The Vision: Meaning is Healing
Historians of ideas such as Hadot, Foucault or Nussbaum, have explained how the Ancient Greeks and Romans were concerned with the effects of philosophy upon the subject’s well-being and good life. “A healthy mind in a healthy body”: Plutarch for example considered that philosophy and medicine were a single domain. After a long Christan period during which philosophy became mostly theoretical, a concern for the ideal of philosophical health is slowly re-emerging since the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein among others. The ideal of philosophical care is applied in the last decades in the renewed practice of philosophical counseling. This transnational movement is part of a contemporary rediscovery or recreation of philosophy as a form of care, sometimes called “therapy for the sane”. Philosophical health is an emerging and open concept, and it’s worth exploring its full and multifarious potential without dogmatic lenses.
Health is today one of the main public concerns of humanity. “Good health and well-being” were coalesced by the United Nations into one sustainable development goal for 2030. In the last centuries, physical health and psychological health have been systematised into a societal imperative, sometimes an industry and in some cases a mode of control. In occidental societies, what was a luxury for the few at the beginning of the twentieth century (gymnastics, dietetics, psychotherapy, etc.) became by the end of the same century a necessity or imperative for many, sometimes even an obsession. States are financing and administrating programs of psychological and physical health, in the line of what Foucault called biopolitics, sometimes favouring a modality of therapy grounded on a mechanical, reductionist, quantitative or dualistic view of the mind and body.
The notion of philosophical health possesses a long genealogy. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a seminar Foucault gave at the College de France in 1981-82, its prehistory is located in the Platonic and Socratic notion of epimeleia heautou, the care for the self or soul. For Plato, philosophical self-care was a necessary condition in order to become a good citizen or governing actor of the city: the First Alcibiades indicates that there was a correlation between the collective idea of justice and the individual idea of rational self-care. Moreover, such self-care was ultimately not individual, as it was a reconnection with the divine within ourselves, an idea epitomized by Socrates’ daimonion. The Ancient Greek notion of philosophical health articulated personal growth with a shared cosmology, a cosmo-political sense.
On the Concept of Creal: the Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute (2017), Luis de Miranda argued that such a bridge between the supra-collective and the infra-individual needs to be reconstructed today via a global social contract, a shared cosmology. The problem with our dominant biophysical or psychological versions of health is that they often implicitly promote a solipsistic and materialist idea of the self, sometimes based on the anthrobotic idea of tech-enhanced standardised bodies, bodies without singular spirit or personhood and without esprit de corps. In the end, mechanistic views, precisely because they might seem efficient in the short-term from a functional perspective, might lead to a general adoption of implicit forms of transhumanism, a constant and anxious management of humanity via chemicals, automation, mimetism and biotechnology that generates guilt or self-contempt among crypto-cyborgs without a deeper purpose nor sense of the possible other than competition or survival.
In a sort of vicious loop, metaphysical worry is sometimes interpreted as “depression”, “bipolarism” or others form of mental diagnosis promoted by the biomedical industry. Moreover, the current high-speed development of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics is generating an artificially deterministic society in which existential choices tend to be increasingly supervised by the state or corporations. Once we are statistically told by machines-who-know-better which education, partner, divertissement, health habits, profession or workplace to adapt to, the episteme of the modern subject, based on the ideal of self-determination, might collapse, generating a wave of pathologies of free will, the premises of which are already observable today. Cognitive diversity and philosophical health are under threat; the rise of a normative form of self-development sends wrong messages about “the right way” to live in order to be successful or “happy”, “well-adjusted”.
Babies come into the world through a canal which at its origin is a kaleidoscope of infinite possibility, but which ends at its social end in this more or less limited image called reality-as-we-know-it. Some souls, however, try to regain some control of the kaleidoscope, by returning mentally and experientially to the creal source, a good sense of the possible (what de Miranda calls “eudynamia“). All too often the monoscopic imperatives of society lash our faces in denying us access to our deeper aspirations. The world needs (meta)cognitive diversity, an explosion of philosophical colours and a generous palette of ways of doing and thinking. In recurring to a philosophical counsellor or to autonomous personal philosophical thinking, human beings are looking anew for deeper, more singular and more sustainable forms of care and cognition, respectful of our natural embodiment as well as of non-human entities (from animals to ideals). The time is certainly ripe to answer the question What is Philosophical Health? in a programmatic way, and perhaps even more importantly: What can philosophical health do? How can intellectual care improve our intercreations?