Book Review: Thinking Through Dialogue: Essays on philosophy in practice

This is a compilation of papers from the 5^th International Conference on Philosophy in Practice held at Wadham College in Oxford in July 1999. It is a hard book to review, because it is a complete mixture of, if I may use a cliché, the good, the bad and the ugly. The editor has tried to help by dividing it into sections, with an introduction for each: the sections are Philosophical Counselling (23 papers), Philosophy with Children (6 papers), Philosophy in the Workplace (7 papers) and The Wider World of Dialogue (4 papers).

Of these, Philosophy in the Workplace is by far the strongest. It contains some really excellent work by Nigel Laurie, who gives a good example, in some detail, of his work with managers. Dorine Beaudouin & Ida Jongsma give a useful brief account of their training work. Karel Musch, it has to be admitted, is more abstract and boring. David Nyberg's paper is well-meaning but a bit feeble. The Will Heutz paper is brief but nice, and the Bernard Roy paper on hospitality is good.

The section on Philosophy with Children is mostly descriptive, and contains very little philosophy. I was sorry to see that the work with children on personality reported by Richard Morehouse made no mention of the idea of subpersonalities, or any kind of plurality within the person (Rowan & Cooper 1999); this is such an exciting area, and so particularly relevant to counselling and consultancy, that it was sad to see it ignored like this. The work of Maria da Venza Tillmanns seemed unduly teacher-dominated to me.

But of course the main section was on Philosophical Counselling, and it has to be said that this showed a woeful state of disarray. All the really bad papers were here. Eite Veening tried to divide philosophy into two great traditions, which he calls the Aristotean and the Platonean. The Aristotonian, as he describes it, is clear enough: it is the path of formal logic and that kind of rationality. But the Platonean is a complete mixture (though he does not seem to realise this) of that which is less than rational and that which goes beyond that kind of rationality. In other words, he is committing what Ken Wilber (1983) calls the pre/trans fallacy. It is one of the extraordinary things about this book that nobody quotes Wilber, who has so much to offer to clarify thinking in this field.

The paper by Dona Warren has some very dubious philosophising, and is much too kind to the failings of Albert Ellis and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. But it is not so bad as the truly appalling paper by Warren Shibles, which not only falls for REBT book, line and sinker, but exhibits all the qualities of dogma and narrowness and intolerance of ambiguity which afflicts that discipline. The paper by Shlomit Schuster is a bit better, but still too respectful towards REBT. The philosophical point is that all these authors, and Avshalom Adam as well ("A question has only one true answer" p.63), apparently believe that formal logic is adequate for counselling; it is not. Human beings do not conform to the laws of formal logic, and to try to make them do so, as Ellis does, is to narrow and demean them. If that itself sounds a bit dogmatic, it comes from my anger at seeing this low-level stuff peddled in a supposedly more sophisticated milieu.

One other (but similar and related) error which recurs a couple of times is the reliance on the idea that there is just one answer, just one truth, which can be discovered. Jon Borowicz is full of this. He tries to talk about the dialogical self, but there is no internal dialogue: it keeps on turning into THE self, as if this were unproblematic. The idea that there might be dialogue within the self is quite foreign to him, as it is to G H Mead, his exemplar; similarly, the idea that there might be different levels of self within the person does not even occur to him. And he argues with Rorty as if there were one truth which he and Rorty were quarrelling about, like two dogs with the same bone. This is essentially what Wilber (1997) has called a flatland approach. Similarly with the paper of Barbara Stecker & Pierre Grimes, which talks about the pathologos and about false beliefs, as if such notions were unproblematic. The aim of philosophical counselling (or in their terms Philosophical Midwifery) is to arrive at the position 'This is the way things are'. (p.108) The very choice of the term 'Midwifery' gives away the underlying assumption that there is just one baby to be delivered. But this pretension to have the One True Method leading to the One True Answer is unphilosophical in the world of today. It is a flatland approach which has no place for multiplicity, either extensively or intensively. The mistake made in so many of these papers is well stated by Jess Fleming: "To be overly rational and analyse everything is equivalent to killing and dissecting whatever it is one is trying to trap in the net of logic and language (love, for example, whether as an abstract concept or a concrete instance)." (p.153) Of course the word 'rational' here refers to the kind of logic which I have referred to as 'formal', and which is also sometimes called Boolean, Newtonian, Aristotelian, mathematical and so forth.

A few of the papers here are not so much bad as boring, saying nothing new. Others are too brief, and I cannot really see the point of putting them in.

But what readers will be interested in particularly is the existential work. More adequate philosophising is to be found, to the relief of all, in the papers by Harriet Chamberlain (full of good critical thinking), Emmy van Deurzen (good distinctions between psychotherapy and philosophical consultancy), Tim LeBon (good discussion of Socrates), Andrew Cathcart (good discussion of the Sophists), Antti Mattila (good on Epicetus and reframing), Vaughana Macy Peary on the multicultural (pity the editor lost all the references!), Anders Lindseth (some very nice philosophical points), David O'Donaghue & Leigh Hursh (good solid stuff on several philosophers and their relevance) and Jess Fleming (bringing in some Chinese thinking). These papers were both useful and inspiring, making it clear that there is something important here, hidden under all the dross. Emmy's chapter is possibly the best, being succinct and yet making a number of valuable points, together with some moving case vignettes. She says: "The two professions need to learn from each other. Neither of them is a panacea on its own. Neither of them can make the claim to mastering speech or to mastering silence. They both need to remain open to their own insufficiency... I cannot think of any valid reasons to postpone our collaboration any longer."

All in all, then, a bit of a mixture, but with enough good material to warrant examination.

John Rowan

References

Rowan, J. & Cooper, M. (eds)(1999). The Plural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life. London: Sage.

Wilber, K. (1983). Eye to Eye: The Search for the New Paradigm. Garden City: Anchor.

Wilber, K. (1997). The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad. Boston: Shambhala.