Luis de Miranda on Philosophical Health
Philosopher interviews
This is an interesting personal question, and I probably won’t be able to avoid generalizations or perhaps some form of sentimentalism.
I was born of Portuguese parents under the dictatorial regime of Salazar in Portugal. My parents emigrated to Paris, France, when I was only three years old. Upon arrival, I developed a severe respiratory reaction that, according to the doctors, could have been fatal. I understand this today as a psychosomatic alert, an intuitive refusal of the Paris environment. Nevertheless, my parents stayed, and I lived in Paris until 2012, with a nearly 2-year parenthesis where I lived in New York, around 1995, and another 2-3 years parenthesis in Edinburgh more recently, where I worked on my PhD.
In New York, while working for the French consulate, I wrote my first novel, Joie (Joy), published in Paris in 1998, which was the expression of a longing — indeed, I never felt joyful in Paris, but rather nature-deprived, lonely and distressed: beyond the pollution and the reign of bureaucracy and stone or concrete, there is in Paris a culture of méchanceté, of intolerance, diffuse aggression and spite that I never understood. Retrospectively, I did not experience Parisian people as healthy. However, because I was an immigrant, I believed for many years that the problem was mine, and that I was incapable to adapt to an imaginary superior social order that I could not understand nor deserve. In order to survive and still experience beauty, I dived into French or international culture from previous centuries. Writing poetry in French language when I was a teenager and later books of fiction and philosophy was a refuge.
In 2012, I had my first child with a Swedish person working in Paris and because I did not want my daughter to grow in Paris and be confronted with the negativity I had experienced, we moved to Sweden before the birth. I still live in Sweden today, and I am very grateful for it. The first time I visited Sweden, in the summer of 1994, I already had a revelation, a feeling of Heimat: I felt home for the first time of my life. Today, I still identify greatly with the Swedish way of life, its crypto-pagan trust in and respect for nature, the civilized and polite interactions between (comparatively rarified) humans, the quality of life and a general pace of healthy slow growth that is based on a rather successful symbiosis between technology, nature and human lifeworld. I still experience gratefulness everyday as I wake up or go for a walk surrounded by trees, birds, water and calm. Well now, this sounds more like Heidi than like Heidegger…
I started my writing life as a poet and then a novelist: crafting words was my literary formation. It was, from the start, an esthetic and political act: a way of reinventing a language that was not my mother tongue in a society in which I felt alien (and my mother tongue was itself not a refuge anymore because my parents were themselves alienated, estranged from France, from each other and from me). I have always written primarily to survive, then to overlive and create a sacred space, to communicate with myself first and foremost, and then of course to lend a hand to the happy few who might feel and think not unlike me.
You are right that I tend to use portmanteau words, which can create unexpected bridges and queer unities, perhaps the kind of quasi-impossible harmony between disparate realities I was longing for when I was young. I did not coin “esprit de corps” however, which is a French phrase from the early eighteenth century, a phrase that became very influential in several languages including English over the next centuries, as I explain in my English book Ensemblance.
Anthrobotics can be found in the literature before I used it in a certain way.
Crealectics is certainly my conceptual child, but then again with many previous influences, for example Deleuze & Guattari’s schizoanalysis and the French critique of dialectics. I coined the concept of Creal in my novel Paridaiza back in 2008, to describe the Creative Real, in contradistinction to conformative realism and materialistic or neoplatonist notions of the Real.
Another coining of mine you’ll find in the book Ensemblance is hieropoiesis, the co-creation of sacred spaces.
Words are not just tools, they have a power, they have a soul, and they are more or less performative. It might be true that language was invented by sorcerers, shamans or witches and that words were primarily magical formulas. I believe I often still use some words as such, as incantations. Sometimes, because some common words are tired or overused, a neologism may perform more or trigger new insights, at least within a small community – perhaps a community in which I am a solipsistic wanderer, throwing new coinages as messages in a bottle?
It is only recently that I became an academic, with the completion of my PhD in 2017. Prior to that, I kept a distance from academia for many years, and worked as an independent author and publisher. Between 2004 and 2012, I worked part-time with my own independent publishing house, Max Milo, together with a friend.
