 So, hi, Lou, and welcome. Hello, Louise. It's our first conversation, in fact. And I'm really glad that this is happening, because we could say, but those who are not very familiar with philosophical counseling, we could say that you are the most famous philosophical counselor in the world. Would you agree with that definition? Well, I'm not entirely happy to be in that category. I would say I'm certainly one of the pioneers of the contemporary movement. I think there have been philosophical practitioners in every generation, probably some of them better known to us, others less well known. But I guess what you're alluding to is Plato not Prozac and its translation into so many languages 20 years ago now, more or less it came out. So it was one of the, we could say the tips of the spear that helped to bring our movement into tremendous prominence. But I mean, there are many, many of us present company, including yourself, who have worked very hard and gradually to advance the awareness and the success of our movement. Well, thanks. Thanks. And I think that one of the notions that we could, that could define us is this idea of philosophical health, which can have various definitions, right? How do you relate to it? Do you have your own approach? I would like to say that I don't, but you know, I tell my Buddhist friends that I'm not a Buddhist and they say that I'm so non Buddhist that I must be a Buddhist. So if you take that kind of dialectical tack, then I guess everybody has an approach, but we run the risk now of amusing our fellow philosophers and confusing perhaps your generic viewers. Wouldn't it be fair to say that there's no two philosophers agree on what philosophy is? That would be rather fair. But now the more we multiply the signifiers, the more we get narrow, right? So we're having a signifier that is not innocent, right? Philosophical health, that's quite surprising. Does it mean that it can be compared to other forms of health that we are familiar with? That's what I would argue. I would argue that we know what is physical health, right? Although there are much debate about it, but we have a certain idea what it refers to psychological health. I mean, we know, I think we think we know what help means, but one would also surely be able to say that there are appropriate forms of help and inappropriate forms of help relative to a certain situation, right? So I would like to have this narrowing with you, Louis. To say what we do, but I have to preface it in all candor by saying that I don't know any two philosophical counselors who take the same approach. And so this is a wonderful thing. I mean, if you go to a dentist, I think you have a reasonable expectation that there are best practices in place on a given day for treating a tooth in a certain way, and that most dentists, if they're following best practices, they can do it more or less well depending on their art. But the science is fairly well established, although it's subject to revision, yeah? But I don't think philosophy is anything like that. And the changing contours of societies and the political and ideological dynamics that drive them are so malleable that even if we think we're doing something specific on a given day, the next day we may have to adapt to novel circumstances. Well, fair enough, fair enough. So we tried a definitional approach to start with and we got Socrates, and that's fair enough. So let's start with a more phenomenological, biographical approach. You were, as all of us in your teenage, who 20, when did you really start feeling that you had a philosophical vocation? Okay, now we can get concrete about something. And I didn't initially. You know, I'm a child of the 60s. I came of age, I remember 1969, particularly well. It was the moon landing and wood stock and, you know, and the deaths of some of our rock star icons. And I was 18 years old. And at that age, I think most boys or certainly boys of my generation and girls were interested in, you know, in rock music. And in my case, motorcycles and Play-Doh was very far down on the list of priorities at that time. But not long afterward, because of the influence, I think of pop culture. The Beatles brought Indian philosophy into public awareness. Alan Watts was publishing popular books about Zen and about Dow. So we got a dose of Asian wisdom traditions along with the kind of hippie counterculture that we were immersed in. So that was an awakening experience for me. And I was happy to use or to learn to utilize those kinds of guidances in my own life. But I never dreamed that I would actually utilize philosophy more broadly conceived to help others. And that didn't happen until 1990. So it was, you know, 20, more than 20 years later. Okay. So did that what we could call new age without being a pejorative at this stage, did that play a real existential role on your biography? Like, did you feel that this gave you a tool towards constructing your world in a meaningful or healthy manner? Absolutely. But I would not use new age, either pejoratively or not pejoratively new age happened in the 90s. But the hippie counterculture was not new age. We were, excuse me, we were, we were old age, re-experienced in youth. The traditions that we tapped into were traditions of cosmic consciousness, if you like, and mind expansion with or without the help of psychedelic drugs and all these other things that were going on in the music music and the trust that was shared by this kind of community. The notion of a freak was, was a, was a fantastic compliment in those in 1969 of somebody called you a freak. It meant you were an individual expressing yourself in a non-harmful but very creative way. And that was a wonderful aspiration. And when everybody in the community became a freak, we could all trust each other. It was very non-judgmental, you know, there was no conformity, it was really anti-conformity. Naturally, once Madison Avenue got hold of it, so we ended up with the consumer version of this, which was what? It was, it was colored kitchen appliances, colored bed sheets and colored tissue paper. You know, this is what was made of the rainbow of experiences that we had. It got grossly commercialized. And of course many ex-hippies became