The quality of philosophical counselling is greatly dependent on the quality and way of being of the philosopher providing it. They are not a technician, a clinician applying a technology in some objective manner, rather they are a human being who has spent decades striving for wisdom. Yes, they practice in a framework that includes skills and shared knowledge--philosophical ideas, the practice of reasoning well--but their character and vision is central to the quality of their work. So I have chosen to weave together an about me page, with a description of the nature of the philosophical counselling I offer. Because philosophical counselling is uncommon, and unfamiliar to many people, therefore this page is long, because I offer quite a bit of detail. This is especially important, given that I developed a whole second career in psychotherapy, with the express intention of eventually practicing purely as a philosophical counsellor, but one who can integrate that therapeutic depth and know-how into their work.
Origins in wonder
I grew up in the Mallee, a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence there was also a sense of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the magnitude of the sky, and at the horizon which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's vision and just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. But there was more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but that it is.
Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in both ways--wonder, or pain--but this existential wonder, and the attempt to understand it, is where I became a philosopher.
The academic path
I dropped out of high-school and left home at 17. Partly that was to escape an abusive home in a tiny, dusty town. A couple of years later, after a conversion to Christianity, I entered a monastery in Italy. A few years on from that I left Christianity, but my time in Italy had exposed me to a deeper sense of European culture, and the monastery's library had included much classical literature in English. I became a voracious reader, and so, back in Melbourne and while working in a factory, I encountered ancient Greek philosophy. I found in philosophy something that I had been instinctively doing, and searching for, my whole life. I decided to study it formally, so I made my way into The University of Melbourne. Eventually I taught philosophy, both there and elsewhere.
When I say philosophy, I mean above all classical philosophy. That is, the ancient Greeks, and the later philosophers of antiquity. As Pierre Hadot points out, classical philosophy is very different to modern philosophy. Modern philosophy focuses mainly on theory--a theory of reality, or of knowledge, or of ethics, and so on. Classical philosophy included much theoretical reflection, but it is above all a transformative path, a guide to life, a set of "spirtual exercises" for transforming how we see and live. Hadot outlines this vision in a variety of papers and books, including The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision. Decades before reading Hadot, while still working in that factory, this is what I recognised in philosophy, and it is why I became a philosopher.
The philosopher at the heart of my work is Plato, with his profound vision of what reality is, and of what our lives can become and mean, when we orient ourselves to the highest values. Also, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates, and the Socratic path of finding understanding through rational exploration within conversation. Also, Plato's student Aristotle, with his very practical articulation of what wisdom, virtue, and human flourishing looks like, and how to cultivate these things. The Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have been constant guides to me, for navigating the challenges of this world while staying true to what really matters. Finally, Plotinus, who because of his synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, is considered by many the capstone of ancient philosophy, is a guiding light in my life. Both within the academy, and for decades since in my work as a therapeutic philosopher, I have been a close student of these thinkers.
Beyond the ancients, I have focused on a range of twentieth century philosophers whom I call phenomenological Platonists. A Platonist is a philosopher who looks to Plato. I call these particular Platonists phenomenological because they limit their reflection to the description of experience, as per the twentieth century method of philosophy called phenomenology, and as per the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Within such modern frameworks, these philosophers continue the work of Plato, in guiding us to discern greater meaning and value. Phenomenological Platonism leads us to open our eyes and discern the spectrum of meaning and value which has been there all along, shaping our lives, and to which we were blind, and whose recognition is nourishing and guiding. Although these phenomenological Platonists challenge the nihilistic dimensions of modernity, they work largely within the perspectives of secular modernity. They include Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, the Australian Raimond Gaita, and my post-graduate supervisor Christopher Cordner.
I explored also non-Western philosophical traditions. For example, I spent a few years focused on Buddhism, both in theory and practice, meditating for hours a day, writing an Honours thesis comparing Platonism and Buddhism, and so forth.
At the university I took the opportunity also to become more widely educated across many fields, either by enrolling in, or informally attending in their entirety, subjects in the classics (Greece and Rome), ancient languages (Greek and Latin), history, literature, creative writing, art, music, theology, comparative religion, anthropology, law, and social science.
What is philosophy?
I have described the philosophers and movements that I focused on, but what is philosophy in general? Or, rather, how do we define classical philosophy? What is it, as a set of activities?
Wisdom and Virtue
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words: philos and sophia. Philos means love, and sophia means wisdom. Hence, philosophy is the love of wisdom. Because it is the love of wisdom, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. That is what we are doing in philosophical counselling: pursuing wisdom, seeking and cultivating it.
At one level, wisdom is generated by certain activities, and philosophy is the practice of those activities. These include:
When I revive the blog on this website, I will discuss the nature of each of these.
