come from sense observation.
Aquinas conceived of the agent as using cognitive and appetitive
potencies in tandem. He emphasized the unity of thought and will in
action. Passion drives a person, but the motive can only be located in the
will which moves the powers of the agent by influencing the intellectual
judgments concerning what is morally good in a particular situation. We
have the option of leaning on this force of emotional resilience. Limitless
acceptance powerfully reframes our emotional state. We can project this
sense of security onto others or a higher power, but the practical
application is utilizing this unconditional self-acceptance as an emotional
protectant.
“[Aquinas] regarded “person” as a title of the highest dignity.”19
We’re separate entities out of ontological necessity. “Individuality is
something worthy of respect because it is intrinsically good.”20 Agere
sequiter esse, what a thing is, is revealed by the way it behaves. But we
are more than rational animals. We are more than bodies that have souls.
19 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 281.
20 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 285.
25
We are souls that have bodies. According to the hylemorphic theory, our
nature is a spiritual form that constitutes the material self we can know.
“What distinctly characterizes the rational soul, and gives it the mark of
uniqueness, is the two key powers of intellect and will.”21 The rational soul
cannot die; it is immortal.
21 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 292.
26

27

Jesus Christ
The relationship we have with God is a loving one. It is not that
of a subject to a king or a servant to a master. Augustine says, “The being
of God is the being strong, or the being wise, or whatever else we may say
of that simplicity whereby His substance is signified,” to which Aquinas
commented, “All names of this kind signify the divine substance.” The
name “bridegroom” we give to Christ is targeted at His relationship to the
church and his level of perfection. Aquinas says, “He can be named by us
from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the
divine essence in itself.”22 He continues, “Creatures represent Him
imperfectly… We cannot know the essence of God in this life.”23
“Bridegroom” explains Christ’s function by relating to our lives.
Aquinas argued that God’s offer of eternal life provided people
access to intellectual perfection in the beatific vision. In order to do justice
to the political and rational dimensions of human life, one eventually had
to acknowledge the supernatural end to which human life is ordered.
Aquinas’s theologically informed position was able to moderate the claims
of political life and of classical philosophy, preventing either from giving
exaggerated or incomplete accounts of the true nature of human life. For
Aquinas, politics contributed to man’s temporal felicity, but it doesn’t lead
man to his ultimate perfection. Aquinas conceived of philosophy and
theology as complete, independent sciences within their own respective
orders.
As a Christian, he could assume the legitimacy of philosophical
speculation. Grace, for Aquinas, did not destroy nature but perfected it by
elevating nature to a supernatural end that it could not achieve on its own.
Aquinas’s approach allowed the Christian to affirm the legitimacy and
22 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 1.
23 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 2.
28
intelligibility of the realms of grace and nature and the harmony between
revelation and reason. Aquinas subordinated Aristotle’s thought to the
service of elucidating the truth of the Christian faith. Aquinas believed that
such flourishing best occurred in the political community, the most perfect
of all human societies. He showed that morality is rooted in the natural
order and that political life has its own natural desirability. Moral virtue,
he thought, was acquired precisely by the repetition of those acts which
the law prescribed or by habitual living and education under good laws.
Aquinas’s position was that making laws was directed toward an
end and that the direction was the responsibility of the one to whom the
end belonged. He said an unjust law was a human law that was not rooted
in natural law. He put natural law within the context of the eternal law,
timeless universal rational orderliness, and divine law, that which is
revealed as God’s design. In the Christian tradition, Jesus died for our sins
so that we can live with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity, with
its ethos of grace and charity, has become an everyday part of life for
hundreds of millions of people. The Magisterium is the guiding hand of
the Church’s stance on natural law. Catholic wisdom from the Vicar of
Christ distilled years of contemplation and study to assist us in our moral
quandary. The Magisterium is vast, but in its expansiveness are there
poignant reminders of that which has become obscured or forgotten for
one reason or another.
Budziszewski says, “Christianity resists being tamed; it cannot be
reduced either to a mere civic function on the one hand, or to a mere
philosophy on the other.”24 He also mentions the doctrine of imago Dei.
Man is made in the image and likeness of God, (Ad imaginem et
similitudinem Dei). Man feels a sense of responsibility for himself and his
actions. Man also feels guilt when he does wrong and pleasure when acts
virtuously. Therefore, he feels responsible to someone, namely God. To
this extent, we are wayfarers; we are all trying to find our way back to
God. The Beatific Vision (Visio divinae essentiae) is unique for every
wayfarer. “Insofar as this light allows us to be aware of God’s presence,
the knowledge we have is direct; insofar as this light is lesser than the light
of glory, which we receive in the Beatific Vision, the knowledge we have
24 J. Budziszewski. The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,
Theory, and Sign of Contradiction. (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014),
Afterword.
29
is partial.”25 This vision is communion with the immaterial. The Beatific
Vision appears to someone about something, but the vision is not the thing
which it represents.
Natural law is an internal moral compass. It is also said to be the
set of instructions written on our hearts. In natural law, there is an absolute
right. While the Decalogue is not exclusively natural law, there is ample
overlap. The Decalogue is scriptural revelation. We already have natural
law, but this begs the question of whose natural law are we following.
Natural law is the participation of reasoning creatures in eternal law. Logic
informs us that we have an opportunity to embrace the divine through
human law. By aligning the intellect and will, we evolved beyond our
current state. Our moral evolution doesn’t require further divine
intervention. We need only embrace the law of the land—the natural
universal order of things inscribed on our very hearts.
“God, says philosophy, is both immanent and transcendent. By
His immanence He lives and acts in the intimate metaphysical depths of
everything that exists. He is ‘everywhere.’ By His transcendence He is so
far above all being, that no human and limited concept can contain and
exhaust His Being, or even signify it except by analogy.”26 This insight by
Thomas Merton shifts our point of view to eternity (sub specia
aeternitatis). God is in a class by Himself (sui generis); for Him “not to
be” reduces to absurdity (reductio ad absurdum); all life comes from life,
(omne vivum ex vivo). Despite philosophy’s attempts to wrangle the self
and the world, we still suffer from an existential crisis. The remedy for this
despair is simply following the instructions manual that has always been
written on our hearts. It has come to be called natural law, the guiding
principle.
David Novak says, “Natural law is a kind of ethical
formulation.”27 Natural law, due to its internal and subjective nature, needs
a measure of objectivity. Well-respected doctrine of antiquity have been
used to corroborate these moral parameters. Natural law is a fundamental
principle that undergirds human existence. These moral truths are
25 Douglas A. Ollivant. Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of
Knowing. (New York: CUA Press, 2002), 258.
26 Thomas Merton. The Silent Life. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), 2.
27 David Novak, “Natural Law, Human Dignity and the Protection of
Human Property.” in Profit, Prudence and Virtue: Essays in Ethics, Business
and Management, ed. James Stoner and Samuel Gregg (Exeter: Imprint
Academic, 2009), 37.
30
inviolable and non-substitutable. “We are not permitted to transgress [the
natural laws] for the sake of supposedly ‘greater’ ends, [and] we are not
permitted to trade them off against each other.”28 Aquinas’s theory of
natural law was a form of principled reasoning, a kind of rational logic.
The morality has “an objective and rational basis and constitutes an
intelligible orderly system.”29
Aquinas structured his moral theory to be teleological. His
approach identified fundamental ends toward which humans are oriented.
Moral requirements are given as to the reasoning necessary to achieve
these ends. Moral prohibitions are given with respect to the reason that
would be destructive concerning particular goods. “The virtues can then
be conceptualized as habits of character whose possession enables a
person to achieve these goods.”30 Aquinas’s theory of natural law is both
an ethic of principles and an ethic of virtues. They are integrated by a
teleological account of basic human goods. The truth to the natural law of
which Aquinas spoke becomes more self-evident the more we make a
study of the self.
Right reason, which is derived from Aquinas’s rationalism,
consists entirely of the application of reason to action. It follows that it is
morally required to do that which natural reason dictates to be reasonable.
This approach is based on an assurance that Aquinas, in line with “the
systematizing tendencies of the decretal tradition, had placed on the ability
of human reason to discover the foundations of the natural law without
appeal to theological premises, and the implicit assumption that morality
itself must exhibit a rational and objective structure.”31 This reasonable
structure can be applied to ethical concerns. It evaluates these ethical
concerns using rhetoric which leads to an equitable distribution of benefits
and burdens. A conflict at one level may present a solution on another
level.
Vernon Bourke claims natural law provides “two radically
different meanings,”32 a theological viewpoint and another based on the
natural light of unaided human reason. Natural law with a prescriptive
theological viewpoint is not discoverable by human reason alone and
28 Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know, 49.
29 Velasquez and Brady, “Natural Law and Business Ethics,” 88.
30 Velasquez and Brady, “Natural Law and Business Ethics,” 88.
31 Velasquez and Brady, “Natural Law and Business Ethics,” 97.
32 Vernon Bourke, “Is Thomas Aquinas a Natural Law Ethicist?” The
Monist 58, no. 1 (1974), 52.
31
requires revelation to verify man’s moral hunches. Bourke holds that
theists who adopt this latter notion also think natural law “ultimately
[flows] from God’s creation of the universe but they will also insist that it
is not necessary to have a special communication from God to know that
some kinds of actions are fitting and others unfitting.”33 Bourke concedes
that even if natural law is based on a theological viewpoint, these laws
could still fall under the second meaning as long as they are discoverable
by human reason.
History and experience are of critical importance in affirming the
existence of natural law with all of its related applications. The precepts
of the natural law call for prudential discernment at the communal but not
necessarily the individual level. The law-like principles of the natural law
require the pursuit of specific goods toward which humans are naturally
inclined. The commitment to specific goods of health, happiness, and
prosperity provide a framework for evaluating ends. Natural law is an
ethical standard in which human laws are evaluated, and human laws need
a template against which they can be evaluated. Grounding decisions in
natural law is a better system than the current secular legal system because
it supplies an absolute moral right. It squares with that which is eternal and
fortifies a moral position beyond seeking perfection in this temporal realm
alone.
33 Bourke, “Thomas Aquinas,” 53.
32

33

Carl Jung
Philosophical practice and modern psychology are indebted to
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung for having developed an impressive cache of
ideas. In addition to a lifetime of systematic clinical work, Jung
demonstrated that the Freudian model of the human psyche was too narrow
and limited, and that human psychology is connected to ancient and distant
symbols that still have the power to oppress us or set us free. His
conclusion was that we must look much farther past our personal
biography and the individual unconscious to even begin to grasp the true
nature of the psyche. “[Jung] discovered that individualized psychological
events, such as dreams and visions, often form patterns of meaningful
coincidence with various aspects of consensus reality that cannot be
34
explained in terms of cause and effect.”34 Jung was a philosophical
operative but one who referenced myths more than treatises.
Freud adopted Jung “as an eldest son, anointing him as successor
and crown prince”35 during a spring visit in Vienna in 1909. Jung,
however, has other curiosities. He had been “a polytheist all his life; that
is to say, had always known that the ultimate “One” which cannot be
named (the ‘inconceivable God’) is manifest in many forms, these
appearing as pairs-of-opposites.”36 Jung, unlike Freud, thought we ought
to look outside of repressed sexual ideation in order to properly examine
the psychological construct that is creating mischief. “With the active
intervention of the intellect a new phase of the unconscious process begins:
the conscious mind must now come to terms with figures of the unknown
woman (‘anima’), the unknown man (‘the shadow’), the wise old man
(‘mana personality’), and the symbols of the self.”37
Jung was a curious supporter of the Christian narrative. Although,
it was his ultimate position that the religion as it has come to be did not
provide the best backdrop for his own psychological health, he never
discounted the need for the Christian narrative and others like it. His work
was a radical shift from the largely biographical, personalistic approach to
the psyche. Jung’s readings into symbolism created a larger, cultural,
historical, and even mythological orientation that became the stamp of his
unique psychological research. He would ask, “What is the myth you are
living?”38
His research indicated that while the “voices and impulses” from
this inner core might be “weak, subtle and delicate, very easily drowned
out by learning, by cultural expectations, by fear of disapproval,” it was
nevertheless true that: “Authentic selfhood can be defined in part as being
able to hear these impulse-voices within oneself.” He said: “No
psychological health is possible unless this essential core of the person is
fundamentally accepted, loved and respected.” Nearly a hundred years
ago, William James, one of the fathers of modern psychological research,
reflected on how we set up arbitrary boundaries that fence in our psyches.
34 Stanislav Grof. The Holotropic Mind. (New York: HarperCollins,
1993), 12.
35 C.G. Jung. The Portable Jung. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988),
xvii.
36 Jung. The Portable Jung, xxvii.
37 Jung. The Portable Jung, 358.
38 Jung. The Portable Jung, xxi.
35
Like Jung and Maslow, he made urgent pleas to open ourselves up to the
vast possibilities inherent there. “Most people live… in a very restricted
circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of
their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general.”39
“The nearer we approach the middle of life, and the better we have
succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social
positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and
the right ideals and principles of behavior.”40 Money-making, social
achievement, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature, not
culture. Man’s values, and even his body, do tend to change into their
opposites. “We suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of
unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the
social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality.”41
We might compare masculinity and femininity and their psychic
components to a definite store of substances of which, in the first half of
life, unequal use is made. A man consumes his storehouse of masculine
substance and has left over only the bit of feminine substance, which must
then be put to use.
A symbolic work is gripping, but is rarely a purely aesthetic
enjoyment. “Works that are openly symbolic do not require this subtle
approach; their pregnant language cries out at us that they mean more than
they say. We can put our finger on the symbol at once, even though we
may not be able to unriddle its meaning to our entire satisfaction. A symbol
remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings. ”42 As further
contents of consciousness, we can also distinguish volitional processes and
instinctual processes. The former are defined as directed impulses, based
on perception, which are at the disposal of so-called free will. The latter
are impulses originating in the unconscious or directly in the body and are
characterized by lack of freedom and by compulsiveness. A perceptive
processed may be either directed or undirected.43
The directed processes are rational, the undirected
irrational.44 Although the two things cannot be compared, the close
connections which undoubtedly exist between them call for
39 Grof. The Holotropic Mind, 86.
40 Jung. The Portable Jung, 12.
41 Jung. The Portable Jung, 12.
42 Jung. The Portable Jung, 315.
43 Jung. The Portable Jung, 26.
44 Jung. The Portable Jung, 27.
36
investigation.45 The intensity of conscious interests and activities
gradually diminishes, leading either to apathy or to a regressive
development of the conscious functions. “They revert to an infantile and
archaic level and undergo something like a degeneration.”46 But the source
is underground and therefore the way leads underneath: only down below
can we find the fiery source of life. These depths constitute the natural
history of man, his causal link with the world of instinct. Unless this link
be rediscovered no loops and no self can come into being.47
“Western psychology knows the mind as the mental functioning
of the psyche. It is the ‘mentality’ of an individual. An impersonal
Universal mind is still to be met within the sphere of philosophy, where it
seems to be a relic of the original human soul.”48 It is in fact not merely an
individual but a collective problem, for the animation of the unconscious
which has become so noticeable in recent times has, as Schiller foresaw,
raises questions which the nineteenth century never even dreamed of.
Nietzsche decided in his Zarathustra to reject the “snake” and the “ugliest
man,” thus exposing himself to an heroic cramp of consciousness which
led, logically enough, to the collapse foretold in the same book.49
“There is no conflict between religion and science in the East,
because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no
religion upon mere faith.”50 The Eastern assertion is that the Universal
Mind is without form (arupa-loka), yet is the source of all forms and that
which seems to be psychologically justified. “I’m so far as the forms or
patterns of the unconscious belong to no time in particular, being
seemingly eternal, they convey a peculiar feeling of timelessness when
consciously realized.”51 In the East, the mind itself is the very essence of
existence; while in the West, we have just begun to understand that it is
the essential condition of cognition including the cognitive existence of
the world.
45 Jung. The Portable Jung, 301.
46 Jung. The Portable Jung, 318.
47 Jung. The Portable Jung, 377.
48 Jung. The Portable Jung, 485.
49 Jung. The Portable Jung, 402.
50 Jung. The Portable Jung, 485.
51 Jung. The Portable Jung, 498.
37
Courage
To be courageous is to desire what is good and honorable, despite
the cost in terms of personal discomfort and danger. A courageous person
must be temperate, but is careful enough to embrace opportune moments.
Courage is noteworthy because it shares mechanics present in a wide array
of other virtues such as hope and endurance; however, the states and
shades of courage diminish when approaching extreme feelings. Courage
38
is led with noble actions and the ends are also noble. Courage is not
exorbitantly for-profit nor is it charitable to its detriment. Courage directs
bravery. 1 Corinthians says, “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be
men of courage; be strong.”
The Beatific Vision, “is unique for [every] wayfarer”52 Jacques
Maritain put the gravity of this vision at the forefront of his writings in the
nineteenth century and Jack Kerouac in the twentieth century. “Insofar as
this light allows us to be aware of God’s presence, the knowledge we have
is direct; insofar as this light is lesser than the light of glory, which we
receive in the Beatific Vision, the knowledge we have is partial.”53 This
vision is communion with the immaterial. The Beatific Vision is inherently
triadic. It appears to someone about something, but the vision is not the
thing which it represents.
Jacques Maritain utilizes a metaphysical foundation in his
political philosophy. Following Aquinas’s lead, he establishes morality as
an extension of an eternal law imperative. Maritain thinks it wrongheaded
to evaluate any period of history as purely good or evil. His project
advocates for a religious-pluralistic political agenda. He strongly
supported the “Century of Philosophy” and sought to unite Aquinas’s
ideas with the present day. The crux, however, is that his project failed
because politics fail to accurately represent Christian principles.
His approach as to social order draws on these values which he
refers to as a secular Christendom. Maritain’s metaphysics and theology
is able to digest present-day life problems and political issues while being
open to analysis. His project is doomed to fail because he is reluctant to
follow through entirely on the implications this kind of undertaking; he
seemed to be unaware that he has not sufficiently developed his
theory. Kozinski explains it is integrally comprehensive ontologically and
epistemologically, but also theologically comprehensive which entails
several metaphysical commitments.
Maritain’s project is advocating for a religious-pluralistic political
agenda that attempts to satisfy the metaphysical and epistemological
questions brought up by Aquinas that have been obscured since the
publication of the Summa Theologica. Maritain offers his own political
sentiments. He embraced the French Enlightenment. He tried to unite the
ancient and modern. Aquinas’s ideas launched in the middle ages, a
52 Henk J. M. Schoot, Christ the ‘Name’ of God: Thomas Aquinas on
Naming Christ. (Leuven, Belgium, Peeters, 1993), 184.
53 Ollivant, Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, 258.
39
mission to unite ancient Greek philosophy with Catholic principles,
needed to be grounded in the present day.
Maritain resolves many practical, ethical issues contemporary to
our time. Phenomenology and readings into Hegel by the late modern
philosophers had put Maritain in a corner. Maritain’s approach to social
order, on the other hand, draws strongly on a political system with
Christian values—his secular Christendom, a unity of orientation with
shared aspirations. This level of reconciliation came at just the right
moment. Far left political liberalism sought to hollow out Aquinas’s
natural law which was anchored in eternal law to make a modern, purely
secular agenda.
Maritain was concerned about truth and knowledge, and his
project aimed at human flourishing on an ethical basis. Rawls’s banter
takes a more materialistic approach while still sharing many of the
anthropological views of other thinkers of his day. Social contractualists
denied the role of the sacred as necessary in the inquiry of justice.
Maritain’s metaphysics and theology was able to digest present-day life
issues and political problems while being open to analysis. This furthered
a much needed dialogue.
In Jungian psychology, the syzygy is comprised of the anima and
animus—anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. “The
recognition of the anima gives rise, in a man, to a triad, one third of which
is transcendental: the masculine subject, the opposing feminine subject,
and the transcendent anima.”54 The triad is found in language and religion.
Transubstantiation is an example of this relation. The Eucharistic elements
of the liturgy are symbols for the body and blood of Christ. In language,
the act of naming is a normative mode of thinking. The parameters of
language include this metaphysical coupling.
A sign, its object, and an interpretant describe the triadic relation.
Percy says, “The lay-science interface often leads to a reversal of roles
wherein the scientist-therapist ‘laicizes’ his sentences, while the layman
patient ‘scientizes’ his, with characteristic miscouplings attendant upon
both.”55 The metaphysical coupling signifies a relation to that which it is
not, and also asserts itself as a symbol which renders something intelligible
to someone. This is an argument for value theory whereby the truth of a
statement has epistemological significance. The triadic relation is a theory
54 C.G. Jung, The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin, 1988), 139.
55 Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Kindle edition.
40
of meaning. It is not simply an index—place holders in an ever-shifting
sea of numbers and letters.
No definition can properly house an essence and because of this
epistemology with always be wanting. Nonetheless, it’s important to know
these distinctions. Knowledge and its reach plays a vital role in our world.
Take cellular reproduction, for instance. We shed our skin cells. In fact,
every seven years we completely replace old cells with new ones. We are
physically a different person yet essentially we are identified as being the
same individual. A thing may not be the matter that composes it, but the
actions that characterize it. The replacement of cells doesn’t constitute a
different person any more than a skeleton is a lost loved one.
A perennial philosophy is more indicative of reality than of
knowledge. Conditioning implies a mastermind—a mind capable of
deceiving the vast majority of our planetary population generation after
generation would have to be of divine proportion. Thought uses ideas to
span the flow of experience and to plunge back into experience. Ideas are
not ways of escaping from time. Ideas are the constant way that thoughts
reemerge. A divine idea ties us together and exceeds societal conditioning.
Our cognition of the divine precedes our knowledge of it.
Man is made in the image and likeness of God. This is an argument
for the triadic relation. Man feels a sense of responsibility for himself and
his actions. Man also feels guilt when he does wrong and pleasure when
acts virtuously as any loyal companion would feel. Therefore, he feels
responsible to someone, namely God. A parallel is Alvin Plantinga’s Self
Refutation of Naturalism. “Naturalism recognizes only one order, the
natural order.”56 Naturalistic epistemology “conjoined with theism does
not [violate the canons of rationality; it should] therefore prefer theism to
metaphysical naturalism.”57
56 McInerny, Philosophical Psychology, 1.
57 Kelly James Clark, Readings in the Philosophy of Religion. (Toronto:
Broadview Press, 2000), 113.
41

