Philosophical Health

Abstract

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the first contemporary “philosophical counselors” started to appear in Europe and the USA, sometimes equating the idea of “philosophical health” with “spiritual health” or “therapy for the sane,” thus partly reviving traditions of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophical practice. Philosophical health is a state of fruitful coherence between a person’s ways of thinking and speaking and their ways of acting, such that the possibilities for a sublime life are increased and the need for self- and intersubjective flourishing satisfied. One is engaging in philosophical health when one’s behavior is careful (and care-full) in considering not only the physical or psychological individual balance but also a certain idea of what the collective and holistic good of humans and all beings on earth might be. Compared to “physical health” and “psychological health,” the idea of “philosophical health” may still appear to be new. In the twentieth century, the phrase was mostly used as a metaphor to describe sound philosophical thinking versus faulty reasoning, and the meaning has been since then extended to describe the attunement of a way of life with its conceptual evaluative grounding. A first step to understand that the idea of philosophical health is equally as important as physical and psychological health is to recognize that any human being possesses philosophical beliefs, intellectual allegiances, and conceptual concerns, even if not yet fully explicit or compossible.