This created much economic and social precarity but also much freedom to work on topics mostly because I found them intriguing, important and interesting, rather than following a career strategy. Now that I am affiliated with the Swedish university, I still work first and foremost on what I consider meaningful, and I still tend to follow strange connections between disciplines and concepts. Perhaps it is the way I think, in a portmanteau way, blending and bridging alien fields that seem disconnected but that have in fact deeper correspondences. I am nevertheless focusing in the recent years on crealectics (theory) and philosophical health (practice), so you could say I might be somehow settling down. Il faut que jeunesse se passe!
Since my official academic career is still in its early stages, I can only hope it won’t be harmed by my previous eclecticism. If one looks carefully at my writings, one sees that the apparent diversity is in fact quite thematic and coherent. I write about world-making, hieropoiesis, the loss of meaning and sacrality in anthrobotic societies, the mystique of the creative experience, a certain idea of health that transcends biomechanical definitions, and in general the fact that philosophy can be generative, that ideas are a social force. Even my early novels are saturated with my love for the ideal of a creative philosophical way of life.
Up to now, Sweden has been generous in welcoming me as well as my ideas into academic research, and it needs to continue this way: I don’t want to look for jobs outside of Sweden even if they are more prestigious, primarily because I want to stay close to my children. My second child will be born in just a few months, this time the fruit of my relationship with a person that is half-German, half-Greek (and speaks the two original languages of Western philosophy).
So yes, there is a great deal of internationalism, different languages and cultures in my life, and that is a gift and a source of inspiration. And again, I felt more like an outsider in Paris than in Sweden. It’s true that here in Sweden, I have been working for the moment as a postdoc in departments that are not directly philosophical departments, the latter being very dependent on the analytic tradition here. We’ll see how this evolves in the future. I give little importance to the prestige of the university, the name of the department, the title of my position: I could remain a postdoc for the rest of my life if this gave me the kind of intellectual freedom I am currently enjoying. That would perhaps make me a postphilosopher…
My literary work preceded my philosophy, which was only implicit at first.
When I was sixteen, I decided to become a novelist because I wanted to create worlds and I was impressed by Céline, Dostoevsky, Auster, Kundera and many others. Then I realized my novels where highly philosophical, and that I had a tendency to deconstruct the narrative aspect. I was never very interested in telling stories that where not metaphorical nor embedded with concepts. So, in 2010 I decided to write my last novel, Qui a tué le poète?, Who Killed the poet? (which was since then translated into several languages, including Chinese). This was my farewell to Paris and writing novels in French.
My first philosophical essays were written since 2003 to echo my novels, to reflect on their themes. Now I prefer to inject (without really trying) poetry and imagination into my philosophical work, and I don’t think I will write another novel ever. I still write poetry, mostly for the woman I love or for my daughter. I would like to believe that, like Emily Dickinson, I dwell in possibility. And I like to help others do so via philosophical and crealectic care.
If you look for example at the notion of philosophical health, you will see that both analytic and continental philosophers refer to it, whether they are reading Wittgenstein, on the one hand, or Hadot or Foucault, on the other hand.
Working on AI and the philosophy of technology was a moment of my intellectual journey, because I don’t think it is possible to philosophize today without thinking and understanding the digital phenomenon. I see sometimes myself as a process philosopher of the creative real: this formulation for many would position me on the side of the so-called continentals. And it is true that I am not very interested in mathematized logical formulas: I believe philosophy is the care for the whole (perhaps the last discipline that can care for the whole while all other disciplines may need to look at a specific part of the world, more or less in a reductionist way). Philosophizing can include politics, societal critique, cosmology, psychology, world-making, care, poetry, and of course also new forms of logic and thinking, as I argued in my article on philosophical creativity.
During my job interview at Uppsala university, where I now work at the Center for Medical Humanities within the department of History of Science and Ideas, I was asked how I would define myself, and my answer was: philosophical practitioner. That is not only because I tend to apply my philosophical thinking to all aspects of (my) life, but also because since February 2018, I have been practicing philosophical counseling with hundreds of individuals that I help to navigate the world (but also corporations like Vattenfall, the energy producer), people who wish to redefine their purpose and destiny in a more meaningful and epic manner.
Perhaps the best here is to link the reader to the article I wrote about Wikileaks, since it was translated into English in 2010 and published by the site OpenDemocracy.