stockbrokers and, you know, other more, more traditional and lucrative pursuits were engaged in. But this wasn't New Age. New Age was more to me like the Celestine prophecy. That was the early 90s. This is a backlash against reality actually. People preferred to retreat into a kind of fairy tale domain, into a domain of optimistic faith perhaps, where, you know, there was a cosmic plan for them and so everything would turn out okay. Everyone will live happily ever after, that sort of thing. It came with this counter movement of anti-realism that was spawned at that time. But really my beginning, if that's what you're asking, I can be very clear, Luis. I mean, we're having these really interesting, you know, allusions to other cultural phenomena. I was working in the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia as a researcher. And what we discovered, and one approach to philosophical counseling, is definitely applied ethics. There are many ways in which we found each of us our own way into this field, right? But there was no field to begin with. So each of us came by definition from some other place, be it psychoanalysis, or be it rational motive therapy, or be it some other road that we were on. In my case, it was applied ethics. And because of the traction that applied ethics has in the public mind, to be it on environmental issues or business ethics, medical ethics is a huge domain, a very important one, genetic engineering, all these things were newsworthy and still are. So the media of the day in Vancouver and more broadly CBC Canada, we're coming to apply ethicists for their little sound bites on these issues of the day, physician-assisted suicide, or what do we do about logging the old rainforest. I mean, these are really interesting important things. And applied ethicists were giving their kind of condensed views. But the public connected us to their own stuff. Members of the public started coming to the center for applied ethics. And my first two cases were precisely this. Somebody phoned in one day and said, I want to talk to a philosopher. So our secretary, I happened to be there. The secretary said, you want to talk to this guy? I said, sure, I'll talk to him. And it was my first case. And it was a really interesting case. And we were able to resolve it with a phone call. But it was a case of a moral dilemma in a professional context. There was, you know, so the second case was a walk-in. So a graduate student had heard about us, walked in off the street and said, I want to talk to a philosopher. So we realized, I mean, we had a bunch of applied ethicists on the faculty. And we suddenly realized there was a need in the public domain, which was not being met, even though Canada, and I'm sure like Sweden, has a very generous social safety net and looks after by and large the mainstream needs of its citizens. There was no such provision of service at the time. So we decided what we've got to figure out a way to provide. We're being asked to do this. We'll do it. And that was my entry point into what we today call philosophical counseling. It's interesting because you mentioned two words that resonate almost dialectically. On the one hand, cosmic consciousness. On the other hand, ethics. And I mean, that's, that's a wonderful story. And I agree with you that even generous welfare states, like Sweden where I lead, tend to have normative stances and politics as regards mental health. And I would say that we are far from having the philosophical approach as one that would be sponsored by the state. Although there are signs that might indicate that because of the failure of other state sponsored approaches, there might be, I mean, there's clearly an openness to that. And for example, I'm working with the Swedish own multinational organization, the Vatican Farron, a philosophical health program. And clearly there's an interest and awareness and a desire to try. But so let's come back to this sort of dialect. So on the one hand, you have something that might in some cases be practiced as normative, right? Ethics. This idea that we are in this real dimension. We apply rules to that allow us in this one shared universal world with codes, etc. Or with national variations, but still, we apply these rules to leave better have better dialogue. On the one hand, you spoke of cosmic consciousness. And I think this refers might refer to another view of philosophy, right? Which is a view of philosophy that I'm not saying that I share it fully, but I've been contemplating it because I've been re-reading about, you know, the Greek philosophers which we know of you, we were referring to Socrates that philosophy has an altered state of consciousness. Because I think that in a way, this might be what the Greeks discovered for us reason. And this sort of metaphysical dialogue seems sometimes a bit normal because we have a long tradition, right? But imagine for the Greeks, right? And Socrates and there are some observers that say, you know, Socrates telling the Greek citizens to start questioning their values might have been completely, you know, mind blowing and really a scandal for them or appealing to really something strange. So where would you be on that sort of scale or positional scale, altered state of consciousness on the one hand and normity, rational normativity on the other? I don't see them as, I don't see this as dichotomy. It's dialectic then. It's a false dichotomy. So what's the synthesis? One who becomes, I would like to say that if one is part of what I mean by cosmic consciousness is the notion that we're not isolated beings and we're not living between our ears, that we're by definition social animals, political animals, communal animals. We have all these varying degrees and nuances of activity that that declares the human being to be interconnected with others, whether we wish to or not, even someone like Nietzsche who puts himself outside of this in order to look on it and diagnose it. And so he's intimately bound up with it in the very fact of his disengagement in order to reengage. So no one is separate, nothing stands alone. And again, I'm not wanting to be pedantic, but in Buddhist ontology, as well as in certain kinds of Western phenomenology, we