42

43

Part 2

Eastern Thought

44

Endless Becoming
A symbol commonly seen in Chinese philosophy is the tai chi, or
the great ultimate, which is the convergence of active and passive forces
bearing the seed of the opposing nature inherently. As a force is exerted to
an extremity or polarity of a cyclical spectrum or model of transference,
yin, the passive force, exchanges dominance with yang, the active force.
This is not merely a theology or a metaphysical conundrum, but it is a
pragmatic equation of dormant elements awakening, coming to an apex of
activity, and receding back into the invisible quietude of being. The tai chi
applies to natural, or worldly, and the subtle, or parapsychological,
phenomenon, reflecting the gamut of human consciousness and the
evolution of the psyche to a harmonious union with the cosmos.
The creative tension brought about from the interaction between
yin and yang is said to arise from wu-wei, or non-doing. Seen as an
effortless action, it serves as individual spiritual ideal and political ideal
for Confucius, referring not to what is or is not being done, but to the
manner in which something is done. The state of wu-wei represents a
perfect harmony between one’s inner dispositions and external movements
as well as a state of harmony between the individual possessing virtue and
the higher power from which such virtue is imparted. The cyclical
overlapping of non-linear time in continual dynamism of universal
oneness can be divided into a stratum of philosophy in Chinese culture.
These underlying features are our organic social sense of self and the
vivacity to affect change.
The social sense of self is that which can only be found within
community. Self-cultivation, which all people are capable of, consists of
inner and outer greatness. Li is the developed virtue from the sprout of
deference and compliance, which are physiologically present, but inert
prior to awakening. It can also be said to be a set of traditional religious
and moral practices encompassing not only sacrificial offerings to spirits,
but also aspects of ritual or etiquette in daily life. By submitting to and
internalizing ritual forms, an aspiring gentleman is able to restrain
improper inborn tendencies, acquire the means to take a rightful place in
society, and thereby win the favor of Heaven, or ritually-acquired virtue
with the Mandate to rule.
The Chinese characters quan yin mean contemplation of the sound
vibration. The method includes meditation on both the inner light and the
inner sound. Through them we come to know God. Inner sound is the
primal vibration. Its nature is transcendental and therefore perceived in
silence. Jesus’s disciples called Him the “Holy Spirit” or the “Word,”
which is from the Greek word logos, meaning sound. After Shakyamuni
45
Buddha attained enlightenment, He spoke of this as well, calling it the
“drum of immortality.” Krishna equated Himself with the sound in ether.
Lao Tzu described the Tao as the “Great Tone.”
Spiritual light also manifests as an aspect of the Divine Presence.
The Supreme Master Ching Hai explains we get in contact with this Spirit,
which is a manifestation of divine Light and Vibration, and by doing so,
we know God.” Wisdom is transmitted in silence. A path to follow is the
Confucian concept of li, the traditional religious and moral practices
encompassing not only sacrificial offerings to spirits, but also aspects of
ritual or etiquette in daily life. Thoughts are transmitted between the
nervous system and the endocrine glands. Mental processes as thoughts
and emotions cannot be separated from bodily mechanisms and functions
as they are involved in biochemical and neurological activity.
Light naturally arises from dense black nothingness in an organic
pattern of growth and evolution, but since infinite light is not contained by
either space or time everything in the universe occurs in one eternal
moment where the two primordial elements of light and darkness support
and create the other. The universe being composed of atoms which are
further composed of electrons that act in a quantum field of activity based
on perception and may be in two or more places at once, or not present
anywhere if it is not being perceived. This reflect the age old riddle that if
a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, will it make a sound.
The sound or any cognitive stimulation of the senses is dependent on the
perception of it.
There is an ancient Zen koan or riddle that asks, “Who is the
master who makes the grass green?” The human perceiver is the master
that controls his or her own spectrum of vision and the depth at which
information is processed. Grass registers as green to most human eyes
because the photons of light entering the visual cortex use the entire
spectrum of light while other earthly animals perceive closer to one
extreme of either ultra-violet or infra-red. With the dissolution of duality
in a process of ascension, the microcosm, the perceiver, comes into
alignment with the macrocosm, the universe at large, or by all speculative
claims, whatever God lies beyond the cognitive system of human sense
perception.
Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra, “Wheresoever are material
characteristics there is delusion; but whoso perceives that all
46
characteristics are in fact no-characteristics “perceives the Tathagata.”58
Evans-Wentz, Miller, and Humphreys comment, “For Northern, or
Mahayanist, Buddhists, the Prajnaparamita scriptures are the most
precious and sacred of their canonical writings. Nagarjuna, the fourteenth
of the Buddhist patriarchs, who flourished during the first half of the
second century C.E. is credited with having been the first teacher publicly
to teach the supreme doctrine of the voidness as therein set forth.
According to Nagarjuna, the dynasty of buddhas, of whom the Buddha
Shakyamuni is the representative in this epoch, first enunciated the
doctrine of the voidness, apparently in a purely esoteric manner, to highly
advanced disciples.”59
While the Diamond Sutra is considered to be the work of the
fourteenth patriarch, Nagarjuna, it is likely that there was a succession of
authors and compilers extending over a period of several hundred years.60
Buddha says, “The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that
arise within it;”61 and that “Those who find consolation in limited doctrines
involving the conception of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a
separated individuality, are unable to accept, receive, study, recite, and
openly explain this discourse.”62 He urges us to bear in mind how we, as a
part, relate to the whole. “Thus,” he decrees, “it is that this unformulated
principle is the foundation of the different systems of all the sages.”63
Buddha admonishes, “If a good man or good woman studies this
discourse only so far as to receive and retain four lines, and teaches and
explains them to others, the consequent merit would be far greater;”64 “It
is impossible to retain past mind, impossible to hold on to present mind,
and impossible to grasp future mind;”65 “Those who aspire to the
consummation of incomparable enlightenment should recognize and
understand all varieties of things in the same way and cut off the arising
58 Nagarjuna. The Diamond Sutra. (Boston, Massachusetts: Shambhala
Publications, 1990), 21.
59 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 3.
60 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 11.
61 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 33.
62 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 35.
63 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 24.
64 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 29.
65 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 39.
47
of [views that are mere] aspects;”66 “My teaching of the good law is to be
likened unto a raft. The buddha-teaching must be relinquished.”67
“If such men allowed their minds to grasp and hold on to anything
they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being,
or a separated individuality; and if they grasped and held on to the notion
of things as having intrinsic qualities they would be cherishing the idea of
an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality. Likewise,
if they grasped and held on to the notion of things as devoid of intrinsic
qualities they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality,
a being, or a separated individuality. So you should not be attached to
things as being possessed of, or devoid of, intrinsic qualities.”68
Instead of the control measures of ancient Greek philosophical
constructs, the tradition of the East is to deconstruct. It is applied
philosophy in seemingly effortless fashion. The mind of the East have
sought answers to different questions than those asked by Homer or the
Roman conquerors. Instead of firm distinctions, they seek harmony and to
understand the interrelating dynamics. Victor in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein says, “Don’t intend [to] disregard more philosophical
approaches—those which stir the imagination as well as the intellect.” It
seems we in the West are incomplete. The other half harkens back to the
wisdom of the sages—those who saw it fit to adopt Confucianism,
Buddhism, or Taoism, but to embrace all three and to learn from them as
venerable teachers.
66 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 52.
67 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 23.
68 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 22.
48
Confucius
Confucius was the first Chinese thinker to work out a philosophy
of moral self-cultivation. The tradition he began is one of the oldest
schools of moral self-cultivation in the world; it is also one of the most
enduring and influential. Confucian moral philosophy can be traced back
as far as the twelfth century B.C.E., the latter part of a period known as the
Shang dynasty, and is recorded on animal bones and shells, that were used
for divination, and ceremonial vessels and instruments of bronze. In these
inscriptions, we encounter an early form of a Chinese character which in
the modern Mandarin dialect is pronounced te which means “virtue.” In
these early contexts, te was a kind of power that accrued to and resided
within an individual who had acted favorably toward a spirit or another
person.”69
Practitioners of this school of thought saw that Tao reflected a
deeper pattern within the universe itself, and when in accord with those
patterns, one was seen to be acting the “proper” way. At the same time,
because it followed these natural patterns it proved to be the most
efficacious, satisfying, and meaningful way to live, Confucius made it his
mission to preserve and spread the records detailing the practices of these
ancient sages.70 Features of Zhou dynasty ethical and religious thought
became central tenets of later Confucian moral philosophy.71 For
Confucius, li is the best guideline for achieving harmony between personal
desire and public advantage. He thought the practice of li prevented bad
actions by regulating feelings, thereby ordering an ideal society through
moral self-cultivation.
Li is seen as guarding against what is yet to come in much the
same way that laws deal with what is already past. Li inspires
respectfulness and moves people toward goodness. Mastery of li, or
kingliness without, is the Confucian vision of the junxi, or the gentleman.
The impact of li, when followed sincerely, goes beyond rules of conduct
69 Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation. (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2000), ix.
70 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 1.
71 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, xii.
49
after it is internalized. Instead of exerting effort, the individual becomes
that which had been methodology. Such inner discipline is the key to self
control on a community-wide level. Bringing about stability and security
between humans and society, it reflects organic naturalism. Taking
precedence over theoretical consistency with practical impact, it reflects
pragmatism. The junxi is not simply outer greatness, but equally composed
of inner greatness.
The way of Confucius’s gentleman was acting with dutifulness
and understanding. Li, seen in the Confucian perspective, is the outer
method mirroring the inner disposition. Representing perfect harmony
between one’s inner dispositions and external movements, it reflects the
state of wu-wei. For Confucius, rites and rituals, is the best way to achieve
harmony and create feelings to offset the negative emotions. After
mastering a rite, ritual, or art, the action becomes non-action, or wu-wei.
Therefore, the intent of li is to use it as a conduit to pass between levels of
consciousness and ascend to the Tao in harmonious reflection. An
examination of the origins of Confucianism and the accompanying rites
and rituals the practitioner applies are an undeniable reflection of the Tao.
In this view, yu-wei consciousness is nothing more than a creative
construction of information and a means of discernment with names and
concepts.
The organic pattern of the Tao is inescapable. Even when it is
thought that an individual is using yu-wei consciousness instead of the not
doing of wu-wei consciousness, that certain perception is the only hint of
separation, and even it, nevertheless, regresses back to the Tao. The
Confucian perspective on self-cultivation is relevant and effective.
Everything fits into the interrelated spectrum of being, and everything is a
reflection of Tao, Mother of the World. His system of utilizes yu-wei
consciousness inherent in human nature either by refining it, or defining
and detaching from it. Awareness of yu-wei consciousness puts the
individual in harmonious union with wu-wei, Tao in the macrocosm, and
te in the microcosm, the creative tension between yin and yang.
According to Philip Ivanhoe, author of Confucian Moral Self
Cultivation, the Mohists objected to many aspects of the Confucian vision.
They argued against the Confucian claim that our moral sense must
develop in relation to and remain partial to our immediate family. In direct
opposition to this claim, the Mohists argued that we should show equal
and impartial care for all. Mo Tzu had a relatively simple view of moral
psychology. Mohists believed that people were highly rational creatures,
and that a well-turned argument would sway any person who could follow
50
it. “They paid a great deal of attention to the form and method of
argumentation, resulting in considerable advances in logic, mathematics,
and optics, among other disciplines.”72
Mencius emerged on the scene to take up the defense of the
Confucian moral philosophy.73
Mencius taught a development model of moral self-cultivation in which
people, through practice and reflection upon their innate and fragile moral
sense, could develop and extend “moral sprouts” until they had stronger
moral dispositions.”74 He employed “thought-experiments” to argue for
the existence of moral sprouts by invoking hypothetical scenarios and then
asking the person to imagine what would occur were such an event to
transpire.75 According to Mencius, humans could realize complete and
perfect knowledge of moral “patterns” or “principles.” This endowment,
something like a complete set of innate ideas, is our basic xing, or
“nature.”76 “The xin “heart/mind” played a critically important role in this
process, being that part of the self uniquely capable of entertaining,
weighing, and choosing courses of action.”77
Yan Yuan responded by trying to fuse together Neo-Confucian
ideas in a way that made self-cultivation attainable. It conceived of a
perfectly pure endowment of li, a sort of “life principle” that guards against
the errant tendencies of our physical nature. He offered an analogy
between the “life principle” and the physical organ of sight. Yan thought
the eye was a good analogy. The socket, eyeball, and pupil are “physical
stuff” while the brightness within these that is able to see things is
“nature.” He regarded the principle of vision as endowed by Heaven. The
socket, eyeball, and pupil are also all endowed by Heaven. “So there is no
point to distinguishing what is “Heavenly endowed nature” from what is
“physical nature.” It is proper simply to say that Heaven endows people
with the nature of the eye.”78
Yan thought Confucians should have been physicians, not
scholars discussing the history of their profession. He concluded that the
Confucian moral philosophy, like traditions of music and medicine, are
72 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 15.
73 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 16.
74 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 59.
75 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 19.
76 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 47.
77 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 29.
78 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 80.
51
disciplines that one must master through prolonged effort. Studying these
disciplines involves practice, just as knowing them involves special kinds
of knowledge. While Yan tends to emphasize the role of practice to the
detriment of theory, there is a sensible intuition at the heart of his ideal
that is reflected in our own way of talking about the profession of
medicine. It is still said that physicians practice their vocation. Yan reacted
to the “philosophical speculation that had become the norm in his age. He
believed strongly in the idea that people acquire virtue as a result of the
daily practices that they pursue over time-what Alexis de Tocqueville
called the “habits of the heart.””79
Dai Zhen is the best known and most respected thinker of China’s
Qing.80 Dai was a strong ethical realist, and he believed that one
approached moral truth by getting clear about the facts. The knowledge
one gains through self-study leads to fortified moral dispositions. For Dai,
self-cultivation consisted of a critical, comprehensive, and careful
examination of the classics. Dai believed “study nourishes one’s mind just
as food nourishes one’s body.” Dai’s approach to moral self-cultivation
can be understood as an ethical expression of hermeneutics. “In regard to
moral issues, one moves from opinion to truth by discovering those things
that everyone would agree to do in a given situation, and one accomplishes
this by employing the Confucian golden rule.”81
His process of moving from “opinion” to “an unchanging
standard” culled “natural desires” by applying the Confucian golden rule.
Only “necessary” desires would then manifest themselves in actions. If
natural desires fully align with the golden rule, then they are not just
opinions, but things one must do.82 Dai’s moral philosophy is not
completely clear about an issue that is central to Mencius’s theory of moral
self-cultivation. For Mencius, morality is satisfying in the same way that
sights and sounds are satisfying. For Mencius, a special kind of joy marks
the moral act as moral. This joy also undergirds moral self-cultivation by
positive reinforcing the good. Dai endorses “any moral action one does
produces a feeling of joy, if only one reflects upon it.”83
79 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 84.
80 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 89.
81 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 92.
82 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 93.
83 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 94.
52
Chuang Tzu
Chuang Tzu championed a revolt against the Confucian moral
philosophy which, while well-meaning, became a stagnant display of
showmanship rather than an actual development of virtues. The image of
the mind as a mirror, or alternatively, as the calm surface of a body of
water which reflects all things perfectly, is not original to Buddhism, it
comes from the Chuang Tzu. When Chuang Tzu said, “The perfect man’s
heart is like a mirror. It does not search after things. It does not look for
things. It does not seek knowledge, just responds. As a result he can handle
everything and is not harmed by anything”84 he means that the sage reacts
to the world in perfect harmony with the way it is by allowing his innate
nature to spontaneously and pre-reflectively manifest itself.”85
Chuang Tzu emerges as an extraordinary voice in the period of
intellectual ferment in the sixth to third centuries BC. He is one of the most
intriguing, humorous, enjoyable personalities in the whole of Chinese
thought and philosophy. Chuang Tzu said, “When I say a man has no
emotions, what I mean by this is someone who does not allow either the
good or the bad to have any effect upon him. He lets all things be and
allows life to continue in its own way.”86 His true-to-life perspective was
a breath of fresh air after Confucius. “The true man of old slept without
dreaming and awoke without anxiety. He ate without tasting, breathing
deeply, incredibly deeply. The true man breathes from his feet up, while
84 Chuang Tzu. The Book of Chuang Tzu. (London: Penguin Books,
1996), 64.
85 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 45.
86 Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 44.
53
ordinary people just breathe from the throat. The words of broken people
come forth like vomit.”87
He famously decreed, “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt
that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I
was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again.
But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or
a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be
some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this
the transformation of things.”88 “When the School of Taoism first began
to look for its roots, sometime around I00 BC, it identified three great
founder teachers. These were, and still are, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lieh
Tzu. Taoism is the search for the Tao, the Way of Nature which, if you
could become part of it, would take you to the edge of reality and
beyond.”89
87 Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 47.
88 Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 20.
89 Chuang Tzu, The Book of Chuang Tzu, xiiv.
54
Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama, affectionately known as Buddha, was the
founder of Buddhism. He was an Indian sage and teacher. He is perhaps
most known for creating the Four Noble Truths. His teachings show the
clearest way to lead a meaningful, compassionate, and happy life without
the need for religious superstition. Buddhism can be practiced as a
philosophy or a religion. Buddha said happiness results from meritorious
deeds. Eastern thought suggests the ends are contained in the
beginnings. All phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, he
thought, with mind as their leader. He said, “Those who are fearful when
there is no cause for fear, and feel no fear when they should, such people,
embracing erroneous views, enter the woeful path;” and “Carpenters
fashion wood; fletchers fashion arrows; the wise fashion themselves.”
The last words of the Buddha were, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” It
is now a guiding light to millions. Buddhism entered China in the first or
second century CE along the Silk Road. Buddhism had become thoroughly
acculturated by the time of the Tang dynasty and was playing a rich and
important role in Chinese civilization.90 Chinese Buddhism was
introduced to Korea in the fourth century and to Japan in the sixth century.
Vietnam adopted Buddhist as early as the second century. Zen Buddhism
emphasizes meditation and discovery of one’s inherent Buddha-nature
90 Malcolm David Eckel, “Buddhism.” in World Religions, ed. Michael
D. Coogan (Exeter: Duncan Baird, 2003), 174.
55
through satoris, or “awakenings.” By the mid-twentieth century, almost
all of the major Buddhist schools and traditions had also come to the
West.91
Charlotte Joko Beck says in Everyday Zen, “Some therapies seek
to move us from an unhappy self to a happy self. But Zen practice (and
perhaps a few other disciplines or therapies) can help us to move from an
unhappy self to no-self, which is joy. To have a “self” means we are self
centered. Being self- centered-and therefore opposing ourselves to
external things—we are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle
quickly when the external environment opposes us; we are easily upset.”92
Zen is a subtle practice that is revealed as our concepts about it are
overturned. The point of practice and the practice itself are one and the
same. It is a transformation the leaves the self changed.
Beck says, “The process of practice is, first of all, to have an
awareness, maybe dim at first, of what we have erected; and the second
step is to practice. Liberation is to see through this unreal super- structure
that we’ve built. Without it, life just goes along as it goes along with no
obstacle… Let’s realize that our when we are attached to the way we think
we should be or the way we think anyone else should be, we can have very
little appreciation of life as it is. Practice must shatter our false ideals. So
we’re stating a fact that for most people is unacceptable.”93 Her teaching
leaves behind Zen traditions like shaved heads, robes and titles. The
practice she preaches has be altered to fit Western temperament.
“Practice,” for Beck, “is not about personal power or joriki, the
strength that is developed in years of sitting.”94 She says that personal
power is a natural byproduct of meditation. She really gets down to
business, knowing the only way to change is through the rigors of a
disciplined practice. “Our practice is definitely our business. And that
practice is to learn what it means to serve that which we cannot see, touch,
taste or smell. Essentially the true self is no-thing, and yet it is our Master.
And when I say it’s no-thing, I don’t mean nothing in the ordinary sense;
the Master is not a thing, yet it’s the only thing. When we’re married, we’re
not married to each other, but to the true self.”95
91 Eckel, “Buddhism,” 175.
92 Charlotte Joko Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work. New York:
HarperCollins, 1989), 42.
93 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 139.
94 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 23.
95 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 100.
56
The purpose of Zen practice is to see through our desires for
therapeutic ends. Zen practice really beings to take shape when the focus
is squarely on the practitioner. There are no shortcuts in Zen Buddhism. It
is, for all intents and purposes, a long, hard look in the mirror. While other
therapies might aim, for instance, at self-realization through a series of
emotional coping skills, Zen seeks to obtain ultimate self-discovery. A life
is a terrible thing to waste. At the same time, how can we serve a purpose
if we don’t fully and truly know the self. Beck says, “Our responsibility is
always right here, right now, to experience the reality of our life as it is.”96
Buddhism had a broad appeal. It is designed to reduce suffering.
Suffering comes from the Latin sub meaning “under” and ferre meaning
“to bear.” “There’s a feeling in the word “to be under,” “to bear under,”
“to totally be under”—“to be supporting something from underneath.””97
Shoyo Roku said, “From the withered tree, a flower blooms.” Our
suffering, no matter how severe, is not eternal. There is still a lot of good
to experience. Zen meditative practices help to bridge the gap. It brings
the self to a place of eternal happiness. “The true way begins with pointing
to the opening of wu-chi. To the Confucian sages, this opening is called
the Original Nature of Goodness. To the Buddhists, it is called Nirvana.
To the Taoists, it is called the Mysterious Gate.”98
The protocol itself is simple enough. “When sitting in meditation
postures, program the mind with suggestions like, “I am as steady as a
rock” or “I am becoming motionless like a statue.” This way the asana will
quickly become steady and, after a while, will be comfortable for extended
periods of time. This is the practice of kaya sthairyam, complete body
stillness. Alternative postures: Apart from the postures mentioned in this
chapter, there are four other asanas which are useful for meditation. These
are described in the chapter on the vajrasana group of asanas. They are: 1.
Vajrasana (thunderbolt pose) 2. Ananda madirasana (intoxicating bliss
pose) 3. Padadhirasana (breath balancing pose) 4. Bhadrasana (gracious
pose).”99
If there is discomfort or pain in the legs after sitting for some time,
slowly unlock the legs and massage them. When the blood has recirculated
and there no longer any pain, you can resume the practice. Be aware that
96 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 142.
97 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 105.
98 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 84.
99 Satyananda Saraswarti. Asana Pranayama Mudra Banda. (Munger,
Bihar, India: Yoga Publications Trust, 2008), 94.
57
the knee is a very delicate and abuse the joint too much by straining it.100
While coming into or out of these postures, do not use undue force.
Carefully observe any pains and continually listen to the body. In all
postures, either the left or the right leg can be placed on top. It is a matter
of personal preference and comfort. Alternate leg positioning so that the
balance on both sides of the body is maintained. Another useful suggestion
is to make yourself more comfortable by placing a small cushion under the
buttocks.101
“Since this is a diaphragmatic variety of breathing, the abdominal
muscles play the major role. The student starts with an exhalation brought
about by an inward stroke of the abdomen. Inhalation follows immediately
after exhalation, there being no interval between the two.”102 “The idea of
the sacred seat also serves to sanctify the simple space in which the
ordinary Buddhist sits to meditate. Devotees of Zen habitually remind
themselves that the spot upon which they sit for meditation is the throne
of all the buddhas of the past and future. In the Buddhist tradition, the
bodily relics and physical images of the Buddha that are venerated in
shrines constitute his “Form Body.” His teaching, known as his Dharma
Body,” is also the object of veneration.”103
Bodhidharma said, “Buddhas have three bodies: a transformation
body, a reward body, and a real body. The transformation body is also
called the incarnation body. The transformation body appears when
mortals do good deeds, the reward body when they cultivate wisdom, and
the real body when they become aware of the sublime.”104 He goes on to
say, “Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that
prevents evil from arising in either. And to invoke means to call to mind,
to call constantly to mind the rules of discipline and to follow them with
all your might. This is what’s meant by invoking. Invoking has to do with
thought and not with language. If you use a trap to catch fish, once you
succeed you can forget the trap. And if you use language to find meaning,
once you find it you can forget language.”105
100 Saraswarti, Asana Pranayama Mudra Banda, 94.
101 Saraswarti, Asana Pranayama Mudra Banda, 95.
102 Kovoor Behanan. Yoga, a Scientific Evaluation. (Dover, 1959), 199.
103 Eckel, “Buddhism,” 189.
104 Bodhidharma. The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma. Translated by Red
Pine. New York: North Point Press, 1989), 71.
105 Bodhidharma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 111.
58
Bodhidharma brought Buddhism to China, but his insights are of
benefit to all who practice. “Our mortal nature is our buddha-nature.
Beyond this nature there’s no buddha. The buddha is our nature. There’s
no buddha besides this nature. And there’s no nature besides the
buddha.”106 He also said, “Language and behavior, perception and
conception are all functions of the moving mind. All motion is the mind’s
motion. Motion is its function. Apart from motion there’s no mind, and
apart from the mind there’s no motion. But motion isn’t the mind. And the
mind isn’t motion. Motion is basically mindless. And the mind is basically
motionless. But motion doesn’t exist without the mind. And the mind
doesn’t exist without motion. There’s no mind for motion to exist apart
from, and no motion for mind to exist apart from. Motion is the mind’s
function, and its function is its motion.”107
“The many other revered texts in Japanese Buddhism include the
original writings of great masters such as Kobo-daishi, Dengyo-daishi,
Honen, Shinran, Nichiren, and the founders of Zen, Eisai and Dogen. Zen
is also noted for the koan (sacred riddle, from Chinese gong an), a mantra
like statement or enigmatic, sometimes seemingly impossible, question for
contemplation. One famous koan is “What is the sound of one hand
clapping?””108 Dogen Zenji is known for saying “To study the self is to
forget the self,” and “Let go of and forget your body and mind. Throw
your life into the abode of the Buddha, living by being moved and led by
the Buddha.” The notion of the beginner’s mind was a favorite expression
of Dogen Zenji.
Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi famously said, “In the beginner’s mind
there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”109 His book,
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, is considered a modern classic. He opens it
saying, “People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a
misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in
the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because
it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental
sense.”110 He claims that meditative practice is the direct expression of our
106 Bodhidharma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 17.
107 Bodhidharma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 43.
108 C. Scott Littleton, “Japanese Traditions.” in World Religions, ed.
Michael D. Coogan (Exeter: Duncan Baird, 2003), 251.
109 Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Boston: Shambhala,
1973), 1.
110 Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 1.
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true nature. “Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice
than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life.111 The
purpose of Zen teaching is to ignite wonder and to investigate that wonder
with the deepest civility.
A half-century ago, Daisetz Suzuki brought Zen to the West
single-handedly which has been likened to the Latin translations of
Aristotle in the thirteenth century and of Plato in the fifteenth century.
Fifty years later, Shunryu Suzuki followed up with a system that catered
solely to the western intellect. “Confucianism and Daoism also made their
appearance in Japan in this period, and both had a profound impact on
Shinto and the development of Japanese Buddhism. But only rarely did
they attain the status of true religious sects. Despite the huge impact of
Chinese religious beliefs, philosophy, and arts, Japan always remained
distinct from its neighbor across the sea. The nation’s deep—rooted
tendency to readapt and transform what it borrows from other cultures
soon manifested itself.”112
“Buddhism has always been identified as a “foreign” religion and
has suffered several persecutions.”113 Despite being seen as an outsider,
Japanese Buddhism commands the devotion of hundreds of millions of
people throughout the East and the West. Japan’s indigenous religion,
Shinto, is called the “Way of the Spirit” which is expressed both by their
native phrase Kami no Michi as well as the Japanese articulation of
Chinese shen (“spirit”) and tao (“way”). Both phrases are written with the
Chinese characters for shen and tao.114 Zen is characterized by the critique
of language and rational discourse. For these reasons, it closely resembles
Taoism. Their shared goal is understanding the true nature of reality even
though they describe that reality differently.
111 Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 2.
112 Littleton, “Japanese Traditions,” 238.
113 Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, “Chinese Traditions.” in World Religions,
ed. Michael D. Coogan (Exeter: Duncan Baird, 2003), 206.
114 Littleton, “Japanese Traditions,” 238.
60
Lieh Tzu
When Bodhidharma talks about the way, the sounds rather Taoist.
“The way is basically perfect. It doesn’t require perfecting. The Way has
no form or sound.”115 Perhaps the most practice of the Taoist philosophers
is Lieh Tzu who would have enjoy Bodhidharma’s stance that “Your mind
is basically empty. All appearances are illusions. Don’t hold on to
appearances.”116 Both Buddhism and Taoism put you in the driver’s seat.
It is a very different paradigm than ancient Greek outlook on the world.
“Lieh Tzu was a real person who lived in the Spring and Autumn period
115 Bodhidharma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 29.
116 Bodhidharma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 27.
61
of the Ch’ou dynasty (770-476 BCE). Most historians now agree that he
was born around 400 BCE, about two hundred years after Lao Tzu and
Confucius.”117
“When Taoism reaches the height of its development in the T’ang
dynasty (between the seventh and tenth centuries), the Lieh Tzu, Lao Tzu,
and Chung Tzu were acknowledged as the three classics of Taoism. From
then on, the Lieh Tzu’s place in the Taoist classics was firmly
established.”118 “Lieh Tzu was a natural hermit. From the scanty
information we have about him, we are told that, unlike Lao Tzu, he never
held an office.”119 “While Lao-tzu talks at us and Chuang Tzu talks to
himself, Lieh Tzu speaks to us.”120 Lieh Tzu has to deal with very concrete
problems, the same kinds of problems we would have to deal with if we
were to embark on a spiritual path. He has to contend with social pressures,
f
inancial problems, the politics of his times, and his own self-doubt and
self-centeredness.”
Lieh Tzu said, “Although the older person is not as harmonious
with the natural order of things like the infant, he is certainly more truthful
to himself than when he was a youth.”121 His quips are as relatable as they
are delightful. “Strength should always be complemented by softness. If
you resist too much, you will break. Thus, the strong person knows when
to use strength and when to yield, and good fortune and disaster depend
on whether you know how and when to yield.”122 He speaks to us
personally. “Our emotions are the result of our beliefs. They have nothing
to do with what is really out there. If we believe one thing, then certain
emotions will follow. If we believe some other thing, we will experience
different emotions.”123
For Lieh Tzu, the person undisturbed by emotional swings can
deal is a calm and composed manner with whatever comes.124 He says,
“Knowledge is the precursor to action, but action is not necessarily the
precursor to knowledge. It is a rare case that someone both knows the
117 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living. (Boston: Shambhala,
2001), 2.
118 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 4.
119 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 8.
120 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 18.
121 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 35.
122 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 78.
123 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 101.
124 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 179.
62
theory and is able to apply it.”125 A passage reads, “Lieh Tzu found that
his shadow had no control over its movement and simply reacted to what
he did. It was only then that Lieh Tzu realized we are also like shadows,
reacting to events in the world. We are not the movers of events; we can
only respond to situations. Whether we should be active or passive does
not depend on what we want to do, but what the situation calls for.”126 A
virtuous person might not appear virtuous and vice versa. Beware of the
surface of things.
Lao Tzu
“The tale also tells that Lao Tzu was the keeper of the imperial
archives at the ancient capital of Loyang. Seeing the imminent decay of
the society he lived in, he resolved to ride away alone into the desert. But
at the Han-ku Pass he was stopped by a gatekeeper named Yin Hsi, who
knew of his reputation for wisdom and who begged him to set down in
writing the essence of his teaching. Thus, the legend tells us, the Tao te
125 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 242.
126 Lieh Tzu. A Taoist Guide to Practical Living, 211.
63
Ching came into being.”127 “Man is built to be an individual incarnation of
this whole. His good, his happiness—the very meaning of his life—is to
live in correspondence and relationship to the whole, to be and act
precisely as the universe itself is and moves.”128
“Psychologically, [Tao] refers to the way human nature is
constituted, the deep, dynamic structure of our being; ethically, it means
the way human beings must conduct themselves with others; spiritually, it
refers to the guidance that is offered to us, the methods of searching for
the truth that have been handed down by the great sages of the past.”129
“The present text, following numerous other translations, renders te by the
English word Virtue. But we must be careful not to bring our ordinary
moralistic associations to this term. It is true that the word te introduces us
to the ethical dimension of this teaching, but this is ethics that is solidly
rooted in metaphysics, and completely separate from ethics considered as
the rules of social morality, which vary from culture to culture, epoch to
epoch, nation to nation, class to class.”130 Ching simply means book.
The Tao te Ching states, “He leaves ‘that’ aside, and attends to
‘this.’” The tai chi, or the great ultimate, is the convergence of active and
passive forces bearing the seed of the opposing nature inherently. As a
force is exerted to an extremity or polarity of a cyclical spectrum or model
of transference, yin, the passive force, exchanges dominance with yang,
the active force. The tai chi applies to nature as well as human psychology.
The underlying cosmic principles of tension between extremes are Tao,
causality in the macrocosm, and te, virtue in the microcosm, which are
mutually reflective. This genuine nature invites us to live in accordance
with the seemingly paradoxical “way” of being in spiritual union with the
eternal Tao.
Lao Tzu said, “Know honor, yet keep humility. Be the valley of
the universe! Being the valley of the universe, ever true and resourceful.
Return to the state of the uncarved block.”131 The uncarved block of wood
expresses the view of li as yu-wei. It can be thought of as expressly
contrary to the intended spirit of li, as it is said to be a reflection of the
Tao, instead of being in opposition with it. Taoists have three kinds of
127 Lao Tzu. Tao te Ching. Translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989), vii.
128 Lao Tzu. Tao te Ching, xiv.
129 Lao Tzu. Tao te Ching, viii.
130 Lao Tzu. Tao te Ching, x.
131 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 30.
64
knowledge. The first is relating to the world by learning the value of the
negative. This is the acknowledgement of the negation or reversal of what
is typically valued. An example of a reversal is nothingness, which initially
may seem completely worthless, but it genuinely makes things functional.
The other two are conventional knowledge and guidance of Tao, or the
spontaneous participation and alignment with the organic pattern of
endless becoming.
“[Zen master Shunryu] Suzuki’s further comments lead us to
consider the ideas of non-being (wu) and non-action (wu wei), which are
central to the practical teaching of the Tao te Ching. He goes on to speak
of nyu nan shin, a “smooth, natural mind”: When you have that, you have
the joy of life. When you lose it, you lose everything. You have nothing.
Although you think you have something, you have nothing. But when all
you do comes out of nothingness, then you have everything… That is what
we mean by naturalness.”132 “Tai-chi is the Confucianist conception of the
source of all things… The Taoist origin of the universe and life is
expounded by Chu-hsi of the Sung dynasty (960-1279 0.12.), who
combined the Confucianist and Taoist theories of the origin of things. He
revised Chou Tuan-i’s treatise Tai-chi T’ao Shuo and Wrote, “From wu
chi comes tai-chi. When tai-chi moves, it creates yang. When movement
reaches its extreme, stillness emerges. In stillness, yin is born. Thus,
movement and still- ness follow each other.””133
“It is not for nothing that in the spiritual language of alchemy this
embrace, under the name “alchemical marriage” or the “divine
androgyne,” is presented as the culmination of long and difficult work on
oneself. It is a question of developing an attention of such strength and
sensitivity that two fundamental cosmic forces, which on one level are
intrinsically at war with each other, come together under an even greater
force of reconciliation.”134 “[The Tao te Ching] tells us about the art of
living in the world, and especially the practical art of leadership — what
Plato spoke of both symbolically and literally as “statesmanship.” The
question is, how to live one’s daily life in a way that supports and
expresses this war of love, this struggle for contact with the transcendently
vibrant non-being, emptiness, and formless energy that lies at the heart of
the human and the cosmic world.”135
132 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, xiv.
133 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, xvii.
134 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, xxviii.
135 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, xxx.
65
Lao Tzu said, “Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind
become still. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches
their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.”136 The Tao
te Ching advises, “Yield and overcome; Bend and be straight; Empty and
be full; Wear out and be new; Have little and gain; Have much and be
confused.”137 Those who like to argue will develop anxiety and tension
from worrying too much about what is right and what is wrong. See
through the illusion of emotions and pursue the Tao. “The sage seeks
freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to
hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost. He helps the
ten thousand things find their own nature, But refrains from action.”138
“Being great, [the Tao] flows. It flows far away. Having gone far,
it returns.”139 “The greatest form has no shape. The Tao is hidden and
without name. The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to
fulfillment.”140 “All these expressions are associated with refining and
purifying the body. The refined body is often called the golden body. The
three treasures are also known as the three flowers, the three jewels, or the
three herbs. They are thing (generative energy), ch ’i (vital energy or
vapor) and shen (spiritual energy, or ling-ch’i).”141 “The Stages in the
Return to the Tao are as follows: 1. The refinement (or purification) of
ching for transmutation of ch’i; 2. The refinement (or purification) of ch’i
for transmutation of shen; 3. The cultivation of shen to return to the Void
(or emptiness); 4. The cultivation of the Void to merge with the Tao.”142
“Craving for sex dissipates the generative force (ching) and the
element water is harmed. Craving for riches injures original nature and the
element wood is harmed. Craving for fame and fortune injures the spirit
(shen) and the element fire is harmed. Desire to inflict harm on others
injures compassion and the element metal is harmed. Egoism injures the
Vital energy in our body (ch’i) and the element earth is harmed.”143 “The
Three Treasures in your body will be your riches. You will live a long life
136 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 18.
137 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 24.
138 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 66.
139 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 27.
140 Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 43.
141 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, xxii.
142 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, xxiv
143 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 132
66
without stress. The sages say, “To me riches are but floating clouds.” The
Golden Mean says, “If you are poor, live in poverty.” Mencius says,
“Poverty cannot be changed.” He also says, “The honorable person is
concerned with the Tao and not with poverty.”144
Sun Tzu
144 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 142
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Lao Tzu is sometimes approachable and sounds more like Lieh
Tzu. “Anxiety and stress generate worry, irritation, unrest, and tension.”145
At other times, he seems like a prophet. He peers into the human psyche
and see both the beauty and the shadow. Lao Tzu’s writing is as tactfully
arranged as the troops of a frontlines general. Sun Tzu was such a man. A
strategist, he is still looked to for wisdom. He is well-known for saying,
“All warfare is based on deception.”146 I think his sentiments can be
applied to the human psyche. There’s a battle of the mind. Allegiance to
the truth might even feel like following an authority figure. Sun Tzu spoke
to this directly. “The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete
accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their
lives, undismayed by any danger.”147
In Sun Tzu’s time, the era of the Spring and Autumn period, more
than one hundred feudal states and principalities were reduced to about
forty, in a process that unfolded until the Warring States period began—
signaling end of the unification of the empire.148 Sun Tzu was looked to
for advice because of his military valor. He said, “In battle, there are not
more than two methods of attack—the direct and the indirect; yet these
two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers.”149 “One
who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful
appearances, according to which the enemy will act. He sacrifices
something, that the enemy may snatch at it.”150 “Ponder and deliberate
before you make a move.”151 “Anger may in time change to gladness;
vexation may be succeeded by [feeling] content.”152
Sun Tzu said “Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make
certain of the truth of their reports.”153 A philosopher is trained to examine
the premises of an argument and two make a distinction between the
argument and its emotional reaction. To embrace suffering and loss as
universal truth instead of demanding what you can’t have. Joy comes in
the morning. When you’re an emotional mess over something, work
145 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 141
146 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 9.
147 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 7.
148 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, xviii.
149 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 14.
150 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 19.
151 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 33.
152 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 57.
153 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 60.
68
backwards to defuse the situation. You aren’t obligated to own any
mistruths or shelter deception regardless if the lying began with you.
69
Honesty
The notion of truth mutating and it being “malleable to human
need” was disturbing for C.S. Peirce although on William James’s concept
of pragmatism, the evolutionary bent of truth is plausible. If truth is
helpful, good, and useful as an instrument of action, it’d make sense that
it would be in relation to the ideas of the day. The relation between these
ideas rests on their substantive qualities. This is paralleled on a practical
level with the scientific model of thought which Peirce purported as being
the pinnacle of belief and a means of explaining reality. In essence, if
query A, query B, and query C substantively mean the same thing, we
don’t need three different inquiries, but just one.
The trouble is confusing the substantive with substance. With our
example, we’d have three conflicting substances that are just three
commutative and substantive definitions of a truth that work to explain a
singular reality. James wants to make truth less speculative and more
practical. His concept hinges on its utility, that is to say, what we call true
is commonly and currently of practical use or it has the potential to be
useful in the future. I think this is, although hazy with James’s poetic
inclination, a superior approach to truth. An example would be the old and
new covenant. New revelations superseded the previous agreement. This
changes the truth values of those signs.
James’s view of truth is an agreement with reality. In this
description, agreement is, according to the rationalist, a copy of reality. He
rejects this copy theory when related to the force behind the façade of
things. Pragmatism, meaning worthwhile leading, not when it copies but
when it leads us on to more satisfying experiences by which he means
verification. This is not to say experimentally we round out an existing
theory but is instead a process in which an idea leads to further experiences
that are worthwhile within an inquiry. On truth, ideas are valuable when
they’re useful, for James, and truth has a practical action on our modes of
thought.
Buddhists refer to our real nature as our true basis. For Buddhists,
virtues are defined by their 1) basis; 2) motivation; 3) misperception; or 4)
a combination of the first three. The five weights of non-virtuous action
are 1) attitude; 2) performance; 3) remedy; 4) perversion; and 5) basis.
Everything seems to both be growing out of our Buddha nature and
guiding us to the acting out of our own Buddha nature. Charlotte Joko
70
Beck says in Everyday Zen, “Dharma may be approximately translated as
“truth,” “learning,” or “right living.””154 The Diamond Sutra says,
“Bodhisattvas who are wholly devoid of any conception of separate
selfhood are truthfully called bodhisattvas.”155
The apocryphal writings attributed to Lao Tzu, Cultivating
Stillness, says, “You must value your original nature and your life.
Recognize the difference between spirit and knowledge. Do not confuse
the true with the false. Recognize the difference between the human mind
and the mind of Tao. Do not mistake the human mind for the mind of Tao,
and knowledge for the spirit.”156 It goes on to say, “In original nature there
is no disturbance and no thoughts… Those who practice the Way of the
Tao cultivate the pill every day and rid the heart of forms and appearances.
They abandon insincerity and hold on to truthfulness.”157
Cultivating Stillness is a cryptic work. It says, “In the pa-k’ua,
ch’ien loses the middle yang as it descends to k’un. K’un loses its middle
yin as it is attracted to ch’ien. The pa-k’ua of Earlier Heaven changes to
the pa-k’ua of Later Heaven as the positions of ch’ien and k’un change to
li and k’an. From then on water and fire do not mix. This is the existence
of Later Heaven, the way of the mortal being. If you meet with the right
teacher, then you are able to return to the true way. The true way begins
with pointing to the opening of wu-chi.”158 “When the true nature does not
dissipate. This is called returning to the center. There are no signs and no
forms.”159
Life itself is a teacher. Philosophy and literature are both teachers.
We get our moral framework from the Bible, other sacred writings, works
from great thinkers themselves or notes taken down from students who
studied in any number of linages. The sentiment across the board, when it
comes to fighting the forces, albeit often self-imposed or allowed, of
deception. When we lack in honest, we can casting a veil between the
person with whom you’re interacting and yourself. Knowledge comes in
many forms. From a philosophical standpoint we could look at the ends
of having that knowledge and assess any behavioral pattern from there.
154 Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work, vii.
155 Nagarjuna, Diamond Sutra, 38.
156 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 37.
157 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 75.
158 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 84.
159 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 115.
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Kant said, “Act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person
or in that of any other, in every case as an end in itself, never as means
only.” By an “end in itself” Kant intends a person and by a “means only”
he intends an object or thing. Kant holds that, as rational, self-determining
agents, humans are bearers of a right of self-determination. This means
that we cannot manipulate and use people without their consent as though
they were mere objects. According to Aristotle “to say of what is that it is
not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or
of what is not that it is not, is true.”
At times, we are serves false documents. These documents claim
an untruth about you. The way you react to that document may say as much
or more about you than the document itself. It’s easier to conceal our
indiscretions instead of having to justify them, but the communication
component is extremely important. Despite the fact that it could be less
stressful to live life with a false persona or based on a false narrative, real
relations and true growth come from being honest with yourself and
others, and from having a strong enough foundation in true to build trust.
Elizabeth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein says, “Tell me the truth,
and together we can face anything.” “The Confucian sages say: “See not
that which you abstain from; hear not that which stirs up your fears.” The
Buddhists teach that there should be no thoughts in the eyes, ears, nose,
tongue, and body; no color, no sound, no fragrance, no taste, and no touch.
The Taoists say that forms are elusive. The three religions teach the same
principles. Act according to the three teachings and you will be free of
craving.”160 “This method is incredible beyond imagination, It has no
beginning, no end, and no form. If you can intuitively realize its real
nature, Then you will transcend the mortal plane and leave the world
behind.”161
“In Buddhism, many practice quiet sitting and imitate the Buddha.
They think that the Diamond Sutra tells them to extinguish their thoughts
and only pursue this objective. They forget to look into the mind and
empty it. They do not clear the mind so they can see original nature. In
Taoism, many practitioners try to cultivate the treasures and learn the arts
of immortality.”162 “Help sentient beings to transcend the suffering of the
mortal world. Those who understand the teachings live the principles of
the Tao by their example, tirelessly teach others, and work hard to
160 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 56.
161 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 65.
162 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 76.
72
accumulate good deeds externally and internally.”163 “When the spirit is
distracted it is not still. When the mind runs wild, the spirit is led astray by
knowledge.”164 Once we remove the rose-tinted glasses and strengthen our
natural eyes, we glimpse the accessible light of truth.
163 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 95.
164 Lao Tzu, Cultivating Stillness, 125.
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74

