Essays on Philosophy, Praxis and Culture: An Eclectic, Provocative and Prescient Collection

PREFACE

The 16 essays selected for this collection are representative waypoints in three simultaneous journeys, still ongoing, that unfolded during the quarter century from 1994 to 2019. One journey is that of a pioneer of the burgeoning global movement of philosophical practice. Another journey is that of a free-thinking philosophy professor’s emigration from Canada to the USA, resistance to increasingly rancorous gender wars and culture wars, and humanistic response to their toxic ethos of political correctness and dehumanizing ideology of identity politics. The third journey is that of an internationally bestselling author of popular books on philosophy for everyday life, who as a result became a regular contributor to conferences of global leadership communities. These three simultaneous journeys give rise to the main threads from which the tapestry of this collection is woven.

Several reviewers of the anthology evinced an interest in knowing more of the autobiographical intellectual journey of this author, so as to contextualize the contents in some kind of coherent pattern, or to ascertain the ‘back-stories’ of their provenance. While this brief preface may only whet the appetite of such amicable curiosity in the short run, it might also engender deeper satisfaction in the longer run, just in case a future biographer takes up the fuller challenge. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the New Yorker magazine was toying with an intellectual biography, which in hindsight would have been premature. It is hoped that such a biography will remain premature for some time to come, at least until critical future missions will have been accomplished. Even so, a number of ‘in-depth’ interviews on philosophical practice, as well as more wide-ranging matters, have been published over the years.¹

Since the essays herein are presented in more-or-less chronological order of their original publication, a four-part taxonomy readily suggests itself: case studies, global essays, maieutic essays, and humanistic essays.

Group One, 1995–2000: Case Studies

This first group of four essays is concerned with case studies. Essay #1 recounts my first two philosophical counseling clients at the University of British Columbia (UBC). It marks my entry into and initial conception of the field. Essay #2 describes a most unusual client in my formative practice at The City College of New York. She was referred to me by her cardiologist and proved to be one of the most self-defeating people I have ever met. Essay #3 offers a hypothetical extrapolation of Mill’s Harm Principle into a then newly emergent cyberspace, and predicts—in year 2000—the lowering of cyber-curtains on the world wide web. Essay #4 actively prosecutes a case, indicting reverse-sexist hiring policies adopted by the Canadian Philosophical Association. The essay was censored by the Canadian university press that published the proceedings of the conference at which the paper was delivered. Such censorship exposes the flagrant hypocrisy of Orwellian slogans like diversity and inclusion, which invariably mean the opposite of what they say; in this case, uniformity of thought and exclusion of non-conformist views.

Highlights of this period included co-organizing, with Ran Lahav, the First International Conference on Philosophical Practice (ICPP), at UBC in 1994. This turned out to be a watershed event for the movement, setting in motion a train of events that have led, at this writing, to 16 ICPPs worldwide.² In 1997, I organized the third ICPP at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, which resulted in a blizzard of US and international media coverage of philosophical counseling. This in turn led to the 1999 publication of Plato Not Prozac by HarperCollins, and the ensuing US book and media tour.³ That same ground-breaking year of 1999 saw the co-founding of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), by Vaughana Feary, Paul Sharkey, Thomas Magnell, Keith Burkum, and yours truly.⁴

This period was capped by City College’s approval and CUNY’s ratification of my application for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2000.⁵ This coincided with the appearance of Plato Not Prozac in the Economist magazine’s What the World is Reading column, and by a subsequent invitation to Davos in January 2001. During this period I also, if not primarily, published technical articles in philosophy of science and decision theory in leading journals in the field.⁶ The cream of that crop resolved the notorious Bertrand’s Paradox, unsolved since 1899.⁷ Under the nom-de-plume Lou Tafler, I also self-published a satire on radical feminism and political correctness, called Fair New World.⁸ Critics compared this 1994 novel with works by Swift, Orwell, Huxley, and Vonnegut, while literary agents either hated it or were afraid to represent it lest they commit professional suicide in the publishing industry’s early onset ethos of stage-one cancel culture.

Group Two, 2001–2008: Global Essays

This second group represents the fruits of eye-widening world travels, mind-opening interactions with political, business, religious, scientific and cultural leaders, soul-searching embroilments in global affairs, and associated invited lectures. This entire period was colored and contoured by 9/11 and its aftermath.

Six weeks after 9/11, I launched the textbook Philosophical Practice at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, and afterwards celebrated my 50th birthday.⁹ Then, in near-deserted skies, I flew to Singapore to deliver a keynote address at the 2001 Singapore Learning Festival and to conduct workshops for a government ministry. I returned to New York in November 2001, for private meetings with the World Economic Forum’s east-coast brain trust, still reeling from effects of 9/11 on the global economy and world order. The WEF was also planning 2002’s Davos in New York to demonstrate solidarity with New York City and America.

