WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS IS PHILOSOPHY NOT PSYCHOTHERAPY

Rational Human beings need philosophy, a rational path to life that guides their thinking and enables them to live in a certain manner. They need a philosophy with which to guide their minds, balm their minds, so as to tolerate the world’s absurdities as they are.

Philosophy gives people a roadmap to guide their lives; philosophy gives people light with which to see the world although it does not predict the future.

The masses, on the other hand, need religion that gives them mythological answers, not necessarily rational answers, to guide their lives.

People do not need shallow psychotherapies that do not answer the existential questions that confront them.

Psychotherapy assumes that people are mentally sick and need treatment; actually, most people are normal but are perplexed by the exigencies of living on earth and need guidance on how to live.

Perhaps, two percent of the people are psychotic (hallucinate and are deluded)? The rest of mankind has questions that only philosophy and or religion can answer for them.

No psychotherapy or psychology in general answers the question: what is life; why do we live and why should we not commit suicide?

Sigmund Freud and his speculations on sex obviously did not answer existential questions of what life is.

Alfred Adler came close to answering existential questions although he allowed his socialist orientation to lead him to posit a teleological goal that folks should strive after, social interest, as the condition for mental health. One can serve only ones interests, such as capitalists do, and be psychologically normal.

The twentieth century was not a century of philosophy and, in fact, did not produce any noted philosopher.

Was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of language real philosophy or mere escape from reality?

Science so overwhelmed twentieth century epistemology that philosophers saw themselves as irrelevant and took refuge in talking about the influence of language on perception instead of talking about the traditional issues that philosophers normally talked about (ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, morality, beauty and so on) .

Science, so far, shades light on matter, space and time but not on the serious issues that exercise the human mind, such as who are we and where did we come from and where do we go to when we die, is death the end of us or do we have spirits that survive us?

Science avoids issues that its scientific method cannot verify, such as the existence of other worlds and spirit. In the future science will probably prove the existence of the multiverse, some of which are spiritual, that is, non-material universe.

The twentieth century was the century of psychology; psychological thinking produced shallow psychotherapies that do not appeal to adult men, may be to women (the majority of today’s therapists are women; men have fled from Psychology and psychiatry).

The age of psychotherapy is over; we now must return to giving rational human beings what they want, a philosophy for adults and a religion to irrational persons.

Boethius said that philosophy is the solace of intelligent persons and Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses.

I have examined most of the philosophies and religions of mankind and borrowed from all of them and synthesized them into a philosophy that makes sense to me, the quintessential rational mind. What makes sense to me makes sense to scientists; we need a philosophy that we do not have to accept on faith but accept on the basis of pure reason, realizing as Immanuel Kant reminded us in his “Critique of pure reason” that pure reason has limitations.

The philosophy I have synthesized is Harmony Haven. It is akin to Gnosticism (see Plotinus’s Ennead and Helen Schuman’s A course in miracles) but is not it for it does not negate this world and escape to some wooly world that we cannot verify; it is like existentialism (see the writings of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jasper, Heidegger, Van Deurzen etc.) but it is not depressed and drown itself in sorrow and addictions (over eating, sex, alcohol and drugs).

It is a philosophy that accepts the world as it is, meaningless and pointless, but boldly gives us a path to finding meaning and purpose to live for.

If it makes you feel fine to see Harmony Haven as religion by all means do so. Philosophy and religion perform the same function for people: give them mental maps and answer existential questions.