Part 3

Modern Thought

75

Kant
Kant sought to develop a rule to explain experience in relation to
the laws of what’s possible. Like Hume’s empiricism, Kant’s philosophy
argues against unfounded presuppositions such as causality and substance.
Kant wanted a way out of the diametric paradigm of the day of
metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions such as those in
Descartes’s dogmatic rationalism.
Kant, on the other hand, thinks our experience conforms to our
mind, not the other way around. This starts with possibility which
structures our experience, as with mathematics and natural science.
Actuality, concepts we get from nature, follows possibility. Kant’s great
contribution was proving that metaphysics, as a science with synthetic a
priori propositions, wasn’t a possibility.
Kant’s transcendental philosophy addressed this mystery and left
a lasting stamp on modern philosophy. His work guides us through an
order of operations, or judgments, with regard to different types of
knowledge. Metaphysics is different than other disciplines like
mathematics and nature science because judgments that are universal and
necessary aren’t possible in metaphysics. Kant’s achievement is that he
reconciled the rationalist and empiricist philosophies by treating
rationalism with a priori propositions and empiricism with a posteriori
propositions. According to Kant, subjectivism isn’t a problem for his
“critical idealism.”
A priori intuition is based in objectivity and universality. Kant’s
view is that it is incoherent to think all things that exist are minds separate
from sensation. Our reception of nature is either in our experience or that
which comes from the laws of what experiences as possible. Categories of
76
this understanding provide objective means for the synthesis of sensuous
intuition rather than presuppositions which serve as the rules for reality.
According to Kant, Metaphysics lies beyond experience such as
ideas about “the whole world.” This doesn’t mean that these things are
inaccessible to us. Kant wants to rewrite the rationalists’ traditional
meaning of Metaphysic such that it applies to our experience. As our
sensuous intuitions piece together particulars to form what is to become
more apparent to be the whole we seek is indeed instead an amalgamation
of data received from experience. This increasingly applicable form that
is built chunk by chunk by our experiences is exactly what Kant says
Metaphysics is that which has thought to have been beyond experience.
Kant sets out to address this incoherence and to ask if Metaphysics
is even possible. In an attempt to construct an experience is that more
unified, Kant says we must address and do away with this notion of objects
of knowledge beyond experience. His strategy is, at the very least, a more
coherent treatment of Metaphysics. He looks to these things as directives
guiding our reasoning.
Our reasoning propels forward in terms of understanding. Our
sense particulars, are then formalized, and are lastly reasoned through.
This way the concept of understanding is less about the rules concerning
ideas which Kant calls regulative and more so a mode of thought which
Kant calls constitutive. The difference in these judgments sets Kant on a
track that comes for circle, or at least, as far as the train of thought goes, it
can be “tracked” by the application of reasoning.
A sensible whole not available to sensibility is the idea of the
whole merely as the appearance of an object of perception. The use of
Metaphysics as a science is not possible according to Kant. This isn’t to
say that the things themselves aren’t things themselves. Experience can’t
satisfy reason. Reason attempts to understand the directive, yet it can never
be achieved. Kant’s symbolic anthropomorphism elucidates this contrast
between those things we can know and that which reason can’t
comprehend.
Kant takes up Hume’s challenge and attempts to meet it by
synthesizing rationalism (form) and empiricism (matter). Kant sees that
Hume is right in maintaining that we cannot find in a priori reason, which
is purely analytic, grounds for such categories as causality and substance;
what we find in a priori reason is universal, necessary, and objective. We
cannot find such grounds a posteriori in experience because the elements
of experience are in themselves loose and separate. A posteriori can
expand our knowledge as. in Newtonian science, for instance.
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Rationalism’s claims to provide a foundation for science are
dogmatic and empiricism’s claims reduce to skepticism. Kant’s
Copernican revolution reverses the relation between the mind and the
world and yields a new concept of objectivity. Objectivity arises not from
the mind’s conformity with the nature of the thing, but from the object’s
being constituted as an object of experience through the application of a
priori forms and concepts. We cannot give up things-in-themselves since
doing so would endanger the status of our experience as merely
phenomenal; nor can we give up the ideas of reason.
The good news, Kant posits, is that theism can be saved from
dogmatism and skepticism by means of a symbolic anthropomorphism—
the relation of the noumenal to the phenomenal. The ideas of reason have
practical value because moral principles require them for their universality
and hope. The Kantian critique overcomes both dogmatism and
skepticism, defines the limits and boundaries of reason, and makes a
secure and central place for faith.
The application of directives rather than theoretical claims
provides a leap beyond dogmatic or rationalist positions. By rooting
knowledge in certainty, we can mitigate our existential crises. The
certainty which epistemology seeks is made possible by doubt which is
contemplative. Every common sense assertion can be doubted. When
epistemology settles doubts, we have reflexive certitudes. “Nothing can
possible be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called
good without qualification except a good will.”
Kant was a very influential rationalist who tried to ascertain the
limits of reason, His theory of morality as duty to higher principles, not
anticipation of consequences, is compelling to secular idealists. “To
secure one’s own happiness is a duty, at least indirectly; for discontent
with one’s own condition, under a pressure of many anxieties and amidst
unsatisfied wants, might easily become a great temptation to transgression
of duty.”
For Kant, the “thing in itself”—the thing as it really is—is much
richer, deeper, and more complete than any one specific phenomenal
representation can be. Our reason can tell us only about the phenomenal
world. “Reason does not however teach us anything concerning the thing
in itself: it only instructs us as regards its own complete and highest use in
the field of possible experience. But this is all that can he reasonably
desired in the present case, and with which we have cause to be satisfied.”
In philosophical counseling, it is important to keep in mind that
our current perception is just one way of seeing things and that the more
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perspectives we can investigate, the better our understanding will become.
Kant’s work also cautions us against defining categories or making
judgments, because it is difficult to know whether the category or
judgment reflects the thing or the way we are looking at the thing. Anais
Nin encapsulated this idea when she wrote, “We don’t see things as they
are. We see them as we are.”
Kant’s theory of ethics is also important in philosophical
counseling. He belonged to the deontology (rule-based) school of thought,
as opposed to the school of teleological, or consequential, ethics, which
holds that actions are right or wrong depending on the goodness or badness
of the outcome. To teleologists, Robin Hood is a hero because, basically,
his ends (giving to the poof) justify his means (stealing from the rich).
Deontologists like Kant, on the other hand, believe that a rule is a rule:
stealing is wrong.”165
165 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 66.
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Freud
Freud psychological model is reductive. The first thing he
discovered was the existence of sexually preceded and criminal fantasies
which are “wholly incompatible with the conscious outlook of civilized
man. A person who adopted the standpoint of these fantasies would be less
than a rebel, a criminal, or a madman.”166 His deterministic method is
purely medical. Freud took a pathological view of mental activity that
seemed to be an unsuitable formation which has taken the place of normal
functioning.
So for Freud, the psyche has to be broken to conform to more
suitable thought and behavior patterns. His idea of treatment involved
clearing out old thought patterns and an adaptation to healthier behaviors.
Freud named sexuality as the controlling psychological force. “Reduction
to the common human foundation is altogether appropriate.”167 According
to his philosophy of psychiatry, neuroses and psychoses as he called them
were all mental problems that he explained in physical.
Freud thought every mental illness was caused by a brain disease.
But Freud wasn’t alone in his psychiatric exploration. “Frankl used the
phrase “will to meaning” to parallel two of the central ideas of psychology:
Adler’s “will to power” and Freud’s “will to pleasure.” But as Frankl
foresaw, there was something still deeper at the heart of most people’s
166 Jung, The Portable Jung, 463.
167 Jung, The Portable Jung, 305.
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central problem, and existing medical, psycho- logical, and spiritual
treatments were not going to be enough to relieve it.”168
Adler left the movement to develop in his own direction. Jung also
had a philosophical disagreement with Freud. Freud tested out his radical
ideas, and his impact, regardless of being a mixed bag of science and art,
helped to change the way people thought about the mind. “Psychiatry
developed as a branch of primitive medicine in the eighteenth century and
really established itself during the twentieth, in the wake of Freud.
Medicine is still a balance of science and art.”169
168 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 15.
169 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 19.
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Justice
Newman’s illative sense reminds me of Aquinas’s connaturalist
and maybe also of quintessence in Buddhism. Either way, I think he had
hit upon a common experience to which we can all relate. It’s viewed as a
virtue. Virtues are always going to be a tricky element to describe because
they are by nature abstract. Like justice, you can’t really pin it down but
you recognize it when it’s present, and you long for it when it’s not. Marcus
Aurelius argued that, “He who acts unjustly acts impiously.”170 His
abstraction gets at the issue.
As musician uses the illative sense when traversing successive
tones in music. Sometimes these notes aren’t always explicitly set out.
Sometimes it’s a spontaneous experience. To quantify it simply impedes
the flow. This isn’t to say an analysis is impossible. Not in the slightest,
and maybe to the contrary. If we think about deduction, induction, and
abduction, they’re all reflective. We need either a premise, data or
symptom to move toward a general statement. It’s moving from the
specific to the theoretical. When you’re on the verge of a game changing
maneuver, you let another faculty take the lead.
Newman called it the illative sense. It’s not like the senses. At the
same time, it’s not a purely mental feat. It’s a super fluid way of being. It
170 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.
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requires finesse. My closing insight is that I think this sense is wanting to
be discovered. The alternative is a frustrating exertion of force. I’d liken it
to a literal sink or swim dichotomy. The water is going to do what water
does, just like the rock face. The way in which we apply or efforts will
define the level and frequency of success which is enjoyed.
Some things are self-evident. The mere fact that we know that
some things are self-evident goes to show that we naturally exhibit a
rational faculty. We know by reason that part of ourselves is spiritual
because of the powers of abstraction and reflection. On abstraction, we are
able to think of a characteristic such as justice. Justice is not a material
measurement yet we’re able to appropriately judge when situations are just
or unjust. On reflection, we possess the ability to think about our whole
self, and even think about our thought process.
Theodicy is the vindication of divine goodness and providence in
view of the existence of evil. Theodicy is one of the most crucial
discussions and has relevance in our lives. The problem of evil leaves a
trail of breadcrumbs to a higher truth. There is a saying, “The best fertilizer
is the gardener’s shadow.” In order to make a case for the existence of
God, we must inquire about the privation of good. Good is the subject of
evil. Evil, therefore, is a real object. Our experience is relational. By doing
good, we are acting on behalf of God. Theodicy is getting at the heart of
God by examining the problems perceived within humanity.
Hegel was a German philosopher. His works The Phenomenology
of Spirit, The Logic of Hegel Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
in Outline, and The Philosophy of Right are still relevant. His ideas about
historical progress, the self, and our dependence on recognition by others
have a social psychology approach. “Another of Hegel’s legacies to
philosophical counseling is the idea of transcendence. For Hegel, to
transcend means both “to negate” and “to preserve.” Your identity is like
a series of concentric rings. The inner- most one is your personal being,
then comes your family, then your community, then your town or city,
then your state, then your country, then your planet, and so forth.”171
For Hegel, all of history with its world historical agents of change
are a means for further surrender to reason. This is manifested as law in
terms of social order and as providence in terms of religion. We can step
into the role of the philosophical historian who abstracts a storyboard with
proper perspective on context. The benefit of this is that it’s based on an
idea. This idea represents an objective reality. The dichotomy collapses
171 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 70.
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when the self is overcome by consciousness. This becomes something
wholly new: self-consciousness. History requires awareness. Self
consciousness eliminates dualism, moving the self toward freedom.
In contrast with Christianity, history’s end-goal, according to
Hegel, is the self-determination of a people. The state is the final product
of all historical events, and law is the realization of freedom. This opens
the door for potential disasters. Hegel is one of the most forward-thinking
philosophers. His “means justify the end” mentality goes beyond theodicy.
He said, “Man cannot overestimate the greatness and power of his mind.”
While Hegel may have had no way of knowing the impact his work’s
interpretation would have on the world, it seems, almost ironically, that
he’s become a world historical agent.
There is, nonetheless, a parallel to Christian theodicy in terms of
the mechanics, but the variables have changed. For Christians, the
explanatory gap is bridged by belief in Christ. Instead of the primary
principle of self-consciousness, we substitute it for a Christ-consciousness
whereby our faith helps us overcome our struggles. Theodicy for a
Christian is a sort of trial by fire. Divine providence is then our narrative
conforming to God’s will. It involves surrendering to a higher power when
we are in need of greater strength. This trust becomes the justification of
evil by way of a promise of divine intervention at a certain point in one’s
life or afterlife.
Human flourishing entails flourishing when many people are self
consumed. Ethics seeks to assist in the adherence to morality for the
common good. Since the common good involves the end and order, the
community has a legal right to demand certain goods. Justice obliges
members of the community and the community can demand other virtues
rooted in natural law for its maintenance. Brian Mullady covers the
common good and its effect on ethics in business. He says the common
good is “a moral union of wills formed by many individuals acting through
choice together to pursue some reasoning good which each could not attain
if left to himself [or herself].”172
He gives an analogy about bees whose concerted effort allows for
the construction and execution of a complex society. Individuals herd
together in order to achieve a common goal. Mullady comments on this
herding instinct, “Since men are governed for their own sakes, they are
172 Brian Mullady, Christian Social Order (Kentucky: New Hope
Publications: 2015), 9.
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governed as individuals and not just as members of a collective or herd.”173
It affords a sense of security. It may also provide real protection should a
tyrant choose to act in such a way that goes against the better sense of the
collective. Mullady is alluding to the danger of excessive state control. The
purpose of authority is to provide for the common good. The common
good works in tandem with the individual good in much the same way that
order and end complement each other.
Mullady says, “[A] true community order pursuant of a correct
human end fulfills the individual.”174 The common good is achieved by
many; it cannot be achieved by the few. For Mullady, justice regards the
“other.” This can mean a neighbor, a business associate, or the whole
community. “Justice is in the will because it involves realizing the
good.”175 Justice is more than the giving of rights. It restores balance
between two parties. This balance is referred to as the “mean.” Mullady
says, “The ‘formal object’ of this virtue is still to give another his due.”176
Justice consists in this “due” which is a right.
Mullady says, “The conscience would be the only norm for
determining such a freedom and there would be no further standard on
which such freedom could be judged. Freedom would be license.” He goes
on, “Authority in any context would be reduced either to merely a guide
to form freedom or a contest of wills to see whose freedom could
overpower the other.”177 Conscience and authority are inexorably linked.
Conscience can align with the truth, but conscience, as an opinion, can be
at odds with the truth. “Conscience is a moral syllogism. That is to say that
it is a syllogism in which the major, minor and conclusion are an
application of the general principles of moral theology to a given
individual action which one either has done or purposes to do.” 178 It
determines the moral validity. Conscience is completed in the judgment of
the intellect. Deliberation is critical, even within the sphere of conscience
itself.
The subjective experience is an inductive personal perception.
It is structured and orders habituated thoughts and actions. These personal
truths orient the agent within a value system. Once sense-information
173 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 12.
174 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 44.
175 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 95.
176 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 99.
177 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 68.
178 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 68.
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is judged qualitatively, the end becomes the objective—that which the
agent desires to ascertain. The agent reorders his or her volitional patterns
in order to accommodate for this objective. Ethics is having identified the
proper means to a proper end. It has import for both the virtuous agent, the
subject, and the end, the object. Virtue perfects the agent; it is not so much
about the product as it is about the formational interior of the producer.
The agent is relative to the work being performed. The work necessitates
a worker, therefore, the subjective is prior to the objective. Work is
ordered such that it begins in the subjective agent and perfects
the objective end. The agent seeks to perfect the end, for instance, a
material good.
As volitional patterns adapt, the agent develops. “Art makes the
work good; ethics make both the work and the worker good.”179 Doing the
work is necessary. The work is objective, but the effects are agent-relative.
According to Mullady, “Two weaknesses follow from this. The first is that
competition enters economics. This is not a healthy competition to provide
a better product or service but is solely motivated by the desire to increase
wealth at the expense of other. The second is that man now thinks he is the
absolute master of the material world and can do what he likes with it.”180
He goes on, “Property is a demonstrative conclusion from the principles
of the natural law which encourage man to develop his material goods for
his own personal perfection and for the perfection of the common good of
society.”181 Social duty, for Mullady, goes along with wealth. There is a
duty to furnish a just product or service and a just wage.
179 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 176.
180 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 173.
181 Mullady, Christian Social Order, 173.
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87