In November 2001, I delivered the invited annual Korzybski Lecture—Essay #5 herein—to the Institute for General Semantics, at the Yale Club. In Korzybski we find invaluable insights that relate to philosophical practice and illuminate the human propensity for violent conflict. Essay #6 is a Davosian response, à la Thomas Mann, to stridently uninformed critiques of philosophical counseling by American psychiatrists. The essay was invited by European psychiatrist Johannes Thome and philosopher Thomas Schramme for their 2004 book on Philosophy and Psychiatry. Essay #7 is a chapter for a book in a popular series for a non-academic readership, in this case More Matrix and Philosophy, invited by William Irwin. Essay #8 was based on an invited lecture at a Cornell University conference organized by Per Pinstrup-Andersen and attended by an international group of Davos-class economists trying to solve the vexed problem of global hunger. They wanted a philosopher to comment on normative aspects of the problem.

During this period, I typically flew 100,000 miles per year world-wide. Some of these missions entailed philosophizing with princes and potentates seeking to grapple with intractable world problems, with billionaires trying to navigate and influence attempted solutions to these problems, or with young global leaders who would inherit these problems in the emerging future. Other missions entailed meeting with fellow faculty recruited by host organizations to dialogue with the above parties, or to facilitate dialogue among them, or to moderate events for them. Yet other missions entailed national and international book tours in many countries, with mainstream media exposure and public events. And seemingly every mission came bundled with talks in universities and bookstores, leading to dialogue with students and members of the public from all walks of life.

At times it felt as though I had a finger on the pulse of the world, and so was able to write The Middle Way, a handbook of virtue ethics for the global village.¹⁰ This magic carpet ride of a solo world tour was gladdened by gracious receptions and newfound friends, and enriched by life lessons and warm encouragements from a veritable galaxy of luminous Great Souls, including Laura Huxley, Daisaku Ikeda, and Elie Wiesel.

In the USA, too, I met with invitations to develop aspects of philosophical practice above and beyond one-on-one counseling. These included conducting annual Dilemma Training workshops for the University of Arizona’s Southwest Leadership and Governance Program, organized by Tanis Salant, whose participants included state legislators, county managers, and senior law enforcement officers. Then-State Senator Gabrielle Giffords was a most memorable participant. At Davos in New York (January 2002), then-US Senator and later presidential candidate John McCain commended my chairing of a panel of international experts on the challenge of containing Islamic terrorism. Another former US presidential candidate, celebrated consumer advocate Ralph Nader, phoned me at City College one day, asking if I could donate a thousand copies of Plato Not Prozac to his organization that promotes civic virtues. (Yes, I could, and did so gladly!)

But my relations with the American publishing industry became rockier. The sequel to Plato Not Prozac, called Therapy for the Sane, was renamed, almost censored, and nearly killed by a then newly installed chief editor suffering from stage two political correctness.¹¹ When against all odds it was published in 2003, the chief editor poisoned my well by declaring me a difficult author—in New York editorial circles, a euphemism for ‘Blacklist him!’ By this time Plato Not Prozac had been translated into more than two dozen languages, and had become a best-seller in dozens of countries. So why would anyone in the New York publishing world want to muzzle its author? Perhaps because political correctness poisons minds and addles wits.Even so, The New York Times Magazine decided to feature me—subject to its usual character assassination—in 2004.¹² And just as soon as that happens, Hollywood starts calling. Anyone prominent enough to be trashed by The New York Times attracts flirtations and even courtships from Tinseltown. In collaboration with Toper Taylor, then-CEO of Cookie Jar Entertainment, producer of globally syndicated animated TV shows for kids, I created and trademarked three philosophical cartoon programs, for age groups 4 to 6, 7 to 12, and 13 to adult. Toper loved them, but major US television network executives proved resistant to the idea of broadcasting philosophy to anybody, least of all to children. I also and avidly pitched assorted treatments and screenplays all over Hollywood. Brian Grazer could not quite visualize turning Plato’s Cave into a movie, but he thanked me in his book all the same.¹³ In the process, I appeared in three documentary films and acquired a taste for movie-making myself.¹⁴

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in my role as Associate Professor of Philosophy at City College, I became the plaintiff in a Federal civil lawsuit, whose defendants were the then-Provost of City College, then-Dean of Faculty Relations at City College, then-Dean of Humanities at City College, and a then-Professor of Psychology at City College. You may well wonder what provoked this brouhaha.

Among other things, the defendants had issued ill-advised edicts shutting down my Federally approved research protocol in philosophical counseling, and terminating a funded pilot project to offer philosophical counseling to students at City College’s newly rejuvenated Wellness Center. The project was invited and co-funded by the then-Vice President for Student Affairs, and co-funded by the Diana Foundation. But clinical psychologists had gaslighted CCNY’s and CUNY’s senior administrations, alleging that APPA-Certified philosophical counselors were offering unvalidated treatment, and warning them of dire legal consequences and bad press just in case, hypothetically, a student jumped off Brooklyn Bridge with a copy of Plato Not Prozac in hand, after talking to a philosophical counselor. Not even Kafka could make this up.