understand the interconnectedness of all phenomena. There is nothing that stands alone as an entity in the universe. And philosophers who try to do this may in fact need solitude in order to ascend some contemplative mountain. Sure, you want to do this. But when you gain the view from the summit, you're right back in the mix with the cosmos. You don't escape from the cosmos. So that's one thing. Walker Percy wrote a very interesting book. You know, the famous, well, once famous American semi-autisticist and also an existentialist in party, he wrote the last self-help book. It's Lost in the Cosmos, he called it. Because the part of the predicament of existential and post-existential man has been this deconstruction of identity, deconstruction of norms, deconstruction of the nuclear family of society. All the things that bound us together for a certain amount of time have been changed, morphed. So the search for identity, the search for meaning, as Frankel rightly saw in his day, has become a bigger one. I know that you see this and we see this all the time. But coming back to something else, you know, I think that there are interconnections that people would benefit from exploring more deeply. And in terms of now not just ethics as metaethics or comparative ethics but virtue ethics, let me say something to you, really two things. Firstly, what we did in the early days of philosophical counseling, at least in my context, was to realize that it truly was invented by civilians, ordinary people who wanted to talk to a philosopher who felt this was a resource that was absent from their lives and sometimes it's just what you need. You may not want to talk to a philosopher every day, just like you might not want to talk to a poet every day, you know, but sometimes that's exactly the person you want to talk to. So the resource is there. And really if you want to qualify it, I think it's very sharply qualifiable in this sense. Applied ethicists, back to my approach through that field, applied ethicists are really dealing with issues. They want to formulate and address very broad issues that are floating above the heads of the people who have them. They want to talk about the ethics of abortion, the ethics of euthanasia, the ethics of the environment, the ethics of medical engineering. These things are issue oriented pursuits and the debate that unfolds will ultimately have influence on policy and probably law at some point, you know, but we contribute to a public debate and shed light on ethical domains and this will influence regulatory policies and the way in which legislators eventually craft or change laws. So applied ethicists have that role to play. But if someone comes to you, Luis, or to me and says if a woman comes in and says, well, you know, I'm contemplating an abortion but I really don't know at this point whether I should or not, or I'm contemplating physician assisted suicide or I'm contemplating chaining myself to a tree to prevent it from being cut down. I mean, these are personal issues. These are the same issues but they're embodied because issues are not free floating all the time. The issues are issues because people have them. So if you want to say that applied ethics is issue oriented phronesis, I would say that's a good definition. But if you want to say philosophical counseling is person oriented phronesis, I think that's an equally good definition. Practical wisdom for people who have particular issues and want a philosopher to help them resolve them, not to tell them what to do but to help them think effectively and creatively and make their own decisions in an informed way. I think we share that sense that and I think it ties nicely with your narrative of the 60s. The singularity, what in France, actually the French philosophers of the 60s call the singularity, right? Not in the sense of computers taking over but in the sense of the person's personal biography, destiny, what I call the conceptual constellation of the person. And I share with you this idea that in my practice that it's not about applying a greed of the philosophical healthy way to live. For example, you need to have a certain logic or no, it's really about cognitive diversity, I think. I think that we're playing a big role in the world that is asking more and more for it. In the sense that even if we are all interconnected, there are various forms of life. There are various forms since you talk about cosmos. I don't know if this pedantic or not, at this stage of my life I don't really care. Cosmo poyesis, right? The world making power that we have as humans and that means that we don't have to conform to one way, the normal way of living but we can let emerge our singularity, our conceptual constellation. It means the kind of network of values, since you spoke of values, that functions for us as a structural integrity that allows us to go in the world without always saying giving up or adapting or saying, okay, I really abide by rules that are not rules that I co-created. Now, would you say that the evolution of, so you're right, I mean, definitely you are one of the pioneers. So what's the evolution of that idea of philosophy as being something that people, some people, as you say, nicely and quite American-ly because if there's a demand, there's a market. But I like, I find it very beautiful. So some people, indeed, I had that case discussing with the psychiatrist, European psychiatrist the other day, she was working, she works with people who have autistic syndrome and some of them might be rather violent. But in this case, she tried so many things with this patient. And the only thing that worked was when she said, you know, I'm out of options, I'm gonna call her philosopher and she started having this triangle of conversation and she had very good results. Now, this was a person who was inclined to intellectual processing of the world. And I'm almost finished, don't worry, it's not gonna be a very long sentence, but I get the feeling as a philosophical counselor that a lot of people that come to me, whether they have been diagnosed or whether they've been successful until now, but they might be, you know, they have that intellectual type. They like to understand, process the