Welcome to Rewilding Philosophy, a newsletter about practical (eco-)philosophy amidst the apocaplypse. I had been working on another essay around healthism and the potential pitfalls of trying to heal the planet and it’s on its way, but I found myself over the past few days wanting to say a few things about philosophical health. So that’s what you have here. I trust you are all well. Welcome to new subscribers, glad you made your way here.
A few days ago, Eva Tomas Casado pointed me to "philosophical health," it's been on my mind since. The philosopher Luis de Miranda defines philosophical health as "a state of fruitful coherence between a person's (or a collective) way of thinking and speaking and their way of acting, such that the possibilities for a sublime life and healing growth are increased and the needs for self-, intersubjective and interspecies flourishing satisfied".
Philosophical health is an addition to physical and psychological health. I understand philosophical health as a direct response to the meaning crisis.
Sometimes, the most simple reframing changes how you grasp an idea. To me, philosophical health is such a term. Though skeptical of the word health, I've never heard a better description to express what I am working on. It's so simple that I think even those unfamiliar with concepts such as inner transformation, the meaning crisis or adult development can grasp what "philosophical health" means.
I believe physical as well as psychological health are insufficient if not accompanied by philosophical health. While psychological health - the mind as embodied, extended, enacted, and embedded - depends on our physiological makeup, including our socialecological realities as well as our biological makeup, I think that our psychological health largely depends on our philosophical health, which encompasses our individual philosophical health as well as the collective philosophical health. And our collective philosophical health can be considered a part of our socialecological realities, which amplifies how tightly entangled our physiology, psychology, and philosophy are.
The expression our psychological unwellness has taken is a devouring of self-help.
I have recently written:
Stepping into my friend’s apartment was like entering a batter of sophistication meets simplicity. High white ceilings, minimalist furniture. However, it was the secondhand bookshelf that got my attention. Stacked with probably over 200 books, meticulously organized by genre. Academic tomes lined one section, reflecting her work interest. And then there was the self-help section, practically daring me to transform myself into my best version right there — just by staring at it. Who knew enlightenment needed so much paper?
The self-help book market has been a huge segment of the publishing industry for many years, with millions of titles sold every year and its market worth billions of dollars annually.
Why is it that we are so interested in self-help? And why is it that we consume vast amounts of it while research shows that overall happiness doesn’t increase? Shouldn’t we all be living our best lives by now?
As with any multi-faceted question, there is no easy answer. But there are better and worse explanations. I have a pretty good one.
The role of outdated philosophies
The way we live our everyday life, how we eat, what we care about, which partner we choose, how we spend time with friends, how we manage people, what good causes we support, what decisions we make in the workplace, but also how we design our technology and infrastructures, such as our streets, all of that depends on the philosophy we live by.
Philosophies shape our lives in ways that we are often oblivious to. They make us into who we are. We don’t consciously choose which philosophy we want to live by. Instead, we adopt it from our parents and our surroundings, the culture we are part of, our friends, movies, and social media.
Sometimes, those adapted philosophies bring us through life just fine. They let us be exactly who we want to be and match our experience of what life is like. If that’s you, you likely have never read a single self-help book. And likely, you wouldn’t be reading this article.
“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.” Alfred North Whitehead
Yet, for many, the philosophies inherited from our upbringing fail to guide us toward where and who we want to be.
The problem is that the dominant philosophy that we have been growing up with is based on a very limited understanding of the world. This philosophy sees the world as a machine, where everything can be broken down into individual components and optimized for efficiency.
This philosophy emerged during the Enlightenment period, or the Age of Reason, during the 18th century and significantly shifted how people conceptualized the world and its workings. This philosophical perspective, heavily influenced by thinkers such as René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon, viewed the universe as a vast machine governed by fixed laws and principles. This philosophy emphasizes that all natural phenomena can be explained in terms of mechanical causes and effects without the need for supernatural or divine explanations. It brought us technological innovations. It also brought us the idea that only the fittest will survive, as well as the notion that success is the accumulation of money and status and that we are lone and separate individuals.
For many of us, this dominant philosophy is insufficient to live a good life in times of climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, and social inequality. It neither helps us solve the most pressing challenges of our time nor does it help us to live a good life.
And because of that, we are drawn to self-help. What we are actually looking for is a philosophy to live by. What we mostly get from self-help literature, though, is bits and pieces that don’t seem to work. And that’s why we need to consume more and more self-help, hoping that the next one will fix us. Likely, it won’t.
Pieces of a good life
Classic self-help can’t. Because it is grounded in the very same philosophy that has caused us to even reach for self-help in the first place: a mechanistic philosophy that thinks the world into pieces. And this is how the advice that we find is offered. A piece of information without all the complexities that actually make you you and that make your life what it is. It is always already incomplete. It doesn’t change what lies beneath and what might actually have leverage to change things: your philosophy.