Philosophy is also the effort of courage and self-discipline: we push ourselves, or pull ourselves back, in ways that reflect the wisdom we have gained, like a scultpor working on an admirable or beautiful statue. We call this the cultivation of the character virtues. The character virtues are good qualities at the level of desire, emotion, and action, which reflect wisdom, and which enable us to live according to wisdom. We cultivate such qualities in ourselves, through strategic, self-aware repetition, so that the courage, or self-descipline, or compassion, or whatever quality we need, becomes a habit, and so a stable trait of our character. We become naturally more courageous, and the like, we do it without well and without thinking, just as we build skills in music or sport or at our job.
Writings
I have just described wisdom as activities. Activities which become habits, virtues, stable traits of character--who and what we are. Wisdom is therefore not something written in a book, it is how we see, and what we see, as an expression of the quality of our head and heart, our way of being. At the same time, wisdom is something to be discussed, and that coversation improves our wisdom. In this spirit, philosophy does write things down. That started largely with Plato, who dramatised the philosophical conversations Socrates has with the many citizens of Athens. We now have two and a half thousand years worth of philosophical writing which can deepen our reflection and wisdom. After all, to truly read, at least in the case of philosophy, is to engage in a kind of dialogue with the author. "I'm not so sure--what about this example?" To do philosophy today, is alongside conversation, to read philosophy, to engage with the writings of some of the most insightful people who ever lived.
The power and consequences of philosophy
How well you see, and how well you think about that, shapes what you are, what you become, how your life goes, and your experience of life.
We can analyse this from multiple important angles. Here is one. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, famousy said that people are made miserable, not so much by events, as by their reactions to events. To an important degree, we react not to events, but to our perceptions of events, to the attitude through which we interpretively perceive events. Imagine two people who suffer the same bad event, and who possess similar psychological temperaments, childhood experiences, and so on. This surely means that they are affected, that they are changed, in the same way? Not necessarily, for there is another, vital factor involved. One person perceives the suffering through their ongoing attempt to be more wise and virtous. They approach the suffering through the wisdom-cultivating activities described above--the lens of reason, of the intellectual virtues, and so on--whcih is to say that they look at the event with a wise perspective, and with compassion and justice, and so on. Their suffering then becomes an occassion through which they grow in further wisdom. However, the other person reacts to the same suffering without wisdom and virtue, viewing it, say, as an outrageous violation, and as something that sets them apart from others--in short, they lack perspective and react egotistically. They may become worse through this suffering, for example resentful, obsessed, bitter. But the suffering is not really the cause of their worsened state, it is merely an occassion through which their lack of wisdom and virtue, their failure of effort in that regard, has deepened their flaws, and made them more miserable.
Philosophy gives us the tools to turn every experience of life into an occassion for becoming better--more wise, more virtuous, and so often, and ultimately, more happy. The ancient Greek philosophical word for the latter is eudaimonia, which scholars translate as happiness, goodness, a successful life, flourishing. This is what philosophy aims at: the best kind of living that we can discern and achieve.
Philosophical counselling
Back to the story, I was a philosopher "in my bones." I was doing very well academically, and it was clear that this would be my life's work. Yet, I could not see myself in an academic or scholarly career. I am not criticising academics here. I have never ceased to study philosophy, day in, day out, and that includes the work of many scholars and academics. But there is much more to it all. Philosophy as I do it, as I love it, is the cultivation of how we see, and who and how we are in the world.
This led naturally to a different focus, not only in how I studied philosophy, but in what I wanted to do as a philosopher. Rather than a life of scholariship, I wanted to do philosophy with people from all walks of life, to engage them in conversation that would help them to see clearly and deeply, and help them in the pursuit of the good life. I struggled for a while with all this, unsure of what my path forward might look like in concrete terms. After all I have the same bills as everybody else. Would I become some kind of tutor, but a tutor in the lived approach to philosophy just described? After some time I came across the idea of philosophical counselling. I had found my career.
Philosophical counselling arose in Europe and spread to America during the second half of the twentieth century. It was inspired by the virtues of psychotherapy, as well as by an awareness of the limitations of therapy's psychological focus. Today there are peak bodies, training courses, conferences, and publications dedicated to philosophical counselling. At the same time, it remains a comparatively small field.
Philosophical counselling is philosophical guidance offered by a trained philosopher. It uses also the basic framework and skills of modern counselling: a confidential, empathetic, knowledge-based, and skillful conversation designed to elicit clarity, action, and personal growth. Due to its use of counselling as a framework, about half of philosophical counsellors formally study counselling as well. To study counselling is often also to study psychotherapy.
So I began forming a vision of what philosophical counselling might look like as a career, and developing a plan for how to enact it. While continuing my study and work as a philosopher, I would (1) study counselling, (2) work as a mainstream therapist within counselling organisations, and then, in time, I would finally (3) practice purely as a philosophical counsellor in private practice. The study of counselling would provide the practical framework and skills for offering philosophical conversations, while psychotherapy would give me greater psychological know-how.
Studying and practicing the therapeutic art
What is counselling and psychotherapy? How do they differ?