world through some form of concepts, perhaps even some form of theorization. Would you agree with that? Yeah, by and large, and I share some of your experiences, as you've summarized it, I've worked quite successfully with some psychiatrists from psychologists also, and I've had, of course, many clients who are clinical psychologists themselves, so they bring an interesting dimension into the consulting room. They don't entirely necessarily subscribe to the party line of the DSM or any of those things, and some of them are traumatized by interactions within the psychological, psychiatric, psychoanalytic community, which are by no means always peaceful, as you probably know. So let me return to your main point that there is, what we would say in American terms is that our work is really the popular books that I've written and that my colleagues write also are really geared more toward what publishers would call the high end of the self-help market. So it's still self-help that people are looking for. That's the biggest single segment right now, and there are interesting reasons for it, but it's not the psychobabble end. It's not the, you know, some mantra I can repeat to myself, and then after a few days it wears off and I need another self-help book. You know, if self-help really helps, people would only need one book. They'd read the book. They'd be helped. They'd get on with their lives, but the fact is that self-help becomes another dependency, so people need a self-help book every week, precisely because it's not helping them to help themselves. It becomes a crutch, but it's a crutch of a kind which may or may not have an enduring effect. At the, I want to say the higher end, and I'm really talking about the more thoughtful end, this is not a hierarchical kind of demarcation, just the more thoughtful people are really neglected in our society for reasons you touched on earlier. When we institutionalize anything, it gets homogenized, and it ends up being run by bureaucrats, and okay, I mean, it has to be this way. If we do large-scale institutionalizations like the social democracies do, then you end up with a bureaucracy even if you didn't start with one. That is a fact of life when you're trying to manage large-scale issues in a kind of systematized way, but what it really does is it crushes the individual. There's no place for the individual in such a system. Everything becomes checkboxes, paint by numbers, regimentation, and some people in the marrow of their bones are so philosophical that they just don't respond well to that kind of treatment. Our medicine has, on the one hand, doubled, you know, the leading edge of medicine has doubled life expectancy, but has stopped treating people. It's only treating illness. Where's the human being in all of this? Even if you're grading state-of-the-art medical treatment, they don't even know who you are. You walk in there, oh, there, you know, your church, you know, we used to have a family doctor who you could call literally a relation in my case, and you could call this person at 2 in the morning, and they would come over with their black bag, and they were treating people. First and foremost, they knew everybody, so they knew the context, and very often illness is contextualized. You know you're speaking about things like autism is a very broad spectrum of issues. It's huge. It's not one thing, it's many things. Same with ADHD. It's not one thing, it's many things. So if we stop treating people, then we lose sight of the whole purpose, in my view. Naturally, we need to systematize, and we need to regiment, and we need, you know, all those things happen, but God help us if the state gets hold of philosophical counseling and tries to regiment it in the way that they regiment other professions. It's not going to work, because we ourselves will not abide by it. You know, we're on the horns of that dilemma, too, Luis. We've had political sponsorship in the United States, and you know that in the U.S., it opens the door to rivers of money. You know, we don't accept third-party insurance, because we're not empowered by states through what we do, but most of us don't want that. We don't want to be colonized by the insurance companies, and certainly we're not going to be colonized by big pharma. But you know there's this resistance, and we want acceptance, but also philosophers or people who, by definition, are nonconformist. Socrates was a nonconformist. He did a great deal of good, but he was an educator, and if we really are educators, and it's our duty, I believe, to constantly encourage people to challenge what they believe, to ask if they have good grounds for believing what they believe. It's really Cartesian. It's Socratic. It's all of those things. And we walk the walk. We're also going to have one foot in the real world, and we're going to try in our own ways to be advocates for various causes that we espouse. So it's an interesting equation, right? It's a very good thing, I think, for some people to want to do this. The whole society always needs gadflies, so I'll just leave it there. We're the modern gadflies. Yeah, so every one of your sentences, I think, would call for one hour of conversation. This is really rich, and I'm sorry for the people looking at us who would expect some sort of disagreement, because I'm in full agreement, and I think you just gave a very nice definition of philosophical health. I couldn't agree more about the fact that, you know, we speak so much of oppressed minorities. We always forget the people with an intellectual orientation. I think the world is so intellectual today, and they are the oppressed minority that we're not talking about. And they are from our experience, because we talk to people that are from all over the world. They are from all social classes. It's not such thing as intellectuals are protected. No, I mean, in the middle of the really bad moments of the pandemic in India, I had a counsellor that needed to talk with me with people in his family dying around him, and that's how he needed that. And so you talked about self-help, and that's an interesting point, because sometimes I think this is not a question, but isn't philosophy about self-transcendence, right? So that's