Philosophy

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Philosophy’ functions as a contested and richly layered term that encompasses at least three distinct registers: philosophy as the intellectual heir of ancient religious mysteries, philosophy as a therapeutic and transformative way of life, and philosophy as an institutionalised academic discipline resisting its own soul-making vocation. Edinger reads early Greek philosophy as the psychological successor to the mystery traditions, arguing that the pre-Socratics articulated the major archetypal concepts of the collective unconscious at a moment when mythic containment was no longer sufficient. Sharpe and Ure, building on Pierre Hadot, trace the persistent tension between philosophy conceived as impersonal conceptual discourse and philosophy as an ethical practice of self-cultivation — a tension that resurfaces with particular intensity in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s polemics against academic professionalisation. McGilchrist insists that philosophy is never purely impersonal reason but is always shaped by the temperament, character, and biographical history of its practitioner. Vernant locates the origins of philosophical thought in the Greek break from mythic logic toward logos and rational intelligibility, while simultaneously noting philosophy’s quasi-religious and initiatory character. The central tension throughout the corpus is whether philosophy’s proper object is theoretical truth or the transformation of the living person — a question Jung himself implicitly answered by insisting that psychology debouches inevitably into philosophy.

In the library 29 passages

philosophy sought to do for men what the mysteries could only do in part, and that it therefore includes most of what we should now call religion… Greek philosophy includes most of what we now call the archetypal level of the collective unconscious

Edinger argues that Greek philosophy functionally replaced the mysteries as the vessel for archetypal and religious experience, making it the ancient precursor to depth psychology’s engagement with the collective unconscious.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis

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academic philosophy is considered a purely theoretical discipline that aims at systematic knowledge… we have seen a powerful resurgence of interest in the countervailing ancient view that philosophy facilitates human flourishing. Philosophy, Seneca famously stated, teaches us doing, not saying.

Sharpe and Ure establish the foundational tension between philosophy as systematic theory and philosophy as ethical practice aimed at transforming how one lives.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

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academic philosophy is considered a purely theoretical discipline that aims at systematic knowledge… we have seen a powerful resurgence of interest in the countervailing ancient view that philosophy facilitates human flourishing. Philosophy, Seneca famously stated, teaches us doing, not saying.

Ure and Sharpe frame the entire study around the recovery of philosophy’s ancient identity as an ethical and transformative way of life against its modern reduction to impersonal theory.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

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Philosophy is not, then, purely a matter of impersonal reason, but living: bound up in the temperament, character and history of the person who expounds it… ‘the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.’

McGilchrist, drawing on James and Dewey, argues that philosophy is irreducibly personal and temperamental rather than objectively impersonal, aligning philosophical inquiry with psychological individuality.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Schopenhauer reclaims and revises the ancient philosophical schools’ ideal of philosophy as a spiritual and therapeutic exercise that converts or cures the soul. Yet Schopenhauer also radically contests ancient philosophy’s optimistic rationalism.

Schopenhauer rehabilitates philosophy as soul-therapy while simultaneously contesting ancient rationalism’s belief that reason alone can liberate the will from suffering.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

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the modern professionalization of philosophy as a university discipline has turned it into a sophistic discourse that answers to the needs of the marketplace rather than the soul.

Schopenhauer’s critique, as reconstructed by Ure, identifies the institutionalisation of philosophy as a corruption that severs it from its original therapeutic and soul-oriented purpose.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

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Greek philosophy had in the 6th century B.C. trod the way which leads from myth to the Logos… the power of philosophical speculation which had been weakened by skepticism showed itself… no longer strong enough to dam the stream of religious mysticism

Edinger traces Greek philosophy’s arc from confident rationalism to a collapse of speculative power before the return of religious mysticism, mapping a psychological regression from logos back toward mythos.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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the form of the poem in which even a doctrine as abstract as that of Parmenides is still presented reflects how much of the character of a religious revelation was retained in early philosophy… the sage was originally defined as the exceptional being who has the power to see and reveal the invisible.

Vernant demonstrates that early philosophy retained the form and authority-claims of religious revelation, blurring the boundary between philosophical and initiatory knowledge.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Philosophy distinguishes these spheres from one another in order to prevent confusion… the authentic being beyond nature that philosophy strives to reach and reveal has nothing to do with the supernatural of myth: it belongs to a quite different category; it is a pure abstraction.

Vernant argues that philosophy’s decisive move was to separate the human, natural, and divine into distinct conceptual domains, replacing mythic confusion with rational abstraction.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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we tend today to think of philosophy as a body of impersonal, conceptual discourses, embodied in written texts, to be interpreted in more or less complete abstraction from their social, institutional and biographical preconditions.

Sharpe and Ure identify the modern reduction of philosophy to impersonal conceptual discourse as a historiographical distortion that occludes its original social, biographical, and practical dimensions.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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if how we understand philosophy, and what can count as philosophy changes, then what we will include and exclude in any history of philosophy will also change.

