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By Luigi Amato Kunst

A rising number of people prefer to discover back up past a philosopher instead of going to traditional psychotherapists for advice and treatment. Why?

Most of the problems and predicaments affecting people are not caused by psychological disorders or psychic traumas, but rather by misinterpretations of structures that underlie reality. Information technology seems that psychology and psychotherapy take made us accustomed to the idea that everything that happens in individual's life is a mental process and most of the predicaments affecting people are coming from an error inside the procedure of thinking. A sort of Ego-Ptolemaic universe, with our tiny ego at the centre of life.

The "tragic," within the Greek thought, is that man life is a collision between what the individual makes through her agency and what that but "happens" to her. Events that but happen to us, changing our life without our consensus. Life, therefore, is non as much governed by reason or feelings. It's dictated by events. This standoff is what makes homo goodness frail and vulnerable.

We must continually "choose" among competing values and circumstances may force us to a position in which we cannot help doing some wrong. And we must accept, as Kierkegaard points out, that "What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to practice, not what I am to know (…) the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to notice the thought for which I can live and die".

Psychology'southward attempt is to demonstrate that everything that happens in life is up to us. The tragic aspect of living does non exist in psychology. The issue is what I phone call "the coaching society." If we are melancholic by grapheme,  "Coaching Society" tries to make us grin. They grinning all the time. Nosotros are surrounded by people who teach usa from how to make a chore interview to how to write a 500 pages novel in one month.

Of form, I am not saying that all of this is due to psychology. Is due to the thought that our lives can exist improved (and this is a very cryptic term), that we can be happier, smarter, quicker, more than successful, but by following some techniques, some lectures, some wise advice. Just by taking a form. Or by reading a volume.

How exercise nosotros retrieve and communicate nowadays? We don't properly think in our daily life. Rather, nosotros link. We jump from one topic to some other in the same way as we use social networks and searching on the net. The outcome is that culture moves horizontally. Nosotros need short texts. We don't want to be bothered by reading long paragraphs. Communication must be quick, immediate, and most important, constructive.

All these psychological and coaching approaches do not go deep into people's predicaments. They but float on the surface. And that is the reason why some people prefer to find back up by a philosopher.

What is then the difference between philosophy and psychotherapy?

I would say the object: psychology is the act of knowing. Philosophy is the object of noesis. Whatsoever the object of knowledge is.

The deed of knowing is non the aforementioned every bit the object of cognition. My feelings and my thoughts to 1 person (P) are non that one person (P). Philosophy, by contrast, is non about individual actual existing facts, something empirically experienced, like thoughts, feelings, a state of affairs, things, objects. It is more than about a priori truths, i.east. before any experience and before annihilation actual existing   And the psychological attitude, and so to speak, led to the idea that everything we feel, believe, think, desire corresponds to what exists. We are, subsequently all, surrounded by our mental projections. And we are prone to believe that our feelings directed to a person or a country of diplomacy are that person or situation.

Are yous saying that "indubitable truths" outside the experience practise be?

Permit's brand an instance. Nosotros are accustomed believing that laws of logic do not be in "itself only they are rather a regulation of a psychical process called "thinking." If it were truthful, then the chains of symbols processed by a computer were nothing more a control of the mechanism of the computer. This is imitation, for the hardware follows an entirely different ready of concrete laws than the concatenation of symbols that information technology calculates. (CFR. Klaus Held, Husserl's phenomenological method).

This approach was called psychologism in the early 20th century and has substantial similarity to the modern cognitive psychology that is interested in what is happening inside our minds that links stimulus (input) and response (output). But to assume an mistake in our thinking procedure, we need to assign the aforementioned value (or magnitude) for each candy symbol.

Husserl points out that "2+3=5″ stands all past itself every bit a pure truth whether there is the world, and this world with these actual things or not" (Hua 9/23).

In short, logic is not an act of thinking process, but an object of thought, standing over-confronting the act of thinking. It is a reality outside our deed of thinking. Here, the term "outside" is not to be  intended in the concrete sense, something spatially located, outward or in some "pedantic platonic heaven of ideas."  Outside our heed stands for inaccessible to us.

And then, what is then the object of knowledge?

Information technology is non the individual actual existing object or facts and states of affairs. A tree, a true cat, a cloud, of course. It is non a matter of fact in the Hume sense.

Therefore, the object is non the empirical object, but rather the fashion and the how the object is given to consciousness. And these manners of giveness, as Husserl says, are neither a representation of the natural object nor an existing concrete object. What does exist in consciousness is content, and non an image.

You are maxim that the "object of knowledge" is not the existing physical object.

The very idea near the subject matter in phenomenology and philosophy of mind is that the object of consciousness is completely and entirely different in nature from the existing physical object. The naturalistic arroyo believes that the object of consciousness is just a representation, as a picture, of the external physical object. Locke believed that our listen was a container filled up with pictures.

Just intentionality, i.e. consciousness, is independent of any bodily existing object. My listen can be directed to an imaginary entity, like gods or dragons, which do not have any bodily being.

