In philosophical practice

Our contemporary culture is enchanted with the idea of self-change and self-improvement. The market is swamped with self-help books and self-improvement workshops and classes: How to become happier, how to gain self-confidence, how to be a better parent, how to have better sex. Presumably we are not good enough, and must be better.

But in philosophical practice such an approach would be misguided. This kind of self-improvement may be a legitimate task for certain psychotherapies, but philosophy can adopt it only at the price of becoming trivial and superficial. It would turn philosophy from a search for wisdom into pragmatic techniques for behavior-improvement or emotion-modification. Furthermore, it would simply replace one pattern with another pattern, from shyness to assertiveness, from anger to smiles, from one prison to a more comfortable prison.

In philo-sophia we do not aim at pragmatic solutions or comfortable prisons. Our aim is more ambitious: to open ourselves to broader horizons of understanding and life. But this doesn’t mean that we attempt to abolish the walls of our perimeter. Once we appreciate the immense resistance of our patterns and conceptions, we realize that this is an unrealistic goal. We understand that it is virtually impossible to eliminate our basic personality and attitudes to the world.

To a limited extent we can, of course, make changes in ourselves. We can acquire new knowledge; we can modify specific behaviors that are peripheral to our personality (e.g., smoking, though even this may be extremely difficult!); we can adopt new techniques to deal with a specific problematic emotion (e.g., a trick for overcoming fear), we can learn how to speak differently (e.g., say positive things), or how to think about ourselves with a new vocabulary. Many therapies do exactly that. But although these superficial changes may help us feel better, they leave unchanged the basic outlines of our perimeter.

As philosophical practitioners our primarily goal is to grow through understanding, not to fix behaviors or emotions. We understand the immense forces that sustain our patterns and conceptions. We realize that our will-power and self-control have little capacity to change ourselves. As counselors or workshop-leaders we give up the naïve hope that philosophical self-knowledge would enable the counselee to change himself in a substantive way. We understand that even when counselees are aware of their patterns, and even when they decide to change them, the distance to an actual change is enormous.

When I understand the forces maintaining my patterns and conceptions, the result is humility. I accept the weakness of my self-control and will. I understand how little my efforts can influence my perimeter. My busy conscious ‘self,’ who likes to control and decide and dictate, realizes its limitations.

This inspires me to let go of my controlling self, to abandon my self-controlling attitude, and open myself to other attitudes. I open in myself a space for other sources inside me, for new fountains of inspiration, of understanding, of wisdom. I allow them to act in me by pushing aside my smart little self.

This is, indeed, an important moment in the process of philosophical practice: the moment of discovering that I am not as free as I thought, that I am a prisoner of powerful patterns. This realization opens the door for a real philosophical understanding and change—not a change imposed by reason on my behavior and emotions, but rather a new dimension of being. But this is a topic for a future lesson.

Exercise

In this exercise your task is to feel the forces of your patterns and conceptions by trying to resist them. If you are like most people, who don’t like making a fool of themselves, you can do as follows:

Go to a store and ask to buy something that is obviously not sold there. For example, go to a ticket office and ask for a sandwich, or go to a restaurant and ask to buy a hammer. Even if you don’t have the courage to do the exercise, try to go as far as you can. Whether or not you succeed, be aware of your inner resistance: the tension and anxiety, the inner struggle, the effort.

Perhaps you wish to object: “I don’t want to do it because I don’t want to offend anybody,” or “I don’t want to waste their time,” and so on. These are excuses. Most likely you don’t have the courage to do so, which means that your pattern is too powerful. It is probably the pattern of following social expectations, expressing the conception “One should behave as expected,” or “One should appear reasonable.”

You can also do a similar exercise with a personal (not universal) pattern that is particularly yours. Again, whether or not you succeed, note the inner resistance, the effort, and the struggle.

Lesson 7