The judge managed to engender dire legal consequences and bad press all by himself, without any help from hypothetical suicides. He initially obstructed justice by summarily dismissing the case and was then roasted by the Appellate court. He next obstructed justice by refusing to allow us to subpoena CUNY’s then-Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs, whom the then-CCNY Provost had wasted no time selling out, under oath, in his deposition.

Since City College is an exotic branch of New York State’s civil service, the defendants were represented by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office. Spitzer soon thereafter became Governor of New York but resigned in disgrace when a scandal erupted over his transporting of prostitutes from New York to Washington D.C.—commendable loyalty to his home state perhaps, but a felony offense nonetheless.¹⁵

The blue-blooded, silver-spooned Spitzer was not criminally prosecuted, but rather sentenced to political rehabilitation: a couple of years of community service teaching Law and Public Policy at none other than The City College, where he became my junior colleague. Eliot’s father, Bernard, an eastern European Jewish immigrant, earned an engineering degree at City College in 1943, at age 18, en route to becoming a New York City real estate developer and philanthropist. He donated the multi-million-dollar Anne and Bernard Spitzer School of Architecture building to City College, where his disgraced son now earned $98.43 per hour teaching as an Adjunct Professor.¹⁶

In 2004, a typically busy year of travels during this period, I rendered services and/or gave media interviews and/or did book-events in Amsterdam, Aspen, Bad Ragaz, Be’er Sheva, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Davos, Delhi, Geneva, Genoa, Heliopolis, Ithaca, Jerusalem, London, Louisville, Los Angeles, Montevideo, New Orleans, New York, Punta del Este, Rhinebeck, Santiago de Chile, Seville, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Toronto, and Tucson.

My philosophical practice became global—except where prohibited by CUNY, which soon enough relented and sought softer targets to carpet bomb with ex cathedra edicts. City College and I also kissed and made up, as three of the defendants passed on to their reward—sleeping with the fishes—while the fourth was disempowered and returned to the general population. A successor conferred on me the Provost’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2019, marking my 25th year of service at this always storied and frequently turbulent institution. And to this very day, no student has yet jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge—nor any other bridge, with or without Plato Not Prozac in hand—after speaking with a philosophical counselor about life issues.

Group Three, 2009–2015: Maieutic Essays

This group of essays is characterized by a deepening (as contrasted with the previous broadening) of praxis. These essays drill down to various bedrocks. Maieutics denotes a form of Socratic inquiry that aspires to shine a light on ideas lurking at murkier depths of mind, luring them to the surface of consciousness.

Essay #9 is a collage—or possibly a collision—of clinical psychology, existential psychiatry, and Jungian synchronicity, whose climax recounts a dialogue with Irvin Yalom in San Francisco that leads to a salient distinction between psychotherapy and philosophical counseling. This is one of the most popular essays in the collection.

Essay #10 was invited by Young E. Rhee, and first delivered as a keynote address in Korea, at a 2012 conference that signaled the full-blown emergence of philosophical practice in east Asia. The essay identifies a host of culturally-induced illnesses besetting Western and Westernized nations, proposes Humanities Therapies as their remedy, and postulates that philosophical practice could become a fourth historical phase of humanism (following the Renaissance, enlightenment, and secular phases). This insight was also informed by the humanistic Buddhist philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda, with whom I was honored to publish a book-length dialogue that same year.¹⁷ This is one of the most important essays in the collection.

Essay #11 brought to light, for the first time in print (2015), a summary of my long-standing excavation of the biological roots of human conflict. The fuller treatment would later be published in a 2019 magnum opus—On Human Conflict: The Philosophical Foundations of War and Peace.¹⁸ The publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, was made so uncomfortable by my views (their words) that it removed the oeuvre from their philosophy catalogue (Lexington Books), banished it from their book exhibits at annual philosophy conferences, and exiled it to their leper colony imprimatur (Hamilton Books), where few if any philosophers would ever learn of its existence. I informed the editors that it was not my job, as a philosopher, to make anyone comfortable; and that if this were their main goal, they should seek admission to a palliative care unit. But that well-intended suggestion somehow backfired, making them even more uncomfortable. My diagnosis? Stage three political correctness. While these gatekeepers of mainstream academic publishing were busy shadow-banning a book that clearly threatened to wake them from wokeness, that very same book made the top-10 list of readings to commemorate India’s 75th year of Independence!¹⁹

Essay #12 was invited by Daniele Schilirò, another philosophically inclined economist, who hails from Sicily. We meet and dialogue regularly at Horasis conferences. Horasis is the global visions community founded by Dr. Frank-Jürgen Richter, a former Director of the World Economic Forum, and long-time friend.²⁰ Sustainability having been a buzzword in global circles for decades, I once remarked jocularly to Daniele that the only things that appeared to be sustainable were conferences on sustainable development. The moral? Yesterday’s jest becomes tomorrow’s disquisition.