the paradox, right? You're trying to live your life, and at the same time, you realize that, well, sometimes the best way to being yourself is to serve an ideal or a deep orientation. Would you agree with that? I do, and I don't. So if people want disagreement, we could probably now get into politics or something. Let's do that. So, all right, well, let's disagree. No, I'm sorry, I'm still disagreeing, maybe as a preamble to disagreeing, but I think there's a tension, we've talked about this implicitly the whole time already, that there's always a tension between the individual and the group. You know, people want to be who they are, but also need to belong or need to identify with some group and need, moreover, usually the approval or the sanction of a group in order to do what they do. But in the history of politics, just as in the history of psychology and philosophy, there's a tension between being who you are, you know, as your own individual person, be it genes or be it culture, be it both, you're an individual, you're recognizable as such, and also part of us wants and needs to conform in certain ways or to anti-conform. So, there's always going to be a relationship between the self and other, and this is the paradox of, you know, of the individual and the state, and it gets played out on many stages, so we agree on that. But actually, the pandemic has changed a lot of things, and we could say a bit about this. I want to return to one thing, though, as a focal point. Identity politics, in my view, has absolutely crushed the individual and has been toxic to any kind of humanism, actually, that I think is beneficial to people, no matter what kind of humanism, whether it's the late-stage Renaissance humanism where people were both good Catholics but also interested in arts and letters and philosophy. I mean, that was an ancient form of Western humanism. It's only a few hundred years old. One could go to the, you know, to the next stage, which is the Enlightenment humanism, where it was still perfectly possible for somebody like Newton to be a creationist and to be extending the laws of physics. I mean, today that's not possible, but he did it, and that generation of humanists were the ones who discovered this paradox we're touching on, because they realized the universe is a lawful place and they wanted to discover what are the laws of physics, of chemistry, of biology, and maybe, you know, social science, which underscore our existence and they revealed in the natural sciences that the universe was very lawful. So, cosmos means order, right? Part of the essential meaning of cosmos is order. It's not chaos. It's order. It's close to logos. It's close to Dao. It's close to things which tell you that there are implicit lawful processes that we could be in touch with. And I think those things operate co-extensively in human domains as well. So, when we have too much liberty, we have perhaps the danger of anarchy, where everyone becomes the law unto themselves and disregards others. When we have too much conformity, the public intellectual is beyond being an endangered species in America. Public intellectuals basically have been destroyed. You know, the book industry has been colonized by a gargantuan thing called Amazon. I'm very grateful that Jeff Bezos, without him my books wouldn't be there, but there are no more little bookstores where you can go in and find specialty books and the person in the bookstore has read them all and you can sit and have a wonderful conversation with them and learn a lot and maybe buy a book or not. But this is the sort of niche culture that globalization has destroyed and also, therefore, robbed people of their ability to express their individual identities in all these different ways. So, that's one problem that we face. When everything becomes too homogenized, there's bound to be a counter-reaction, all right? That's what I wanted really to say to you. And identity politics is not allowing people to choose on some rational basis which group they would like to identify with. It's telling you from the moment of your birth by virtue of the most irrelevant possible criteria, namely your skin color or your sex, what group you belong to, and therefore whether you have moral credit or some demerits and it's crushing the individuality out of everybody right from the get-go. So, naturally, as you can see, I'm not a big fan of it. I see your point. And I think you're right that when we speak of diversity, we, philosophers, are more interested in, as I said before, incognitive diversity. How we can have pluralism, because I believe pluralism is a good thing in the standardized world, right? Or what Chantal Mouff calls agonistic pluralism because there will always be dialogue tensions, but this can be sort of articulated in some form of respect, but indeed we should be discussing values rather than what Plato would call images, right, as you refer to. Again, so many things that you mentioned, but I did notice that you mentioned Tao and you actually had a very strange list, Order Logos Dao. And then, and I'm going to let you talk, but then I remember you also said, well, Newton was a creationist. I get the feeling that today, 90% of physicists are creationists, not in the sense that they think that there was a guy with a beard, in this case, more you than me, because your beard is longer, that had a fiat look, created the world once and for all, but that there is a creative principle, a creacio continua, a creative principle at work in the world and what we could call Dao, what we could call Creel, what philosophers have been talking since Eric Lutus. And so physicists are saying today that there is this black matter, black energy, which is some sort of creative force, it's expanding, et cetera. So how do you articulate this creative possibility, which I would argue, I would agree that it's at the center of the universe and the fact that there needs to be localized order for life to thrive, right? I'm asking you that because I know you wrote a book on Daoism recently and it seemed to me that Dao was more on the side of this creative chaos, which can get locally ordered by a certain practice. So please tell me more about that. Why do you associate