Philosophical Counselling as a Process of Fostering Wisdom in the Form of Virtues - Management Assignment Help

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Abstract

The main theme of this article is that an adequate understanding of the concept of wisdom enables philosophical counsellors to identify their proper tasks. The concept refers to a great number of cognitive and practical virtues, and philosophical counselling is a process where the counsellee's powers of virtue are examined and encouraged. This is often therapeutic in the sense that it enhances the counsellee's well-being.

Keywords: Philosophical Counselling, wisdom, virtue, well-being, therapy

Introduction

It has often been said that the goal of philosophical practice is wisdom (Achenbach, 1998 and 2002; Lahav, 2001 and 2006). This is of course not a surprising view, given the original notion of philosophy as love of wisdom. But wisdom is a philosophically challenging concept: it is by no means obvious what we mean by it. Since we do not wish to be ignorant about our aims, some explication is necessary.1 I will first provide a virtue-based account of wisdom, and then discuss some of the implications of this view to philosophical counselling. The first implication is that philosophical counselling is a process of fostering virtues. The second implication is that philosophical counselling can be therapeutic.

Virtues as Wisdom

Robert Nozick (1989, p.267) characterises wisdom in these terms: 'Wisdom is what you need to understand in order to live well and cope with the central problems and avoid the dangers in the predicament(s) human beings find themselves in.' He says that a wise person needs to understand many things: the most important goals and values of life; what means will reach these goals without too great a cost; what limitations are unavoidable and how to accept them; knowing when certain goals are sufficiently achieved; how to tell what is appropriate at a given time. John Kekes (1983), Sharon Ryan (1999) and Gerd Achenbach (2000, 2001) similarly emphasise that wisdom has to do with knowing how to live well.

Considered as a practical virtue, objectivity means distancing oneself from one's immediate concerns and seeing them in a larger context of human and nonhuman life, or even from a cosmic perspective. Plato's lofty view that human things seem puny from a 'satellite perspective' of soul's flight is a good imaginative-pictorial representation of this virtue (Hadot, 1995, pp.238–250). The virtue of justice may presuppose, or at least benefit from, an objective view of things. And as Plato remarked, the aerial perspective gives rise to greatness of soul (Hadot, 2004, p.68). Bertrand Russell (2006, p.159) says that a person with greatness of soul sees 'himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit', and realizes 'the brevity and minuteness of human life'. Russell also writes in a rather Platonic and Stoic manner that a person 'who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him.' The virtue of disinterestedness is an ability to experience the world as it is in itself, and not only as it is for us and our projects (Hadot, 1995, p.254; see also Curnow, 2000). Disinterestedness requires that we are able to disengage ourselves from our everyday cares and motives of action, and this means that we have to let go of an evaluative attitude towards our experiences and the world. Any genuinely philosophical attitude involves a dimension of disinterested perception of life and the universe. Nozick's definition of wisdom suggests that our conceptions of virtue should have room for skills and dispositions that are oriented towards avoiding dangers to our personal well-being and enabling us to cope with difficulties in our own lives. Some practical virtues like flexibility in one's aims and hopes are not so much moral virtues as ways of securing a personally tolerable or even satisfactory life. This does not mean that moral virtues do not enhance our sense of personal well-being. Often they do; and in many cases one and the same virtue—objectivity, disinterestedness, forbearance, foresight, moderation, carefulness or courage, for example—has both moral aspects and aspects that have more to do with the health of our own souls (von Wright 1963, ch.7).

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