Intentionality is "the fundamental property of consciousness" with two main features: a) beingness-independence, b) conception-dependence.  Information technology is pretty obvious that any attempt to explain intentionality (and therefore consciousness) from a purely objective point of view, such as causality, beliefs or neurophysiology fails.

Consciousness is not depending on the empirically given object that happens to be there (in this instance information technology would be a uncomplicated connection). It depends on the "Essence," that is the universal determination. The universal determination is a "significant," while the singular determination may not possess that specific meaning for consciousness.

Consciousness, therefore has an ideal construction of an deed's content, something universal and not connected with annihilation actual existing. Nonetheless, to become access to this ideal structure is necessary, we accept the real experience.

In decision, intentional mental act despite has a content can exist related to no object at all. In this example, the meaning of the mental act gives the act the very aforementioned intentional character that it would have if it had an object.

A hallucination is intentional and has a mental content, (a noematic Sinn) even if at that place is no object standing before the perceiver.

Dissimilar meanings can determine the same referent in various ways. Oedipus desiring the Queen is quite a unlike human action than his desiring his female parent, not because they are acts with different objects but because they are acts with dissimilar content

The world of life then, (Lebenswelt) is not constituted by a sequence of objects but rather by meanings. And it is up to these various meanings that nosotros create stories since a story is the investigation of a context and a context is the set of experiences, situations, and facts that make the object or the situation to exist given

External objects, and then, situations, are like triggers, activating an explosion of references, a universe of meanings. This frame of references tin can be narrated, but it needs to be done authentically, that is, "authentically experienced."

Consciousness is, therefore,concerning an invisible structure of reality we cannot "see". This reality is a philosophical truth since information technology does not depend on anything actual existing and isa priori, namely before whatsoever experience.

Tin can you make examples of this invisible reality?

How can nosotros account for our social and mental existence in a realm of beast physical facts?

In psychoanalysis, the patient quite ofttimes believes that her intentional state is the real object. If I hate my instructor, or if I am disappointed with him, my instructor is my hate and my disappointment. At that place is quite a common linguistic misunderstanding in psychoanalysis: when we speak about x, we practice not indeed talk about x, merely we talk about our intentional country virtually x. I hate x; I love x, I desire x, I am disappointed most ten. In so doing, nosotros become prone to believe that the object corresponds to what we experience virtually it.

Facts are episodes occurring within a context. If John marries Jane, this fact does not have any sense, without the invisible and weightless institutional reality of "marriage." Just "marriage" is an institutional reality that goes far beyond that particular actual episode of John getting married to Jane.

Marriage, coin, President of The states, are forms of social reality past homo agreement.

All these institutional realities, even by homo agreement, are independent of annihilation actual existing. They tin be considered equally ideal truths, essences.  Institutional realities are not vague concepts, merely physical structures of real. They carry what Searle calls "deontic powers," that is, rights and obligations. This burden of responsibilities is what that makes a spousal relationship, friendship, a joint project, an upstanding institution.

A "Nosotros -Intention" is not an "I intention" since information technology starts by beingness a We. The structure of togetherness Shared Agency, Oxford Academy Printing, 2014, pp. 5-6).

So, what is philosophical praxis to life?

Psychotherapy works on feelings, emotions, beliefs, thoughts, dreams, expressed past the patient to the therapist. The patient can go along talking for years of her feelings or behavior to a certain object, person, state of affairs. Neither the patient nor the therapist does execute an investigation "peri tes ousias," around the thing at hand, e'er. In psychotherapy, we need to accept what the patient says.

Psychotherapy does not investigate the truth on the side of the object, but rather feeling or thoughts on the side of the bailiwick. This "obsessive" focusing on our feelings and behavior does non help usa to know the real world, that is, the object of knowledge the weightless and invisible structures nosotros cannot run across.

Why do you use the notion of "narrative" in philosophy?

Philosophy is dialogic, that is, it investigates the world by having a dialogue. The root of dialogue is dia-logos. Logos in ancient Greek means "discussion" while Dia means "through" (Bohm D, On Dialogue, ed. by Lee Nichol, p.half-dozen). The world of life in philosophy is more similar the ancient Greek agorà, an open context to a crossroads of meanings. Narrative, in turn, entails the endeavour of telling a story and the effort of listening to the other wayfarers we meet at the crossroads. Listening stands for reading the other's determinations of consciousness.

How can we practice that?

To paraphrase Kierkegaard's Enten – Eller incipit: what is an thespian?  Or what is a writer? An actor is somebody who investigates other's existence suspending any judgment. The actor'due south aim is a "clarification," the more accurate as possible, by suspending any judgment (a kind of phenomenological epochè). The outcome is a existent investigation around (peri) the object of knowledge.

Is this the method used by narrative philosophy?