The normative and descriptive charge carried by the term ‘philosophy’ determines what enters the historical canon, making metaphilosophy inseparable from historiography.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reclaimed elements of the ancient idea that philosophy is a transformation of our way of inhabiting and perceiving the world… ‘the dignity of philosophy is trampled into the dust’

Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche opposed the nineteenth-century professionalisation of philosophy by reasserting philosophy’s ancient identity as existential transformation.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reclaimed elements of the ancient idea that philosophy is a transformation of our way of inhabiting and perceiving the world… ‘the dignity of philosophy is trampled into the dust’

Ure shows that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche shared a polemical diagnosis of modernity’s debasement of philosophy and a common orientation toward philosophy as world-transforming practice.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Philosophy’s aim, in pursuing wisdom, must ultimately be to cultivate the virtues… ‘the beauty of Wisdom, which is the body of Philosophy… results from the order of the Moral Virtues which visibly make that joy.’

Dante’s position, as read by Sharpe and Ure, holds that philosophy’s telos is moral virtue and the cultivation of living wisdom rather than disembodied theoretical truth.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Philosophy’s aim, in pursuing wisdom, must ultimately be to cultivate the virtues… Philosophy should be ultimately a divinely sent ‘guide’ for living.

Dante’s philosophy-as-guide-for-living thesis represents a medieval recovery of the ancient ideal that wisdom is practical and moral, not merely speculative.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Greek philosophy has its own particular psychological context in antiquity. It was only one of a number of currents which came together as the sources of the modern Western psyche.

Edinger situates Greek philosophy within a broader psycho-historical matrix, arguing that it is one tributary — alongside Hebrew, Babylonian, and other sources — feeding the modern Western psyche.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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philosophical thought found it possible to disengage itself from the spontaneous forms of language in which it had been expressing itself, and to subject them to a preliminary critical analysis.

Vernant traces philosophy’s emergence as the moment logos detaches from ordinary language and myth, establishing rational non-contradiction as the supreme criterion of thought.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Schopenhauer reprises the Socratic claim that true philosophy can only derive from those who live for philosophy rather than those who live off it… ‘this kind of money-making devalues the dignity of philosophy.’

Schopenhauer draws on the Stoic and Socratic distinction between genuine philosophical vocation and sophistic professionalism to condemn the commercialisation of academic philosophy.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Schopenhauer reprises the Socratic claim that true philosophy can only derive from those who live for philosophy rather than those who live off it… ‘this kind of money-making devalues the dignity of philosophy.’

The Stoic and Socratic ideal — that philosophy is a vocation lived rather than a commodity traded — is mobilised by Schopenhauer against the university system’s corruption of philosophical inquiry.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Does any conception of philosophy as PWL require that the specifically rational, argumentative dimensions of philosophy be devalued, collapsing any distinction between philosophy and rhetoric or religion?

Sharpe and Ure raise the critical meta-philosophical question of whether philosophy-as-way-of-life dissolves the boundary between philosophy and religion or rhetoric, threatening philosophy’s rational identity.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Does any conception of philosophy as PWL require that the specifically rational, argumentative dimensions of philosophy be devalued, collapsing any distinction between philosophy and rhetoric or religion?

The tension between philosophy’s rational argumentative core and its therapeutic-spiritual aspirations is posed as a fundamental unresolved question within the PWL framework.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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the common creed of Greek philosophy that nature is strictly ordered by reason and does not admit exceptions to its rules… man’s freedom is taken as the consequence of his being endowed with reason

Dihle identifies the foundational naturalistic rationalism of Greek philosophy — the equation of reason, nature, and freedom — as the framework within which classical moral psychology was constructed.

Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting

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Behind nature and beyond appearances, an invisible background is formed, a truer reality, secret and hidden, which the philosopher seeks to attain and which he makes the proper object of his meditation.

Vernant describes the philosopher’s distinctive orientation toward invisible, intelligible reality beyond sensory appearance as constitutive of philosophical inquiry’s separation from common experience.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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the Hellenistic schools’ ideal of sovereign, rational self-mastery offers nothing more than an illusory substitute for civic freedom… ‘Stoicism rests on the illusion of freedom when one is enslaved’

Hegel’s and Arendt’s deflationary critique of Hellenistic philosophy as a compensatory illusion rather than genuine liberation shapes the modern German reception of ancient philosophical therapy.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside

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the Hellenistic schools’ ideal of sovereign, rational self-mastery offers nothing more than an illusory substitute for civic freedom… ‘Stoicism rests on the illusion of freedom when one is enslaved’

Ure traces how Hegel’s critique — that Hellenistic philosophy substitutes inner withdrawal for genuine political freedom — became the dominant modern framework for dismissing ancient PWL.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside

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the modern Stoicism movement continues to go from strength to strength… bringing together psychologists, counsellors, academics, with members of the wider community devoted to reanimating PWL

Sharpe and Ure note that contemporary movements are actively reviving philosophy-as-way-of-life in practical and therapeutic registers, bridging the academy and the wider community.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside

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By separating the ultimate cause of being from being itself, the Platonists were able to preserve the unity of being and thought on which Parmenides had based philosophy and firmly established the primacy of reason.

Dihle shows how Platonic philosophy preserved rationalism’s primacy by separating the Absolute from being itself, a move that simultaneously opened the door to voluntarist and mystical alternatives.

Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982aside

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