Group Four, 2016–2019: Humanistic Essays

While humanism can have specific meanings in terms of given historical periods or particular organizations, it is also a portmanteau term for any outlook or ethics that focus squarely on human agency as the decisive factor in human affairs, whether in terms of individual flourishing, social harmony or political stability. Thus, and from the outset, humanists are not beset by the intractable theodicy problem—why does an ostensibly omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God permit evil to exist? This problem afflicts every organized religion hitherto minted in the minds of men or foisted upon them by their Gods themselves.

Humanists tend to assert that evil arises and proceeds from human ignorance, or folly, or hubris, or depravity, or ferality, or poisoned minds, or choices made heedless of cause and effect. Humanist ethics tends to instill secular virtues and adhere to man-made precepts that act as behavioral brakes on evil, encouraging people to lead ethically wholesome lives, and therefore examined lives of quality, even if not especially when under the influence of Hobbesian egos or Draconian Ids.

So, humanism broadly construed, as an umbrella term, encompasses many forms, not only of classical virtue ethics but also of robust strands of existentialism, behaviorism, Stoicism, Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Then again, ideologies ranging from Marxism to Scientology might also lay claim to being humanistic. Let us leave that debate for another day.

I was introduced to modern secular humanism during my teenage years, in the 1960s, via the Montreal Humanist Fellowship.²¹ The MHF was the incubator of the Canadian Humanist Association, led by then-controversial if not criminal abortionist under Canadian law at that time, Dr. Henry Morgentaler. The Montreal Fellowship entrusted me, as a teenager, to lead its youth group in secular ‘Sunday School’ ethics discussions. Now fast-forward 50 years: while Essay #10 herein traces various phases of humanism under the mantle of Maieutics, and in the context of the history of ideas, this fourth group of essays expresses aspects of my more personal humanistic outlook, from serious to humorous.

Essay #13 reminds readers that Ayn Rand was a precursor, if not inadvertent co-inventor, of philosophical counseling. While some doctrinaire Randians may bristle at my rough-and-ready characterization of her Objectivist philosophy as humanistic, her Objectivism admits of undeniable congruency with generic tenets of humanism, such as methodological individualism, meritocracy, individual responsibility, enlightened self-interest, honoring one’s word, abiding by one’s principles, fulfilling one’s contracts. This is, moreover, consonant with central facets of philosophical practice. At any rate, I have been an unabashed admirer of Atlas Shrugged since first reading it as a teenager. Essay #13 was originally delivered in 1997, most fittingly in Manhattan (Rand’s adoptive hometown), at the Third International Conference on Philosophical Practice, but for various reasons remained unpublished until 2016. Even so, by that time Rand’s apocalyptic predictions concerning the collapse of formerly stable capitalist socio-economic orders under the ministrations of incompetent Marxist ideologues were ringing truer than ever. By this writing (2022), her warning bells are tolling with deafening veracity to a nation increasingly bereft of ears to hear them.

Essay #14 was invited by Lydia Amir and inspired by the centenary of the founding of Zurich’s Carbaret Voltaire (1916–2016), the seat and wellspring of Dadaism. Dada’s trenchant critiques of the brutal consequences of blind conformity to somnambulating politics, epitomized by the slaughterhouse of World War I, influenced iconic Western counter-culture movements ranging from jazz to the Marx brothers, from the Beat generation to the Woodstock generation. To a recovering Hippie like yours truly, it was an inspiring exercise to relate Dadaism to philosophical practice and vice-versa, in the process producing works of neo-Dadaist art that unmask political facade and butcher sacred cows with satire. There is nothing more human than laughter, and nothing more dehumanizing than the suppression of humor by political correctness and its metastasization into now-inoperable stage four cancel culture. In the ripeness of time, once it cancels everything else, it will end up canceling itself.

Essay #15 was delivered as the closing keynote address at the 15th International Conference on Philosophical Practice, organized by David Sumiacher in Mexico City in 2018. This essay represents a more mature version of the Bodhisattva-like role of philosophical counselors that emerged from dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda in 2003 and 2007, and from our 2012 book The Inner Philosopher. This role is also consonant with Plato’s conception of the philosopher as a midwife to the birth of wisdom (among other virtues) via dialogue with citizens—or with clients, as the case may be. Awakening a client’s inner philosopher via dialogue is a far cry from diagnosing their putative mental illness via the DSM. A such, Essay #15 affords a definitive and much-needed distinction between philosophical counseling and psychotherapy.