My article on Auschwitz, primarily published in French in the journal Le Monde in 2008, was translated into English and published by OpenDemocracy in 2017: The Auschwitz video that had a life on its own. One of the most troubling and mysterious experiences in my life.
I agree with you that the historical revival of philosophical counseling started before me. I have merely given a generic name to its telos, “philosophical health”, in contradistinction to physical health and psychological health.
In the last 3 years, I have had in consultation and I believe helped two kinds of profiles. The first one: people or institutions that are relatively healthy psychologically (by common standards) but feel their life lacks meaning, purpose, enthusiasm, a deep orientation, self-transcendence.
The second kind: people who are labeled as psychologically unhealthy by the system, for example “depressive”, or “ADHD”, or “bipolar”, or “suicidal”. My experience is that I am also capable to help them with the tools of philosophical health. Now in this second case, I am not saying that philosophical care should abruptly replace other forms of therapy or clinical care. It can come as a complement, until the patient feels empowered enough to give up on chemical corsets or neurotypical labels that tend to negate our neurodiversity.
I have to confess that I tend, slowly and carefully, to help people realize that the intake of antidepressants or ketamine for example or the adherence to victimizing medical labels can be progressively abandoned if one is to actualize one’s highest destiny. I am not here to replace psychiatrists, but nevertheless there is too much rigidity today in the biomedical model, which tends to see the mind as a chemical machine. The philosophical health position in fact does not really distinguish between the two types I mentioned: all are beings trying to make sense of this strange, sacred and difficult experience which is called being a human being in a given society. Perhaps I help those who suffer realize what took me so long to realize when I was living in Paris: there was nothing wrong with my brain: my suffering was political and social. Principles of philosophical health are healing if cultivated regularly, for example: mental heroism, deep orientation, critical creativity, deep listening, and the Creal as sense of possibility.
I believe one should be careful before starting a practice of philosophical counseling. I personally have not only a PhD and many years of study in philosophy but also a training in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Having said this, the kind of people who come for a philosophical counseling session are usually rather intellectual or analytic already: they know or feel what works for them, and even if they are a bit lost, they are not submerged by their feelings. They are part of this intellectual type that is one of the most oppressed minorities today, and a forgotten one in a global epoch that is rather anti-intellectual.
There are today a lot of social devices and norms that create damage and that don’t need a health certification, for example on internet or on social media. If you are talking to someone who helps you define the meaning of your destiny without imposing an ideology or a normative grid, how bad can that be? I often offer a first session of philosophical counseling free of charge, and it’s up to the person to decide to continue or not. No state or institution forces them to follow my sessions.
Allow me to be a bit technical here. The idea that attentive listening (“akroasis” in Ancient Greek) can be practiced as a “spiritual exercise” and as a principle of philosophical health was already present in Philo of Alexandria two thousand years ago.
Since Aristotle, we know that philosophy starts when we consider objects, ideas, or practices in their peculiarity and singularity, but also with a comprehensive attitude in order to situate these particulars within the greater whole. To comprehend philosophically is not only to understand analytically, it is also to engage in dialectic com-prehension (etymologically a seizing-together), a form of dialogue that aims at becoming “consonant” with the other, with nature and with the ideal of truth, authenticity, secular sacredness or honesty.
As a philosophical counselor, I am every week in private conversation with individuals, talking about their existence, acts, interpretations, and existential beliefs. In a deep dialogue with another person, philosophical listening is a practice belonging to the Socratic tradition of care for truth as “emergence” and “co-naissance,” a co-creative birth of signification and meaning.
Contrary to analytical descriptions aiming at a neutral objectivity, a healthy philosophical perspective engages the observer, the listener, the speaker, the writer, not in order to apply a systematic grid of diagnoses or predefined solutions, but to let a singular signification manifest itself, here and now, within a context of trust for the unheard-of.
Human flourishing is a harmonious dialogue with inner and outer worlds akin to a pragmatic form of poetry, an intuitive co-creation of slowly emerging networks of symbols, webs of meaning, some of which become explicit or performative at a slower rhythm than the forced pace of technological growth. A consonant signification might connect signs, realms or domains that might have seemed to be heterogenous previously.
