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President-elect Barack Obama met the press today with Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the man he's picked as the new head of the Democratic National Committee. It was advertised as a press conference, but they didn't take any questions -- a rule reporters learned about just a few minutes before the event began.Obama said he and Kaine share "a pragmatic, progressive philosophy that was at the heart of my campaign and will be at the heart of this administration." He said they are both less interested in ideology than in ideas that practice work.
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Philosophical life counselling in a philosopher's practice nowadays has become an alternative to the psychotherapies. It is an institution for people who are tortured by sorrows or problems, who can't cope with their lives or who think they somehow "got stuck"; who have questions they neither solve nor get rid of; who get along in the prose of their everyday lives but have a vague feeling of not really being challenged - for instance if they realise that their actualities don't meet their possibilities. In Philosophical Practice, people show up who don't just want to live or to get through but rather want to give account of their lives and who want clarity about their lives' shape, the from-where, in-what, where-to. Their demand quite often is to reflect upon the special circumstances, the peculiar entanglements and the somehow ambivalent course of their lives. In short: They visit a Philosophical Practice in order to understand and to be understood. It is almost never the Kantian question "How shall I live" which moves them, but more often the question of Montaigne: "What am I actually doing?"
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We will be talking about both the world of ideas that is, philosophy and the world of institutions and actions that is, politics and society. Philosophies are in large part derived from sociologies and are specific to particular societies. Although philosophers can and should learn from the work of earlier philosophers, this is not their main source of ideas when they are doing their job properly. What philosophers primarily do is study the actual world in which they live its politics, traditions, social organization, families and so on and try to find the ideas and values that must underlie those institutions and practices, even if the members of the society cannot articulate them, or cannot articulate them fully. When the philosophers have done their work correctly, the philosophy they articulate will reflect their society; and because philosophers are uniquely suited to see the society as a whole they will be in a unique position to point out inconsistencies, propose new ideas consistent with the old ones that are nevertheless improvements on those ideas, and show why things that seem trivial are actually crucial to the society, and vice versa. They are also in a position to examine not only what it is that the people in their society do but why they do it, even when those people cannot explain it for themselves. These are the things show the inconsistencies and incoherencies at the center of modern conceptions of morality and society and transform them so that the modern expression of morality, structure of society, and practices of politics can be transformed as well. But philosophers do not and cannot stand outside of all societies to offer objective truths or objective moralities, since these must always be connected to particular societies.
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