I regard counselling as a framework and set of conversational and relational skills, rather than the embodiment of a particular theory. Within that framework and through those skills, in combination with the counsellor's particular field of expertise, a counsellor typically helps the client exercise practical wisdom about their concern, or leads the client to insight and growth. Counselling is a framework that can be applied to many fields of concern and expertise: from psychological well-being, to relationship success, to career guidance, to religious guidance, and more. Thus, counselling can readily be applied to philosophical reflection, the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
A psychotherapy, by contrast, is the embodiment of a particular, psychological theory of human nature, its ills, and their solutions, including an associated set of practices which embody that theory as a therapy. Because there are many such theories, there are many competing psychotherapies. The three main therapeutic fields, which account for most of the different therapies, are the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural, and the psychodynamic fields of therapy.
Before continuing, I need to make an important aside. It became evident to me through my years of mainstream therapeutic practice, that many people conflate psychotherapy with clinical psychology. That is a serious mistake. Both of these professions work with your psychology, but psychotherapy typically embodies a more humanistic, existential, relational, experiential, phenomenological understanding of human nature, its ills, and how to respond. Clinical psychology, by contrast, operates according to "the medical model," viewing your challenges as clinical disorders to be assessed, diagnosed, and treated according to clinically approved practices. I have qualifications in counselling, which includes psychotherapy; I do not have a qualification in the profession called Psychology. During my time as a mainstream therapist I worked closely alongside many psychologists, thus I am much more familiar with their concepts and practices than the average person, but I am not trained to provide any clinical services.
An analogy I often use for this difference between psychotherapy and clinical psychology, is the difference between a personal trainer and a medical doctor. A personal trainer is not a lesser version of a medical doctor, and likewise a psychotherapist is not a lesser version of a clinical psychologist, rather what they do is very different. When you need a doctor, which is to say, when you need medical diagnosis and treatment, then a personal trainer will not do. However, there is so much you can gain from seeing a personal trainer over time, that you do not receive from a doctor. What you receive is indeed very important when it comes to your health and well-being--to the avoidance of many of the things which a doctor diagnoses and treats. Likewise, psychotherapy is very different to clinical psychology: its focus and skill lies in guiding you toward your own deeper insight, personal growth, well-being, and competency with life.
Whenever I speak about psychology, for example the presence of psychological work in my philosophical counselling, I am referring to the psychotherapeutic conception of psychology. I am never referring to the clinical conception, which I choose to have nothing to do with.
Returning to the main focus, I studied counselling and psychotherapy to master’s level. I took to the art naturally; by the end of my training, my educators were offering me both academic and therapeutic employment. That led to years working as a mainstream therapist in organisations focused on bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and veteran's counselling service, and workplace counselling (EAP). I designed and provided counsellor training within those organisations, and was also repeatedly headhunted for academic teaching positions in counseling, but declined that in favour of therapeutic practice (I continued to teach philosophy at university until 2014, at which point I was too busy to continue). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level.
During those years I was a voracious learner, taking deep dives into many therapeutic approaches—Carl Rogers' person-centred therapy, various psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapies, cognitive-behavioural therapies like REBT and ACT, and the array of existential therapies. Given my background, I was especially drawn to existential therapy. In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, focused on that approach, which ran for almost a decade and alongside my work in organisations. Hence, during the 2010s, I took deep dives into each major version of existential therapy: those of Viktor Frankl, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinelli, Betty Cannon, and especially Emmy van Deurzen.
Existential Therapy is a philosophically-oriented psychotherapy. It draws heavily on phenomenological and existential philosophy, and is the therapy of meaning and purpose par excellence. Viktor Frankl, existential therapist, Holocaust surivor, and author of Man's Search for Meaning, observed that the person who can find a Why can find a How. I have seen this repeatedly: people are remarkably resourceful...if they are motivated. The problem in our somewhat nihilistic culture is the lack of a deep Why. The power of existential therapy lies in its capacity to explore the meaning implicit in a client's struggles, and so to help them cultivate value and purpose. I began developing a more Platonic form of existential therapy, and that would no doubt have been my life's work, however, if you remember, this was all a part of a larger, longer term plan as set out above.
Integrating psychotherapy into philosophical counselling
Why not remain an existential therapist? After all, that combines philosophy and psychotherapy. Plus, I was building a reputation with some of the leading names in existential therapy, and was about to make, for the first time in my life, a rather good income supervision to other therapists. Why then proceed with my long-term plan to eventually cease mainstream therapy, and dedicate myself purely to philosophical counselling?
It is because I am above all a philosopher.
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Psychotherapy is an array of ideas and practices for shaping our psychological patterns.
Philosophy is the attempt to see what is true and good, and to be transformed by that.
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Psychotherapy makes the unconscious consciousness. Or, in phenomenological terms, it makes the implicit explicit with regard to our felt sense and our psychological currents. This has many transformative benefits.
