YOU MAY BE DOING PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT REALISING IT

Before I became a psychotherapeutic counsellor, I spent many years as an academic philosopher. When I changed careers, I sometimes wondered how much of that old life would follow me into the therapy room. As it turns out, a lot of it did.

This doesn't mean that I sit opposite clients quoting Aristotle at them (although I’m not going to pretend it has never happened). I don't keep an emergency copy of the Tractatus concealed under my chair, which is just as well, since it is less useful as a footrest than its reputation might suggest. Philosophy in the therapy room is usually much less conspicuous than that.

The boiler in our home recently stopped working. There was nothing obviously wrong with the boiler itself, which was almost new. The problem turned out to be a tiny leak from an elderly radiator in the bathroom. It had been quietly losing water, the pressure in the system had dropped, and eventually the boiler refused to cooperate. Suddenly we had no hot water.

Until that happened, I had very little interest in how the bathroom radiator and the hot water coming out of the taps were connected. I was perfectly happy for the whole system to carry on doing whatever it did behind the walls.

This is more or less the philosopher Mary Midgley's point about philosophy.

Midgley famously compared philosophy to plumbing. Both, she argued, involve complicated systems which usually go unnoticed. The systems were not designed as a whole, we inherit them rather than designing them from scratch, they have been altered and patched over time in response to smaller localised events, and most of us have little reason to investigate them while everything appears to be working. It is when something goes wrong that we start wondering what is underneath the floorboards.

Our lives have conceptual plumbing too. We have ideas about what makes somebody a good person, what we owe our families, what counts as success, whether we deserve to rest, what makes us valuable, what love requires of us, and how much control we ought to have over our own lives. Most of the time we don't experience these things as philosophical positions. They are simply part of how the world seems to work.

Then something starts leaking, a bad smell slowly emerges, or we turn on the taps one day to find that nothing comes out anymore. Perhaps you become ill, or end a relationship. Perhaps you become a parent and discover that your ideas about what a good parent ought to be are impossible to live up to. Perhaps you finally achieve something you have spent years working towards and discover, inconveniently, that it hasn't made you happy.

Suddenly, something that had been quietly carrying the water around in the background becomes visible.

The questions we live

Imagine someone who has always worked incredibly hard. They built a successful career and became the person everybody could rely on. Then something changes. Perhaps they burn out, become ill, lose their job, or simply retire or discover that they can't keep doing it anymore.

Some people experience this in the form of anxiety, depression, shame or a frightening loss of identity. At the root of this might be a question they have never consciously asked: ‘What makes me valuable?’

Perhaps they have spent much of their life living according to the answer: ‘what I achieve, what I produce and how useful I am to other people.’

They weren’t necessarily ever taught this as a philosophical doctrine. We acquire ideas about what matters in much the same way that we acquire accents, habits, and ideas about whether scones should have jam or cream on first. They come from families, schools, workplaces and the culture around us. By the time we notice them, they often look less like beliefs and more like obvious facts about the world.

This is basically what Midgley meant by philosophical plumbing. The systems underneath our thinking, she wrote, are “usually unnoticed”, but sometimes something goes wrong, and when it does we suddenly have reason to examine the structures that had been quietly carrying our assumptions around for us.

Another example might be when a person finds themselves unable to set boundaries with someone who repeatedly hurts them. There may be love, fear, habit, dependency and/or decades of shared history involved. But there may also be assumptions about obligation.

• What do I owe my parents/family/partners?

• What is love? Does loving somebody mean accepting the way they treat me?

• When is putting my own needs first selfish, and when is it necessary?

Often these questions remain implicit. Therapy can work with them through feelings, relationships, memories, contradictions and what happens between two people in the room. The question doesn’t necessarily need to be asked if an alternative answer silently provides itself through the therapeutic relationship.

Sometimes thinking is part of the work

Sometimes, though, it is useful to drag the question out into daylight and have a proper look at it.

Therapy quite rightly attends to feelings, bodily experience, and relationships. This is probably the bulk of the work that I do. But there is a peculiar temptation to divide human beings into parts and then argue about which part is the real one. Are we thinking too much? Should we stop analysing and start feeling? Is the body telling us something that the mind has failed to understand?

Therapeutic literature often makes stark distinctions between thought and feeling, sometimes even treating the thinking part with great suspicion. Real people are rather less conveniently organised: we are thinking, feeling, social, bodily animals, and these things are happening together. Intellectualisation can certainly be used to avoid painful feelings. A beautifully constructed explanation of why I am sad can sometimes save me from the much less comfortable business of fully feeling my sadness.

But that doesn’t make thinking the enemy. Some people are naturally reflective. They need to turn something around, examine it from different directions and see whether it makes sense. They may want to know whether, on reflection, they really believe what they have always assumed that they believe, or whether two apparently contradictory things might both be true, and if so, how.

For these people, being told, explicitly or implicitly, that they are ‘overthinking’, and that they must stop thinking and concentrate on their feelings instead, can be profoundly frustrating. Sometimes thinking is one of the ways we engage with our experience. A client might genuinely want to consider the ethical questions about what responsibility they have towards somebody who has harmed them, whether forgiveness is necessary in order to move on, and whether being a good person requires self-sacrifice, whether the successful life they have spent twenty years constructing is actually one they want to inhabit, whether some achievement is necessary for making a human being valuable.