it? I wouldn't say less about it because the first verse of the Dao De Jing is that the real Dao cannot be defined. So if we're going to start talking about Dao, we're going to get further and further from Dao. The more we talk about it, you want to get close to it, don't talk about it, swim with it. But my friends in China, look, I've spent many, many, many fruitful days, weeks and months in China in the last 15 years or so, particularly, not since the pandemic, of course, but because of my, I suppose, love of Chinese philosophy and how it was a cradle for Buddhism and how it was very interesting. I really find Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism be fascinating. So China has demonstrated tremendous longevity as a civilization. So we have to look to China to understand some things about how they have kept themselves glued together, notwithstanding all of the transformations they've been through. So anyway, one of my dear friends and colleagues in China is the one who suggested that Dao had something to do with Logos. That's Professor Tikuan Pan of Nanjing University, who's a very, very interesting guy. He's done decision theory. I mean, he's a specialist in decision theory, but he's also a leading pioneer of philosophical counseling in China. And when we talk about Dao, his notion of Dao is that it's more allied to Cosmos and to Logos than to Chaos, because there is an order, although it's not an order that you can regiment in a political way or a legal way. You're not going to have a textbook on the order of Dao, but if you look at this, so what we have is a paradox, and I'm going to, I think we've been, we've been up in several ways, so we have really our dialogue to me is almost like we're opening a Pandora's box of paradoxes, which is a wonderful thing. I love paradox, and early in my career, I actually resolved some, I think very important ones. Of course, philosophers don't all agree about that, but some of my best work has been in this area, a very technical area of resolving technical paradoxes. But here's the point, Louis, that we always experience the individual versus the group in this quasi-paradoxical fashion. And diversity, as we mean it, not as a political slogan, which means we're going to exclude people we think are overrepresented. I mean, all of these myths and this whole horrible, Gordian knot of nonsense that's been basically put into orbit over our heads politically is destroying Western civilization. So pardon me for being adamant and passionate about that. I love Western civilization for all the good that it's contributed to the world. And in all the ways that what we call developing nations are trying to adopt the best practices of Western civilization to facilitate their development without necessarily rejecting their indigenous norms. I think there are beautiful possibilities on the ground for that kind of constructive change. But basically, we're looking at a phenomenon of impermanence because we know whether you want it from Taoism or Buddhism or from Greek philosophy that we have constantly to cope with change and our wisdom, if at all, is going to lie in coping with change in a more constructive rather than a more destructive way. And that fundamentally, this business of diversity as we mean is in a salutary way. Diversity in nature we value because when you go to the jungle and you find this proliferation of life forms, this gives life itself more possibility. It also means we can find cures for diseases we haven't even discovered yet. Nature is a better chemist than we are so far and all of that. So that kind of diversity is wonderful. The paradox comes in when you realize that 99% of all life forms that ever existed are extinct. So we're celebrating this enormous diversity and we're lamenting the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Borneo rainforest and the old growth forests and... there's only 1% of all life forms. So we're neglecting to recall that this thing we call diversity that we're trying to preserve is actually only the remaining 1% that lingers after all the great extinction state place. So again, we need to put things into perspective. We probably lost a lot of value without other 99% but we're not going to know because the fossil record is really minimal. So I'm saying that even when you talk about diversity as some kind of a desirable quality or a virtue, if you wish, you still need to realize that there is some selectivity that is going on behind the scenes and that what appears as diverse might actually be the result of a... this might be the end process of a very complicated selection that's gone on. Okay, so let's focus on... on philosophical health again and this is not to... to be politically correct because I mean, I do agree that in a way there is this red carpet syndrome, right? A lot of people are saying why is society not putting a red carpet in front of me? Right? I am also a victim and then we enter into this sartre and bad faith, right? Where we... we use the past as an argument to sort of ask for a status of victim. Nevertheless, I'd like to see this if possible, not as a re... in a reactionary manner also because there's always good in excesses, right? So I think what is happening now is that there is a very disorganized attempt to do something that I think is beautiful, which is cognitive diversity and real conceptual pluralism and various forms of life in the world and that is done in a way that is very human, which is very disorganized, chaotic, sometimes immature, but in the end I think that if we use that energy, you know a bit like martial arts since we were talking about Asia, we use that energy to take what's the best in it and what I see is that in the legal jurisprudence in the Anglo-Saxon world actually more than everywhere else for now, there is the emergence of a concept that is called protected philosophical belief. I don't know if you saw that, you probably saw that, but I think it is that some courts are now recognizing that someone who consistently applies a thought belief in her life may have in some moments an action that might be censored and punished by say a lawyer and that might be protected by the law. And I find that interesting because I