Philosophy makes the unconscious conscious, or the implicit explicit, at the level of knowing and loving, truth and goodness, meaning and value, happiness and flourishing. This transforms our lives, both outwardly, and at the deepest inner levels.
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Psychotherapy is also the modification of emotion and behaviour, to align it with psychological insight, so that our lives may be more functional and gratifying.
Philosophy is the cultivation of the virtues--emotion, desire, action--so that they embody wisdom. That makes us strong, good, and happy, and our lives meaningful, successful, flourishing.
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The world is polyphonous; there are many good activities in the world. It is a fine and wonderful thing to take a mostly psychological approach--to be a psychotherapist, and not a philosopher. About half my clients these days are psychotherapists or psychologists. Many of the psychotherapists come to me partly for mentoring, and I love that work, for I love psychotherapy and find it endlessly fascinating. However, my approach to psychotherapy, my use of it these days, is different to that of mainstream therapy. There is another way that psychotherapy can be framed and practiced, a way of integrating it into philosophy.
If you drive through the Mallee you will see massive silos, often in groups of two or four. There are multiple silos so that the grains can be seperated from each other, according to quality or type. Likewise, modern thinking divides philosophy and psychotherapy into seperate silos. Again likewise, that is done to maintain the integrity of each discipline. Yet, the division of these disciplines is only about 150 years old, and its justifications are complicated. That is, there are very good reasons for separating philosophy and psychotherapy, as well as very good reasons against it. Ancient grains were blended, and the bread was much more nutritious. Likewise, when philosophy and psychology are blended, a cross-pollination takes place that makes for much richer nourishment.
What follows are a few considerations for why psychotherapy should be integrated into philosophy, into philosophical counselling. I am not arguing that psychotherapy should cease as a separate discipline--I would disagree and resist such an argument--rather, my point is that this other way of doing things is legitimate too, and has its own significant benefits.
Classical philosophy is composed of a variety of sub-disciplines. These include metaphysics (the study of the nature of being), epistemology (the study of how we know), logic, ethics, and others, including importantly...psychology. Psychology represents a very important sub-field of classical philosophy. Psychology is one part within a greater whole. There is a two and a half thousand year old, significant and sophisticated, precedent for engaging in a practice that integrates psychological work into philosophical work: it is classical philosophy, the cultivation of wisdom and virtue and eudaimonia.
Following on from the above paragraph, the ancient and classical philosophers were, many of them, master psychologists. They recognised that psychological insight a necessary part of cultivating a good mind, good character, and happy life. We can see the sophistication of ancient psychological thinking, even in its popular stories such as Aesop's Fables. Classica philosophers were well aware of the games we play, not only with others but, blindly, with ourselves, and with our own thought and speech, in order to serve psychological purposes, instead of our conscious values and goals. Unlike today, however, these ancient philosophers did not reduce us to our psychology. Our human nature includes a psychological dimension, but we are much more than our psychology.
I said above that philosophy is the attempt to see what is true and good, and to be transformed by that, and that psychotherapy is an array of ideas and practices for shaping our psychological patterns. Psychotherapy competes with philosophy when psychotherapy is in a state of error, such as when it assumes to explain all of life, or reduces us to our psychology. It complements philosophy when its ideas are sound and keep to their genuine limits, for example our vision and lives are distorted by psychological defenses, so it is vital to discern and to work on them, but we are not reducible to them. There are higher things we need to attend to.
This is why, as (so to speak) a classical philosopher, I sought to gain the competence of an experienced psychotherapist. Psychotherapy is highly important within my philosophical counselling. Just as psychotherapy is a better form of help when it is philosophically informed, so too philosophy is a better form of help when it is psychotherapeutically informed, and that is especially the case with philosophical counselling. Just as psychological work on oneself is better done, when done with with philosophical depth, so philosophical work, growth in wisdom and virtue, is better done, when done with psychological self-awareness and know-know, and it is often done worse, or outright undermined, when we lack psychological self-awareness and know-know.
So the service I offer is philosophical. But my philosophical counselling has a richly psychotherapeutic dimension. You can see how this works--what is essential, and what is simply advantageous--if you consider that with some clients the work is a combination of philosophical and psychotherapeutic work, while with others there is almost no psychotherapeutic aspect at all. In either case, the essence of the service remains.
Psychotherapeutic work is one of the best things you can do for yourself and those around you, and I highly recommend it. At the same time, we are much more than our psychology. If you seek psychotherapeutic work, for example if you seek existential therapy, you may find a rich form of it in my work, offered with the competence of somebody who has spent decades in that field. And yet, the work is not psychotherapy at its base, but philosophy. And so you will discover here that there is much we can do--other, deeper forms of growth--which can be even more important and powerful, when it comes to your problems and goals in life, and your desire to create a good way of being and a good life. We will work on your psychological patterns as needed. But above all, we will work on the cultivation of wisdom, and as needed, the cultivation of virtue.