Nietzsche
Nietzsche called Socrates a valetudinarian, one who is obsessively
concerned about his own ailments. Socratic morality with its dialectical
process of reasoning wasn’t enough for Nietzsche. Value, Nietzsche
countered, is the key to morals. The term value depends on the valuing of
a thing. He speaks of pathology, that of Socrates, and thusly the
symptomatic concern of philosophical judgments. Ressentiment, the
French version of the word resentment, is for him the desire of the
impotent for revenge against the strong. This desire rails against authority
and projects his ideas of evil while rejecting the strengths inherent in
economic and personal success.
This impotence is driving the intellect in reverse. Backwards
thinking is the psychological pathology to which Nietzsche is referring. It
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seeks to justify weakness and tear down glory. This has far reaching
implications for traditional philosophy as well as religious traditions such
as Christianity. A self-professed Anti-Christ, Nietzsche does point out a
perplexing paradox in the conversation of morality that’s as old as the
written word. This leads to his revaluation, that is to say, a redemption of
value in its original sense. The weak ensnare the strong by this Socratic
dialectical approach which exhibits an inverted value system.
After Rousseau’s natural man was in service to society in the
second wave of modernity where his thought of man as an end in his being
compassionate and his romanticism looked to history which gave his work
a phenomenological perspective. His ideas led arguably opened the door
for communism. In the third wave however, Nietzsche’s view of the end
of man looked more like cruelty and his ideas arguably led to the rise of
fascism. Nietzsche talked a lot about our modern ideas that were built
upon studies of the ancients are in dire need of a revisioning. He believes
Socrates for instance was the symbol of weakness and cowardice.
Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed anti-Christian. He brought this
value or lack thereof when with ideas. The secularization was the
culmination of the Reformation and Enlightenment eras. Nietzsche
determines that man needed free will in order for his Over-man to work.
For Nietzsche, it was a rational conclusion that man was evolve to this
Over-man or instead backslide to being no more than a beast. Nietzsche
says, “The noble kind of man experiences himself as a person who
determines value and does not need to have other people’s approval….He
understands himself as something which in general first confers honor on
things, as someone who creates values.” According to Nietzsche, we are
made noble when we encounter profound suffering; it’s what “separates
the sufferer from the uninitiated.”
Nietzsche said, “To live alone one must he an animal or god;” “It
is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if it
forgets how to make war;” and “Whatever doesn’t kill me outright, makes
me stronger.” Camus reminds us, “Even before Nietzsche, Stirner wanted
to eradicate the very idea of God from man’s mind, after he had destroyed
God Himself. But, unlike Nietzsche, his nihilism was gratified. Stirner
laughs in his blind alley; Nietzsche beats his head against the wall. In
1845, the year when Der Einziger und sein Eigentum appeared, Stirner
begins to define his position. Stirner, who frequented the “Society of Free
Men” with young Hegelians of the left, had an account to settle not only
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with God but also with Feuerbach’s Man, Hegel’s Spirit, and its historical
incarnation, the State.”182
Nietzsche says, “Judgments, valuations with regard to life, for or
against, can ultimately never be true: they only possess value as symptoms,
they only come into consideration as symptoms, in themselves such
judgments are follies.” He says, “Socrates was the buffoon who got
himself taken seriously.” I liken this to mowing the grass in seeking across
the board homogeny instead of organic freedom. This rational at any price
is in opposition to instincts and is in no way a return to virtue, health, and
happiness. “Man is the animal that is most courageous, most accustomed
to suffering, does not negate suffering as such: he wants it, even seeks it
out, provided one shows him some meaning in it, some wherefore of
suffering.”
Nietzsche said, “To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be
destroyed, that is the law.” According to Nietzsche, he who wants to be a
creator of good or of evil must first of all destroy all values. “Thus the
supreme evil becomes part of the supreme good, but the supreme good is
creative.” “Instead of methodical doubt, he practiced methodical negation,
the determined destruction of everything that still hides nihilism from
itself, of the idols that camouflage God’s death.”183 Nietzsche enlists values
in the cause of nihilism which, traditionally, have been “considered as
restraints on nihilism—principally morality. Moral conduct, as explained
by Socrates, or as recommended by Christianity, is in itself a sign of
decadence. It wants to substitute the mere shadow of a man for a man of
f
lesh and blood.”184
Instead of whining about your misfortune, triumph over it by
turning your suffering into something positive. Instead of looking to others
for approval, think of yourself as an independent, autonomous, creator of
values. Nietzsche was known for his extravagant nonconformity and
unapologetic take on antiquated moral dogmas. He said in The Will to
Power, “Not one of the ancient philosophers had the courage to advance
the theory of the non-free will (that is to say, the theory that denies
morality);—not one had the courage to identify the typical feature of
happiness, of every kind of happiness (“pleasure”), with the will to power:
for the pleasure of power was considered immoral;—not one had the
182 Albert Camus. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by
Anthony Bower. (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 62.
183 Camus, The Rebel, 66.
184 Camus, The Rebel, 67.
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courage to regard virtue as a result of immorality (as a result of a will to
power) in the service of a species (or of a race, or of a polis); for the will
to power was considered immoral.”
He promoted instead the idea of an ubermensch, a superman, who
would transcend moral convention; however, he appeals to postmodernists
whose politics tend toward the other extreme. “Frederick Nietzsche is most
remembered for his idea of man and superman. He thought each person
had a duty to evolve, to strive to be a Superman. One way to look at this
is as a call to be your own best self, or to lift yourself up above the common
standard. Nietzsche himself had an unhealthy contempt for the average
person; he believed that rising above meant rejecting conventional
morality, and his ideas were badly abused by the Nazis. To use his work
you need to winnow the grains of wisdom from the chaff of venom. But
his belief that we are too easily satisfied with mediocrity and that most of
us don’t bother to be all that we can be is a warning worth heeding.”185
185 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 75.
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Boethius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius introduces a few new
concepts and harps more on the larger themes of sorrow and glory. Prose
IV begins: Boethius pleads that “sorrow’s crown of sorrow is
remembering happier things,” which is a reference to his
accomplishments, for only when we have gained can we experience loss.
92
The train of thought is clear, not lost in poetry, but stated beautifully. The
new themes include avarice and generosity and the methods by which
those with fortune can share it to the benefit of many or hoard it at their
own detriment. In this essay, I will further explore the Consolation of
Philosophy and its themes of greed, happiness, and virtue and the acts that
tie these fates together.
Lady Philosophy takes great care in explaining the nuances of
fortune. She concedes that Boethius indeed has found himself on hard
times but then contests his complaint by stating the obvious which includes
him having a father-in-law of virtue, a wife who exhibits the same quality
for the sake of Boethius, and his two sons who are, dare I say, fortunate
enough to be consuls. Fortune is prone to change. None are immune to its
tendency which is of divine origin and simply proceeds according to the
virtues and vileness of humanity wherein we can decide whether or not to
place ourselves under its good graces. It’s stated in Met. I, “This is her
sport: thus she proves her power; if in the selfsame hour one man is raised
to happiness, and cast down in despair, ’tis thus she shews her might.”
Boethius reveals himself as a stark and austere veneer like Jesus’s
forty-night-long desert excursion, and the illumination we see is the light
of God. We’ve come to the end of the Consolation of Philosophy and it,
all of a sudden, dawns on me like the sun: prayer is living communication
with God. At the end of our rope, we tug, and that vine that winds through
grief and sorrow narrows to a unified and glorified series of questions and
answers. I listen, but all I can hear are variations of the same thing: “Do
you concede that God is superior?” “Indeed.”
Certainly, philosophy only goes so far. We see this woven
throughout (and in and back again), but we are given some important
insights in the nature of God’s intelligence. Is freewill an important
question? Many philosophers have thought so. It seems like a make or
break argument for the existence of God in the hearts of people who’d be
scared to commit to a doctrine lacking a certain level of freedom. It’s a
question that directly affected years of my life as a blinding distractor. In
short, it’s a fair question, but really so low on the totem pole, we may as
well be asking, “Why isn’t God doing more for me?”
Boethius does a more than proficient job of providing adequate
background of Platonic and Aristotelian notions of eternity, infinity, sense
perception, reason, and contemplation. I found many similarities to Meno
with the mention of true opinions when discussing the reason of
Providence and future events. Prose III states, “Absolute knowledge has
no taint of falsity, so also that which is conceived by knowledge cannot be
93
otherwise than as it is conceived. That is the reason why knowledge cannot
lie, because each matter must be just as knowledge knows that it is.”
With regard to freewill, nothing is forced or coerced. The way
things are known depends not on things, but on the nature of the knower.
Prose IV begs “let us state that there is no foreknowledge at all. Then are
the events which are decided by free will, bound by any necessity, so far
as this goes? Of course not… If things have no necessity for coming to
pass when they do, they cannot have any necessity to be about to come to
pass before they do… A man himself is differently comprehended by the
senses, by imagination, by reason, and by intelligence… [where] the
higher power of understanding includes the lower, but the lower never
rises to the higher.”
Compassion
“If you’re spinning in a self-destructive, vicious cycle, get
pessimistic about your future. Expose the blind, perverse craving for
security that keeps your life in limbo. Then do what you can to increase
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the probability of a brighter future.” Schopenhauer was well educated,
f
luent in many European and classical tongues and had a notoriously
difficult relationship with his mother. He sought refuge from emotional
suffering in Indian philosophy. He wrote pungent essays and acerbic
aphorisms and was one of the few philosophers whom Wittgenstein read
or admired. Whether this bodes well or ill for Schopenhauer depends on
whether you read or admire Wittgenstein.
He said, “If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how
would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this
race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and
turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without
any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place
some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight
and kill one another; and thus they would create for themselves more
suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is.”
“Nietzsche’s philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the
problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. But
we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion
begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then
it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity
and reflects dishonor on a world which doubtless has no direction but
which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods… He was
the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide
that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless
it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret
or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not
formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on
rebellion. If he attacks Christianity in particular, it is only in so far as it
represents morality. He always leaves intact the person of Jesus on the one
hand, and on the other the cynical aspects of the Church. We know that,
from the point of view of the connoisseur, he admired the Jesuits.
“Basically,” he writes, “only the God of morality is rejected.” Christ, for
Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is
summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil.”186
“From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in
immortal life, he becomes “responsible for every- thing alive, for
everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” It is
he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile
186 Camus, The Rebel, 68.
95
be- gins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the
most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks
itself: where can I feel at home?” Because his mind was free, Nietzsche
knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to
which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle.”
“The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary. Nietzsche’s
most profound concept is that the necessity of phenomena, if it is absolute,
without rifts, does not imply any kind of restraint. Total acceptance of total
necessity is his paradoxical definition of freedom. The question “free of
what?” is thus replaced by “free for what?” Liberty coincides with
heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, ‘the bow bent to the
breaking-point.’”187
Boethius says, “The clouds of my grief dissolved and I drank in
the light. With my thoughts recollected I turned to examine the face of my
physician. I turned my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, and I saw that it
was my nurse in whose house l had been cared for since my youth—
Philosophy.” Wealth begets avarice, avarice begets loss, and loss begets
sorrow, so we can see in this way that riches are the true crucible by which
a man’s resolve is tested. We read in Prose V, “Fortune will never make
yours what Nature has made to belong to other things.” To me, this is
reminiscent of the sadhus and Jains found in India who, as renunciates, are
rewarded with what his beyond measure. It also reminds me of a quote
from the Buddha. “True charity occurs only when there are no notions of
giving, giver or gift.” Wealth, like happiness, is a shared experience.
There are numerous examples closer to home exhibiting this
mechanism in Christianity. I immediately think of Solomon who sullied
his right to rule granted by God for his own personal aggrandizement.
Solomon asked for the wisdom to rule, but then God who was so pleased
that Solomon didn’t ask for wealth also granted him it. Solomon self
indulgently took several hundred wives and concubines rather than sharing
his wealth with the poor. There’s yet redemption for Boethius when he
says “Through Love the universe with constancy makes changes all
without discord.” Certainly we all know someone who let success get the
best of them. I know I’ve known a person of this caliber, and have since
watched him recoil with self-destructive habits, but unconditional love can
heal those ills and set things right which I’ve also witnessed. He who
hasn’t witnessed this may find glory utterly elusive.
187 Camus, The Rebel, 72.
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Book V of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy deals with the
treatment of freewill and divine foreknowledge. It is a different tone from
the rest of the work. It is deeper and more serious with more specifics.
Lady Philosophy explains that God’s intelligence can view all things from
its divine mind, while human reason can only see them from a temporal
point of view. Humans should respect this and acknowledge God’s nature
as infinitely higher than ours in knowing. In this essay, I will address the
main illustrations concerning freewill and foreknowledge, and I will
discuss the limitations of philosophy.
Prose VI continues, “God is ever the constant foreknowing
overseer, and the ever-present eternity of His sight moves in harmony with
the future nature of our actions, as it dispenses rewards to the good, and
punishments to the bad. Hopes are not vainly put in God, nor prayers in
vain offered: if these are right, they cannot but be answered.” All things
are present at once to God: those determined by necessity and human will.
Both retain their natures. Through certitude and necessity, God is an
infinitely superior intelligence. Where philosophy falls short, prayer
consoles, and is taken it into account with our good actions.
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98

Sartre
French philosopher and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, studied with
Husserl the founder of phenomenology and Heidegger the leading German
f
igure in existentialism. Sartre said, “Man can will nothing unless he has
first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone,
abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without
help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny
than the one he forges for himself on this earth.” A Marxist by conviction,
Sartre attempted to found a political party in France. Notwithstanding his
Marxist commitments, he staunchly defended his belief in individual
responsibility. According to Sartre, “confronting your existential freedom
can be anxiety-producing, and to put it into practice requires awareness of
the obstacles in your path—plus an understanding that you put them there
yourself. The restrictions on our freedom that we put into place ourselves
are called “bad faith” by Sartre.”188 He said, “Man is nothing else hut that
which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.”
Sartre explored another logical extension of existentialism: if the
universe is undetermined, We are completely free to choose our own
course. While constant possibility—With the responsibility for action
always falling on the individual-can be a daunting proposition, it is also
liberating. No matter what your past experience, you control your future
direction. Sartre labeled as “bad faith” any efforts to deny that we are
responsible for our actions, and he saw religion, or religious faith, as one
of the leading culprits. In calling existential angst nausea, Sartre also
connected the mind and the body on some level, acknowledging that the
dis- orienting effects of existentialism can be physically discomforting.”189
Sartre said, “The existentialist does not believe in the power of
passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent
which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He
thinks that man is responsible for his passion.” The general problem of
knowledge introduced by Descartes emerges as a preoccupation that
knowing anything is an impossibility and thus having knowledge is itself
problematic, but skepticism is reduced to absurdity. By rooting knowledge
in certainty, man can mitigate his existential crisis. This is the stage at
188 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 128.
189 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 75.
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190which philosophical wonder makes itself its own object. Any human
knowledge must be known in the manner that human beings know.
According to Sartre, we must always choose, notwithstanding the
ambiguity and uncertainty of the future. “Everything is gratuitous, this
garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you
feel sick and everything begins to drift that’s nausea.” If we waited to be
sure about what to do about problems of everyday living, we would never
act. Moreover, according to Sartre, there are no hard-and-fast standards
that can save us from the inevitability of having to choose in the face of
uncertainty. “You’re free,” he said, “choose, that is, invent.”
Existentialism is often considered more of a mood than a philosophy, and
some of its leading texts are in fact novels rather than treatises. The they
were on a moral quest bereft of divine authority. Instead, the existentialists
admonished that we do the right thing with courage and integrity—doing
the right thing for its own sake.
Man himself is not simply a being with limitations, but is limited
by his very nature. His mode of existing is temporal, and knowing is a
function of his mode of existing. Both Kierkegaard and Sartre emphasized
that man is not what he is. He must become what he is. Just as man’s being
is a perpetual becoming, so his knowledge is perpetually achieved.
Conversely, just as man is not what he is, he doesn’t know what he thinks
he knows. Human knowledge is thus subject to the conditions of human
existence. It appears to be an alienating, isolating worldview. “So why get
up in the morning?” Kierkegaard asks. His Christian bent, in stark contrast
to the atheism of most existentialists. “The existentialists actually
rediscovered morality. In their line of thought, it may be all there is.
Kierkegaard realized the difficulty of confronting pure existence” no
essence, no mystery, no intangibles, no meaning, no purpose, no value.”
Kierkegaard said, “The crowd is untruth.” He rejected Hegel’s
systematic philosophy as well as organized religion. In his view, human
judgment is incomplete, subjective, and limited, but we are also free to
choose and responsible for our choices. Only by exploring and coming to
terms with fundamental anxieties can we become liberated within our
ignorance. “Gödel’s incompleteness theorem showed that there are
theorems we will never be able to prove or disprove–thus some questions
in mathematics will never be answerable… Scientific and technological
190 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 74.
100
progress had to be tempered by new philosophical insights. The
existentialists stepped right into that gap.”191
Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov’s work confirmed the stimulus-response theory. S-R
theory in particular and behavioral psychology in general look at the
person as a machine that can be programmed for a desired outcome.
Pavlov’s accomplishment involved getting dogs to salivate when they
heard sound of a bell. He trained the dogs by ringing a bell immediately
prior to feeding them. There is, however, a vast mystery responsible for
explaining the interplay between stimulus and a perceived response when
it comes to emotions.
According to the theory, you need only find and use the right
stimulus in order to train yourself to react differently. Stimuli and their
responses are rich resources for our existential investigations, but chances
are we will need to look a little deeper into the relationship, at least when
investigating human emotions. Similarly, we should get to know another
person’s behavioral patterns by studying their unconditioned responses. It
is an important path of psychological discovery that reveals philosophical
principles. Reducing all actions to cause and effect may be easy to get
away with in some areas, but as far as human emotions go, the theory fails
the litmus test.
Thinking of a human as no more than a machine with a
conditioned response is thinking far too little of our amazing species. We
can certainly be manipulated into responding a particular way, but the wish
to give such a protocol traction would diminish our very humanness. Such
a claim marginalizes the person to an animal’s level of awareness. We are
more than just conditioned individuals; we have the capacity to think
deeply and completely reframe our worldview, given the will and support
to do so.
“Applying the scientific method yields some important
information about humans and how they work. But though it may pick out
threads of insight, psychology will never reveal the whole complex
tapestry of human nature. For example, proper scientific method
notwithstanding, behavioral psychology will never yield a system of
191 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 73.
101
ethics.”192 Philosophical counseling can, at times, feel like training for dog
trainers. There are methods and desired outcomes, but there is a sense of
awareness in the human sphere of knowledge that supersedes a canines.
192 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 22.
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Temperance
Intemperate courage is not courage but rashness. Temperance, in
turn, needs courage if it is to face up to temptation. The temperate
individual practices rational self-restraint and embraces challenges. When
people are presented with facts and have a warm regard for human
relations, their understanding will be stimulated. This promotes inner
harmony as opposed to inner conflict. Marcus Aurelius spoke on
temperance. He said, “Being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent, [will
protect you] against inconsiderate opinions and falsehood;”193 and “Those
which relate to good and bad: the belief that there is nothing good for man,
which does not make him just, temperate, manly, free; and that there is
nothing bad, which does not do the contrary to what has been
mentioned.”194
French novelist and thinker, Albert Camus, explored the
experience of believing in nothing beyond one’s individual freedom and
actions, and the moral implications of that way of thinking. In the novels
of Albert Camus, including The Plague and The Stranger, as in Sartre’s
novel Nausea and play No Exit, the heroes are always trying to do the right
thing, even when everything is falling apart. They are good people,
although they suffer a lot; they are numb but still strive to do good. Camus
said, “Rebellion in itself is not an element of civilization. But it is a
preliminary to all civilization. Rebellion alone, in the blind alley in which
we live, allows us to hope for the future of which Nietzsche dreamed:
‘Instead of the judge and the oppressor, the creator.’”195 He won the 1957
Nobel Prize for Literature for his work in the absurd “which he used to
193 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4.
194 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8.
195 Camus, The Rebel, 273.
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describe the feeling of meaningless existence. Whether absurdity, nausea,
or dread is the presenting symptom, Existential Crises are commonly
encountered—and resolved—by philosophical counselors.”196
Camus said, “Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which
man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is
metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation. The
slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his
state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in
which he finds himself a man.” There is a part of us that won’t tolerate
abuse. “Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses
from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary. When the
throne of God is overturned, the revel realizes that it is now his own
responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain
within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.”197
Political rebellion is always going to be limited in scope if it’s not
tempered with metaphysical principles. Revolution, however, originates in
our ideas. Camus argued it was the injection of ideas into historical
experience, and rebellion leads from individual experience to the realm of
ideas. He said rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and
principles. “Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself
is moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout
history and its eternal disturbances. The very origin of this value
guarantees us that it can only be partially destroyed. Moderation, born of
rebellion, can only live by rebellion. It is a perpetual conflict, continually
created and mastered by the intelligence.”198
196 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 76.
197 Camus, The Rebel, 25.
198 Camus, The Rebel, 301.
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105