think for example there was a case where a seller that was fired had to be reintegrated in his job because he claimed that he was a stoicist and needed to be honest with the clients and so when they asked is this any good, he said you know I don't think this is done by this but it is living according to you and the court recognizes that and so I think this in this indeed chaotic and sometimes a very childish debate about diversity I think behind that there is a question, a philosophical question which is do we live together without thinking or all the same thing and I know that I mean again we are into I don't know if there are paradoxes or simply a dialectic think is that of course on the one hand philosophy wants to create this universal world where you were talking about where we realize that there is some sort of enlightened rationality and we could live together and we are all interconnected so but at the other hand philosophy wants I believe also to favor different forms of experimentation with life, cognitive experimentation so this is a way to come back to your topic, to your previous topic initial topic because we are almost done with time at least for this first conversation of interconnection so you describe a world that is antagonistic right there is I mean the world we live in today and I know that's exaggerated by the media but there's a lot of tension, there's a lot of anger there's a lot of misunderstanding and to the point that people seem to be almost in different rational planets what can we do as philosophical healers I don't know if we are healers as shamanistic healers but what can we do as philosophical counsels and practitioners such that we will create harmony right, logos in that sense without being normative about the right way to think yeah great I mean I'm not a moral relativist either we have to I think make this clear I don't think you are either at the end of the day we respect and tolerate difference only if it's not aggressively harmful and malignant and you know I mean I think we should do pretty much what they want as long as they're not trying to kill me you know I mean we have to be tolerance and I respect all religions in this way if they're not out to get me I mean to be prudential about it right if they have a teaching that says people who look like me should be put to death I don't think I can tolerate that okay isn't that what every community does is that every community tries to expand their ideology right so in a way that every group web of belief if we don't have some sort of a collective mode of control they will try to expand well that's why we have laws you know we have nurture mimics nature in some ways so you have these competitions among species and within species which are very well documented in Darwin and Neo Darwinism I mean that's all played out but also nature can transcend so I've written my best book is my least read book it's called on human conflict and it was so it touches these issues so deeply that my academic publisher in the states wanted to censor it after accepting you know they saw I updated and then they were horrified because I was saying things they said that made them uncomfortable and I said to them it's not a philosopher's job to make people comfortable you want to be comfortable check into a palliative care unit they'll make you comfortable my job is not to make you comfortable my job is to make you think so you know I mean excuse me back to back to the Socratic model we're educators what we can do Luis and in the remaining time it's hard to kind of cash this out but you've said some really important things just now that people are waking up very angry very confused very frustrated and what they don't understand or understand only at the end is that this is being exacerbated by the power structures that are that are currently holding sway and that actually a lot of people in power are pulling these levers because they profit enormously from people's unhappiness people's rage people's discontent they can reify problems that they themselves have created blame them on the opposition and make them only worse when pretending to remedy them so they're victims who really are the victims who don't know they're the victims you know are getting the rewards of victimhood but that that is poison they're actually becoming made they're being made worse on a daily basis so what we can do as philosophers is to basically unshackle other people from this cave you said it early on when you talked about Plato people are being herded back into the cave now in numbers that we've never seen in history the only difference is they're being handed a remote control so they think they have the freedom of choice which cave wall which echoes on which cave wall screen do you want to watch but actually that's all the cave so our job has not changed since those days and I just want to say two things you know and then we can maybe begin to wrap up but I think that people have lost touch because most valuable of ancient wisdom traditions I know Indians have lost touch with Indian philosophy the Chinese who technologically are becoming like us now you go to Beijing you'll see the traffic jams you'll see the millionaires you'll see the all the all the tensions you know that we know about from the west and you know they've lost touch with Chinese philosophy they've lost touch with Tao they've lost touch with Confucianism it's really interesting so they're trying to also resuscitate this because they know and in the west we have lost touch with the whole idea of a philosopher being somebody who can stimulate debate and who can tolerate difference of opinion and try to harmonize it that's our job wholeness is an orchestra is whole but it has many voices but if the voices are brought into unison with some kind of you know a beautiful score then the orchestra is one thing with many many diverse parts that actually functions as a whole same with a choir as a society we want diversity because it's a beautiful thing aesthetically and it can be a beautiful thing in other ways too but it still needs to be harmonized and philosophy can be the harmonizer of this so you know that wholeness is an old word it comes from hail the idea of whole