A Brief Postscript
There are many other things I could discuss, but I will leave them for blog posts, so that is enough for now. In 2020 I closed my office in Carlton and began working purely from home by phone and video. I live a rather frugal and hands-on life in central Victoria, in an old mud-brick cottage by a forest. I see clients part-time, and dedicate the rest of my time to my ongoing philosophical growth. Beyond my work, I am a jazz drummer, and have a passion for vintage motorcycles.
Origins in wonder
I grew up in the Mallee, a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence there was also a sense of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the magnitude of the sky, and at the horizon which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's vision and just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. But there was more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but that it is.
Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in both ways--wonder, or pain--but this existential wonder, and the attempt to understand it, is where I became a philosopher.
The academic path
I dropped out of high-school and left home at 17. Partly that was to escape an abusive home in a tiny, dusty town. A couple of years later, after a conversion to Christianity, I entered a monastery in Italy. A few years on from that I left Christianity, but my time in Italy had exposed me to a deeper sense of European culture, and the monastery's library had included much classical literature in English. I became a voracious reader, and so, back in Melbourne and while working in a factory, I encountered ancient Greek philosophy. I found in philosophy something that I had been instinctively doing, and searching for, my whole life. I decided to study it formally, so I made my way into The University of Melbourne. Eventually I taught philosophy, both there and elsewhere.
When I say philosophy, I mean above all classical philosophy. That is, the ancient Greeks, and the later philosophers of antiquity. As Pierre Hadot points out, classical philosophy is very different to modern philosophy. Modern philosophy focuses mainly on theory--a theory of reality, or of knowledge, or of ethics, and so on. Classical philosophy included much theoretical reflection, but it is above all a transformative path, a guide to life, a set of "spirtual exercises" for transforming how we see and live. Hadot outlines this vision in a variety of papers and books, including The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision. Decades before reading Hadot, while still working in that factory, this is what I recognised in philosophy, and it is why I became a philosopher.
The philosopher at the heart of my work is Plato, with his profound vision of what reality is, and of what our lives can become and mean, when we orient ourselves to the highest values. Also, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates, and the Socratic path of finding understanding through rational exploration within conversation. Also, Plato's student Aristotle, with his very practical articulation of what wisdom, virtue, and human flourishing looks like, and how to cultivate these things. The Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have been constant guides to me, for navigating the challenges of this world while staying true to what really matters. Finally, Plotinus, who because of his synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, is considered by many the capstone of ancient philosophy, is a guiding light in my life. Both within the academy, and for decades since in my work as a therapeutic philosopher, I have been a close student of these thinkers.
Beyond the ancients, I have focused on a range of twentieth century philosophers whom I call phenomenological Platonists. A Platonist is a philosopher who looks to Plato. I call these particular Platonists phenomenological because they limit their reflection to the description of experience, as per the twentieth century method of philosophy called phenomenology, and as per the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Within such modern frameworks, these philosophers continue the work of Plato, in guiding us to discern greater meaning and value. Phenomenological Platonism leads us to open our eyes and discern the spectrum of meaning and value which has been there all along, shaping our lives, and to which we were blind, and whose recognition is nourishing and guiding. Although these phenomenological Platonists challenge the nihilistic dimensions of modernity, they work largely within the perspectives of secular modernity. They include Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, the Australian Raimond Gaita, and my post-graduate supervisor Christopher Cordner.
I explored also non-Western philosophical traditions. For example, I spent a few years focused on Buddhism, both in theory and practice, meditating for hours a day, writing an Honours thesis comparing Platonism and Buddhism, and so forth.
At the university I took the opportunity also to become more widely educated across many fields, either by enrolling in, or informally attending in their entirety, subjects in the classics (Greece and Rome), ancient languages (Greek and Latin), history, literature, creative writing, art, music, theology, comparative religion, anthropology, law, and social science.
What is philosophy?
I have described the philosophers and movements that I focused on, but what is philosophy in general? Or, rather, how do we define classical philosophy? What is it, as a set of activities?
Wisdom and Virtue
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words: philos and sophia. Philos means love, and sophia means wisdom. Hence, philosophy is the love of wisdom. Because it is the love of wisdom, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. That is what we are doing in philosophical counselling: pursuing wisdom, seeking and cultivating it.
At one level, wisdom is generated by certain activities, and philosophy is the practice of those activities. These include:
- intuitive contemplation
- discursive reason
- the exercise of the intellectual virtues
- the intentional exercise of imagination
When I revive the blog on this website, I will discuss the nature of each of these.
Philosophy is also the effort of courage and self-discipline: we push ourselves, or pull ourselves back, in ways that reflect the wisdom we have gained, like a scultpor working on an admirable or beautiful statue. We call this the cultivation of the character virtues. The character virtues are good qualities at the level of desire, emotion, and action, which reflect wisdom, and which enable us to live according to wisdom. We cultivate such qualities in ourselves, through strategic, self-aware repetition, so that the courage, or self-descipline, or compassion, or whatever quality we need, becomes a habit, and so a stable trait of our character. We become naturally more courageous, and the like, we do it without well and without thinking, just as we build skills in music or sport or at our job.