Essay #16 was originally invited as a keynote lecture at the International Conference on Humanities Therapy in Technosociety, at Nanjing University, China, August 2019, organized by Tianqun Pan. The conference theme was Bridging the Gap between Science and Humanity. The essay summarizes eight ways in which Humanities Therapy can help remedy cognitive and social deficits engendered by the near-universal imposition of digital interfaces and technologies between formerly human-to-human interactions. Notwithstanding undeniable benefits of the digital revolution, its detriments are palpable and growing, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted soon after this 2019 lecture was delivered. Since human identity and human interactions are being virtualized and altered at an accelerating pace in ways that are not necessarily or not at all aligned with humanistic aspirations, Essay #16 provides fitting closure to this fourth group, and to the collection.

From 2020 onward, the world’s trajectory was and is being altered by a new wave of political and civilizational tectonic shifts, in response to which a sequel set of essays will doubtless suggest itself. It will endeavor, as does this collection, to offer explanations to those who seek them, correctives to those who need them, and aspirations to those embrace them.

Notes

1 E.g. in video: Lou Marinoff, Plato Not Prozac , public TV premiere, 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12wUI0XnP2g;

E.g. in podcast: Lou Marinoff, Rationally Speaking, Episode 48, November 20, 2011, http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/48-philosophical-counseling-lou-marinoff/; E.g. in print: Lou Marinoff, Philosophical Counselling: An interview with Lou Marinoff, Psychotherapy in Australia 8, no. 3 (May 2002): 36–40; Lou Marinoff, Café Philosophique with Lou Marinoff, Europe’s Journal of Psychology 9, no. 3 (2013): 419–426, https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v9i3.665; Lou Marinoff, Interview, in Philosophical Practice: Five Questions, edited by Jeanette Bresson and Ladegaard Knox (Birkerod, Denmark: Automatic Press, 2013), 183–202; Lou Marinoff, Playing with Ideas: An Interview with Lou Marinoff, American Journal of Play 9, no. 1 (2016): 1–18, https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2022/01/9-1-interview-playing-with-ideas.pdf; Lou Marinoff, From Bach to Buddhism via Table Hockey: An Interview with Guitarist Lou Marinoff, interview by Colin Clark, Fanfare: The Magazine For Serious Record Collectors 40, no. 1 (September/October 2016): 118–128, https://www.loumarinoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Fanfare-Magazine-Archive-of-CD-Reviews.pdf; Lou Marinoff, Lou Marinoff, in The Philosophy Clinic, edited by Stephen Costello (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016), 119–144.

2 For summaries of all ICPPs, see https://icpp.site .

3 L. Marinoff, Plato Not Prozac: Applying Philosophy of Everyday Problems (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

4 See American Philosophical Practitioners Association, APPA , https://appa.edu

5 There is pervasive and apparently permanent confusion, even among New Yorkers, between CCNY and CUNY. The City College of New York (CCNY) was founded by Townsend Harris in 1847, with the mission to educate the whole people free of charge. Competition for admission was fierce during its halcyon years, and CCNY produced more Nobel laureates (ten) than any other public institution in the USA. The early 1960s saw the incorporation of The City University of New York (CUNY), which swallowed formerly free-standing liberal arts institutions such as City College, Hunter College, Baruch College, Queen’s College, Lehman College, etc. Yet to this day, when professors at City College introduce themselves as such, New Yorkers more often than not ask Which campus?, having mistaken the part for the whole.

6 See L. Marinoff, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Highway Robbery and Game Theory, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 4 (1994): 445–462, https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409412346251; Three Pseudo-Paradoxes in ‘Quantum’ Decision Theory: Apparent Effects of Observation on Probability and Utility, Theory and Decision 35, no.1 (1993): 55–73, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01075235; Maximizing Expected Utilities in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Journal of Conflict Resolution , 36, no. 1 (1992): 183–216, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002792036001007; The Inapplicability of Evolutionarily Stable Strategy to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41, no. 4 (1990): 461–472.

7 L. Marinoff, A Resolution of Bertrand’s Paradox, Philosophy of Science 61, no. 1 (1994): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1086/289777 .

8 L. Tafler, Fair New World, 25th anniversary edition (San Diego: Waterside Productions, 2019).

9 L. Marinoff, Philosophical Practice (New York: Elsevier, 2001). A video of the APPA’s response to 9/11, delivered at that launch, is here: L. Marinoff, Remembering 9/11—Twenty Years After, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuHL0wszQPM .

10 L. Marinoff, The Middle Way: ABCs of Happiness in a World of Extremes (New York: Sterling, 2007; San Diego: Waterside Productions Inc., 2020).

11 The back story is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4caLXICq2I

12 Daniel Duane, The Socratic Shrink, The New York Times (March 21, 2004), https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/magazine/the-socratic-shrink.html .

13 Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman, A Curious Mind: The Secrets to a Bigger Life (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2016), 16.

14 Table Hockey: The Movie , directed by Thor Henrikson (Triad Film Productions Ltd. 2004), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0829293/; and Lou Marinoff, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2306345/ .

15 See P. Elkind, Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (London: Penguin, 2016).

16 See Cathy Burke, Former Gov now a Prof, New York Post (September 2, 2009), https://nypost.com/2009/09/02/former-gov-now-a-prof/ .