I don't think a therapist's job is to supply the correct answers to these questions. In fact, when I left academia, the absence of pressure to cling tightly to a very specific thesis and defend it against all attackers felt like stepping out into a clear fresh morning. But therapy can provide an unusually interesting place in which to ask these questions.

Philosophy doesn't stop being personal when we think about it

In my previous life, I taught philosophy on subjects including abortion, euthanasia, war, sexual assault, disability, and healthcare. These were philosophical questions, but to me they were never only philosophical questions.

You could be discussing an argument about abortion without knowing that somebody sitting in the room had experienced one. A seminar about disability might include somebody whose own life was being described (sometimes accurately, often otherwise) by the theories under discussion. Questions about death, sexual violence, illness, and medical treatment do not remain tidily on the page.

I was always conscious of this when I taught. Taking an argument seriously did not require pretending that nobody in the room had a life. This creates more continuity between philosophy and therapy (often caricatured as thinking and feeling) than it might first appear.

A person can think very carefully about whether they have obligations towards someone who harmed them because the answer matters painfully to them. Someone facing serious illness can genuinely want to think about mortality, dependence, dignity or what makes their life worthwhile. Someone who has spent decades pursuing a particular version of success may need both to feel the grief of discovering that it hasn't made them happy and to ask what they actually think a good life consists in.

The philosophical and the personal aren't two separate layers to be dealt with one at a time, but are tangled together because that is how we function as human animals. What has changed for me since leaving the seminar room isn't that philosophy has suddenly become real when it wasn’t before. It is what I am there to do with it.

As a philosophy lecturer, part of my job was to help people examine arguments: to ask whether a conclusion followed, whether an important distinction had been missed, whether an objection worked, or whether a position could survive its counterexamples.

As a counsellor, I'm not there to mark anybody's philosophy. I might notice an assumption. I might wonder where it came from, what it means to this particular person, or what happens when they imagine questioning it. Sometimes a client may actively want to think something through, and my philosophical background can be useful. At other times, the philosophical question may never need to be stated. It can be explored through feelings, relationships, memories, contradictions, and silences.

Life is not a seminar, but nor do we have to stop thinking when we enter the therapy room.

Thinking won’t always make it better

There is a danger here of making this sound much neater than it is. Therapy is sometimes described as though suffering is mostly the result of looking at things in the wrong way: find the unhelpful belief, replace it with a better one, and perhaps life will become happier. This itself can reflect a wider social narrative about independence, individual responsibility, and the idea that it is primarily up to each of us to adapt successfully to our circumstances.

Sometimes changing how we understand something really does make an enormous difference. But sometimes the problem is not our interpretation of reality. Sometimes reality is awful.

People die. Bodies become ill and disabled. Other people hurt us. Relationships end when we desperately wanted them to continue. People live with poverty, discrimination, loneliness, frightening uncertainty, and circumstances they have remarkably little individual power to change. No amount of philosophical plumbing should be used to persuade you that the sewage coming through the ceiling is really a question of perspective, and not the fault of the water companies or irresponsible landlord for leaving you covered in the proverbial.

And the assumption that the eventual goal must be happiness is itself something we can question. What does it mean to live well when something has happened that we will never be happy about? Can grief remain painful without being a failure to recover? Can we accept that something happened without judging that it was acceptable? What might make a life meaningful when happiness is scarce? When is distress something we want to alleviate, and when is it an entirely intelligible response to the world we find ourselves in? And, a question often neglected by therapy, when is collective or political action the appropriate response to psychological distress?

These are philosophical questions, but they aren't solved by producing sufficiently clever answers. They are also emotional questions, bodily questions and questions about how we continue to live. Sometimes the work isn't to make the bad thing seem better. It is to find out how we can live alongside the fact that it really is bad.

Looking under the floorboards

Midgley's plumbing metaphor helps here because it tells us that philosophical reflection doesn't require us to throw everything away and construct a complete new worldview.

Our conceptual systems, like our actual plumbing, were never (as Midgley puts it) “consciously planned as a whole”. They have histories. We inherit them, alter them and bolt bits on as circumstances change. And our conceptual systems are intimately connected with the structures of our emotions, sensations, and relationships.

We all have beliefs about what people are like, what matters, what makes us valuable, and how life ought to be lived. We didn't necessarily choose them. Some are inherited from our families. Some come from religion, education, work, friendships or relationships. Some are supplied by our prevailing culture and political and economic systems so persistently that we barely notice they are there: independence is good; productivity is virtuous; successful people are happy; needing other people is weakness.

Therapy can sometimes involve lifting the metaphorical floorboards and having a look. The aim isn't to blitz the place down to the basement and start again. Some of our inherited assumptions serve us perfectly well, while others may need adapting. Some peculiar bit of pipework installed several generations ago may turn out to be causing problems all over the house, but even that might come in useful if we recycle it for another purpose.

Perhaps one of the freedoms that therapy can offer is the chance to discover which answers we have inherited, which ones we have chosen, which ones have been useful to us, and which ones no longer fit the lives we want to live. You don't need to have studied philosophy to do any of this. Midgley's point was precisely that philosophy isn't an optional luxury detached from ordinary life. The structures of thought are already there.

Sometimes we just need a reason to look at the plumbing.