Philosophical health, contrary to some forms of psychotherapy, does not establish borders, labels and distinctions between minds or human types: it presupposes that we are all, on planet Earth, of the same cosmological flesh and therefore we are bound to comprehend each other, if only we listen to alterity before we respond. “Deep listening” was a key concept for American musicologist Pauline Oliveros, who advocated to “listen to everything until it all belongs together and you are part of it.”
Crealectics deals with how agents in the world, whether they are human or not, actualize the power of the Creal (which you might compare to the oriental Dao or Chi). I believe there are at least three modes of understanding the world.
Analytic: you divide the unknown into parts that are known, named, discretized, as if cogs in a machine.
Dialectic: you look at tensions, contradictions, opposites and how they may or may not form a synthesis; and
“Crealectic”: you reconnect with the creative source of the multiverse (the Creal), the generative virtual influx of possibility and potentiality from which everything emerges.
It is important in philosophical health to have a powerful sense of possibility and understand the co-creative interconnection of different life-worlds. I have observed in practice that many people can conceive intellectually of the creative Real. Many scientific discoveries help us imagine it: the vacuum fluctuations of quantum physics for example. But to feel the Creal in your mind-body is more difficult. This is one aspect of my philosophical care practice, to help people expand their access to the creative domain of possibility, before they choose an orientation.
Philosophical health is about the deep coherence between our thoughts and our actions. It takes a lot of discipline, awareness and reflection to only perform what is in accordance with our philosophical stance. We have to understand and build our personal philosophy, our existential deep orientation. Then we must act within the domain of possibility allowed by it, since not all actions or ideas are compossible, possible together without a contradiction of values.
The philosophical possible is the idea that our thoughts and worldviews can have a generative and performative impact upon our lives. Now the sentence you quoted, certainly complex, is taken out of context, but it suggests that ideas are social forces. Many realities we take for granted today started in a thought experiment, an ideal.
Exactly. A dialogue with a patient is not a lecture. It is a singular co-creation in which I am not interested in defending my philosophical views, but rather help the person reach a clearer and empowered idea of who they are as a thinking human being. The main work I perform, along with the re-awakening of the crealectic sense of possibility, is help the person define a telos, a vision, and then which strategies this person could pursue to actualize that telos into a harmonious biography, both idealistic and pragmatic.
I have noticed that people who are too emotional in their way of processing reality may take more time in understanding the benefits of philosophical health. Conversely, people who like to intellectualize, conceptualize, theorize, discuss meaning, without necessarily being trained in philosophy, find it usually refreshing to be able to discuss philosophically rather than clinically.
Since I believe there is a category called psychological health, different from philosophical health, it is clear that some people with a severe mental condition should not abandon their psychiatrist for a philosophical counselor, at least not too soon. Some of my counselees are doing both, following a psychiatric treatment but also engaging in a philosophical health program with me because they feel the psychologist or the psychiatrist are not equipped to discuss deep questions that matter to them, or that standard clinical therapy has become too soulless, too mechanical, too statistical and dismissive of the singularity of each person and of our search for meaning.
When I opened the Philosophical Parlour in Stockholm in February 2018, I had no idea if this would work and to be honest, I was not sure I would be good at it. To my great surprise, most people that come to me seem to find it very useful after just a few sessions.
I tend to start with a discovery session, and let the person decide if they want to continue further. In general, I have found that only 5 to 10 sessions seem to be enough to generate a beautiful intellectual and social empowerment and awakening. Now since the Covid event, I have moved all my consultations online, and discovered that this is no less efficient, perhaps even more effectual because my practice is now intercultural.
Every cycle of philosophical dialogue is different, and I cannot really say I have a defined type of patient or counselee: I help people from Sweden, the USA, Japan, or Bangladesh, among others, and I now realize very concretely that the humanist idea that we are all equal in our aspirations is true very concretely. I feel humbled every day by the beauty of the human soul. Perhaps philosophical health is needed to help us build the global cosmopolitical psyche that shall help us get closer to a form of paradise on earth, not only for humans but for all living beings (which I believe is one of the deep projects of philosophy).
Of course, one can have a philosophical dialogue with oneself, but this needs some training. There is also a magic that happens in dialogue with an experienced practitioner, that triggers new insights, ideas, a co-creative dynamic, a real if slow change.