17 Daisaku Ikeda and Lou Marinoff, The Inner Philosopher: Conversation on Philosophy’s Transformative Power (Cambridge, MA: Dialogue Path Press, 2012).

18 Lou Marinoff, On Human Conflict: The Philosophical Foundations of War and Peace (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

19 Founding Fuel, Ten Books to Read to Mark India’s 75th Independence Day, Founding Fuel (August 14, 2021), https://www.foundingfuel.com/article/ten-books-to-read-to-mark-indias-75th-independence-day/ .

20 See Horasis , https://horasis.org/ .

21 See Humanist Canada , https://www.humanistcanada.ca/about/ .

INTRODUCTION

Rick Repetti

Professor of Philosophy

City University of New York, Kingsborough campus (Brooklyn)

1. What and Why?

What is this book about, what does it aspire to achieve, and why does that matter? In this section, I will answer those three questions.

You hold in your hands an engaging, provocative, and quite often very entertaining—I laughed out loud a number of times while reading this—educational tour of the field of philosophical counseling (PC) (among a few other things), by one of the prominent pioneers of the field, but also much more than just a tour of the field. I have disparagingly neologized the sort of pedagogy I see becoming increasingly popular in academia as edutainment, that is, the funneling of all educational content into an entertaining format in order to provide extrinsic psychological motivations for learning that used to be intrinsic motivations on the part of students. However, while there are some very entertaining moments in this collection, I am confident in asserting—what the reader will soon discover—that Marinoff rails against the dumbing down of the citizenry through endlessly diminished academic standards. In his case, however, I think it is safe to say his wit, societal criticism, and sense of humor are on a par with the likes of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and, more recently, Dave Chappelle, while simultaneously channeling the spirits of the Buddha, Socrates, and, among many other philosophical luminaries, Nietzsche.

In this excellent collection of a representative subset of Lou Marinoff’s voluminous writings on this topic, perhaps merely the tip of the iceberg of his incredibly comprehensive knowledge and depth of wisdom, you will enjoy, and often be enlightened to learn, of Lou’s many provocative encounters with critics of PC from both within and without philosophy, alongside what, to my lights, amounts to the equivalent of the Buddha’s diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, and prescriptions for the currently deprivational state of the human condition, a great deal of which analysis converges with the Buddha’s vision, but which broadens it in many ways. For Marinoff’s philosophical wisdom is not merely formed, by analogy with honey, from the metaphorical pollen gathered only from Buddhist flowers, but also from many different types of philosophical, humanistic, psychological, scientific, historical, and other types of flowers, as each of the essays collected here amply demonstrates. I will briefly overview each of them shortly, some in greater detail than others, illustrating only some of the more representative gems to be found throughout his works. But before I delve into each essay, it will facilitate the reader’s general understanding to sketch some of my own ideas about what ties them all together, what collecting them in one volume aspires to achieve and why this matters.

What ties together all the essays in this collection, except perhaps one, is Marinoff’s unyielding philosophical activism against what he, I think, correctly diagnoses as our current meaning crisis, if not more ominous indications of the death spiral of Western culture, on the one hand, and his conviction that PC and other forms of practical, applied philosophy promise to address the root causes of this existential predicament/threat, whereas, by contrast, the institutions of society that ought to stand as secure bastions against cultural collapse—for example, psychology, academia and government—have not only abandoned ship, but embraced and partnered with the betrayal of Western values, humanism and individualism.

What collecting these essays into one volume aspires to do, if I may extrapolate such an intention from simply reading the collection, is to enlighten the reader about, and thereby diagnose, the multi-dimensional but integrated problem facing our age, with in-depth analyses of the political, sociological, psychological, biomedical, economic, scientific, technological, informational and ultimately philosophical dimensions of its etiology, on the one hand, together with Marinoff’s cautious, sometimes skeptical, if not cynical, prognostications about the somewhat narrow prospects for reversing this alarmingly downward trend, and his nevertheless somewhat optimistic prescriptions for anyone attempting to contribute to this noble cause, on the other hand. Because the problem is ultimately rooted in philosophical ignorance, it is essential that it be properly diagnosed and treated as such, that is, philosophically, or else any attempted remedies will continue to simply manipulate or otherwise postpone the symptoms.

Why does this matter? It matters because the presently accelerating downward pattern of cultural and possibly civilizational decay is such that time is of the essence. As Marinoff makes clear, millions of otherwise healthy children—already being dumbed down daily with politically correct pedagogy instead of history, science, math, and language skills—are being erroneously diagnosed on a daily basis with ADHD; millions of otherwise sane, mentally healthy adults are being diagnosed with depression and anxiety; and all of them are being treated with pharmaceuticals approved by the DSM and the insurance companies, all of which are complicit in lulling virtually every other average citizen into a pharmacologically induced stupor as a way of keeping them zombified and addicted to social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok, when they are not in intelligence-deadening Netflix marathon mode, texting their nearby family members and friends during commercials, in their echo chamber versions of Plato’s cave, consuming not only fattening junk food, mind-numbing pseudo-music, and increasingly disposable cheap goods, but low resolution memes and more sophistic propaganda disguised as journalism from their ideological tribes while deluding themselves into thinking they are properly informed because other dimwits like their retweets. I believe I may have just channeled the spirit of Lou, though he remains quite alive.

