GÖRSEL: FELSEFEFİ

Furthermore, we also fail to recognise that the self-identical, enduring-through-time self, that we ascribe to ourselves – the I or the Ego – does not exist in the way that we take it to be. We take ourselves to be an entity that endures through time, acquires certain attributes (such as age, height, income, colour) and in the end, runs out of time and dies. On the contrary, Buddha suggested that there is no enduring self underneath these attributes. There are five bundles orskandas– consciousness, volition, sense, perception, and form – and the selfas we know it is merely the locus of these five processes dynamically changing and evolving over time. There is no unified entity that endures through it. Butif there is no unified entity underneath these processes, thenwhosefortunes and misfortunes are we worried about?If we think about it, it is the self that stands to lose or gain in this world; it is the target of fortunes and disasters that we imagine for ourselves. In the absence of such a self, our worries and their resulting suffering appear to stem from a deep confusion about who we are. We are anxious because we have not understood ourselves properly. In my book, I give the example of a person who goes to see a movie but refuses to leave the theatre once the credits roll out and instead starts crying and wailing because they want the movie to go on. Everyone can agree that this person needs to be educated on the concept of a movie, so that they stop distressing over the fact that it has ended. The same goes for the self.

Meditating on our anxiety can help with this. By meditating, I do not just mean sitting in a mindfulness session but actually thinking about what might be making me anxious. This is an unpleasant task, but it is necessary if we are to use anxiety as a source of self-knowledge. Anxiety can also remind us of the values that we wish to live by, because our failure to live by them can make us anxious, which in turn can be an opportunity to investigate the values we have chosen for ourselves. Thus,learning to live with anxiety can help us assess the kinds of lives we have lived so far, whether they meet the conditions we have imposed upon ourselves and to inquire into where those conditions come from.When I talk about living with anxiety, I am inviting you to engage in a species of self-inquiry. If I find that I am anxious in particular circumstances or settings, then there is a particular relationship I have to those circumstances and settings that is worthy of my investigation as a kind of gateway to self-knowledge.

But I found the philosophical discussions I had with my classmates to be a kind of deliverance. All the traditions and thinkers that I have mentioned so far, I discovered on my own because I was curious to find out why they were dismissed by analytic philosophers in the ways they were. I had come to philosophy via reading existentialist literature and I started reading Marxist theory in college, both of which helped me think through the feelings I had about who I was in this world.  I also found the writings of some African-American writers to be very useful. So, I would say that a complex set of sources influenced how I thought about philosophy and how philosophy could help me. And once I started teaching, I offered a wide spectrum of courses from various philosophical traditions. As I discussed and worked through this material in classes with my students, I found some of the deliverance and relief that I was looking for. Not all the philosophy I studied was equally helpful to me, but much of it was.

So, I would say that philosophical counselling is psychotherapy in the sense that psychotherapy is a kind of philosophical counselling. If you look at all the modern psychotherapeutic traditions, they start with philosophical foundations. Psychoanalysis has the theory of the tripartite mind and it understands mental disorders as resulting from inner psychic conflicts. Freud was famously influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his theory of the unconscious. Cognitive behavioural therapy is quite explicitly based upon Stoicism: there are chains of reasoning and we learn to throw spanners in the reasoning that leads to problems. These are all philosophical methods and theories that have found their way into psychotherapeutic modalities. All of these psychotherapeutic traditions (including clinical psychology) rely on models of the person. Philosophy offers its own models of the person, whether metaphysical or moral. These models help us understand who we are and why we might be facing certain problems. The reflections that philosophers have offered on the human condition are useful for thinking through how we might learn to live with ourselves. Probablythe hardest challenge of all is coming to understand who we are and accepting ourselves.In this way, philosophy has an important role to play in psychotherapy and it is a field that philosophy should never have vacated in the first place. Thus, philosophical counselling is just an attempt to return philosophy to its rightful position assoul healerswhich is what philosophy was supposed to be.