Writings
I have just described wisdom as activities. Activities which become habits, virtues, stable traits of character--who and what we are. Wisdom is therefore not something written in a book, it is how we see, and what we see, as an expression of the quality of our head and heart, our way of being. At the same time, wisdom is something to be discussed, and that coversation improves our wisdom. In this spirit, philosophy does write things down. That started largely with Plato, who dramatised the philosophical conversations Socrates has with the many citizens of Athens. We now have two and a half thousand years worth of philosophical writing which can deepen our reflection and wisdom. After all, to truly read, at least in the case of philosophy, is to engage in a kind of dialogue with the author. "I'm not so sure--what about this example?" To do philosophy today, is alongside conversation, to read philosophy, to engage with the writings of some of the most insightful people who ever lived.
The power and consequences of philosophy
How well you see, and how well you think about that, shapes what you are, what you become, how your life goes, and your experience of life.
We can analyse this from multiple important angles. Here is one. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, famousy said that people are made miserable, not so much by events, as by their reactions to events. To an important degree, we react not to events, but to our perceptions of events, to the attitude through which we interpretively perceive events. Imagine two people who suffer the same bad event, and who possess similar psychological temperaments, childhood experiences, and so on. This surely means that they are affected, that they are changed, in the same way? Not necessarily, for there is another, vital factor involved. One person perceives the suffering through their ongoing attempt to be more wise and virtous. They approach the suffering through the wisdom-cultivating activities described above--the lens of reason, of the intellectual virtues, and so on--whcih is to say that they look at the event with a wise perspective, and with compassion and justice, and so on. Their suffering then becomes an occassion through which they grow in further wisdom. However, the other person reacts to the same suffering without wisdom and virtue, viewing it, say, as an outrageous violation, and as something that sets them apart from others--in short, they lack perspective and react egotistically. They may become worse through this suffering, for example resentful, obsessed, bitter. But the suffering is not really the cause of their worsened state, it is merely an occassion through which their lack of wisdom and virtue, their failure of effort in that regard, has deepened their flaws, and made them more miserable.
Philosophy gives us the tools to turn every experience of life into an occassion for becoming better--more wise, more virtuous, and so often, and ultimately, more happy. The ancient Greek philosophical word for the latter is eudaimonia, which scholars translate as happiness, goodness, a successful life, flourishing. This is what philosophy aims at: the best kind of living that we can discern and achieve.
Philosophical counselling
Back to the story, I was a philosopher "in my bones." I was doing very well academically, and it was clear that this would be my life's work. Yet, I could not see myself in an academic or scholarly career. I am not criticising academics here. I have never ceased to study philosophy, day in, day out, and that includes the work of many scholars and academics. But there is much more to it all. Philosophy as I do it, as I love it, is the cultivation of how we see, and who and how we are in the world.
This led naturally to a different focus, not only in how I studied philosophy, but in what I wanted to do as a philosopher. Rather than a life of scholariship, I wanted to do philosophy with people from all walks of life, to engage them in conversation that would help them to see clearly and deeply, and help them in the pursuit of the good life. I struggled for a while with all this, unsure of what my path forward might look like in concrete terms. After all I have the same bills as everybody else. Would I become some kind of tutor, but a tutor in the lived approach to philosophy just described? After some time I came across the idea of philosophical counselling. I had found my career.
Philosophical counselling arose in Europe and spread to America during the second half of the twentieth century. It was inspired by the virtues of psychotherapy, as well as by an awareness of the limitations of therapy's psychological focus. Today there are peak bodies, training courses, conferences, and publications dedicated to philosophical counselling. At the same time, it remains a comparatively small field.
Philosophical counselling is philosophical guidance offered by a trained philosopher. It uses also the basic framework and skills of modern counselling: a confidential, empathetic, knowledge-based, and skillful conversation designed to elicit clarity, action, and personal growth. Due to its use of counselling as a framework, about half of philosophical counsellors formally study counselling as well. To study counselling is often also to study psychotherapy.
So I began forming a vision of what philosophical counselling might look like as a career, and developing a plan for how to enact it. While continuing my study and work as a philosopher, I would (1) study counselling, (2) work as a mainstream therapist within counselling organisations, and then, in time, I would finally (3) practice purely as a philosophical counsellor in private practice. The study of counselling would provide the practical framework and skills for offering philosophical conversations, while psychotherapy would give me greater psychological know-how.
Studying and practicing the therapeutic art
What is counselling and psychotherapy? How do they differ?