As Marinoff makes evident, it is no coincidence that PC threatens to expose the fact that is the contemporary equivalent of the emperor has no robe, and thus that the combined forces of national psychological associations, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies would not merely try to prevent PC from becoming a recognized, valid, established adjunct or alternative to psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals, but to silence and discredit it. What is worse is the many millions of ordinary people who could benefit from PC who are funneled through the psychology to pharmacology mill. That is the short-term loss. The greater, longer-term loss is of all that human capital, as a zombified, dumbed down citizenry fails to see that society is like a plane whose engine has shut off and is beginning to pick up speed as it accelerates in a downward spiral, and thus fails to do what it can to save itself.

I may be adding an element of hyperbole, but the reader can discern from the earlier essays that Marinoff is a very prescient sociopolitical prophet, as the patterns he identifies and the predictions about their courses of unfolding that he articulates increasingly come true over the course of the writing of his later essays. While the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, were so named humorously because of their somewhat militant atheism, and while Marinoff is not a militant atheist, I would classify him among the truly prophetic voices forewarning us of the impending apocalyptic collapse of our culture. Similarly, Jordan Peterson is an equally passionate prophet, whose simple advice to young people, like clean your room, is such a huge success, precisely because it constitutes the beginnings of applied philosophy—philosophy as a way of life—and obviously moves in the direction of filling the existential/philosophical vacuum Marinoff sees as defining contemporary culture. Similarly, I recently saw a Jordan Peterson podcast entitled The Four Horsemen of Meaning, with three guests discussing the meaning crisis, one of which was John Vervaeke (like Jordan and Lou, another Canadian), author of an enlightening 50-episode series on YouTube, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which series addresses the same existential vacuum Marinoff’s work is devoted to reversing.¹ Marinoff is thus also a key horseman of meaning.

In the next section, then, I will sketch each essay, in sequence. In the final section, I will conclude with some summarizing observations and some suggestions for the reader.

2. The Essays

I will sketch what each essay is about in a moment, but before I do, I will alert the reader that on occasion I will quote Marinoff here, especially some of his gem rants, as they are icing on this cake, and I think the reader can benefit by sampling some of them as appetizers.

In Essay 1, On the Emergence of Ethical Counseling: Considerations and Two Case Studies, Marinoff sets forth a number of insightful descriptions of the contemporary meaning crisis, which he refers to as an existential vacuum, which he astutely ascribes to the rise of science and the fall of faith, in general, and the many implications and developments thereafter, which he traces. Marinoff then delves into two cases studies—one descriptive, the other prescriptive—illustrating how PC and ethical counseling (when the case at hand has a core ethical component), respectively, can work to help individuals resolve manifestations of the meaning crisis in their personal lives. While I think ethical counseling is a species of PC, I suspect Marinoff uses the more specific term ethical counseling to tap into the fact that ethics counselors came into the limelight before philosophical counselors did, to tap into readers’ associations, possibly making it easier for them to place PC as a related idea. I also suspect this 1995 essay serves well as a first entrée into Marinoff’s work, into PC per se, and into the more complicated content to follow, particularly as readers are likely to get a better sense of just what PC is by diving into two simple yet different types of case studies.

In Essay 2, What Philosophical Counseling Can’t Do, Marinoff goes a step further, outlining the constraints, limits, and boundaries of PC, in a manner that might be construed as preempting the standard objections by addressing them before they arise (although I’m sure much of his thought on these parameters was borne of encountering them in the form of objections). For example, he notes, PC cannot control its misrepresentation in the media, its effectiveness in various cases, its relationship with psychology, psychiatry, or analytic philosophy. One example of such is that the media is likely to turn up at least one psychologist eager to trash-talk the merits of PC simply because a wolf may be expected to try to talk the sheep away from the shepherd, to use his metaphor.

Nor can PC help with physical illness or mental illness, the latter of which Marinoff rejects as a convenient myth: there are brain illnesses but not mental ones. Noetic problems, like existential despair, can induce physical problems, but drugs do not cure noetic problems. PC cannot cure malevolent individuals, but neither can psychology nor psychiatry. PC cannot overturn the DSM and its pseudo-scientific claptrap, predict its successes or failures in individual cases, control whether it is established as equal to psychotherapy without the support of psychotherapy, nor as equal to analytic philosophy by mere force of arguments (tacitly, because although analytic philosophy claims it is all about the arguments, it is not).