In between sessions, I often give exercises of bibliotherapy or thought experiments, or applied philosophical exercises, and this may be compared to a gymnastic of the mind or a training of the soul. I tend to wish to liberate my counselees to their destiny after only ten sessions, because ultimately, I do believe in personal autonomy.
The philosophical caregiver is here to open a new way of being, understanding and doing in the least dogmatic way possible, such that people are able to live the highest version of their destiny. I’d like to think that I help people become masters of their biography and capable of collaborating with others to build secular sacred spaces and new forms of life, and that is why I don’t think it is good to keep people for years in continuous consultation as it is sometimes practiced by psychoanalysis or other kinds of therapy, which are often too ego-centered or focused on the past or the victim in each of us.
Philosophical health is today a luxury for the happy few. Gymnastics (physical health) was a luxury for the happy few in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it became a necessity for all. Psychotherapy (psychological health) was a luxury for the happy few in the beginning of the twentieth century, and it became a necessity for all. I hope philosophical health will be seen as a necessity for all by the end of this century.
But I also hope that the standardization and normativity that comes sometimes with physical health and psychological health will be avoided. This can be done by remaining focused on the philosophical concept of creation: there is not one right way to think, not one right way to live. People can eventually practice by themselves, as Kant recommended, the freedom of thought that liberates, but also the capacity to think into the place of the other (human, animal, plant, etc.), and of the Other with a capital O, call it the Creal or a higher power that allows for self-transcendence and experiencing that everything is sacred.
I don’t feel I am too imperialistic about philosophical health, but at the same time, I receive every month messages from all over the world that show that philosophical health is needed.
The global irrationality caused by the Covid phenomenon also shows our general deficit in philosophical healthcare. Many fields can benefit from philosophical health, including businesses. For example, the work that I am conducting with the multinational Vattenfall in helping their transition from a fossil-free model into a regenerative model demonstrates that philosophical health has tremendous political and societal potential to overcome unhealthy capitalism and the competitive imperative.
Perhaps philosophical health should not be fully professionalized, but rather be distributed as a form of commons, at least partially. Personally, I already work mostly on donations, with many sessions offered free of charge. I tend to avoid talking to more than 3 people per day, because it is a very demanding task and a tiring one. I will not transform philosophical counseling into a full-time profession, because I don’t want to need my patients to make a living. I see my core activity as thinking, researching: I am a philosopher that also helps the other concretely, but does not forget to help himself and remain free and curious, rather than a productive machine. I still enjoy writing a great deal, and I believe in the ideal of a free-thinking academia, even if it is under great pressure.
One possible portal is the Philosophical Parlour. Anyone can send me an email to start with. Since I am mostly offering consultations online at the moment, it does not matter from which part of the world my counselees are. On the Philosophical Health International page, one might find more information or contacts.
There are many other sources, and people who as you mentioned have been working in philosophical counseling before I myself started. I don’t approve of quarrels in a field that is still fragile and marginal. Philosophical counselors of the world, unite!
Yes, I will now focus on philosophical health and my theoretical approach to it, crealectics. I am also interested in the emerging concept of “protected philosophical belief”, which is a legal notion that will in my view become more and more important in the future. No one seems to know today what qualifies as a legally valid philosophical conviction that might replace the now often defunct religious convictions. I believe in this field also philosophical counselors can help lawyers and courts. Recently, if I remember correctly, a supermarket employee won a case against his employer because he could defend that his stoicism was a philosophical belief that prevented him to be dishonest with the clients.
Thank you for the gracious questioning and long live Daily Philosophy. And allow me to conclude with a personal message for the reader: Don’t be scared, don’t be scarred: you are sacred!
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Luis de Miranda lives in Sweden and is a philosophical practitioner, author of essays such as Being & Neonness (MIT Press), Ensemblance (Edinburgh University Press), and novels such as Who Killed the Poet? and Paridaiza (Snuggly Books). Some of his books have been published in various languages, such as English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Swedish, etc.
He works currently as a researcher at the Center for Medical Humanities of Uppsala University, and is the founder of The Philosophical Parlour, through which he offers online philosophical counseling sessions to individuals around the world. He is currently working on the contemporary revival of philosophical health and a related theory of crealectic intelligence and practice, based on a process philosophy of creativity.