Part 4

Literature & Drama

106

Character and Narrative
Human knowledge is theoretical and removed from action and is
outside of the present moment. The key to making a distinction between
appearance and reality is in our mode of existence. If the gap between
appearance and reality disappears, so does doubt. The question of self is
the irreducible beginning. Cognition of the question is beyond
qualification; it is language. Saint Augustine is quoted as saying, “the Old
Testament has a fourfold division as to history, etiology, analogy and
allegory,” to which Aquinas replies, “It is called analogy whenever the
truth of one text of Scripture is shown not to contradict the truth of another.
Of these four, allegory alone stands for the three spiritual senses.”
We can’t know God apart from revelation. Language presupposes the
question of what is the self. The questioner then shares experiences
through language with other beings. Our very being dwells in language.
Language composes our world, and our world composes our language,
known only by the knower. The Old Testament—meaning evidence—
begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.”
It is hard to know where, when, and even why an idea has gone
awry. This good, common to all, is easily forgotten; however, narratives,
known to most, are easy to remember. Historical narratives have a way of
putting concepts into perspective. Both factual and fictitious narratives are
instructional. Rotation—by catastrophe or amnesia—and repetition—by
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an aesthetic act or existential representation—are methods by which an
individual finds meaning in the mundane. The triadic relation, most
significantly personified in language and religion, is an intercession—a
restoration of proper relations—of the immaterial. This coupling “not only
signifies a relation which is unlike itself but also asserts itself”199 as a
symbol which renders something intelligible to someone.
In mathematics, a dyad is the combination of two vectors.
Moreover, it’s any system consisting of two parts. This might be father
and-son, male-and-female, or cause-and-effect. This objective-empirical
set of two elements is central in today’s worldview. It describes the tide’s
ebb and flow—a dynamic back and forth with a measurable beginning and
end. In music, a dyad is a set of two notes. Walker Percy refers to the
subject-object split using Sartre’s pour soi-et-en soi. They translate to
Percy’s rotation-and-alienation. “[The] penchant for taking to the woods
reverses the objective-empirical.”200 This Phenomenologizing is “closer to
novel writing than science of behavior.”201
Percy’s subject-object split, Pour Soi-En Soi, explain his ideas
on rotation and alienation. “[The] penchant for taking to the woods
reverses the objective-empirical.” In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha,
Siddhartha, the son on an ancient Indian Brahmin, is unhappy. He feels
that he has learned from his community all that his father has to teach. He
decides to leave with traveling ascetics with Govinda. Siddhartha and his
best friend, Govinda, follow the directives of the ascetics, but Siddhartha
feels that the path of the renunciate would also not guarantee the kind of
enlightenment he sought. After departing, the two friends encounter
Gotama, the Buddha. Govinda is convinced the Buddha’s path has the
answers he needs, but Siddhartha isn’t. He feels like the Buddha’s teaching
of going beyond with the physical conflicted with his lesson of all things
being in union.
Up to the point, the story seems to alternate between alienation
and rotation but the rotation is only a temporary fix. Next, Siddhartha parts
from Govinda. He meets Kamala, and she convinces him to become
worldly by being a merchant. With riches to spare, he indulges in drinking,
sex, and gambling. These embody Percy’s aesthetic repetition. After a
199 Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is,
How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other
(Stuttgart, Germany: Picador, 2002), Kindle edition.
200 Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Kindle edition.
201 Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Kindle edition.
108
time, he grows discontent and goes off to drown himself in the river.
Instead, he falls asleep on the river bank. Of all people, Govinda stumbles
upon and watches over Siddhartha until he wakes. They part ways again
and Siddhartha seeks out a ferryman, Vasudeva, who he had met earlier in
the story. The old man lets Siddhartha live and work with him to learn all
that the river has to teach. Kamala shows up with who he learns is his son.
She dies and leaves the child in Siddhartha’s care. As a transcendental
twist, the boy runs away because he doesn’t want to live that life.
While it makes for great literary effect and has value in
engineering where the combination of two vectors is needed, the dyadic is
not always appropriate. It is known that Plato’s Theory of Forms divides
a singular object into two worlds. This is a fallacy. The Marxist
bourgeoisie-and-proletariat are perfect examples of this mode of thought
which polarizes society. From Freud’s psychology to Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey, the Taoist Tai Chi and Ptolemy’s illustrations, the dyadic
dynamic is as fundamental to ancient thought as it is today. The coupling
mechanism of the triadic relation, on the other hand, doesn’t just paper
over this San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.
The use of language is unique to humans. Not only do humans
talk, but they do so incessantly. They make careers out of talking. They
are radio personalities, politicians, writers, and teachers. In a certain sense,
it is impossible to divorce the human experience from language. In a way,
language is essentially human. Naming things, the nominal mode, is a
semiotic account of our knowing. Like William of Ockham, Charles Pierce
had the misfortune of having his theories picked apart and ultimately
reduced to dyadic exchanges perhaps from a lack of understanding his
intentions. The nature of language is abstract—the symbol in particular
represents a meaning in general.
Humans think of words as having concrete meaning—a very
Webster’s Dictionary approach to definition. Language, however, is
limited with this sort of dynamic stimulus-response game. Language
conveys something to someone. A name is a universal essence. It can be
abstracted in the mind and transmitted via the symbol to another
individual. These labels are delivered in sentences. The sentence is the
most basic unit of language. The subject and the predicate are connected
by the copula. This metaphysical coupling is the framework of our thought
process. When “the ball is red” is uttered, it is known that the ball is not
made out of the substance red, but that it has redness.
The triadic relation supersedes the dyadic, objective-empirical
mode of thinking. Rotation and repetition are tactics in
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Phenomenologizing and literary fiction. Man seeks to overcome the sense
of emptiness he experiences. The metaphysical coupling of the triadic
relation allows for the abstract absolute, God. It’s expressed in the Beatific
Vision. It is a path from alienation to reconciliation. The triadic relation is
best expressed in language and religion. It is an intercession of the
immaterial. This coupling—a restoration of proper relations—asserts
itself. It is a form rendered intelligible to humans. The triadic relation is a
semiotic account of our knowing.
A narrative on the moral life is triadic. Percy and Aquinas posit
this from opposite ends. The agent, the object, and the end work to give
ethics a sound basis. The triadic model is irreducible. That which is
essentially human, namely truth, is a triadic structure. To remove the agent
from the picture is to reduce human affairs to a power struggle toward an
end. Aquinas observes man’s image and likeness to God—an instrumental
end. Our power of abstraction separates us from the animal kingdom. We
act toward an end, but being that our involvement is necessary, it’s
instrumental. Through vocation, we embody what would otherwise be a
purely abstract notion.
Similarly, through narrative, an artist can abstract what might
otherwise be an objective-empiricist’s account of knowing. The triadic
structure affords the agent an anthropomorphic significance. With gift and
task, man plays out drama as an actor, but he can also reflect back on a life
well-lived. God-given gifts, for instance, are talents given from God to
man. Similarly, man is tasked to make good use of his talents to an end.
The moral life, according to Pope John Paul II, includes the imitation of
Christ. In the notion of responsibility, man is responsible for something to
someone, namely God. It’s an irreducible relation.
Not all facts are empirically verifiable. Moral values, however, are
characterized by the blame or praise attributed to them or the shame or
pride accompanied by them. Morality is an abstract concept and differs
from natural goods which deal with objects, not human emotions. Ethics
considers people’s lives and their likes. People are called saints and
monsters. At some points in time around the globe, there have been
morally vile practices that were completely accepted socially. The worry
is when these arcane practices the norm.
If a person subscribes to a narrative that only seeks to attain wealth
and power, then he or she will come to mirror the type of person modeled
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in the story.202 These individuals set aside the soothing stories from
childhood which instill values such as temperance as in The Tortoise and
the Hare. Humanity seems to be fated to make the same mistakes because
they have forgotten or never learned these timeless lessons. The stories
taught by parents to children have normative ramifications. They are
meant to instill values. As Randels points out, individuals can be easily
deceived by a seductive narrative.
There are two dimensions present in every narrative, the episodic
and the configurational. The episodic dimension contains the actual events
while the configurational dimension consists of constructs of meaning
throughout the series of events. This configurational dimension is also
referred to as the narrative arc which is extended through the episodic
storytelling. Randels says, “[Narratives] provide both cognitive and
normative order. The very description of an act reflects the larger
conceptual framework of a moral tradition, a moral ordering that
incorporates values and responsibilities.”203
Prophetic narratives convey the strongest normative force as they
describe the world in a particular way that prescribes or prohibits moral
duties. They are written with the intention of changing the reader’s
volitional patterns. At the same time, Randels warns, “A narrative can be
inefficient if it cannot account for things associated with our purposes and
values that another perhaps can, or can only account for them with great
difficulty.”204 Ethics is a guide for behavior. Family values can provide a
basis for this trust if they are grounded in a commitment to the ethical
treatment of others.
The notion of character is central to the ethical theories of
Aristotle and Aquinas. Looking at moral problems through the lens of
character opens up a framework for moral analysis. By focusing a
particular ethical inquiry, values can constitute a moral framework which
Donahue called constitutive values. These values then take on a particular
form. His analysis and recipe for the use of character hinges on the
essential ingredients to moral experience. He argues that these ingredients,
constitutive values in a particular form, are cast as norms, and that these
norms provide a necessary complement to character ethics. “[There] are
formal processive norms that are necessary components of a virtue ethic
202 George D. Randels Jr. “The Contingency of Business: Narrative,
Metaphor, and Ethics,” Journal of Business Ethics 17, no. 12 (1998), 1305.
203 Randels, “The Contingency of Business,” 1300.
204 Randels, “The Contingency of Business,” 1302.
111
which give virtue a normative framework providing a basis for moral
decisions.”205
Values and norms are necessary for moral decision-making.
Values translate to norms. Norms and values can be seen as points that
constitute a moral framework. Norms and values must be taken as a
composite whole. Norms are directives of moral choice. Objects of
attention—the stimuli of sense-perception with ethical import—compel
moral action. A vision of the moral good incorporates virtues and values.
Norms are directives of moral choice. Donahue says, “Character
particularizes a distinct moral identity and connotes the way that particular
virtues are ordered within the self or in a community.”206 He goes on to
say, “Character refers to the unity, coherence, and integration of the self
as the way that the self is oriented to moral excellence and the good.”207
Virtues are qualities intrinsic to communities in distinctive ways that
enable them to achieve a particular end.
According to Donahue, “The meaning and content of these virtues
are contained in the stories and narrative tradition of a community.”208His
moral framework, composed of constitutive values, give particular form
to each norm. Narrative and character “can be formulated as formal norms
that give direction to how that value is actualized.”209 These norms provide
a benchmark of action-guides throughout the decision-making process.
Character orients the agent toward the good. Virtues are habits of acting
in certain ways appropriate to and consistent with character. Character
formulates unity of the moral self in a particular way. “This meaning,”
Donahue says, “is contained in and communicated through the narratives
of the self and the community that form the content of one’s tradition.”210
It is articulated in themes, myths, and images.
Historical narratives have a way of putting concepts into
perspective. Both factual and fictitious narratives are instructional. Not all
facts are empirically verifiable. Moral values, however, are characterized
by the blame or praise attributed to them or the shame or pride
accompanied by them. Morality is an abstract concept and differs from
205 James A. Donahue, “The Use of Virtue and Character in Applied
Ethics,” Horizons 17 (1990), 235.
206 Donahue, “Use of Virtue and Character,” 231.
207 Donahue, “Use of Virtue and Character,” 231.
208 Donahue, “Use of Virtue and Character,” 231.
209 Donahue, “Use of Virtue and Character,” 238.
210 Donahue, “Use of Virtue and Character,” 238.
112
natural goods which deal with objects, not human emotions. “At this
period there is even an imperialist of evil, who aim is to annex everything,
even the most orthodox geniuses. “What made Milton write with
constraint,” Blake observes, “when he spoke of anger and of God, and with
audacity when he spoke of demons and of hell, is that he was a real poet
and on the side of demons, without knowing it.” The poet, the genius, man
himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out simultaneously with
Satan: “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell free, farewell
remorse…Evil, be thou y good.” It is the cry of outraged innocence.”211
“Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of
creation–which was inconceivable to the Greeks. In their minds, there
was not gods on one side and men on the other, but a series of stages
leading from one to the other. The idea of innocence opposed to guilt, the
concept of all of history summed up in the struggle between good and evil,
was foreign to them. In their universe there were more mistakes than
crimes, and the only definitive crime was excess. In a world entirely
dominated by history, which ours threatens to become, there are no longer
any mistakes but only crimes, of which the greatest is moderation.212
Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein thinks that language is a social instrument and that
philosophy has a therapeutic end. “The philosophical problem is an
awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering
them.” For Wittgenstein, we can have certainty. His responds to G.E.
Moore with a more than reasonable digestion of Moore’s criticism. In
short, doubt comes after belief. This hinges our inquiry into certainty.
Ultimately, Wittgenstein is getting at his “picture of the world” within
which we put things to the test. Certainty then is a framework within which
we conduct inquiry and correct our beliefs by way of doubt.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, Wittgenstein argues this
sequence (of doubt being posterior to belief) because we must have a
211 Camus, The Rebel, 48.
212 Camus, The Rebel, 28.
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context for our doubts. As the book points out, a child believes before he
or she doubts. “The child learns to believe a host of things” (236). We must
and arguably do first take things on belief. The certainty we seek is made
possible by doubt. When we settle doubts of common sense assertions, we
then have reflexive certitudes.
While Wittgenstein posited that we can be “certain of these things
but we don’t know them,” his argument seems to, at least, rest on a flimsy
definition of knowing. We can only know something if it can be doubted,
but the things of which we are certain are beyond doubt. Some things need
only be perceived to be perfectly known. Not everything must be known
by demonstration. We cannot know the things we are certain of.
Doubt can occur only against a context of belief, a framework
within which inquiry can proceed. Furthermore, Wittgenstein correlation
between doubt and belief properly chart the movement of knowing: an
interaction followed by contemplation. This engagement is based on
experience and natural sequence on which our certainty hinges. His
linguistic mediation serves as a tangible basis for making sense of the
world. The method is not methodical. Application follow theory.
Wittgenstein contends that the Cartesian picture of language and
meaning has bewitched philosophy. In the Cartesian picture, inner life
occurs in a private inner space with introspectible objects that must be
transferred across a gap to the world and others; knowledge of others
comes by means of an inference by analogy; and linguistic meaning
depends on the inner association of private ostensive definition with public
names. The inner and outer dichotomy subverts a criterion for right and
wrong; raises the problem of communication if thoughts are private
introspectible objects; as well as the natural expressiveness of the human
body.
For Wittgenstein, understanding does not occur in the medium of
a private, inner world of the mind, but in the medium of public signs,
beginning with the natural expressiveness of the human body and
culminating in language. Meaning is not a mental image or any other inner
accompaniment of a sign. The space between mind and world necessary
for asking the skeptical question, therefore, does not appear. The existent
world is key to any epistemological understanding. The Cartesian model
doubts everything besides the existence of the self.
Descartes believed that thoughts were representations of ideas.
Wittgenstein objected to this representation. He argued that all human
thoughts are dependent on language. I think Wittgenstein’s criticism is
very compelling. We have primitive reactions based on the notion of
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language and based in the world of sense. Our reaction or set of abilities
can analyze and induce knowledge. These inferences about the condition
of another individual’s inner experience bridge the gap between language
and expression. Wittgenstein also recognized divinity and aesthetics as
important despite not having scientific value.
Natural expressiveness of the human body means we have a public
starting point for our engagement with one another in language. Without
this starting point, language could not arise. On the other hand, the
possibility of language means that we can go beyond the realities that first
find expression naturally in the human body to communicate universals. I
think his model is a suitable alternative. His denial of the possibility the
universal skepticism is convincing. The skeptical question is poorly
formed since it follows from something established with certainty.
There is a modal connection between language and the body’s
natural expressiveness. This grows out of a logical treatment of the human
body’s expressiveness and linguistics. An example is the doctor-patient
relationship. The patient undoubtedly lacks formal medical terminology.
The doctor begins his methodology by coaxing out of the patient terms
that work in tandem with the body’s natural expressiveness, perhaps by
placing a hand over the area of tension and asking if pressure makes it
“more painful” or any number of other suggested terms that help with
diagnosis.
Pain-behavior is one logical argument against a strict boundary
between inner and outer realities. We sense it in ourselves and in others
and the sense qualifies the sentences. Imagine a doctor who has no concept
of pain and only a tenuous grasp of language. When the patience says, “It
hurts here,” the doctor, without acknowledging the patient’s natural
expressiveness, misses out on a vast amount of information. Body
language can be eighty percent of communication. An example is the
destitute. A beggar with hand extended generally says very little, but the
gesticulation expresses the plight beyond question. Another example is the
gesture for eating when visiting another country. The native, seeing the
sign, simply points the traveler in the direction of an eatery.
We have a primitive reaction in these situations. This reaction or
set of abilities can analyze and induce knowledge. These inferences about
the condition of another individual’s inner experience bridge the gap
between language and expression. Wittgenstein recognized divinity and
aesthetics as important despite not having scientific value. Language is
used in more than one way. Instead of reporting a description of inner
space, a picture, we can express our thoughts and sensations that are
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meaningful to others. This meaning is a pre-linguistic mode of our being
on which language is based.
After mentioning a number of such examples, he says: “And we
can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way;
we can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this
examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping
and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities.” Hence: “I can think of
no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family
resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a
family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap
and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family”
(§67).
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein begins by saying
“consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’ … look and
see whether there is anything common to all” (§66). He concludes: “And
this is how we do use the word ‘game.’ For how is the concept of a game
bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you
give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn.
(But that never troubled you before when you used the word ‘game’)”
(§68).
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Walker Percy
Percy’s claim about the truth of things has relation to reality. In
this way, his radical anthropology is a real science, in that is the line of
though can be followed and replicated. His ideas on culture, on intentional
relations, is real in the sense that it has its own being. It’s relation on mind
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is still an existing relation. That is to say, it’s still real. This model, while
working outside the parameters of Kantian philosophy, the prejudice that
there’s nothing to be known beyond the activity of the knower.
He nevertheless adopts the scientific method in order to develop
his ideas on phenomena that are unique to humans. The functional method
can be traced back to Aristotle and bringing order to aporia. This same
method can be applied to the self, the study of that which is uniquely
human, just as it can be applied to external objects. An action however
must be brought into the picture for the examination of examination if you
will. Due to its immateriality, it’s a relation between three corners, not just
two objects.
Assertion is a triadic act. Culture is also triadic. We like to impose
the dyadic model, but in the world of meaning and understanding, we’re
dealing with intentional being instead of material being. The dyadic, cause
and effect, involves reduction. The irreducible triadic relation thus requires
a broadening of the functional method. The assertion can’t be reduced to
output. The form of human relation is triadic according to Percy. We might
compare the dyadic to the triadic with a two-dimensional representation to
a three-dimensional one.
Percy isn’t the first to stumble upon the triadic. Without
regurgitating those thinkers and thoughts here, it illustrates a closer
resemblance to reality than the alternative. I’ve long been fascinated with
this concept before I had the language and references to speak on it. The
coupler for Percy is immaterial. This can bridge science and philosophy
without compromising one or the other. It strengthens both investigations.
Percy’s radical anthropology is a surer science. It dissolves misplaced
divisions between separate sciences for truer human knowledge.
The case of the delta factor and its explanation on an event that
happened to Helen Keller was exciting to me to say the least. The chapter
hit on a lot of things on which I’d often reflected. It’s maybe common study
at one point in philosophy, perhaps epistemology if not linguistics, that we
naturally ask ourselves what these notions really bear in truth to the
experience itself. I also like Percy’s elucidation of humans being the only
talking creature on earth and one who does so incessantly.
The delta factor itself refers to a relation between the object, the
sign for it and the subject. It’s neat but its extensions are beyond many
contemporary modes of thinking as Percy points out. He does, to add a
dash of optimism, point out another thing. He stresses that as one age ends
its model will no longer serve their purpose and the new age must devise
a new model.
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I don’t think this is at all meant to be sarcastic or dismissive of the
years of thought and research that have gone into the models we hold dear
whether they’re theological in nature or scientific. I think it’s a truth to
which we can all relate because being wrong and being humbled by the
truth is a curious thing that happens to us humans. Like language itself, we
might describe all of the surrounding particulars but dance around the truth
we experienced.
On some level, perhaps the ultimate level, the delta factor, being
a model to explain phenomena, includes God. At the same level, a study
of all man can know, it also includes the man who’s calling into question
things of such depth. We tend to get stuck here and resort to saying
statements that reflect a one or two-way directional path of causation. The
delta offers something different. For me, it connects a lot of dots. The sign
is how we know things. That’s its place. Language rightfully straddles the
void between man and beyond.
Percy brings with his message in a bottle analogy a breath of fresh
air to the over-exhausted philosophical dialogue of both the limits of what
we can and can’t know and the sphere of being in and of itself. While he
remains more quiet on that latter, he certainly leads us to the point to make
some clear deductions of our own. The message in the bottle deals with
the human as a wayfarer, a stranger in a strange land. His insights on this
personally resonate as the highest truth.
Epictetus
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Roman philosopher and teacher of stoicism, Epictetus said, “No
man is free who is not master of himself.” Epictetus was born a slave and
was crippled from repeated torture. Through philosophy, however, he
enjoyed greater freedom of mind than most. Epictetus admonished
refraining from attachment to things beyond your full control. Factors
outside our power of control are the last thing that should bother a person.
Tutor of Marcus Aurelius Compare what seems awful to you to
much worse things and content yourself with how much worse things
could truly have been. His was a philosophy that focused on humility and
self-control. He was said to be more serene than the emperor he served.
Epictetus said, “If it ever happens that you turn outward to want to please
another person, certainly you have lost your plan of life.”
Epictetus offered a view of things that challenged common
fallacies of thinking. He saw that depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger,
and other negative emotions follow from wrong thinking. Self-defeating
assumptions and unrealistic expectations only set a person up for
misplaced feeling of distress. Epictetus is artful with his presentation of a
philosophy that’s easily applied in one’s life.
He considered it a duty to uncover the suppressed premises that
rule the mind. In daily life, we should regard circumstances carefully to
prevent making invalid arguments that only promote a negative way of
thinking. “No word is a word of bad omen which expresses any work of
nature; or if it is so, it is also a word of bad omen to speak of the ears of
corn being reaped.” He admonished we keep away from sensual pleasure
altogether, but also cautioned against allowing our aversions to have
power over us.
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121

122

Marcus Aurelius
As refined as a person can be in practice and in frame of mind,
Marcus Aurelius served as the emperor of Rome in the second century.
Even if he wasn’t the most cheery emperor to ever hold the throne, he was
effective in consoling himself with philosophical remedies of those who
preceded him including Epictetus. He urges us not to place too much value
on the dispositions of others.
He thought we created our own good fortune by maintaining a
favorable disposition, and imbuing our lives with positive emotions rather
than negative ones. “Think of the country mouse and of the town mouse,
and of the alarm and trepidation of the town mouse.”213 When we
subscribe to the notion that we have been offended, we are signing up for
all the sour emotions that flow from owning a misplaced sentiment.
Aurelius is almost the prototypical philosopher. He is Plato’s
philosopher king embodied. He said, “Even in a palace it is possible to live
well,” as if he was wholly indifferent to worldly pleasures and human
pains. “What then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only
one, philosophy.” But as Stoic as he is, Aurelius is difficult to ignore. His
Meditations is revealing of that fact that he was practicing the ideas he
espoused.
“Give yourself a time of quiet to learn some new good thing;”214
“Let no act be done without a purpose;” “There is nothing new: all things
are both familiar and short-lived.” He urged us to examine our own “ruling
faculty”215 and questions the validity of our emotional reasoning. “A
scowling look is altogether unnatural.”216 Aurelius thought that we exist
for the sake of one another, and it was better to teach someone than quarrel
with them.

213 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 11
214 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2
215 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9
216 Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7

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Epicurus
Epicurus was a Greek philosopher. He taught that contemplation
was a greater tool for living than hedonistic tendencies, yet his philosophy
continues to be confused to hedonism based on his famous rallying cry,
“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” But he was also the
source of more balanced comments. “We can take precautions against all
sorts of things; but so far as death is concerned, we all of live like the
inhabitants of a defenseless citadel.”
Epicurus found that philosophy provided of remedies for diseases
of the mind, and was, therefore, the medicine of the mind. He thought
philosophy could act as a practical guide to life. We makes life happy and
pleasant by expelling all opinions and falsehoods through reason alone.
Epicurus actually advocated moderate pleasures such as friendship and
aesthetic pursuits. “Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does
not relieve any human suffering.”
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who taught a system
of values. Though he was opposed to the Hedonists of his time, his ethics
are understood as hedonistic compared to Western values today. He was
the main opponent of Stoicism and put emphasis on pleasure, not as
mindless hedonism, but as reasonable indulgence in the good things in life.
He valued intellectual pleasure and recommended the cultivation of
friendship.
Epicurus does not deny the gods; he disregards them as beyond
our power and therefore beyond our concern. He thought we had no other
recourse than to retreat into the citadel. “The happy and immortal being
has no preoccupations of his own and no concern with the affairs of
others.” He thought that we should all be enjoying ourselves as it is absurd
to postpone enjoyment, according to Epicurus. He said, “We spend our
lives in waiting and we are all condemned to die.”
Lucretius goes even farther. “It is incontestable that the gods, by
their very nature, enjoy their immortality in perfect peace, completely
unaware of our affairs, from which they are utterly detached,” and said
that this vast world is condemned to death and ruin. Therefore let us forget
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the gods, let us never even think about them, and “neither your thoughts
during the day nor your dreams at night will ever be troubled.”217
217 Camus, The Rebel, 29.
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Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is a literary titan. His works define literature
for a lot of people. He is the very last word in wordsmithing. A master of
the linguistic arts, Shakespeare creatively revived a lot of traditional
stories much like Dostoevsky. His Antony and Cleopatra, portrays a battle
on the high seas between Antony and Octavius. Cleopatra orders her fleet
of ships to return home, and Antony follows her, leaving what would have
been his glory on the battlefield.
Shakespeare’s dramas were generally not built on either a
psychological motive or an ethical end; instead, they explain moral
predispositions throughout the character’s development. In Julius Caesar,
the first in a set including Antony and Cleopatra, features Brutus, an
obvious predecessor of Hamlet and Othello. It takes a more historical
approach than King Lear and Macbeth. Cassius says, “The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
In act one of King Lear, Edmund says, “I grow, I prosper. Now,
gods, stand up for bastards!” He serves as the focal point in King Lear in
many ways; Edmund seems strong and honorable but proves to be the
exact opposite. In act two, King Lear says, “I will have such revenges on
you both that all the world shall—I will do such things—what they are yet
I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” Ultimately, it’s a
powerless threat.
While King Lear couldn’t come up with many practical solutions,
other characters of Shakespeare display an array of virtues. Polonius says
in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the
day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Isabella says in Measure for
Measure, “I’d rather give my body than my soul,” and she asks, “How
would you be if He, which is the top of judgement, should but judge as
you are?” Friar Laurence says in Romeo and Juliet, “Virtue itself turns
vice, being misapplied, and vice sometime by action dignified.”
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127

Elation
Honor, along with wealth and pleasure, are important identifiers
of happiness for Aristotle. He saw happiness as a practical end for human
activity. Happiness is agent-relative and varies person-to-person.
Aristotle’s three character types are the vulgar, the political and the
contemplative. Proper to their character, the three types approach
happiness differently. If happiness is rational activity in accordance with
virtue, then it cannot be reason alone. The ultimate goal for a life well
lived does not need to be rationalized. Honor is pursued for the assurance
of goodness. Piety requires men and women to honor truth above human
relationships. While lesser goods are a product of immediate and short
lived utility, the common good is a lasting factor that shapes decisions in
individuals and businesses that forges notion of virtue. Moral excellence
avoids wrong action for pleasure. Likewise, it acts nobly in the face of
pain.
Character arise from acts of goodness rather than passion or
faculty. Pain and pleasure are transient. Happiness would not be a product
of effort; it is instead an involuntary response when an individual or
business is engaged in virtuous activity. Virtue is that which makes the
agent good and makes the agent want to perform the work well. It aims at
that which is intermediate between two vices: deficiency and excess.
Happiness is not excessive pleasure, abstaining from encounters for fear
of pain, or following a prescribed course of action. Just as moral virtues
themselves are the product of constant practice, happiness follows from a
virtuous course of action toward a good. Happiness is meaningful by way
of reason, exemplary by way of action, and virtuous by way of choice, or
choosing to act with purpose.
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For Aristotle, happiness meets the requirements for the ultimate
end of human action. “Morality has to do with developing habits, the
habits of right thinking, right choice, and right behavior.”218 Happiness is
another word for good; it is fulfilling. Happiness is that which results from
acting in accordance with an individual’s or a business’s nature. This
nature is distinctive; it’s relative to the ends, the specific goals that agent
is working toward. In the Politics and in Ethics, Aristotle stresses purpose.
The state naturally has a distinctive function. “Aquinas built upon
Aristotle’s theory of ethics. Like Aristotle, he considered ethics a quest for
happiness. Moreover, following Aristotle’s lead, Aquinas argued that
happiness is connected closely with our end or purpose. To achieve
happiness we must fulfill our purpose.”219
Aristotle thought that an individual who received a well-rounded
education would be a good judge of character. In the Aristotelian
Thomistic tradition, the universal and realizable desire to know the right
course of action is the predicament of man. The first step toward the kind
of knowledge of which Aristotle wrote is the Socratic realization that man
does not know himself. The desire for the practical knowledge which
Aristotle references cannot be pursued in the attitude of the common sense,
but instead in an effort to decide the limits of what can be known in a given
realm. Virtue is a necessary condition of happiness, since it is the
foundation of the self-approval.
The tradition of Sufi masters imparting spiritual knowledge
students has its root with the very origin of Islam. This cultural practice is
evident around the world. Each language has its own symbols and word
forms for the ideal of a master. The earliest documented cases suggest that
the practice of initiation is foundational within a community. This
ceremonial rite is central in the development and continuance of ethics.
The Whirling Dervishes believe in performing their devotional acts (dhikr)
in the form of a spiritual concert (samā). During the time of Rumi, his
followers gathered for musical and whirling practices. Rumi was a
musician, and his favorite instrument was the reed flute. The Sufi order
was well-established and many of the members of the order served in
various official positions.
In the search for the ecstatic experience, we encounter
acculturated language, symbolism, dogmatism, and skepticism. It’s
challenging to reconcile the external circumstances of the material world
218 Stumpf and Fieser. Philosophy: History and Problems, 93.
219 Stumpf and Fieser. Philosophy: History and Problems, 176.
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with the internal purity of heart. We as humans make a conscious effort to
extrapolate practical knowledge in pursuit of happiness. Sufism is within
and without Islam because it supports the fundamental drive for
unification that spurred its original indoctrination. The tradition of masters
is a practical societal device for initiation into the order of existence and
the practice of writing poetry is a means of channeling that sense of
oneness.
“According to tradition, [Confucius] is credited with editing an
early collection of poems to form a book that is now known as the Odes.
While most contemporary scholars no longer ascribe the editing of this
text to [Confucius], the traditional view reflects the critical importance of
this text for [Confucius] and his disciples. [Confucius] did seem to believe
that the Odes contained a hidden meaning that was at the very least
consistent with the goals of moral self cultivation. We also have examples
that appear to record [Confucius] and his disciples teasing out the proper
meaning of a particular ode by seeing how it applies to an issue concerning
moral self cultivation.”220 “[Proust] has demonstrated that the art of the
novel can reconstruct creation itself, in the form that it is imposed on us
and in the form in which we reject it. In one of its aspects, at least, this art
consists in choosing the creature in preference to his creator. But still more
profoundly, it is allied to the beauty of the world or of its inhabitants
against the powers of death and oblivion. It is in this way that his rebellion
is creative.”
“The novel is born at the same time as the spirit of rebellion and
expresses, on the aesthetic plane, the same ambition.”221 Virgil said,
“Night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps
and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the tool!” Voltaire said,
“Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.” And
according to Poe, compulsion is as captivating as the call of virtue.
Tolkien’s Arwen said, “The shadow does not hold sway yet.” Twain
thought the best course of action is the one that leaves you blameless and
with no regrets. Shelley said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world.”
“If metaphysical rebellion refuses to assent and restricts itself to
absolute negation, it condemns itself to passive acceptance. If it prostrates
itself in adoration of” what exists and renounces its right to dispute any
part of reality, it is sooner or later compelled to act. Ivan Karamazov—
220 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 3.
221 Camus, The Rebel, 259.
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who represents non-interference, but in a dolorous aspect—stands halfway
between the two positions. Rebel poetry, at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth century, constantly oscillated between these
two extremes: between literature and the will to power, between the
irrational and the rational, the desperate dream and ruthless action.”222
“Until Dostoievsky and Nietszsche, rebellion is directed only
against a cruel and capricious divinity – a divinity who prefers, without
any convincing motive, Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s and, by so doing,
provokes the first murder. Dostoievsky, in the realm of imagination, and
Nietzsche, in the realm of fact, enormously increase the field of rebellious
thought and demand and accounting from the God of love himself.”223
“The sentimental love story, the horror story, and the edifying novel
deviate from art to the great or small extent that they disobey this law. Real
literary creation, on the other hand, uses reality and only reality with all its
warmth and its blood, its passion and its outcries. It simply adds something
that transfigures reality.”224
222 Camus, The Rebel, 81.
223 Camus, The Rebel, 33.
224 Camus, The Rebel, 269.
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Part 5