I regard counselling as a framework and set of conversational and relational skills, rather than the embodiment of a particular theory. Within that framework and through those skills, in combination with the counsellor's particular field of expertise, a counsellor typically helps the client exercise practical wisdom about their concern, or leads the client to insight and growth. Counselling is a framework that can be applied to many fields of concern and expertise: from psychological well-being, to relationship success, to career guidance, to religious guidance, and more. Thus, counselling can readily be applied to philosophical reflection, the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
A psychotherapy, by contrast, is the embodiment of a particular, psychological theory of human nature, its ills, and their solutions, including an associated set of practices which embody that theory as a therapy. Because there are many such theories, there are many competing psychotherapies. The three main therapeutic fields, which account for most of the different therapies, are the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural, and the psychodynamic fields of therapy.
Before continuing, I need to make an important aside. It became evident to me through my years of mainstream therapeutic practice, that many people conflate psychotherapy with clinical psychology. That is a serious mistake. Both of these professions work with your psychology, but psychotherapy typically embodies a more humanistic, existential, relational, experiential, phenomenological understanding of human nature, its ills, and how to respond. Clinical psychology, by contrast, operates according to "the medical model," viewing your challenges as clinical disorders to be assessed, diagnosed, and treated according to clinically approved practices. I have qualifications in counselling, which includes psychotherapy; I do not have a qualification in the profession called Psychology. During my time as a mainstream therapist I worked closely alongside many psychologists, thus I am much more familiar with their concepts and practices than the average person, but I am not trained to provide any clinical services.
An analogy I often use for this difference between psychotherapy and clinical psychology, is the difference between a personal trainer and a medical doctor. A personal trainer is not a lesser version of a medical doctor, and likewise a psychotherapist is not a lesser version of a clinical psychologist, rather what they do is very different. When you need a doctor, which is to say, when you need medical diagnosis and treatment, then a personal trainer will not do. However, there is so much you can gain from seeing a personal trainer over time, that you do not receive from a doctor. What you receive is indeed very important when it comes to your health and well-being--to the avoidance of many of the things which a doctor diagnoses and treats. Likewise, psychotherapy is very different to clinical psychology: its focus and skill lies in guiding you toward your own deeper insight, personal growth, well-being, and competency with life.
Whenever I speak about psychology, for example the presence of psychological work in my philosophical counselling, I am referring to the psychotherapeutic conception of psychology. I am never referring to the clinical conception, which I choose to have nothing to do with.
Returning to the main focus, I studied counselling and psychotherapy to master’s level. I took to the art naturally; by the end of my training, my educators were offering me both academic and therapeutic employment. That led to years working as a mainstream therapist in organisations focused on bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and veteran's counselling service, and workplace counselling (EAP). I designed and provided counsellor training within those organisations, and was also repeatedly headhunted for academic teaching positions in counseling, but declined that in favour of therapeutic practice (I continued to teach philosophy at university until 2014, at which point I was too busy to continue). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level.
During those years I was a voracious learner, taking deep dives into many therapeutic approaches—Carl Rogers' person-centred therapy, various psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapies, cognitive-behavioural therapies like REBT and ACT, and the array of existential therapies. Given my background, I was especially drawn to existential therapy. In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, focused on that approach, which ran for almost a decade and alongside my work in organisations. Hence, during the 2010s, I took deep dives into each major version of existential therapy: those of Viktor Frankl, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinelli, Betty Cannon, and especially Emmy van Deurzen.
Existential Therapy is a philosophically-oriented psychotherapy. It draws heavily on phenomenological and existential philosophy, and is the therapy of meaning and purpose par excellence. Viktor Frankl, existential therapist, Holocaust surivor, and author of Man's Search for Meaning, observed that the person who can find a Why can find a How. I have seen this repeatedly: people are remarkably resourceful...if they are motivated. The problem in our somewhat nihilistic culture is the lack of a deep Why. The power of existential therapy lies in its capacity to explore the meaning implicit in a client's struggles, and so to help them cultivate value and purpose. I began developing a more Platonic form of existential therapy, and that would no doubt have been my life's work, however, if you remember, this was all a part of a larger, longer term plan as set out above.
Integrating psychotherapy into philosophical counselling
Why not remain an existential therapist? After all, that combines philosophy and psychotherapy. Plus, I was building a reputation with some of the leading names in existential therapy, and was about to make, for the first time in my life, a rather good income supervision to other therapists. Why then proceed with my long-term plan to eventually cease mainstream therapy, and dedicate myself purely to philosophical counselling?
It is because I am above all a philosopher.
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Psychotherapy is an array of ideas and practices for shaping our psychological patterns.
Philosophy is the attempt to see what is true and good, and to be transformed by that.
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Psychotherapy makes the unconscious consciousness. Or, in phenomenological terms, it makes the implicit explicit with regard to our felt sense and our psychological currents. This has many transformative benefits.
Philosophy makes the unconscious conscious, or the implicit explicit, at the level of knowing and loving, truth and goodness, meaning and value, happiness and flourishing. This transforms our lives, both outwardly, and at the deepest inner levels.
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Psychotherapy is also the modification of emotion and behaviour, to align it with psychological insight, so that our lives may be more functional and gratifying.