The systems scientist Donella Meadows analyzed the best place to intervene in a system to change it. And as the most significant leverage point, she declared that our paradigms — or philosophies — offer the greatest leverage.
“Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons…. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we run from one self-help book to the next without challenging our underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values about the world, we will get the same old. Or makes things even worse.
The self-help market, which promotes personal fulfillment and success in the form of monetary and material abundance without consideration for the social and ecological inequality this brings with it, has brought forth more narcissistic behavior than any planet can handle.
We are missing a good philosophy to live by. And we look in all the wrong places to find it.
While having principles is part of a philosophy, and those principles are what we often find in self-help, those principles are also insufficient if they are not grounded in a wholesome philosophy”.
So what makes a wholesome philosophy - or philosophical health?
According to Luis de Miranda the cultivation of philosophical health requires mental heroism, deep orientation, critical creativity, deep listening and the Creal (or Creative Real).
Mental Heroism: Mental heroism refers to the courage and resilience required to navigate the complexities of modern life.
Deep Orientation: Deep orientation is to define a fundamental high orientation.
Critical Creativity: Critical creativity means not only being able to remain logically vigilant about fallacies of reasoning by examining the premises and consequences of our beliefs – it also means to address and anticipate situations of crisis with an hyperstatic attitude, one that is not obsessed by a conservative and perhaps impossible return to a past equilibrium, but capable of creating new states of consciousness and existential haleness.
Deep Listening: Deep listening is the practice of fully engaging with others and their perspectives with openness, empathy, and attentiveness. Deep philosophical listening induces a feedback loop of attention between the persons in dialogue.
Creal: Creal is a concept introduced by de Miranda that blends creativity and reality. It encompasses the idea that reality is not fixed or predetermined but is continuously co-created through human creativity, imagination, and perception.
While each of these makes sense to me, and I agree that they are part of philosophical health, I am unsure if they encompass its totality (which de Miranda also doesn’t claim). They are a rather precise prescription of what philosophical health entails. This is not meant as a critique. Instead, I’d prefer to add to his definition.
At this point, I am not sure what the exact principles of a healthy philosophy are, and I am also not sure if they are the same for each person. For me, philosophy is about the process of practicing philosophy, of thinking, being, and acting philosophically while grounded in my specific philosophy—in which having a philosophy and practicing philosophy get mushed together into a stew in which one always already contains the other.
The way I understand philosophical health requires the following:
a cosmology: a perspective about the nature of the universe, its origin, structure, and evolution.
an ontology: a perspective of the nature of being, existence, and reality.
an epistemology: a perspective on what knowledge is (e.g., are spiritual experiences a valid form of knowing)
ethics: a perspective on what’s good and bad
an axiology: a perspective on what is the good life
an anthropology: a perspective on what it means to be human and human’s role in the universe
a social imaginary: a perspective about how society should be organized.
and áskesis: which simply means ‘exercise’ or ‘training’ in ancient Greek.
All of these are overlapping, and just as Karen Barad talks about ontology, epistemology, and ethics as a single tripartite, an ethico-onto-epistemology, I would argue that it's an ethico-onto-cosmo-axio-anthopo-imagaginary-epistemological áskesis. Ha, I love that word. I am German, so we love long words, such as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (real word).
Having a perspective (lightly held) on each of these in the sense that they bring us into better relations with reality gives us philosophical health.
I think often, when we find ourselves in psychological turmoil, we actually find ourselves in philosophical turmoil. I don't even think it's correct to distinguish the two sharply, though our disciplinary siloes, especially in academia, want us to. When I look at the psychology research methodologies - often conducted in clinical settings, often disconnected from the real world, often conducted with male graduate students, usually empirical versus how philosophy comes to results - through logic and good arguments - the two could not possibly be more different. Yet, as Pierre Hadot points out in "Philosophy as a Way of Life", psychology and self-help were an inherent part of philosophy.
I also think philosophical health, while it will be different for each person, is likely not mechanistic but—as I often argue—relational. In fact, I’d argue that health - whether psychological, physiological or philosophical - is always ecological. Health is not bound in an individual but always already relational. That’s why I would add the prefix “eco” any time.
And lastly, I think that philosophical health requires our philosophy to be practical. That means that we don't just want to hold the perspectives and ideas but actually practice living them on a day-to-day basis. Our life becomes a philosophical practice (áskesis).
To do all that, and to become philosophically healthy, we can't be left alone. Like there are hospitals and psychiatrists, and just like physiological and psychological health have both been acknowledged to need institutionalized offers, as I argued before, I believe we need institutionalized PhilosophyGyms, and like Luis de Miranda, I believe that philosophical health will eventually be recognized as another pillar of health and wellbeing. I also believe this is vital to change ourselves and society at large. The dominant mechanistic philosophy — as many wonderful things of comfort and technology as it has brought us — is outdated and doesn't match our needs anymore. It's up to us to consciously choose what we want our following dominant philosophy to be.
Your article made for A Fun Exercise.
https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/a-fun-exercise