and the idea of being therefore integral in one's orientation to life if people who wake up in the morning are waking up angry waking up you know in some sense agitated and think that they're going to resolve a problem by destroying something then they're sadly misguided and probably will make things worse we need to step back and have an arena be it in a public space be it on YouTube be it in the classroom where students feel free to express really what are their views and feel free to do it without being prejudged how they look for God's sake which has nothing to do with their characters and feel free to express themselves even if it flies in the face of conformity that's what philosophers can do we create a space and you know it I know you do this in your practice I'll stop in a second we co-create a reflective space where people can be who they are and can feel tremendous relief in a dialogue that allows them that safe harbor of interchange of views and since when did this become so hard to find? that's why we're becoming more important now and God help the world if it's grasping at philosophy like a last straw if they grasp at it like a first straw we'd be in less trouble than we are now all over I like your passion and I like your reference to how today affliction is being mitigated by Netflixion but I think you said something that could be a nice conclusion like something positive something that emanates love also not just outrage and political outrage is important philosophy I do believe is the care for the whole in a world where most other disciplines are caring about parts you mentioned medicine and so if you care about parts you end up seeing the world as a machine constituted by parts and you lose the interconnection and so this care for the whole I think is something that people who come to us from different perspectives are looking at reconsidering and so I think that we've solved here a few of our paradoxes because well despite the fact that there are disagreements and different views etc we do need to sit down and say ok how do we how do we take care of the whole and it's not just at the level of this it is also at the level of this ball we call Earth right but it's also the whole the whole in a more cosmic conscious manner in a more in a manner that considers that well we need to be careful that this what Burbson called this universal production of values and gods and he was talking of gods as ideal we need to be careful that this infinite flow of possibility is taken care for such that we can continue to you know to feel it and to wake up in the morning and feel that wait a minute it is not because things have been such in the past that they need to be such in the future very nice and I love your reference to Burbson we could have a whole dialogue on him you know and his alternative evolutionary theory and so forth and maybe we are the sort of creature that just simply destroys a planet but it takes us a quarter of a million years I think our best bet is to get off the planet let's get to some other planets we're still going to need a philosopher on board by the way or a CD ROM or something because we'll be having these debates all over the galaxy so far what Nietzsche said just a parasite on the Earth's skin then I guess it's our duty to colonize other skins and to just keep doing what we do because we do it very well up to a point but yes to be optimistic and again what I wanted to say is people need for their own benefit and for the benefit of the larger social organisms that we construct and inhabit to get back in touch with the virtue ethics of antiquity we see Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius they were all virtue ethicists and Confucius is more privileging the group over the individual you know individual happiness comes from you fulfilling your duties to others in that matrix and it works, the Chinese are happier than us, Bertrand Russell wrote about this a century ago because of that brand of virtue ethics although they're getting unhappier now because they're more western and Aristotle privileged the individual over the collective as you know but still that's really a key thing because we mustn't lose sight of the importance of what psychotherapists call a healthy ego that's a pretty slippery term but you know it's good to be in a certain sense prudential in a good way in a helpful way, yes but Buddha did the took both, he said it's not a dichotomy either because the individual is supremely important you're the one who can wake up we're the ones who can help others to wake up but also you do need a community of awakened people to really further the whole process so it's not either or it's yes we're individuals and yes we're a community yes to both and all of them are advocating a practice not just contemplation not just what goes on, one of the nicest things a student ever said about me Luises you get these funny comments on evaluations you know students write very candidly and very truthfully therefore from deep levels and this student said last year gee the lecture was so interesting he said that the professor made me keep thinking even after the bell had rung so I hope this I hope this conversation which indeed sounds more like an introduction right will keep people thinking a bit and they're welcome to manifest themselves in the comments or any other way Lu I think that yeah we could continue forever maybe I'm a little bit of a psycho-rigid maybe I'm a little bit of a psycho-rigid because it's been exactly one hour or almost one hour so I don't know it's totally arbitrary or perhaps due to also the size of the files that we may import to YouTube right but thanks a lot and thanks for the tremendous energy that you've been putting in developing the the practice of philosophical counseling and care and also in a way that you you federate and you allow people to be able to find a philosopher when they want to talk to a philosopher you're very welcome Lu thank you very much for having me I hope that together that this will also help people to keep thinking after our bell has rung which it is now but we will continue I look forward to another conversation with you and thanks again for having me on your your channel thanks