One rant worth quoting from this essay is as follows:

In sum, mental illness is a myth, and mental health is its pernicious reflection. The ensconcement of mental health as a putative medical state has spawned a Leviathanesque industry, replete with agencies, bureaucracies and emissaries calling themselves mental health professionals. Lest the insidiousness of this profession escape you, consider that dental health (a desirable and patently medical state) is best maintained by dental hygiene. Now it does not even begin to follow—but has nonetheless been professionally packaged and slickly hawked to the American public—that mental health is best maintained by mental hygiene. In the American education system, this translates into a unitary non-curriculum of feel-good know-nothingism. Illiteracy, amorality, aculturalism, vacuous self-esteem, Orwellian slogans and politically correct beliefs are the hallmarks of the mental hygienists who have taken over the K-12 system and the universities [...] Their accomplices are psychologists and psychiatrists who have contributed to this chimerical edifice of reflected and re-reflected myth.

While Marinoff goes on to deliver a scathing critique of the DSM and a former President of the American Psychological Association, I’ll leave the reader with curiosity about the remainder of this essay.

In Essay 3, On Virtual Liberty: Offense, Harm and Censorship in Cyberspace, Marinoff, displaying his prescient voice, preemptively, and perhaps prophetically, takes up one of the root issues in the war against woke—currently fought daily in cyberspace, Marinoff’s target here—long before it metastasizes, so to speak, in his defense of John Stuart Mill’s classic distinction between the no-harm and the no-offense principles in Mill’s seminal work, On Liberty: We can legislate against the initiation of force, violence, or fraud on the grounds that it interferes with others’ equal rights to negative liberty (briefly, the freedom to be left alone), and thus constitutes genuine harm (the no harm principle), but we cannot legislate against violations of our normative expectations that do not involve the initiation of force, violence, or fraud, but which nonetheless might significantly offend our sensibilities (the no offense principle). Too bad society missed this article when it was penned over two decades ago. In this 1999 essay, Marinoff tacitly predicts what will lead to our current state of affairs when he argues that Mill’s spot-on distinction bangs against two practical challenges.

The first is a widespread conflation of offense with harm itself. This vital distinction is willfully and wantonly blurred by assorted deconstructionists, biopoliticians, and dupes of their assaults on truth, freedom and reason.

Indeed! However, little did the rest of us know the potential destructiveness of this conflation in 1999; nor could we imagine the magnitude it could reach in 20 years.

The second is the unenforceability of the harm principle in cyberspace itself. Conditions that would enable its virtual implementation could undermine rather than uphold the very liberties at stake.

Did Marinoff have a time machine? To my memory, in 1999 there was little cyber-activity beyond email. Yet he saw clearly the danger of these two problems in the trajectory of the conflation of harm and offense in cyber-space before most of us even knew what cyberspace was.

Moreover, he presented solid rebuttals, again, like a voice crying out in the wilderness. For example:

Your state of being offended is an internal one, emotionally or cognitively palpable to you but intangible and immeasurable to the observer, who has no offensometer for quantifying the extent of your experience.

In the same prescient breath, Marinoff rebutted an entire field of woke philosophy several years before it became a thing, namely, standpoint epistemology, a branch of social epistemology (cf. social justice), according to which one’s socioeconomically situated vantage grants superior incorrigible first-personal (singular or, better, plural) epistemic privilege to alleged victims (and/or identity groups of victims) in the oppressor/oppression hierarchy, who alone can directly experience and thus directly attain gnosis—apparently, this school of thought tacitly posits the axiomatic ontology and possession of Marinoff’s offensometer—about the systemic structures and mechanisms causing their alleged harms (which, on Mill’s analysis, are more likely mere offenses).

As with every essay in this collection, there are many gems worth extracting here for quick consumption, such as: "Generically, harm is given; offense, taken." And,

While tyrannical governments (e.g. totalitarian regimes) […] censor offense and inflict harm, postmodern governments (e.g. politically correct democracies) […] censor offense after having equated it with harm. In both cases, albeit for different reasons, the harm principle is abrogated. A common conclusion follows: all forms of tyranny must be resisted. Abuses of negative liberty are incompatible with the exercise of positive liberty.

Marinoff is sometimes more of a prophet than he himself seems to have realized. For example, he seems to have anticipated the nefarious cyber-manipulation of algorithms, shadow banning, and outright shutting down of platforms devoted to free speech, although he did not seem to anticipate that it would not come directly from Big Brother (government), but from its bedfellow, Big Tech:

As long as no totalitarian power lowers a Cyber Curtain, freedom of expression of opinion will reign supreme in cyberspace. If Mill could surf the net for a day, he'd surely applaud its cybertarian liberties.

Marinoff ends this essay on an optimistic note, one which he likely will look back upon from today’s vantage as perhaps naïve:

If cybernauts remain unfettered, they will compile a vision of humanity that may offend some but will also harm few and possibly enlighten many. Man may be