Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Every now and then I suspect that psychotherapy, the talking cure, was born because philosophy has deserted itself and, from a way of life, has become the profession of teaching.
Now this profession is coming to an end, yet the enrollment of students in the various philosophy faculties does not decrease, despite the disapproval of the parents («It’s not going to give you job opportunities») and the constant calls that come from everywhere to “professionalize” the school, to “specialize” it for jobs. Then, it just takes philosophy to be discussed at the Parenti Theater in Milan, or the Philosophy Festival to be held in Modena, and the halls and squares fill up. But why? What is the question that philosophy has stopped giving an answer to?
The question – it’s pointless for us to play dumb – is the question of meaning, posed from existences that are born, grow, work, produce, consume, grow old, die, without being able to find in their biographies a trace in which to find themselves and to give expression to. Each of us suffers from this, indeed perhaps this is the essence of the pain that derives from the fact that, provided by nature with a conscience, we live impulsive lives, to which we do not pay the slightest attention. So we either dull our consciousness with work and escapism, or we leave it in the pain of an unanswered question.
In the first case, no one takes care of us since we were the first to decide not to take care of ourselves. A little work, a little consumption, a little family, a little sex, a little football, a little TV and life goes by without too many questions. In the second case, when the question of meaning does not leave us and comes up again, not necessarily in the crucial moments of life, but when we go to work, when we are shopping, when we return to the family, when we make love, when we go to the stadium or we watch a little TV, then we are immediately classified under pathology.
At this point, either you go to the drugstore to buy some antidepressants, under medical advice of course, or you go to therapy. In this case, either to adapt oneself to the world we live in, since one cannot change the world, or to find oneself and what in our emotional life is causing pain.
In my opinion, the psychotherapies about adaptive behavior are “cognitivism”, which invites you to adjust your ideas and reduce your cognitive dissonances to harmonize them with the world you live in, and “behaviorism”, which invites you to adapt your own conduct, regardless of one’s feelings and ideas which, if different, are tolerated only if confined to the private sphere and cultivated as an original trait of one’s identity, provided they have no public repercussions. Thus a paradoxical situation is created in which authenticity, being oneself, knowing oneself, which the ancient Oracle of Delphi indicated as the way to a healthy soul, becomes something pathological, and so are being self-centered (self-centered), having poor adaptation skills, or an inferiority complex. This last pathology suggests that those who are not adapted are inferior, and therefore that “being oneself” and refusing to give up the specificity of one’s identity is a pathology.
And there’s some truth in all of this, meaning that both cognitivism and behaviorism, as psychologies of conformism, consider being compliant an ideal of health indeed, which, from an existential perspective, is however the characteristic trait of the illness. While the single individuals, by internalizing the models indicated by cognitivism and behaviorism, reject any self-reflecting process that is not functional to the world in which we live.
Instead, psychoanalysis is dedicated to the search for oneself, for one’s deepest self, to understand how many deceits (rationalizations) we have committed to ourselves in an attempt to settle the conflicts that arise between our inalienable desires and the requests that come to us from the outside, which we cannot escape from. Here rationality must confront the dark lands of ourselves to discover what is “defensive” about something that we do not want or cannot accept, what is “compensatory” for our weaknesses that we never wanted to consider, and finally what is truly “expressive” about us that we have not yet had the courage to express.
All psychotherapies, if well conducted, work, both for those who don’t want to know anything about themselves, but simply want to find a good adaptation in the world, and for those who want to know something about themselves independently of adaptation problems. But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. For these people, who on close inspection could be considered almost the totality of humans, there are only two ways left: religion or philosophy.
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