If the world is neither the summation of matters of fact, nor a projection of our feelings, thoughts, and emotions, then it must be the crossroad of meanings. Klaus Held in his essay on Husserl's Phenomenological Method (Stuttgart 1985) points out that "the character of activities of consciousness is not dependent on the empirically given objects that happen to be there, but instead of Essence, that is, in the universal determination of types of objectivities." Now consciousness that is not tied to the factual perception of individual situations is called fantasy. According to Husserl, in fantasy, we can imagine an intentionally lived feel, and nosotros tin can "run through the variants" always differently in free variations.

We need to detect good stories. And adept stories contain the accurate description of consciousness content or decision. I know much more of a writer by reading his books than by reading his biography.

1 may say that this is what psychoanalysis does. Information technology comprehends patient's stream of consciousness. But it does differently. "In psychoanalysis, nada occurs but the interchange of words between the patient and the physician. The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and present impressions, complaints, confesses his wishes and emotions" (Freud 1917). It is not a dialogue merely rather a monolog.In turn, the risk of this kind of monolog is to believe the word as beingness a mental projection.Reading a book is a dialogue with the author. We need to meet somewhere on the halfway.

Let'due south brand an case. You remember y'all hate your male parent because he left your mother some years ago. And he left "you" of course. the one who left your mother and y'all." A reduction is an explanation that explains your feelings, that, for case, you are angry at him. Through the psychoanalytic process, if y'all can explain the reason why you feel what yous feel, and the symptom tends to fade away. This is the original aim of psychoanalysis.

Is your male parent this kind of utterance? Your feeling is non him. Let's take an actor; I hateful a good one. He should interpret the role of your father. What practise you lot recollect he would practice? Do you think he but would read the sentence "He is the i who is going to leave the family unit" and right after starts acting?  This is not a story. A story is almost revealing characters, and a person'south character simply appears in a plot. we only tin practice that past What is a plot? "That man left his family" is a story. "That human being left his family and his girl hated him for the remainder of her life" is a plot. "That man was so aroused at his wife that he left her" is another plot. "That human being was so mad at life, that he left everything he had." That's a practiced story about that person'south grapheme. And hither is where a good actor or a skillful writer starts with the investigation.

Then, what?

To empathise somebody, you lot need to dilate an existing part of you. You should not exist artificial. You need to retrieve across the stereotype, and the stereotype is precisely the sentence running over again in your mind. Y'all must piece of work on causality. Your father was not the few sentences running in your head, and you need to make a step forward and go beyond this artificial simplification. This is an explanation and not a comprehension. Maybe he was a existent bounder, but you should empathize why and to investigate about circumstances, since probably in many means you are like him. And that is one of the most powerful subtexts nosotros take in our daily life. We are like the others. This similarity gives united states of america the opportunity to investigate and aggrandize something we do have in ourselves.

Decision

Quite often we exchange mental processes with the objects toward which the processes are directed. This holds truthful when we speak about somebody or a land of affairs. We tend to identify our feelings and emotions, our thoughts with that person or situation. No affair whether we are in a wedlock, in a job context, in a friendship, in a family, etc.

This kind of confusion assumes that consciousness content is a representation of the same nature of the object in "itself." Rather than "objects" the world of life is made upwardly by meanings. These meanings are not representations only essences.

I raise my doubts near phenomenology applied to psychotherapy. This method is based on the idea of the psychotherapist who pretends to "run across" the world through patient's eyes. This is a category mistake since intentionality of consciousness is context-dependent. Therefore, the patient would exist inevitably influenced by the therapy session's context. And psychotherapist would be subjected to the homunculus fallacy, a "regressio ad infinitum". Similar, who is watching into the therapist'due south eyes?

The human existence has the chapters to "see" and to "image" the future. The past or future organize themselves co-ordinate to their greater or bottom distance from the current now (CFR Klaus Held The new Husserl, p.45).  The manners of givenness remembrance and expectation.

This stream of fourth dimension constitutes an invisible plot we are non witting of. Nevertheless, this plot is a logical and coherent story. Every time a high emotion strikes into it, we get stuck, and our behavior seems to lose the invisible path, and we behave incoherently and illogically to the reader. Village's behavior, so detached from the plot, is a good case in literature.

My hope in narrative philosophy is that we tin can locate ourselves into a wider story, exploring contexts, revealing characters. We can re-write our story and modify it, but just if we learn how to explore this crossroad of stories that make our world alive.

We need to run across the other (Thou) in the dazwischen (in that location in-between) as Martin Buber points out.

Buber makes a stardom betwixt I-It and I-Thou relation. In the meeting with the Thou, man is no longer discipline to causality and fate considering when one faces a human being being as 1'due south Thousand he is no longer an object amid objects, a particular point of space and time. Meeting and then is not in space and time but space and time in meeting. (CFR. Friedman Thou, Martin Buber the life of dialogue, Univ. Chicago Press, 1956, pp-57-58).

Luigi Amato Kunst is a philosophy consulting analyst. Specialized in Theoretical Philosophy, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Heed, is the founder of PHILOACTIVA organisation.

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Source: https://philoactiva.org/8880/

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