Case Studies

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Disturbance
Clare is a mother of three. That’s how she describes herself at
least. She’s a librarian, but her days of cataloging are overlain with an
endless series of worries. Clare is experiencing a difference of opinion
with one of her children—the middle child. While every parent is
perfected prepared to love their children unconditionally, those good
intentions expire when, in this case, mom began feeling disrespected by
her mouthy teen.
“I like to ask my client how they define themselves.”
“And why is that?” Clare retorted.
“The role that a person regards as their primary reveals a lot
about the way they think about things,” I said.
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“Well, being a single mother is my main preoccupation.”
“I can only imagine.”
“The hardest part is, my kids don’t see why I ask what I do from
them.”
“What are you wont to ask of them?”
“It’s mostly the middle one.”
“What’s the complication?”
Clare buried her head and took a deep breath. Her distress was
obvious. She composed herself to the best of her ability and continued,
“You want the best for someone.”
“Of course…”
“And when they deviate from that track…,” she
stammered. “She’s headed for heartache.”
“Why do you say that?” I inquired.
“She’s been dating some kid from her class I don’t approve of.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“Not directly. I keep trying. Our relationship is already strained.”
“The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus said, ‘Raising
children is an uncertain thing; success is reached only after a life of battle
and worry.’ Is it that you feel a deeply personal level of disturbance that
you can’t shake?”
“You know what? That is exactly how I feel.”
In the DMT system, disturbance is the first fallacy. From still
water, a ripple appears. Clare is dealing with a persistent anxiety over
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factors that are beyond her control. It is a rating fallacy meaning that the
sentiments as linguistic constructs exist on the basis that the disturbance
has some kind of vivacious nature to borrow from the term from Hume.
“You might be interested to know that your logic is a bit mixed
up.”
it.”
“How’s that?”
“How did you arrive at the conclusion that?”
“I don’t know. I guess that’s just how I’ve always thoughts about
“I think your reasoning goes something like you feel it’s
warranted to obsess over these minutia of your emotions regarding your
kids because that’s what a good parent ought to do.”
“Precisely.”
“Do you think there’s a possibility that the rating you attribute to
the things you’re feeling may not be proportional to the gravity of the
detail assessment from another vantage point?”
“And what vantage point is that? I’m a mother, and mother’s
worry.”
“I mean a position free from claims like the one you just made. I
mean that we form certain ideas like a duty to worry that may not be
based on sound reasoning. There is a big difference between
experiencing stress and fear at the appropriate times from conventional
standards and just stewing on the same old thoughts. What’s more is that
we have a tendency to magnify the severity of these common worries to
extent that they affect the way we see ourselves and others.
“I’m listening.”
“Aristotle might suggest you employ a little more discretion
about the feelings you let consume you.”
“That’s really interesting. I never, I can admit, thought I was part
of the problem.”
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“Prudence, the virtue that quells persistent disturbance, deals
with contingent truths. Prudence integrates the person feeling a certain
way as an active and culpable participant in the feeling and associates
linguistic constructs. The way we think about things is language-based.”
“So you’re saying I should be more prudent about the way I let
myself feel?”
“That’s right. In the world of emotions, a disturbance may
appear much larger than it really is.”
“How do I get into the habit of being prudent?”
“I think it takes time. It’s all too easy to get carried about in a
moment of panic, particularly when it’s about our kids.”
“Exactly. So what parenting is good parenting if I can’t trust my
intuition?”
“I think there is a different between anxiety and intuition.”
“Okay. I’ll give you that one.”
Clare is confusing the panicked thoughts that well up in regards to
her middle child with intuition. According to Kant, a priori intuition is
based in objectivity and universality. It was his position that it is
incoherent to think all things that exist are minds separate from sensation.
Our ideas about reality are either in our experience or come from the laws
of what is possible. This provides an objective means for the synthesis of
sensuous intuition rather than presuppositions which serve as the rules for
reality. The logical conclusion leads us to the position of Kant, where
experience is the product of the relationship between the subject and the
object. Objectivity needs no secondary qualities, and while the virtual
realists fall short of Kant’s conclusion, the problem of perception persists.
Intuition is prismatic. You can try to catch it, but in the process you get in
the way and the image fades.
“Aristotle thought that decision making was a combination of
intellectual intuition and induction. Prudence is the virtue that achieves
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good decisions that serve a sensible purpose. Our perception are
structured by our habits, the way we tend to think and feel on a regular
basis. These habits, often times, say more about the person experiencing
the emotion than the “truth” about another individual. Prudential
knowledge is directed toward practical, sound reasoning.”
Rejection
Antonio is a political policy student who has been coming to
terms with a mounting sense of rejection. He just recently relocated and
is wide-eyed about the future. The problem Antonio is facing is a clash
between the value system he professes and the way he feels about
himself at the end of the day. Antonio’s story is very common. After the
fallacy of disturbance, rejection ensues.
“I cannot seem to do anything right.”
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“I see you’re rating everything you do poorly. Surely, that’s an
unfair assessment.”
“This bothers you often?
“At first, yes, I felt bothered. Now, I think I just feel alone.”
“Do you know a lot of people outside of school?”
“Not really, and that’s been a shock since I come from a big
support system.”
“You’re close with your family.”
“Yes, but I’m hours away from any of them, and on my budget,
it’s not worth it to drive there. I’m not even sure it’d really make me feel
any different.”
“And because of your limitations of distance and time
constraints you feel cut off?”
“Sure, but I think I’m also cutting myself off from the world. I
know that probably doesn’t make sense.”
“Social withdrawal and isolation commonly follow from the
fallacy of rejection that you’re experiencing. The virtue that assists in
combatting this particular symptom of wrong thinking is self
acceptance.”
“I feel like I’ve accepted my situation.”
“Self-acceptance is a personal choice. It sculpts the dimensions
of value within which the self operates. Habits of self-acceptance have a
profound effect on an individual’s psychology.”
“I can imagine, yet I don’t know how to conjure up this
completely different idea of myself.”
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“Self-acceptance houses our rational faculty. It forms the further
constructs to protect us from unexamined philosophical assumptions.”
Aquinas conceived of the agent as using cognitive and
appetitive potencies in tandem. He emphasized the unity of thought and
will in action. Choices predicated on self-acceptance are necessarily
virtuous. Limitless acceptance powerfully reframes our emotional state.
We can invoke this sense of metaphysical security, the practical
application of which is using unconditional self-acceptance as an
emotional shield. A person utilizing self-acceptance as a virtue gives up
attempts to control forces beyond them to operate from a positive self
image.
Antonio is operating under the assumption that his support is
limited. These ideological limitations have allowed him to cast an untrue
image of himself. This sort of doctrine of limitation and lack of support
infiltrates our psychology and corrodes the pillars of self-worth. Kant
said that people are an end in themselves, and never a means only. Kant
means there is more value to a person than serving a means to an end.
Kant says we are rational, self-determining agents, and bearers of our
own self-determination.
“So how do I do that?”
“It’s as easy as not limiting yourself based on your current
circumstances. Your self-worth is unconditional; it’s not contingent on a
support system. With a clear-minded perspective, your value is self
evident.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“What you are wanting from others, from school, from a career,
does not equate to the sense of meaning to attribute to your existence.”
“I think I get it, but how do I go about implementing this
perspective?”
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“The Kantian moral imperative to respect ourselves as ends does
not, in turn, demand the approval of others. This wish for acceptance
from others is not something that can be expected by a rational person.”
“I guess I never looked at it that way. I always assumed that my
pride was something validated by the way people looked at me.”
“This demand for approval subverts Kant’s idea that we should
respect ourselves as ends because it undermines the autonomy of others.”
“Wow. That’s powerful. Okay. I can see how it’s not realistic to
demand approval from others.”
“Doing so, operating from a philosophical assumption that others
should have the same view that we have for ourselves, violates the basic
a respect for others.”
“What then are we doing all of this for?”
“We’re living for ourselves and our loved ones to uphold a
community build on a sense of purpose.”
“That sounds too easy for me to make sense of.”
“I think that’s only because you’ve been looking at this
differently for such a long time. If you apply this perspective
consistently, it will become your norm.”
It is in our best interest not to minimize the importance of
unconditional self-acceptance. Our value and ability to determine our
emotional fate is innate. While we tend to project the source of our worth
on others, it always comes from within. The basis of a higher-power in the
view of psychology is to protect and fortify the mind. Our emotional state
is directly shaped by the ideas we agree with. By exchanging one set of
ideas for another, we reshape our very identity as well as the emotions
associated with it.
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142

Dominance
Midlife crises are a dime a dozen. This isn’t because our value
changes over time; it’s that our perception of what’s worthy of value shifts.
In our early years, we tend to exhibit rather short-sighted judgments. Being
that we’re just kids in this phase of life everyone considers it to be okay. I
tend to wonder why philosophy is only taught in college and not before
then when it could be of practical use. When we’re older, we’ve learned
from mistakes and don’t take things for granted as much. Midlife is fraught
with both voice—struggling for dominance.
Molly has bad luck letting bad characters into her life. Jesus said
in the sermon on the mount, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
the earth,” and “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill
cannot be hidden.” Molly definitely qualified as the meek. She let her boss
and her boyfriend rule her. She claimed she hated herself, and in turn,
allowed others to be hateful to her. This was my second session with her.
“How have things been?”
“Much better, and I really mean that.”
“How about the control issues with your boss and your
boyfriend?”
“They aren’t problems in my life anymore. I finally took back
control of my life,” she proclaimed.
“I had hope you would sort some stuff out.”
“I had faith that carried me through.”
“Have you been reading it still?” I asked.
“Every night. I like the bible. I can’t believe I never really gave it
a chance before.”
“There’s a lot of wisdom in it.”
Molly winced. She balled her fists and looked up. “I’m just so
damn,” she paused, “unburdened!” She laughed, and then relaxed a bit.
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“You seem like you’re in a much better place.”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“You had the courage within,” I assured her. “And anyway, ‘Bear
one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.’
“What’s that one?”
“Galatians 6:2. Do you have any passages that have stood out to
you?”
“Yes,” she said. “John 1:5, The light shines in the darkness, and
the darkness has not overcome it, and John 3:31, He who comes from
above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks
in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all.”
“Molly! I’m impressed. “’The Lord’s curse is on the house of the
wicked, but He blesses the home of the righteous.’ Proverbs 3:33. Old
Testament.”
“Oh! That’s maybe beyond my time investment management, you
know, forecast,” she stammered.
I laughed. “’Be strong and of good courage.’ Deuteronomy 31:6.
There’s some good stuff. You’re thirty-four if I remember correctly.”
“Yep.” She smiled.
“And recently emancipated from a couple less than ideal
situations.”
“Yeah.” She took a second. “I knew the behavior, my behavior, of
letting people walk on me, was wrong, yet I allowed it.”
“Allowing builds courage. It’s how we learn. We come out the
other end stronger because of the struggles we experience.”
“Do you have any parting wisdom before I go?” She asked of me.
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“How about I leave you with one more from the book of John?”
“Okay then.” She accepted.
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because
fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in
love.”
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146

Deception
Tim is a quick study. He’s hungry. Tim, we can call him, was a
client of mine. Tim was a wannabe cop. He got kicked out of college for
partying and has since then been scheming in one way or another. Tim has
truly done it all, with respect to his deception. He lies. He cheats. However,
Tim is very successful. He just has a terrible time picking up the pieces
when things go sour.
“I’m trying to get mine,” he was fond of repeating.
“So you think you have to deceive others in order to do so?”
“I don’t know. It comes naturally to me. I’ll think of a lie quick!
And it’s a good lie.”
“How much of the time does that work out?”
“Most of the time.”
“Give me an example.”
“Last week, my boss found some unapproved expenses on the
company account.”
“Did your boss find the person responsible?”
“Someone was fired over the ordeal.”
“So you were or were not involved?”
“That’s the thing about a golden tongue. I immediately got upset
and deflected the heat onto another person. So I figure there’s no wrong
doing if you don’t get caught.”
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it?”
“You’re saying a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear
“Precisely.”
“But there were unapproved charges and someone lost their job,
right?”
“Somebody has to take the fall. It’s like chess.”
“I’d imagine there’d be some blowback from that.”
“She was out the door anyway. She’d been at odds with our boss
before. I knew there was tension between them. I just fanned the flames a
bit.”
Tim is under the impression that he is absolved of wrongdoing if
he can pin it on an unwitting victim. He also has marital problems in
relation to chasing women. Of course, it’s completely justified in his mind.
He explained that he doesn’t have coitus, it’s not an affair. But anything
besides intercourse is fair game. A man, he argues, has needs. Tim clearly
loves his wife and kids. He also compulsive engages in trickery and deceit
to provide for them and to sustain his identity construct. He builds barriers
and buffers. He forges alliances too. Tim has spun himself in an intricate
web where he is the architect and the hero.
Tim is extremely well-read. He’s taken cautionary tales and
crafted a super villain that always gets away with the rouse. His confidence
is vivacious. Tim’s distorted sense of moral structure encourages to build
the right backstory to get what he needs to the next step in his plan. He is
under a delusion himself to think that he always wins and will always win.
It may even be true in the most superficial sense, but Tim’s actions aren’t
consistent with his wedding vows or work contract. It doesn’t seem to
bother him. He’s beat the system or so he likes to imaging. He’s a fox in
the henhouse.
Tim and his wife are on the outs. He was sleeping around and got
called out for his misdeeds. His wife came home to find Tim’s other phone
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on the kitchen counter. While he explained it away as his new work phone,
the tension just grew from there.
“My wife doesn’t understand what I’m trying to attain,” Tim told
me.
“You think she’s got it all wrong?”
“Mostly. Don’t get me wrong. I wronged her. Sure. She found out
more than she needed to. True. But I’m still here, putting my stamp on the
world.”
“And what stamp is that?” I asked.
“Unstoppable motion.”
“Why are you trying to achieve this state?”
He explained, “As much as I tried, and I’ve tried plenty, to tell my
wife that she doesn’t give me the attention I need.”
“So it’s perfectly sensible then for you to see satisfaction outside
of your marriage?”
“No, it’s not perfect. It’s just one solution. I told her she could get
a boyfriend. I wasn’t serious, of course. We’re just different.”
Tim uses deception to mask the reality of the situations in which
he finds himself. Tim is a matchstick man, a con artist. He charmed his
wife. He woos his employer by taking credit for others’ work and placing
blame elsewhere to deflect any unwanted scrutiny. According to Tim, he
never actually cheated. Since the interactions he’s been having with other
women is primarily just an attention grab, he swears he doesn’t actually
sleep with them. Tim is running into a boy who cried wolf scenario.
Although he may be telling the truth, the fact that he deceives others so
often and so effortlessly makes trusting him more difficult.
Tim experiences panic when his plans go sour, but he insists he can “flip
it” to be to his advantage. This might be true in the short term. Due to his
deceptive behavior, his reliability is at least questionable is not invalid.
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“Do you notice that you justify your actions—actions others don’t
view as nice?” I asked him.
“I like to think I have good reasons for my actions.”
“So let’s reconstruct your argument. You want unstoppable
greatness, and to succeed you need to manage your needs, so striving for
nonstop action means that it’s okay to satisfy your needs.”
“Yeah, I’d say that’s right,” Tim agreed.
“Do you think it’s possible that the deeds your wife and your wife
find offensive aren’t really helping you achieve the height of your
potential?”
“I suppose that’s possible,” he conceded.
“Buddha said, “those who aspire to the consummation of
incomparable enlightenment should recognize and understand all varieties
of things in the same way and cut off the arising of…” lesser joys.”
“You’re saying that my flirting and my upsetting tactics at work
are limiting me instead up uplifting me to where I want to be?”
“Precisely!” I assured him. “Bodhidharma, who brought
Buddhism to China said, “The three realms are greed, anger, and delusion.
To leave the three realms means to go from greed, anger, and delusion
back to morality, meditation, and wisdom.””
“I guess I always thought,” Tim confessed, “that lying and
cheating were beating the game. Yet, here I am, playing games that are
holding me up.”
“Exactly, but all’s not lost. You’ve gotten into the habit of
justifying certain behaviors that are temporarily appealing because your
wife doesn’t give you the attention your deserve or because your boss
doesn’t pay you the salary you deserve.”
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“But I’m not a Buddhist, and I don’t know how to seek wisdom or
really know how to make my life make sense based on a view of morality
I’ve been railing against for two decades.”
“Have you ever tried Zen meditation?” I asked him.
“Maybe in college,” he laughed. “What is Zen?”
“According to Bodhidharma, “Not thinking about anything
is Zen.””
“So…” Tim stammered, “Don’t think. I thought you were saying
the opposite.”
“Sure, other philosophers might have other angles on the matter,
but those ideas are just more moral constructs. If it’s a construct you want
to work toward, I’d suggest being honest.”
“Honestly?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I questioned him.
“Well, I guess I’m not trying to be a Buddhist.”
“You don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice Zen. In fact, Buddha
insisted that his teaching of the good law is to be likened to a raft, but
the buddha-teaching must be relinquished. You don’t need to become a
Buddhist. You no longer need the raft once you arrive to the other side.”
“Honesty?”
“That’s where you can aim, but also examine your
mind. Nagarjuna, the fourteenth patriarch who lived in the second century
said in the Diamond Sutra, “If such men allowed their minds to grasp and
hold on to anything they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a
personality, a being, or a separated individuality; and if they grasped and
held on to the notion of things as having intrinsic qualities they would be
cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated
individuality. Likewise, if they grasped and held on to the notion of things
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as devoid of intrinsic qualities they would be cherishing the idea of an ego
entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality. So you should
not be attached to things as being possessed of, or devoid of, intrinsic
qualities.””
“So what then?”
“What is there left when you stop playing games that deceive
people?”
“I suppose it’s still me, just thinking and acting more responsibly.”
“Being honest with yourself and others is a powerful
practice. Buddha said, “It is impossible to retain past mind, impossible to
hold on to present mind, and impossible to grasp future mind.” Too much
on an agenda will naturally because cumbersome. Buddhas warns us that
those who find refuge in small-minded ideas are unable to accept, receive,
and learn from his discourse on being truthful. Letting go of some of you
impulses is not dying who you are or shutting out a part of your mind.
Buddha said, “The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that
arise within it.” Our identity is not the sun total of the thoughts that careen
across our attention.”
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Torment
Jason and Holly were always at each other’s throats. There seemed
to be no way for the two to salvage their marriage. It was their thing to
goad the other into an outburst, and then to shame them into submission.
They’ve been married for ten years and have twin girls. They decided to
seek counsel from a professional since their daughters are now old enough
to catch wind of their fights and have just begun to mimic their parents.
“Was your relationship always like this?” I inquired
Jason attempted to speak, but Holly rushed to get her comments
in first. “We’ve been working on the same things for eight years, but no.
I think it was easier in the beginning.
“Well, sure.” Jason chimed in. “That’s before he had kids or jobs
which have since been thrown into the mix.”
Holly laughed. “I’ve always worked. That’s just your excuse.”
“Why don’t we take a step back?” I suggested. “Holly, what is
your main gripe with Jason?”
“He’s my husband and I love him, but when I tell him to do
things he should do yet doesn’t listen, I get furious.”
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“Did you hear that?” Jason jumped in. “The emperor has no
clothes.”
“Jason, I’m not sure that’s helping.” I rebuffed him.
Jason sat back, and attempted to lower his defenses. “I was being
insensitive. She actually has a point.”
“Holly, do you think you and Jason, talk about the same set of
issues time and again?”
“Yes! And yet, I really don’t know how. A lot of the time we’re
happy. I think that’s why it’s so hurtful when things take a sour turn,”
Holly confided.
I stepped in. “Do you guys have landscaping at your place?”
“We do.”
“I think a constructive approach is to think of your time together
as a careful planned and executed landscape design. Let me explain. The
mind finds refuge from stormy conditions in philosophical truths. You
two have complex and busy life. Like a row of hedges, each issue poses
different challenges and is manifested in its own unique shape.”
“Like snowflakes,” Jason said, loosening up.
“Exactly. There is an organic process behind each facet of your
life together. The trick is to tend your garden, trim your hedges, and
carve into the earth something you’re proud of and something you
protect.”
“I like that,” Holly commented. “But how do I apply that in my
life? I get scared that we’ve hurt each other so much that there’s no way
to repair our landscaping as you say.”
“The work and the result go hand in hand, Your life is only as
neat or as unkempt as you allow it. If you take time to do the work, that
sense of anguish will disappear. The truth rests upon its own virtues; the
caveat to this is that virtue is very much a living and breathing animal. It
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takes you, the agent, to really come into bloom. Freud took this fallacy to
its logical conclusion. His work is reductive; he deterministic method
takes the idea of pathology to the nth degree. I think he takes a very
Greek approach which explains, in part at least, how he justifies his ideas
as to what set of assumptions are unsuitable.”
I continued. “By removing thought patterns that no longer serve
you, you’ll adapt to healthier patterns naturally. He notice that our
criminal fantasies, those behaviors which are deemed socially
unacceptable. Freud was one of the foremost theorists to argue that we
act on a set of ideas.”
Jason stepped up to the plate. “I know what you’re saying.” He
looked at Holly. “I’m sorry. I hope you know how much I really love
you. We play those pointless games to get each other to stick around, but
it’s just built on nonsense.”
“Our family is all I live for,” Holly added. “And it’s just as much
my fault. I love you too with all my heart. I will try to keep that in
perspective the next time I’m upset.”
It’s easy to fall into a situation where the minutia of thoughts and
behaviors are built on false ideas. Instead of rooting out the bad idea, we
get tangled in a web of justifications for misdeeds. We have to eventually
face the music. Our psychology and the interplay of thoughts and deeds
are contingent on our philosophical framework. Freud developed his
tripartite model of the mind (id, ego, and super-ego) ostensibly from
studying Plato’s theory of the gut, the heart, and the head. The mind, for
Freud and Plato, is a dynamic energy-system. True to philosophy, the
tripartite is a theoretical model rather than an observable one. The mind
utilizes defense mechanisms such as repression to squelch the truth. In
philosophical terms, we could say the suppression of premises leads to
incoherent, invalid, and emotion-charged arguments.
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156

