Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems

364 Pages·2016·1.36 MB·English

by  Lou Marinoff

PLATO
NOT PROZAC!
APPLYING PHILOSOPHY
TO EVERYDAY PROBLEMS
LOU MARINOFF, PH.D.
Dedication
To those who always knew philosophy was good for something, but
could never say exactly what
Epigraph
“It is Reason alone which makes life happy and pleasant, by expelling all
false Conceptions or Opinions, as may in any way occasion perturbation of
mind.”
—EPICURUS
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
—Socrates “The time of human life is but a point, and the substance is a flux,
and its perceptions dull, and the composition of the body corruptible, and the
soul a whirl, and fortune inscrutable, and fame a senseless thing…. What
then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS
“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 I
had been cared for since my youth—Philosophy.”
—ANICIUS BOETHIUS
“Man cannot overestimate the greatness and power of his mind.”
—GEORGE FREDERICK HEGEL
“To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, yet at the same time
to attempt to discover the truth.”
—IRIS MURDOCH
“Carpenters fashion wood; fletchers fashion arrows; the wise fashion
themselves.”
—BUDDHA
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART • I
NEW USES FOR ANCIENT WISDOM
1• What Went Wrong With Philosophy—and What’s Going Right With
It Lately
2• Therapy, Therapy Everywhere, and Not a Thought to Think
3• PEACE in Your Time: Five Steps to Managing Problems
Philosophically
4• What You Missed in Philosophy 101 That Can Help You Now
PART • II
MANAGING EVERYDAY PROBLEMS
5• Seeking a Relationship
6• Maintaining a Relationship
7• Ending a Relationship
8• Family Life and Strife
9• When Work Doesn’t Work
10• Midlife Without Crisis
11• Why Be Moral or Ethical?
12• Finding Meaning and Purpose
13• Gaining from Loss
PART • III
BEYOND CLIENT COUNSELING
14• Practicing Philosophy with Groups and Organizations
PART • IV
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
APPENDIX A• Hit Parade of Philosophers
APPENDIX B• American Philosophical Practitioners Association
APPENDIX C• Further Reading
APPENDIX D• Consulting the I Ching
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART • I
NEW USES FOR ANCIENT WISDOM
1
What Went Wrong With Philosophy—
and What’s Going Right With It Lately
“As for Diseases of the Mind, against them Philosophy is provided of
Remedies; being, in that respect, justly accounted the Medicine of the
Mind.”
—EPICURUS
“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.”
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A young woman confronts her mother’s terminal breast cancer. A man
contemplates a midlife career change. A Protestant woman whose
daughter is engaged to a Jewish man and whose son is married to a
Muslim woman fears potential religious conflicts. A successful business
executive struggles over whether to leave his wife of over twenty years.
A woman is happily living with her partner, but only one of them wants
children. An engineer and single father supporting four children is afraid
that blowing the whistle on a design flaw in a high-pressure project
could cost him his job. A woman who has everything she thought she
wanted—loving husband and children, beautiful house, high-paying
career—struggles with meaninglessness: when she looks at her life she
thinks, “Is this all there is?”
All of these people have sought professional help in managing the
problems they feel overwhelming them. In another day, they might have
found their way to the offices of a psychologist, psychiatrist, social
worker, marriage counselor, or even their general practitioner for help
with “mental illness.” Or they might have consulted a spiritual adviser or
turned to religion for moral instruction and guidance. And some of them
may have been helped in those places. They may also have endured
discussions about their childhoods, analysis of their behavior patterns,
prescriptions for antidepressants, or arguments about their sinful nature
or God’s forgiveness, none of which got to the heart of their struggle.
And they may well have been signed up for a lengthy and open-ended
course of treatment, with a focus on diagnosing the illness as though it
were a tumor to be excised or a symptom to be controlled with drugs.
But now there’s another option for people unsatisfied by or opposed to
psychological or psychiatric therapy: philosophical counseling. What the
people described above did was seek out a different kind of assistance.
They consulted a philosophical practitioner, looking for insight from the
world’s great wisdom traditions. As established religious institutions lose
their authority with more and more people, and as psychology and
psychiatry exceed the limits of their usefulness in people’s lives (and
begin to do more harm than good), many people are coming to the
realization that philosophical expertise encompasses logic, ethics, values,
meaning, rationality, decision-making in situations of conflict or risk,
and all the vast complexities that characterize human life.
People facing these situations need to talk in terms deep and broad
enough to address their concerns. By getting a handle on their personal
philosophies of life, sometimes with the help of the great thinkers of the
past, they can build a framework for managing whatever they face and
go into the next situation more solidly grounded and spiritually or
philosophically whole. They need dialogue, not diagnosis.
You can apply this process in your own life. You can work on your
own, though sometimes it helps to have a partner to converse with who
can make sure you’re not overlooking something or settling for
rationalization over rationality. With the guidance and examples in this
book, you’ll be ready to discover the benefits of an examined life,
including peace of mind, stability, and integrity. You don’t need any
experience in philosophy, and you don’t have to read Plato’s Republic or
any other philosophy text (unless you want to). All you need is a
philosophical turn of mind, which, since you’ve picked up this book and
read this far, I’d say you have.