Philosophy is the cultivation of the virtues--emotion, desire, action--so that they embody wisdom. That makes us strong, good, and happy, and our lives meaningful, successful, flourishing.
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The world is polyphonous; there are many good activities in the world. It is a fine and wonderful thing to take a mostly psychological approach--to be a psychotherapist, and not a philosopher. About half my clients these days are psychotherapists or psychologists. Many of the psychotherapists come to me partly for mentoring, and I love that work, for I love psychotherapy and find it endlessly fascinating. However, my approach to psychotherapy, my use of it these days, is different to that of mainstream therapy. There is another way that psychotherapy can be framed and practiced, a way of integrating it into philosophy.
If you drive through the Mallee you will see massive silos, often in groups of two or four. There are multiple silos so that the grains can be seperated from each other, according to quality or type. Likewise, modern thinking divides philosophy and psychotherapy into seperate silos. Again likewise, that is done to maintain the integrity of each discipline. Yet, the division of these disciplines is only about 150 years old, and its justifications are complicated. That is, there are very good reasons for separating philosophy and psychotherapy, as well as very good reasons against it. Ancient grains were blended, and the bread was much more nutritious. Likewise, when philosophy and psychology are blended, a cross-pollination takes place that makes for much richer nourishment.
What follows are a few considerations for why psychotherapy should be integrated into philosophy, into philosophical counselling. I am not arguing that psychotherapy should cease as a separate discipline--I would disagree and resist such an argument--rather, my point is that this other way of doing things is legitimate too, and has its own significant benefits.
Classical philosophy is composed of a variety of sub-disciplines. These include metaphysics (the study of the nature of being), epistemology (the study of how we know), logic, ethics, and others, including importantly...psychology. Psychology represents a very important sub-field of classical philosophy. Psychology is one part within a greater whole. There is a two and a half thousand year old, significant and sophisticated, precedent for engaging in a practice that integrates psychological work into philosophical work: it is classical philosophy, the cultivation of wisdom and virtue and eudaimonia.
Following on from the above paragraph, the ancient and classical philosophers were, many of them, master psychologists. They recognised that psychological insight a necessary part of cultivating a good mind, good character, and happy life. We can see the sophistication of ancient psychological thinking, even in its popular stories such as Aesop's Fables. Classica philosophers were well aware of the games we play, not only with others but, blindly, with ourselves, and with our own thought and speech, in order to serve psychological purposes, instead of our conscious values and goals. Unlike today, however, these ancient philosophers did not reduce us to our psychology. Our human nature includes a psychological dimension, but we are much more than our psychology.
I said above that philosophy is the attempt to see what is true and good, and to be transformed by that, and that psychotherapy is an array of ideas and practices for shaping our psychological patterns. Psychotherapy competes with philosophy when psychotherapy is in a state of error, such as when it assumes to explain all of life, or reduces us to our psychology. It complements philosophy when its ideas are sound and keep to their genuine limits, for example our vision and lives are distorted by psychological defenses, so it is vital to discern and to work on them, but we are not reducible to them. There are higher things we need to attend to.
This is why, as (so to speak) a classical philosopher, I sought to gain the competence of an experienced psychotherapist. Psychotherapy is highly important within my philosophical counselling. Just as psychotherapy is a better form of help when it is philosophically informed, so too philosophy is a better form of help when it is psychotherapeutically informed, and that is especially the case with philosophical counselling. Just as psychological work on oneself is better done, when done with with philosophical depth, so philosophical work, growth in wisdom and virtue, is better done, when done with psychological self-awareness and know-know, and it is often done worse, or outright undermined, when we lack psychological self-awareness and know-know.
So the service I offer is philosophical. But my philosophical counselling has a richly psychotherapeutic dimension. You can see how this works--what is essential, and what is simply advantageous--if you consider that with some clients the work is a combination of philosophical and psychotherapeutic work, while with others there is almost no psychotherapeutic aspect at all. In either case, the essence of the service remains.
Psychotherapeutic work is one of the best things you can do for yourself and those around you, and I highly recommend it. At the same time, we are much more than our psychology. If you seek psychotherapeutic work, for example if you seek existential therapy, you may find a rich form of it in my work, offered with the competence of somebody who has spent decades in that field. And yet, the work is not psychotherapy at its base, but philosophy. And so you will discover here that there is much we can do--other, deeper forms of growth--which can be even more important and powerful, when it comes to your problems and goals in life, and your desire to create a good way of being and a good life. We will work on your psychological patterns as needed. But above all, we will work on the cultivation of wisdom, and as needed, the cultivation of virtue.
A Brief Postscript
There are many other things I could discuss, but I will leave them for blog posts, so that is enough for now. In 2020 I closed my office in Carlton and began working purely from home by phone and video. I live a rather frugal and hands-on life in central Victoria, in an old mud-brick cottage by a forest. I see clients part-time, and dedicate the rest of my time to my ongoing philosophical growth. Beyond my work, I am a jazz drummer, and have a passion for vintage motorcycles.