Harassment
Jonathan is a first-class teacher. He works for a private school.
The principal has been on Jonathan’s case the past three years, trying to
get him to quit. Last month, things came to a head. Jonathan sought
counseling, but didn’t feel his situation necessarily warranted long-term
therapy. His search criteria led him to philosophical counseling.
“Tell me the basis of the issue you’ve been tackling.”
“For a long time I was resigned to the thought that all this–my
principal trying to get me to fold under pressure–was just in my
head,” Jonathan began. “Now, I’m positive this is really happening. He
doesn’t want to fire me, so it’s just one petty thing after another.”
“Is there a superintendent you could get in touch with?” I asked.
“There is, but she’s just like this guy–power tripping authority
figures stepping on toes.”
“How so?”
Jonathan sort of swirls his head around as if to capture this
thoughts like a butterfly net. “It’s workplace harassment.”
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DMT is designed to tap into the linguistic wheelhouse of the mind.
Harassment is the reporting fallacy. This fallacy works differently. Instead
of being built on a false premise, harassment usually blows the scenario
out of proportion. If not, it’s likely that the environment is tolerated for
one reason or another despite the constant nagging.
“Why don’t you quit?” I wondered.
“Quit?!” That apparently wasn’t a viable option for Jonathan.
“I’m not in the wrong. I just want the principal to knock it off.”
“I’m hearing you. Do you think that’s the only positive
outcome?” Jonathan seemed to be having trouble with my question.
“What if the principal never stops giving you a hard time? What could
you do beyond getting your superior to lay off with the persistent
comments?”
“I honestly never considered backing down. I mean, I’m not in
the wrong.”
Jonathan is operating under the fallacy that says the predicament
is a travesty. In this case, the agent adopts a worldview that the outer
circumstances are the problem. The outer world rarely conforms to our
inner demands. The truth is, there are more than a few disheartening
constants that we experience on a daily basis such as the perceived severity
of the strain between employer and employee.
Thinking we can change another’s thoughts and actions is a sure
fire way to being defeated. In logic, we move from the major premise to
the report. The fallacy of harassment says, “If I don’t uphold this teaching
position, then I’ve failed my myself. The report which follows says, “My
jobs intolerable,” and the conclusion is, “I’m a failure.” The situation
may be bad, but so is Jonathan’s reasoning.
“Nietzsche said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me outright, makes me
stronger.’ Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind was not a comfort,
but an achievement to which one aspires and only obtains after an
exhausting struggle. Instead of whining about it, Nietzsche admonishes
we triumph by personal development. He advocated for the emergence of
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the superman (ubermensch) who would transcend conventional
morality.”
“That sounds a bit too much like fatherly
advice,” Jonathan pivoted.
“That’s fine. He’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Boethius said that
sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.”
“That’s poetic. I’m an English teacher so I can more easily
appreciate works written with a poetic bent.”
“He also said, ‘Absolute knowledge has no taint of falsity, so also
that which is conceived by knowledge cannot be otherwise than as it is
conceived. That is the reason why knowledge cannot lie, because each
matter must be just as knowledge knows that it is.’”
“That’s amazing, but a bit too deep for me.”
“Boethius commands a beautiful message that reframes
Nietzsche’s basic ideas about the true utility of philosophy. He evokes a
superwoman anthropomorphism. His Lady Philosophy, a term said with
affection, takes great care to properly explain the self. Boethius does a
lovely job of conceptualizing Ancient Greek notions of perception and
contemplation.”
“Can you break down his position? Bottom-line it for me!”
“Our sorrow results from a lack of scrutiny with regard to the
reports we dictate to ourselves,” I explained. “You are in control of your
own life; nothing is forced or coerced. The way we judge our emotional
predicament is worth a thorough examination. The emotional world as
we know it depends on the nature of the knower. We oversimplify,
broadly generalize, and stereotype; we might distort probabilities or
ignore evidence.”
Jonathan was processing. “I’m thinking that maybe my
workplace isn’t as oppressive as I made it seem.”
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“We all do that and it’s easy to forget that those reports can be
contrary to fact. Ockham suggested we look to the simplest explanation.
Don’t let your ideas about ‘the way things are’ undermine your own real
time rational assessments. Take into account your ability to reshape your
life. You’re only as miserable as you allow yourself to feel so try to have
a little compassion.”
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Isolation
Mary has been troubled lately. Her husband’s demands for
affection have led her to isolate herself based on poor reasoning. Isolation
in the DMT model is an example of a syndrome of fallacious reasoning.
Isolation is a behavioral fallacy. Actions piggyback off of thoughts.
Typical, isolation results from experiencing dominance and harassment.
Again, while the nature of the emotion might seem external, it is Mary in
this case who has allowed these feelings to pervade her psyche.
Without the courage and compassion to battle dominance and
harassment, a person will tend to turn inward in an attempt to escape their
philosophical assumptions. The benefit of this is that the individual is now
taking steps to manifest their thought process in action which can be
pointed out by others as an objective reality. Sometimes finding which
fallacy is the culprit of poor reasoning can be challenging; however,
isolation is obvious to the individual and those around them.
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“I don’t feel like I should have to sleep with him if I don’t want
to,” Mary began.
“You mean your husband?”
“Yes. I’m just tired of having to submit to his demands.”
“For sex?” I asked.
“Right. Why do I have to be the source of his happiness?”
“Let me explain the difference between philosophical counseling
and traditional psychotherapy. We don’t focus so much on the trigger for
your emotions in the sense of an external force. We look at your actions
and the thoughts that led to them.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“I think it’s easier just to walk you through it,” I explained.
“Let’s do it”
“You don’t feel like being intimate with your husband?”
“Correct.”
“Is he otherwise supportive financially and emotionally?”
“He actually struggles keeping a job. Emotionally, I don’t know.
I just don’t think it’s my to have sex with him. Maybe he expects it at
this point in our marriage so I’m resisting. I guess I don’t feel special to
him. I’m pulling away. I can recognize that. The sad thing has been his
response. He won’t stop asking me for sex now, to the point where I feel
weird submitting because it’s become a whole thing.”
“There is discomfort surrounding the discussion? I questioned.
“You think your husband is making you satisfy his intimacy
needs. Since it’s not your duty, you think he shouldn’t harass you about
it. Now, you’re isolating yourself because he won’t stop talking about it.”
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“That’s exactly right,” Mary confirmed.
“How do you feel now that you’ve isolated yourself?”
She thought a moment. “I don’t think I’m any happier. I decided
to double-down. I’m probably angrier that we can’t find a middle
ground, but I don’t know how to straighten things out since I’ve made so
much noise.”
“That’s not a bad thing. It’s tough finding your way through the
weeds of your own reasoning. French philosopher and playwright, Jean
Paul Sartre, admonished us to take responsibility for your
interpretations.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that you’ve never gain any ground on this issue unless
you examine your philosophical assumptions,” I said.
“You think I’m blowing things out of proportion?” She inquired.
“It’s easy to do. Perhaps his approach could use a change in
tactics, but people certainly have needs. It sounds like he’s
communicating albeit too often.”
“You’re right. I could try harder to see where he’s coming
from,” she conceded.
“The other assumption is that he’s making you do anything. You
always have a choice to even be in the position for him to ask anything
of you.”
“Do you mean divorce?”
“I mean you married him for a reason, and you’re still with him.
I’d imagine you’d do what you think is reasonable to keep the marriage
at this point,” I explained.
“Absolutely.”
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“So does it make sense to isolate yourself?”
“I guess it just makes things worse,” she admitted.
“If you feel that’s the case, then you’re probably onto something.
I’d just keep an eye on how you frame your husband’s requests. I bet you
two can come to a happy medium. This requires awareness of those hot
button issues and being able to surmount them. Sartre said any efforts to
deny that we are responsible for our actions is ‘bad faith.’
“That’s disorienting. I see now that I’ve spun myself up in a web
of ideas,” Mary added.
“That’s what it is. The value of working with a philosophical
counseling is to have that bird’s eye view, but the insights are all within
you—ready to be examined.”
The existentialists were on a moral quest to do the right thing in
the absence of some essential idea of goodness and bereft of divine
authority. They argued that we must do the right thing even when there is
no reason to do it, and that takes temperance. Kierkegaard believed we
are free to choose and responsible for our choices. Only by exploring and
coming to terms with fundamental anxieties can we be liberated.
Aristotle thought temperance needed courage if it is to face up to
temptation. The temperate individual practices rational self-restraint and
embraces these challenges.
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Abjection
Charles has had a full and very productive life. He recently retired
and hasn’t been able to get out of bed let alone being emotionally available
to his wife, children, and grandkids. Charles feels as though all of his joys
are behind him, that he has nothing more than a steady decline as far as
the eye can see. He stays in bed most of the day under the guise of resting,
but he has no purpose anymore; hence, he’s found himself in doomsday
scenario that’s invisible to everyone else.
“Tell me about yourself, Charles.”
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“Well, I don’t know where to start. I always thought I had my
head screws on. I’m pretty sure it’s coming loose. I don’t do anything. I
know I’m being a worthless lay-about, but I can’t seem to motivate
myself to get it together. Sometimes I don’t speak for an extended
period. I just can’t find the words to express my ball of emotions.”
“Thank you for sharing. I think I have some perspective,” I said.
“My good man, I’m willing to hear all it is that you want to rattle
off.”
“When did all of this begin?”
“Right after I retired. I realize it. I felt paranoia about this very
thing happening which just makes me feel more helpless now that I’m
experiencing it.”
“Do you mean a lack of direction?” I asked for clarification.
“I think that’s a real good way of putting it. It’s like I slipped and
can’t quite find my footing to stand up again.”
“Sure. I understand,” I assured him. “I think you’ve got a bout of
abjection.”
“Sounds serious,” he said with a laugh. “Tell me all about it.”
“I mean that you’re operating under the assumption you’re your
condition of being retired is horrible.”
“And I’ve heard all the reasons it’s great to be retired a thousand
times, but I still feel like the rug has been pulled from under my feet.”
“Maybe I can be of assistance. Abjection is the sense of horror
over a perceived threat that the distinctions between yourself and the
world will breakdown.”
“That’s more or less it—the loss of my identity,” Charles added.
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“Believe it or not, this is idea is commonly tied to two other
ideas which might be the real root of your depressed state.”
“Great,” he said. “Lay it on me.”
“They are the fallacies of disturbance and rejection. Firstly, you
thought an awful lot about your impending retirement. You obsessed
over it to the point that you felt sick with worry. It sounds like that
anxiety about the future has come to pass, yet the anxiety remains. Now,
it has morphed to be disturbance that you’re just getting worse. Even
though retired is perfected expected of you, it seems as though you’re
dealing with a sense of rejection being that you’re unable to work.”
“I wouldn’t argue with any of that,” Charles said. “So what can
be done for me?”
“I think we should address the facts. Being that you’re right were
millions have been, I think it was be a good step to normalize the fact
that you aren’t working. This is precisely what you’ve been work toward
all these years, and now that it’s here you’re having trouble enjoying it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Charles agreed.
“What’s more, you are allowing yourself to feel a sense of
rejection because you don’t have others validating your worth when in
reality there’s no good reason to jump to this conclusion.”
“Triple threat,” he said.
“We call it a syndrome. Your preoccupation with disturbance
and rejection is the typical precursor to a feeling of abjection—being
downtrodden about this grim, cold, and lonely world. The Stoics has a
philosophy that produced lasting joy by focusing on ethical conduct,
reflective contemplation, and meditation.”
“Show me what that looks look,” Charles commented.
“They did not aim for a mental state like happiness or elation.
They knew it could only be the result of other factors. They also didn’t
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judge mental health by feeling better or being more productive. Those
cues can be misleading. They sought to understand the self and like
truthfully.”
“Are you suggesting that my view is askew?”
“I think the truth is nearly impossible to view if you have other
fallacies operating in your reasoning. The Stoics viewed having worldly
attachments as a misperception. The promoted a philosophy that was
indifferent to health, beauty, pleasure, strength, wealth, fame, disease, or
pain because it didn’t qualify these facts of life as good or bad. Epictetus
said, ‘No man is free who is not master of himself.’”
“You think I’ve been duped?”
“I think you’ve been operating under a couple assumptions that
aren’t up to snuff. Because of that you’ve come to a behavioral
conclusion that you should stay in bed. Epictetus, the most well-known
Stoic philosopher crippled from repeated torture. Through philosophy,
however, he enjoyed greater freedom of mind than most.”
“So I guess I shouldn’t be complaining.”
“Maybe your complains aren’t well-informed. Let’s see if we
can shift you to a more positive conclusion. Stoicism challenges fallacies
of thinking. Depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, and other negative
emotions, according to Epictetus, follow from self-defeating assumptions
and unrealistic expectations.”
“Okay. So how do I apply that in my life?” Charles retorted.
“Compare what seems bad to something much worse,” I told
him. “Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, was a student of Epictetus,
and was effective in consoling himself with philosophical remedies. He
thought we created our own good fortune by maintaining a favorable
disposition, and imbuing our lives with positive emotions rather than
negative ones.”
“He sounds like a smart guy.”
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“I think that’s a safe assumption. His wisdom has lasted and is still
a go-to set of ideas for people in your very predicament. He said, “Give
yourself a time of quiet to learn some new good thing,” and “Let no act
be done without a purpose.”
“Well, I quite like the sound of that.” Charles took a moment to
process everything. “I think I’ve had my head full of ideas. I guess my lack
of drive was the result of thinking these things were true when clearly they
aren’t. I miss my family. I want to be there for them. I’m ready to let go of
those nonsense ideas that are just keeping me down.”
In Stoicism, it’s important to act with a virtuous intention.
Abjection is a serious state of behavioral conditioning brought about by
examined assumptions. The wise person questions everything. Negative
emotions can create health problems and lead to struggle in other areas of
life. The Stoics knew that practical training of the mind was necessary to
achieve a deep level of mental, emotional, and behavioral transformation.
Intellectualizing is not enough. Action has to be firmly grounded in truth.
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Part 6
Applied Philosophy
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Symbols and Patterns
For Locke, words are a sign for an idea. He implements his
semantic triangle whereby he links words which refer to ideas in the mind
of the speaker, ideas which refer to things, and the things themselves
which produce or excite ideas. This isn’t a flat triangle without depth, but
is instead a triangular prism from which one can obtain knowledge. This
toroidal behavior uses language as a tool to enjoy new ideas. This
predictive model, which we could liken to the circle of fifths in music
theory, assists us in the process of moving from the real to the speculative
to construct abstract ideas.
“John Locke’s famous legacy is the idea of the mind of a newborn
child as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. He believed that our minds are
completely impressionable and that all knowledge is impressed upon us
from outside ourselves. He divided ideas acquired from experience into
two types: sensations—the information we get through seeing, hearing,
and our other senses—and reflections-the information we get through
introspection and processes of the mind like thinking, believing,
imagining, and willing.”225
Universality, not in the Platonic sense but generality, is the crux
of philosophy. This is what allows it to be an effective tool in rhetoric, but
also that which extends cogency to mathematical, scientific, and religious
notions. Locke’s empiricism reinforces that we are in potency to see the
truth of certain judgments. His rejection of innate ideas is worth noting.
His evidentialism, however, provides us with assent which is judgment
about truths delivered in words. He argues that we live in the twilight of
probability, the appearance of agreements based on fallible proofs, to
which we assent in proportion to evidence.
Gallagher argues that knowledge is the ultimate and irreducible
given which can’t be conveyed more fundamentally, and can’t be broken
into further constituents. The certainty which epistemology seeks is made
possible by doubt which is essentially reflective. Every common sense
assertion can be doubted. When epistemology settles these doubts, we then
have a reflexive certitude. The proper task of the philosopher is not to
begin by denying the cognitive value of experiences, but to seek to discern
what modulation occurs in terms of the knowledge as is applies in various
realms.
Epistemology is really concerned with the question of the ground
of judgment. The truth-values of judgments are decided in terms of
evidence. The value of judgment is a question of the admissibility of
225 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 64.
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evidence to predicate concepts of sense-particulars. The judgment is the
expression of the self’s assimilation of reality. There are types of
knowledge that do not rely on judgments based on reason. Having the
faculty to allow the real to emerge-to-view, such as love, may be more
important than understanding evidence.
The problem of perception is inherently tied to the reflection of
common sense. John Locke spoke of this problem when he posed the
question, “How do we know our ideas resemble things?” Gallagher gives
a vivid illustration in chapter four of an individual riding in a car with a
panoramic view of the scenery. As new imagery comes into view, the
previous set leaves the frame. Despite our shifting perception, we don’t
assume these things are gone. Instead, we assume they remain to be
perceived by another individual zooming by. In this essay, I will explore
the conceptual framework of our perceptions, what they are, and how we
can know them.
For Aristotle, the activity of the highest virtue was contemplation.
This reasoning has two ways of acting, a purely receptive truth and a
productive truth. Not only is contemplation the greatest activity, but it’s
also concerned with the greatest objects. These noble objects were sensed
with the mind and refined from common sense experience into a
speculative reality. Gallagher says, “The first reflective consciousness is
only a regularization of the situation in which the acting consciousness
finds itself.” This is a reflection of common sense into something more
certain. From our perceptions, we form concepts. Descartes describes this
experience as a being thinking.
Gallagher addresses what an essence is and why is it important.
We can no more talk about the essence of something than we can begin to
define our knowledge of it. Gallagher says, “The “essence” in this sense is
hidden in the abyss of the divine knowledge, and it would be rash to claim
that we can plumb that abyss.” 1 We can attempt to plumb it to its depths
or define it, but in those depths, the divine dwells and manifests as any
number of things with various accidents. The ontological question is
answered by the experiences afforded and knowledge only has use
insomuch as it is attributed to an essence that’s being described to others
as reality.
No definition can properly house an essence and because of this
epistemology with always be wanting. Nonetheless, it’s important to know
these distinctions. Knowledge and its reach plays a vital role in our world.
Take cellular reproduction, for instance. We shed our skin cells. In fact,
every seven years we completely replace old cells with new ones. We are
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physically a different person yet essentially we are identified as being the
same individual. A thing may not be the matter that composes it, but the
actions that characterize it. The replacement of cells doesn’t constitute a
different person any more than a skeleton is a lost loved one.
Our knowledge of essences is in a fluid state, as Gallagher reminds
us, where our insights into essences is thought to be the basis for
knowledge. What is true in one culture will not necessarily be true in
others. To analyze perception, we can study the present moment.
Gallagher explains this Zen-like fleeting moment. Oddly enough, once we
focus on the present moment it has already passed. Consciousness slips
out of our grasp like a fish, and as we clamor for possession, it too soon
returns to the ebbing river from whence it came. Naïve realism can be
describe as a unified center of action set against an individual’s action. It’s
against that center that we act, and it’s upon us which it reacts.
It is possible in respect of human knowledge, to make a distinction
between appearance and reality. The problem of epistemology is to
overcome this distinction so we can tell them reliably apart. The key is in
our mode of existence. Existence gives rise to the distinction. Gallagher
says that surpassing this distinction and justifying the value of our
knowing is not found doubt. If the gap between appearance and reality
disappears, so does doubt. The question is the irreducible beginning.
Language, then, is what composes the world. Stebbing says the meaning
of the word table comes from the world of direct perception.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.”
With a little imagination, we can entertain the notion and even eventuality
that the flesh will become Word. That is to say that language composes
our world, and our world composes our language, known by the knower.
This relationship of the questioner to the absolute is the felt presence of
direct experience. Human knowledge is theoretical and removed from
action and outside of the present moment. Cognition of the question is
beyond qualification, it is language. Language presupposes the question,
the questioner and the community of other beings with whom this
experience is shared. Our very being dwells in language.
While senses may be charged with “error,” we must first recognize
the requirements before we deem the experiences trustworthy. Gallagher
gives the example of a color-blind person misreporting a red datum who
is really making a judgment, going beyond the immediate report of the
senses, when he declares “This patch of cloth is red” instead of making the
judgment, “I am now experiencing a red datum.” The judgment of what’s
immediately present to sensation is immune to being erroneous. Error in
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perception is only possible when one is going falsely beyond immediate
data of sensation, and making a false report of the sensory information.
The “objectivity” of sense perception cannot be settled in terms of
perception alone.
We see a similar debate between classical physics and quantum
mechanics. It’s reminiscent of the perplexing question, “if a tree falls in
the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” While the
classical physical would say of course, quantum mechanics offers a
different perspective. While science and philosophy have different
processes, they both begin with wonder. Wonder makes itself its own
object. It may come as no surprise that perception acts in much the same
way. An electron is only measured to be somewhere when it’s being
measured. In fact, an electron may occupy two or more places at the same
time, and yet at the same time it’s said to occupy no space at all if it’s not
being observed. Schrodinger’s cat is an example of the latter.
Virtual realism reduces the world outside of consciousness to a
qualitatively barren state. Objects of perception do not need to be proven
to be formally extended. The most basic tenant of philosophy is
abstraction, and with virtual realism it gets some prime time in the
limelight. Gallagher says, “If the data given to perception are really
relational data, then perhaps there is reason to think that they are all
relational data, and do not inform us at all about how objects are apart from
their relation to consciousness.” The logical conclusion leads us to the
position of Kant, where experience is the product of the relationship
between the subject and the object.
Objectivity needs no secondary qualities, and while the virtual
realists fall short of Kant’s conclusion, the problem of perception persists.
Studies have shown that the more a person focuses on their own happiness
the more it tends to elude them. Happiness is a byproduct of focused
efforts in other endeavors. I view particulars in the same way. To name
them all is to miss the power of abstraction. General natures are abstract
ideas. Whether they are words or ideas, these signs are “creatures of the
understanding.”226 Returning to language, words are used for signs of
abstract ideas which is the very essentia “from which all of its properties
flow.”227
226 K.T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Knowledge. (Fordham University
Press, 1986), 379.
227 Gallagher, The Philosophy of Knowledge. 381.
175
There is a pattern found in rosary prayers as well as the length and
breadth of theology that consists of joy and sorrow. God’s glory is a way
of breaking this pattern and experiencing something greater. For anyone
who has experienced grief, belief in something greater than yourself and
your problems is not only a coping mechanism, it is quite literally a life
saver. On the same token, for anyone who has had children or experienced
good fortune beyond explanation, he or she may attribute the bounty to
God’s good will and an expression of that which is greater than the sum
total of his or her efforts toward accomplishing such a seemingly
unattainable goal. Henry David Thoreau said, “To be a philosopher is not
merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school. . . . It is to
solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically.”
“In order to successfully address the ethical questions of one’s
own time and place, one needs not only an ideal toward which one should
strive (some theoretical standard or goal), but also some conception of how
one is to get there from here. Among other things, this requires one to have
an understanding of the kind of creatures we are, what resources we begin
with—our limitations as well as our capabilities.”228 “We must turn more
of our attention and energy from theoretical to practical concerns and
specifically to the question of how we and others can become better. To
achieve such a goal we will have to pay greater attention to and cooperate
more broadly with colleagues working in anthropology, history,
education, psychology, sociology, and other related disciplines. Such
interdisciplinary work is challenging and in some respects daunting, but in
the case of these particular problems, it is necessary.”229
Besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols
which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the
earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make
up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the
fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return
to them.230 Heraclitus, who taught that everything in time turns into its
opposite. “Out of life,” Heraclitus wrote, “comes death and out of death
life, out of the young the old, and Out of the old the young, out of waking
sleep and out of sleep waking, the stream of creation and dissolution new
stops.”
228 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 104.
229 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 103.
230 Jung, The Portable Jung, 20.
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177

Maieutics
“Philosophical counseling is a relatively new but rapidly growing
field of philosophy. The philosophical practice movement originated in
Europe in the 1980s, beginning with Gerd Achenbach in Germany, and
started in North America in the 1990s.”231 “As a philosophical practitioner,
I’m an advocate for my client’s interests. My job is to help my clients
understand what kind of problem they face and, through dialogue, to
disentangle and classify its components and implications. I help them find
the best solutions: a philosophical approach compatible with their own
belief system yet consonant with time-honored principles of wisdom that
help in leading a more virtuous and effective life… Most clients come to
me for reassurance that their actions are in accord with their own
worldviews and rely on me to call attention to inconsistencies. The focus
in philosophical counseling is on the now—and looking ahead to the
future—rather than on the past, as in so much of traditional psychotherapy.
Another distinction is that philosophical counseling tends to be short
term.”232
“Socratic Dialogue: a reliable process that guides you to define
explicitly what you already know implicitly. Socrates was also famous for
probing people, through a series of questions, until he elicited
contradictions from them. If you offered Socrates a careless definition of
justice, and if he then led you to admit that your definition could give rise
to injustice, you would have thus contradicted yourself. In consequence,
your definition could not be correct. Technically this is called the Elenchic
method, but it is often known as the Socratic method. Note that it reveals
only what some- thing isn’t, not what it is. At the end of the day, this
231 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 7.
232 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 9.
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method will reveal any number of unserviceable definitions of justice (or
whatever’s on the table) but not one serviceable one. By contrast, Socratic
Dialogue aims directly at what a thing is. It uses personal experience as
the basis for finding a universal definition of the thing at hand that is both
explicit and accurate. It employs individual doubt and hard-won consensus
to allow you to answer questions.”233
“It is the dialogue, the exchange of ideas itself, that is
therapeutic… Many people who ultimately rely on philosophical
counseling have first benefited from psychological counseling, even if
they find it isn’t enough on its own.”234 “Psychology didn’t emerge as a
f
ield of study in its own right until l 1879, When Wilhelm Wundt opened
the first psychology laboratory. Before that, the kinds of observation and
insight we associate with psychology were the province of philosophers.
Even after psychology came into its own, philosophy and psychology
remained twin disciplines into the twentieth century. William James,
hailed as a great thinker in both fields, held a joint chair in philosophy and
psychology at Harvard.”235
“Philosophy can provide additional help in just about any case
where physical or psychological work is being done. Even in the strictest
psychiatric case, like needing lithium for manic-depression, philosophy
could be helpful once you are medically stable. Bearing a diagnosis like
that might be easier if you could develop a functional philosophical
disposition toward your situation.”236 “Philosophical counseling is a way
of exploring and coming to terms with your problem itself. That’s a good
place to finish. The latter approach is obviously more direct, focusing on
coping with whatever problem you face, finding and taking whatever
necessary actions are consistent with your personal philosophy, and using
what you learn as you move forward with your life… The balance of
psychological and philosophical insight is what will actually benefit most
people.”237
“On the Socratic model, knowledge could at best redirect our
inherent desires, appetites, and passions. Given his understanding of
things, Socrates did not have an adequate way to account for or
accommodate problems like weakness of will, Later thinkers in the early
233 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 262.
234 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 10.
235 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 21.
236 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 34.
237 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 35.
179
Greek and western tradition developed more elaborate pictures of moral
psychology in which different parts of the self could be in conflict with
one another.” They also developed views of the self in which our different
parts could influence and shape one another.” In time, the idea of a distinct
mental power, the will, was introduced as a way of bridging the gap that
one often finds looming between the course of action we know we should
take and what we actually do.”238
The moral virtues are deduced from premises as a general
argument for living well. Natural law is an inductive standard of ethics. It
is not so much deduced but is inferred from the best of human reasoning.
Logic is typically thought to be a separate inquiry from the other branches
of philosophy including ethics. The use of a syllogism, the basic structure
employed in logic, is not an ethical standard in itself. It can, however, be
used to map out the reasoning which leads to a choice that has ethical
implications. Aristotle referred to reasoning that ends with an action as a
practical syllogism. A general syllogism is theoretical, a strictly logical
argument, whereas the practical syllogism is not purely hypothetical
because it leads to action. Therefore, the reasoning is practical; emotional
reasoning interfaces with behavioral reasoning. This is also known as the
Socratic Method.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s account of reason which he
calls dialectics characterizes not only logic, but also “everything logically
real.”239 Hegel referred to the kinds of purposes that occur in
consciousness, such as needs or drives, but also telos such as that proposed
by Aristotle. Ethics, for Aristotle, is an inquiry in which “beliefs are
examined, compared with one another, purged of their inaccuracies and
inconsistencies, and found to yield truths “more intelligible in
themselves,’ by no means obvious at first sight but self-evident when once
you have reached them.”240 Ethics is not only demonstrative; is it
dialectical, a distinction frequently drawn in Aristotle’s logic, which leads
to first principles. “Aristotle often reasons dialectically, not from the
principles known to be true but from the opinions whether of ‘the many’
or of ‘the wise,’”241
238 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 62.
239 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part 1
of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1991), 125.
240 Ross, Aristotle, 213.
241 Ross, Aristotle, 213.
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Phronesis is practical and based on concrete action, not
speculation. According to Aristotle, it is based on experience and is a
virtue of a human being as a whole, not only of a human being who uses
scientific reasoning. The study of phronesis can help the agent work
through their philosophical puzzlement (aporia). The tradition that derives
phronesis from episteme goes back to antiquity. Its foundation is not in
ethics, but in the primary study of reason of which practical reason is only
one type. In this tradition, reason is defined differently than its post
Enlightenment counterpart. Reason is not seen as a structuring of content
but rather as a faculty for content-based criteria at the root of knowledge
in general which determines validity and logical relationships.
Giambattista Vico, the Enlightenment era philosopher, saw
phronesis as being an instrument and methodological principle for
defining the humanities. Phronesis is a tool; it lays the groundwork for the
separation of types of knowledge. This undertaking investigates primary
functions. Such an investigation led natural philosophy to its present-day
form as natural science. Vico posits, “Human choice, by its nature most
uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men
with respect to human needs or utilities”242 This account symbolizes a
critical discourse of knowledge as it relates to the human being. It is
applicable not only to the various humanities, but has utility for
interdisciplinary enterprises. The dialogue between philosophy and the
methodology of the humanities owes much of its careful dissection and
subsequent flourishing to phronesis. In a similar fashion, phronesis offers
the possibility of furthering this dialogue in future developments.
Peter Kreeft explains in his book Socratic Logic: A Logic Text
Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles
that “the clearest difference between deduction and induction is that the
premises of induction come from sense observation.” He goes on to say,
“Socrates was the first person who seemed to know exactly what he was
doing in using both inductive and deductive reasoning together. His typical
method of arguing combined the two.”243 Kreeft outlines the Socratic
Method as follows: 1) A question arises; 2) Relevant sense observations
are made of examples of the matter in question; 3) An inductive
242 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1984), 63.
243 Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method,
Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (South Bend, IN: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2014), 211.
181
generalization is made on the basis of these examples; 4) By the reasons
for it, the necessity of this universal is understood; 5) The universal is
applied to the particular by deduction.244 He concludes, “Ethics is the most
important part of philosophy—the only part Socrates ever explored. If
logic is irrelevant to ethics, then both logic and ethics become almost
trivial.”245
Case in point, the fourth step is about understanding instead of
either inductive or deductive reasoning; however, it illuminates the
generalization produced by inductive reasoning. At least one of the
premises in deductive reasoning also comes from understanding. The
critical analysis of universals requires prudence in the realm of ethics
because universal knowledge of the good is practical. It is directed toward
a particular action. Practical reasoning is usually pure or a mixed
hypothetical syllogism; otherwise, it would be theoretical as is true in a
strictly logical argument. Practical reasoning is not purely hypothetical
although one of the premises may be based on a generalization which
includes a universal. Practical syllogisms lead to action because emotional
reasoning interfaces with behavioral reasoning.246 Businesses can temper
their volitional habits by using the Socratic Method which structures
reasoning in a syllogism.
244 Kreeft, Socratic Logic, 212.
245 Kreeft, Socratic Logic, 362.
246 Elliot D. Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy and Everyday Emotions
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 18.
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Praxis
The scientific method is the application of the principles of
induction to physical reality. The basic steps include: 1) A problem arises;
2) A decision is made to address the problem (critically and scientifically);
3) A preliminary hypothesis is proposed which is: relevant, simple,
compatible with everything else known (both proven facts and probable
theories), testable (verifiable and falsifiable), and capable of explaining or
predicting future data; 4) Relevant data is collected to test the hypothesis;
5) The hypothesis is refined and made exact enough to be tested by the
data; 6) The hypothesis is tested by observation of the predicted
consequences; and 7) As the hypothesis succeeds in predicting and
controlling that which could not otherwise have been predicted and
controlled, it moves to being a theory (which is only probable) toward
being a law (which is verified and nearly certain).
For Aristotle, ethics was a matter of practice and cultivation of
rational habits overtime, relative to the agent, to improve one’s skills and
environment. Elliot Cohen who developed Logic-Based Therapy (LBT)
says in Logic-Based Therapy and Everyday Emotions, “As Aristotle
admonishes, the way to make constructive change is by cultivating a
rational habit through practice.”247 The practice of LBT is a developmental
method based on the practical syllogism and the virtues. “This portends
247 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 134.
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cultivation of virtuous ‘personality traits,’ that is, formed habits to think,
act, and feel in virtuous ways.”248 An individual or business is congruent
when the external image matches the internal one. A “corporate officer
lacks congruence who sells out his ethical principles for the sake of
advancing the company’s bottom line.”249 Cohen goes a step further to
elucidate the method with which an individual or organization can
determine whether or not a business practice is ethical.
“LBT accordingly holds that different emotions (E) can be
identified and distinguished in terms of both their objects (O) and their
ratings (R). LBT expresses this way of identifying distinct emotions in
terms of the formula, E = (O+R).”250 He adds, “Accordingly, reports are
subject to mistakes in inductive logic, that is, mistakes in probabilistic
inferences drawn from experiential data.”251 The conclusion that follows
does not simply describe or report the intentional object; the conclusion
rates the object. This rating plays an important role in the reasoning of the
moral agent. The conclusion of emotional reasoning tends to lead to action
because emotional reasoning interfaces with behavioral reasoning, and the
behavioral reasoning, for Cohen, relates to the volitional habits mentioned
by Aristotle. “LBT is an inherently ethical practice.”252
True to Aristotle, LBT practitioners commit to virtuous living as
an end. They help clients to see the logical difference between preferring
and demanding that something be a certain way. “Refute a belief that the
world must or should be a certain way; help the client to see he is deducing
‘must’ from a want or preference which is a fallacy in itself, the so-called
naturalistic fallacy.” A normative claim cannot be deduced from a purely
factual claim. If an individual wants something to be done a certain way,
it does not follow that he or she must have it done that way. The client’s
expectation that something should happen gives the normative claim its
evaluative force—bridging “is” and “ought.” Cohen says, “LBT maintains
that primary emotions are sustained by emotional reasoning, which, when
fallacious, can permit such primary emotions to fester unless adequately
addressed by LBT’s six-step method.”253
248 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 167.
249 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 98.
250 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 7.
251 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 16.
252 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 172.
253 Cohen, Logic-Based Therapy, 170.
185
In Howard Curzer’s article “Aristotle’s Practical Syllogisms,” he
says, “Aristotle does not provide an explicit, fleshed-out account of
decision making.”254 Interpretations differ with respect to how Aristotle
intended to show that agents set their goals. The first is that virtue—
understood as non-rational, habituated dispositions of action or practice
(praxis), passion (appetite or desire), and perception––identifies the ends
present in each situation. A second states that deliberation rather than
virtue identifies the proper ends. A third and final interpretation is that
decision making is a combination of intellectual intuition and induction.
According to Curzer, the first step of the practical syllogism is perception
structured by habituated passions which reveal salient truths. In step two,
perceptions are combined with general rules to specify particular goals to
be pursued which become objects of desire. Lastly, agents identify the
means to these ends. “Eventually, this process culminates in descriptions
of actions available to the agents. In these complex cases, virtue—
understood as non-rational virtue plus practical wisdom—identifies the
right ends for virtuous agents.”255
The practical syllogism can be used to reconstruct the logic which
composes practical reasoning behind the moral virtues in conjunction with
prudence as well as the adherence to natural law. Both of these ethical
standards are practiced. Praxis is a moral action performed for the sake of
that activity. The scope of this proper act renders the businessman or
woman a developmentally better person and the business itself a better
workplace. Otherwise, if the agent were only trying to change the external
world, it would not be considered praxis. Human flourishing in the realm
of business can be judged by either the virtue-based approach or a natural
law approach. Policies, established business decisions, can benefit from a
syllogistic reconstruction to examine the emotional reasoning behind them
and the developmental process that changes the moral agent and the
external world.
Praxis is moral action. Solidarity between a business and an
uplifting philosophy binds ethics to praxis. Praxis is a movement in which
the end or for-the-sake-of-which is the practice itself. Praxis transcends
the categorical structure. Praxis is an activity done for the sake of that
activity. It is a habituated action or practice. Praxis is not only individual,
however. Collective praxis is possible when common standards are
254 Howard J. Curzer, “Aristotle’s Practical Syllogisms,” Philosophical
Forum 2 (2015), 129.
255 Curzer, “Aristotle’s Practical Syllogisms,” 130.
186
followed. Richard Nielsen says in his article “Action Research as an Ethics
Praxis Method,” “Action research can be a form of Aristotelian critical,
ethical praxis that developmentally changes the action researcher and the
external world.”256 The scope of praxis includes action research that
renders the action researcher, a business person in this case, a
developmentally better person and the business itself a better place to
work.
He goes on to say that Aristotle would not consider actions as
praxis if the actor was only trying to change the external world without a
concern for ethical, developmental action learning within the actor. In
Aristotelian praxis, ethical ends do not justify unethical means.257 Praxis
carries with it the implication of development in the agent. Praxis is not
only a tool for the singular agent; it can be extended to a common ethical
standard of operations in business. Bowler’s concept is that theory and
practice harmonize, but not by way of philosophical guiding actions;
rather, “philosophy is the comprehension of what is.”258 Therefore, action
research is in itself a praxis method of ethics. “Action research can
combine three good things: 1) a method that joins ethics with actionable
learning; 2) a method that helps make the actor and the world
developmentally better; and 3) a method that uses inductive, practitioner
based theory building that is helpful”259 for the practitioner of ethics.
There is a difference between the inclination to the proper end
(logos) and an inclination to the proper act (praxis). The former refers to
the speculative intellectual knowledge of the end as good. The latter refers
to the inclination to a particular action. Michael J. Bowler’s Heidegger and
Aristotle: Philosophy as Praxis details this distinction. Heidegger
appropriated the Greek logos as “discourse.”260 A universal is a logos, that
is to say, a state of knowledge that comes from sense observation.
According to Bowler, Aristotle is suggesting that discourse (legein) results
in a state of knowledge (hexis) in terms of its having, possessing, habit or
virtue.261 For Aristotle, the activities of life—seeing, understanding and
256 Richard Nielsen, “Action Research as an Ethics Praxis
Method.” Journal of Business Ethics 135, no. 3 (2016), 419.
257 Nielsen, “Action Research,” 422.
258 Nielsen, “Action Research,” 423.
259 Nielsen, “Action Research,” 427.
260 Michael J. Bowler, Heidegger and Aristotle: Philosophy as Praxis
(London: Continuum, 2008), 117.
261 Bowler, Heidegger and Aristotle, 118.
187
thinking—are all praxis, not productions (poesis). Aristotle says that a
human being is a living being characterized by its praxis.262
Heidegger examined the connection between praxis and
phronesis. In his work, he described practical wisdom (phronesis) as
having great potential. His exploration into this type of knowledge fits well
with his idea of Seinsvergessenheit, placing man in the concrete world.
The Aristotelian concept of phronesis is also prominently featured in Truth
and Method by Hans Georg Gadamer. Using the concept of phronesis,
Gadamer developed an interconnected series of concepts which includes
common sense, taste, tact, and cognition. Heidegger and Gadamer share at
their cores a critique of modernity. In this critique, they combat against
intellectual frigidity which is a product of the Enlightenment and that
which epitomizes the consciousness of today. Phronesis or practical
reason is separate from episteme or scientific reason. Phronesis appears to
be a form of reason which, when unpacked, reveals many insights about
the mental horizon of the Western thinker.
Praxis means thoughtful, practical action. Aristotle developed a
three-part flowchart to describe the attributes of rational human beings
including: 1) theoria or theoretical with respect to the goal of obtaining
truth; 2) poiesis or doing with the goal of producing results; and 3) praxis
or practical, thoughtful action done with the goal of action in mind. The
word praxis promotes both practice and reflection, but this is not a
paradoxical concept. Aristotle was astute in describing the human
condition and the way in which humans interact with the world. These
terms have equal if not more relevance today considering the constant
distractions of industrial and technological advancements. These terms are
attributes that pinpoint associations and further learning. Many of the
terms Aristotle employs are rather passive in that they do not involve any
action. They are describing an interplay of the self which includes the
intellect and the will.
This can easily be applied to the example of a driver. If the driver
is careless, tries to speed through a yellow light turning red, and gets
clipped by another car, he or she would ideally learn an important safety
lesson. Driving a car requires practice to be able to be comfortable behind
the wheel. Then, when driving to and from a place, the driving itself is
being practiced. All the while, the driver is focusing on the road and,
through the cumulative experiences of driving, is upgrading and revising
that practice. “Adaptive management” is a term used for “learning by
262 Bowler, Heidegger and Aristotle, 120.
188
doing” which not unlike the tenets of praxis. In a way, this is not much
different from the training of an animal. The difference is that humans
have the capacity to abstract this scenario instead of having to live it yet
this intellectual power of abstraction is not always utilized.
Phronesis is the virtue of the calculative part of the
intellect. Values intersect with knowledge when praxis is combined with
phronesis. In the practical syllogism, nous and orexis work together as an
intrinsic unity forming the beginning (major premise) to the end
(conclusion). Nous stands for thought and orexis for the appetite. The
moral agent perfects the appetite. In business commitments, is not always
best to promote a rigid position. The driver risks getting into an accident.
In the application of ethics, the agent is still paying attention to all of the
factors. He or she is learning and doing at the same time, teaching and also
accumulating new experiences. The rigid justification of one viewpoint
can quickly backfire. The driver needs to have a sense of everything
happening on the road to ensure a safe trip. Applied ethics is no different.
It requires careful deliberation, and action toward a particular destination.
The actions taken are guided by a certain conception of what the activity
involves.
189
Hermeneutics
Philosophical hermeneutics refers to the detailed and systematic
examination of human understanding that began with the German
philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. He argued that our perception of the
world is not primarily theoretical but practical. We don’t assess objects
neutrally from a distance, but they disclose themselves to us as we move
around in an already existing totality of meaningful relations.
Hermeneutics is the philosophical discipline concerned with analyzing the
conditions for understanding. Practitioners of the discipline examine
the language, philosophy, or a literary work. Language can be expressed
in different ways and both verbal and non-verbal language are taken into
account. Our nature as historical beings make understanding
possible. Hermeneutics is the interpretation of a work or text but the
method is applied with equally efficaciousness in day-to-day life—
190
showing how spoken and written words were expressions of inner
thoughts.
Plato used the word hermeneutics in dealing with poets as
‘hermeneuts of the divine’, and Aristotle wrote the first treatise on
hermeneutics which he showed how spoken and written words were
expressions of inner thoughts. Hermeneutic thinkers claim that
understanding is the interpretive act of integrating particular things such
as words, signs, and events have significance. We only really understand
an object, word, or fact when it makes sense within our own life context
and thus speaks to us meaningfully. Hermeneutic thinkers claim that our
modern consciousness is disengaged and that the mind is shaped we
imagine.
Because of this, it is a powerfully effective
psychotherapy. Hermeneutics allows the client to delve into their interior
world and inspect the various linguistic constructs that undergird a
person’s view of things.
Hermeneutics involves a balance between understanding and
engagement. It goes beyond logical analysis to pinpoint any underlying
principles. The word ‘hermeneutics’ comes from the Greek hermeneuein
meaning ‘to explain.’ Hermeneutic thinkers claim that our modern
consciousness is disengaged and that the mind is shaped we imagine, and
we’re disconnected from others.
“The old treatise “Consilium coniugii” explains that the
“philosophical man” consists of the “four natures of the stone.” Of these
three are earthy or in the earth, but “the fourth nature is the water of the
stone, namely the viscous gold which is called red gum and with which
the three earthy natures are tinted.” We learn here that gum is the critical
fourth nature: it is duplex, i.e., masculine and feminine, and at the same
time the one and only aqua mercurialis.”263
“For which reason the philosopher (Hermès in the “Tabula
smaragdina”) says: “The wind hath carried it in his belly.” Therefore
“wind is air, air is life, and life is soul.” “The stone is that thing midway
between perfect and imperfect bodies, and that which nature herself begins
is brought to perfection through art.” “The stone is named the stone of
invisibility.””264
“The philosophical man is: he is the androgynous original man or
Anthripos of Gnosticism, whose parallel in India is pursusha. Of him the
Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad says: “He was as large as a man and woman
263 Jung, The Portable Jung, 407.
264 Jung, The Portable Jung, 422.
191
embracing. He divided his self (Atman) in two, and thence arose husband
and wife. He united himself with her and men were born,” etc. the common
origin of these ideas lies I the primitive notion of the bisexual original
man.”265
“It looks as if the idea had dawned on the alchemists that the Son
who, according to classical ( and Christian) tradition, dwells eternally in
the Father and reveals himself as God’s gift to mankind, was something
that man could produce out of his own nature—with God’s help, of course
(Deo concedente). The heresy of this idea is obvious. The feminine nature
of the inferior function derived from its contamination with the
unconscious. Because of its feminine characteristics the unconscious is
personified by the anima (or animus).”266
“Since the philosophical side of alchemy was of concerned with
problems that are very closely related to those which interest the most
modern psychology, it might perhaps be worthwhile to probe a little
deeper into the dream motif of the ape that is to be reconstructed in the
square. In the overwhelming majority of cases alchemy identifies its
transforming substance with the Argentine Buchner or Mercurius.
Chemically this term denotes quicksilver, but philosophically it means the
spiritus vitae, or even the world-soul, is that Mercurius also takes on the
significance of Hermès, god of revelation.”267
In Euthyphro, Socrates is talking shop with a Theologian. The
dialogue happens at the palace of King Archon. On the front steps,
Socrates is present on the grounds that Meletus of the “deme of Pitthis,”
an administrative district within Attica (near Athens), has levied a grave
accusation against him. While the nature of the conflict between Meletus
and Socrates is explicitly mentioned, that being the curious case of
Socrates’s tendency to pontificate, the charge is in short that Socrates is a
poet who invents new gods and ignores others who are widely recognized
and accepted by the establishment. This conversation as it seems is merely
to segue into the beef of the conversation and set the stage for Plato’s later
works as an enquiry into piety. Euthyphro is where Socrates finds him
because he intends to wage a complaint against his father for a serious
offense.
Euthyphro’s contrived plight is an unlikable trait, but likewise,
Socrates is at his most oblivious in this quip so it’s tit for tat. The violation
265 Jung, The Portable Jung, 408.
266 Jung, The Portable Jung, 370.
267 Jung. The Portable Jung, 384.
192
is murder, and Euthyphro argues that a pious person must usher in a
criminal complaint despite familial ties when it’s such a heinous violation.
When Socrates pokes holes in Euthyphro’s blanket statement and presses
further, Euthyphro states that piety is that which pleases the Gods. Socrates
rejects this on the basis that piety seemingly has little sway in terms of
what pleases the Gods. Trying to save face and to come up on a better
explanation, Euthyphro interjects that piety is that which is loved by all of
the Gods, and that those actions which are unloved by all of the Gods are
impious and thus unjust.
In defeat, Euthyphro offers to Socrates that sacrifice and prayer
are indeed the hallmark of a pious person. There seems to be a lot at play
here, and the interplay is undeniably brilliant between Socrates and
Euthyphro. They really dig into the meat of “holiness” and how it flows
from the Gods. There is a lot Plato does to paint a picture of the Theologian
as one who himself paints with muddy colors. The nature of holiness
eludes Euthyphro in his attempts at definition and finally he confers that
he really doesn’t know how to express his meaning. The end is sharp, but
not flat. It packs a punch that redeems the “court case”—ending on a sober
note.
In Meno by Plato, Socrates is having a dialogue with a Thessalian.
Meno is laying the groundwork for further philosophical dialogues, and is
followed by Euthyphro. In these philosophical discourses by Plato that are
presented with suggestive hints, quirky jokes, and subtle wit, Socrates
serves as the driving force in a most curious fashion. Socrates in these
writings has, as Meno describes it, a magical ability to unnerve his
conversational opponent. In Meno, this is characterized by Anytus, a
character who resurfaces in the dramatic death of Socrates, who tires of
the line of questioning Socrates delivers so effortlessly. Meno himself
retains a level of composure well enough to unrelentingly entertain the
questions and answers Socrates offers, but has his own noble pride and
thirst for knowledge which sully his understanding of virtue.
Socrates comments on Homer, saying, “he and his virtue in like
manner will be a reality among shadows.” Socrates draws Meno’s
attention to the simile in multis of virtue as being a distractive factor as
virtue must retain a universal essence common to all people: men, women,
children, poor and rich alike. Although the central question of Meno to
Socrates is if virtue is natural or if it is acquired, the probe is handled
expertly by Socrates who exhausts the possibility of both. Lastly, my two
final reflections on Meno are 1) that a statesman of note may have a son
of skill but who is lacking in virtue thus virtue can’t be instructional, and
193
2) that a guide with true knowledge has more virtue than a wanderer of
right opinions whose internal compass leads him to the same destination
because reason is a toolkit which deepens one’s understanding of himself
and the world.
In the Apology, Socrates is defending himself from crimes against
the state. Socrates’ court case largely consists of an uninterrupted appeal
for the recognition of his moral rectitude. He defends himself against the
accusation that he’s a sophist who takes money in exchange for teachings.
Unlike Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias who convinced young men to
exchange payment for teachings, Socrates did not. Chaerephon, upon his
return from Delphi, shared the Pythian prophetess’s answer that there was
no man wiser than Socrates. Politicians knew little yet they thought they
know all whereas Socrates knew just how little he knew which was his
only “slight advantage” in terms of being wise. Socrates explained that
while the men most in favorable repute were the most foolish. Others less
esteemed were really the wiser and better.
Socrates found that poets exhibited some sort of ingenious
aptitude for their craft but lacked the comprehension of their artfulness.
Artisans, because of their workmanship, thought that they knew of high
matters, but this personality defect overshadowed their inherent wisdom.
Socrates admitted that he had no divine wisdom. He only exhibited a
greater capacity for philosophical reasoning over other men. The charge
of impiety arose from Meletus on behalf of the poets, the craftsmen and
politicians on behalf of Anytus, and the rhetoricians on behalf of Lycon.
Socrates goes on to defend against being a curious evil-doer who “makes
the worse appear the better cause.” He is accused of being an atheist, but
Socrates rebukes, “I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than
you.”
Socrates’ claim that “The true champion of justice, if he intends
to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to a
private life and leave politics alone,”268 is important here, for Aristotle
insists that Socratic citizenship is not citizenship due to the lack of civic
engagement. For Socrates, however, such active civic involvement usually
resulted in one’s participation in injustice or, if one retained one’s moral
standards, put one’s life at risk. Aristotle also argues that there is a
268 Plato, “The Apology,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought, ed.
Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 32.
194
distinction between a good man and a good citizen.269 Socrates, however,
would protest this distinction, as he argues that “goodness brings wealth
and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.”270
269 Aristotle, “The Politics,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought,
ed. Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 114-117.
270 Plato, “The Apology,” 30.
195
Moral of the Story
The practice of ethics is formational for the agent. Much like the
business professional, the moral agent must pass many tests to fulfill his
196
or her intended purpose. School is one area that is meant to provide an
ethical buffer. Having a terminal degree signifies years of study. These
PhDs are not only academics, they are business executives, financial
advisors, and mental health counselors. These professionals provide
necessary services to the community and the community places demands
on these individuals. Mental health counselors require a license to practice.
This is for the safety and security of the individuals who are seeking
counsel. The philosopher, the archetypal academic, can be consulted on
standards of ethics and how to apply them.
Ethics addresses concerns which may have been swept under the
rug if it were not for a hard target search for a moral judgment. Aristotle
gets at ethics in two ways. He employs means/ends reasoning (M/E) and
rule/case reasoning (R/C). M/E begins with what an individual or a
business wants to achieve in a particular situation whether it is good or
not. R/C begins with what is good to do in a particular situation regardless
of whether the individual or business wants to do it or not. “M/E moves
from future specific acts to present specific acts, while R/C moves from
general to specific at a single point in time.”271 Virtue theory says an act is
permissible when it abides by that which the ideally virtuous person would
do. “The conclusion of R/C becomes the major premise of M/E.”272 The
conclusion for M/E is a virtuous act. M/E brings the practical reasoning
back to the agent.
“For Socrates, the person who fails to act morally simple needs to
know more. For Augustine, she needs to engage in an act of will.”273
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” “When Socrates
spent his days debating major issues in the marketplace, and when Lao
Tzu recorded his advice on how to follow the path to success while
avoiding harm, they meant these ideas to be used. Philosophy was
originally a way of life, not an academic discipline—a subject to be not
only studied but applied… Analytical philosophy is the technical term for
what probably pops into your mind when you think of philosophy. This is
the field as defined academically. This kind of philosophy is mostly
abstract and self-referential, with little or nothing to say about the world.
It is rarely applicable to life.”274
271 Curzer, “Aristotle’s Practical Syllogisms,” 147.
272 Curzer, “Aristotle’s Practical Syllogisms,” 149.
273 Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 64.
274 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 8.
197
“Three important branches of philosophy originated in roughly the
same time period of antiquity, circa 600-400 B.C.E. The one responsible
for the vision of philosophy conjured in most people’s heads—bearded,
toga-and-sandals-wearing men—is the Athenian school, featuring
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They were building on some significant pre
Socratics too (such as the Cynics and early Stoics), but for our current
purposes we’ll stick to the biggest guns. At the same- time, in a different
part of the planet, the Forest Sages of India, most famously Siddhartha
Gautama (Buddha), were adding to the Hindu worldview. Just around the
globe, Confucius and Lao Tzu Were developing Confucianism and
Taoism, Which, together with the older I Ching, form the heart of Chinese
philosophy. This crucial period in these ancient civilizations was
formative in the history of philosophy.”275
Socrates was a philosopher and teacher. Socrates saw himself as a
political gadfly, constantly stinging Athenians into awareness of their
philosophical shortcomings. He allowed himself to be put to death by the
corrupted state because his reasoned argument compelled him to remain
even though his friends had arranged his escape. Thus he prized
philosophy above life itself. Plato never forgave the Athenians for
executing Socrates. Christians believe that Jesus died to redeem mankind
from sin; it may be secularly asserted that Socrates died to redeem
philosophers from unemployment.
Socrates, through his adoption of the maxim “know thyself,”
seemingly affirmed our universal ignorance as the predicament of man,
but to answer to the question “what is the self,” we’d need be able to
recognize the right answer, and thus must already know it which is a
paradox, but a crucial one that directs our attention to different meanings
for knowing. Aristotle affirmed universal and realizable desire to know as
the predicament of man. The first step toward the kind of knowledge that
Aristotle had in mind is the Socratic realization that we do not yet know.
The desire for philosophical knowledge of which Aristotle spoke cannot
be pursued in the attitude of the common sense, but instead in an effort to
decide what can be known in any given realm. Plato argued that this
philosophical inquiry begins in wonder, but not as in curiosity or the need
to collect information.
An ethical person observes the rules of the moral road. Its actions
involve a commitment to the basic human goods without which humans
could not flourish. Morality with respect to business as well as the sole
275 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 53.
198
proprietor of agency can be grounded in particular ethical standards. The
standards examined in this paper are the moral virtues and natural law
which render personal and professional roles consistent with each other
and the common good. In Aristotelian virtue ethics, having good moral
sense means living a characteristically human life. Virtue ethics focuses
more on the individual by using the moral requirements that guide them.
The guiding virtues of professionals refer to the proper goals of the
profession. Aristotle’s virtue ethics stresses the importance of harmony
between thought and appetite, self and other, and can be applied to the
transfer of goods and services in business. Furthermore, professionals can
integrate their personal and professional lives to achieve cohesion.
Psychological detachment in carrying out professional roles can
assist with meeting requirements and upholding business goals. A fair
amount of psychological distance can allow for morally worthwhile ends.
The image of the workaholic who cannot distance himself or herself from
the job is a tragic case. Like the driver who is always paying attention to
the road, the business professional always keeps the steering wheel
aligned. The road, however, is two-fold. It is useless to achieve business
goals if personal health is ruined in the process. It is counterproductive to
be obsessive in a professional area of life while allowing personal
relationships to suffer. According to Aristotelian virtue ethics, acting well
is determined in reference to what counts as excellence in performing
various functions which are characteristic of humanly flourishing. A good
professional life involves a commitment to key human goods including
self-care.
“When Socrates declared that the unexamined life is not worth
living, he was arguing for constant personal evaluation and striving for
self-improvement as the highest calling.”276 “The other major contribution
Socrates left to philosophical counselors (along with countless others who
f
ind it useful) is the so-called Socratic method: asking a series of questions
to get at ultimate answers. Socrates’ famous dictum “The unexamined life
is not worth living” Sums up his belief that leading a life of quality is the
most important thing and that we do so primarily through inquiry.”277
“Both Aristotle and Confucius, who were contemporaries though
they lived Worlds apart, believed that virtue, like vice, is a habit. Virtue is
not an unattainable goal, but rather is Well Within our grasp. Society does
condition us, but at some point we have to assume responsibility for which
276 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 11.
277 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 57.
199
habits we acquire.”278 Aristotle studied astronomy and zoology as well as
logic and ethics… Laws of motion were discovered by natural philosopher
Sir Isaac Newton, biological evolution by natural philosopher Charles
Darwin… Ultimately science and philosophy followed divergent roads,
and Western medicine-after centuries in the hands of charlatans, barbers,
phrenologists, and snake-oil vendors—allied itself with science. “The
highest object of knowledge is the essential nature of the good, from which
everything that is good and right derives its value for us.”279
278 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 94.
279 Marinoff, Plato not Prozac, 94.
200
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