Ready for change? Your time starts now

Oh happy day! Life Changing: A Philosophical Guide is now available online. Follow this link to the PalmerHiggs online bookstore to order or download a copy today.

From next week, Life Changing will also be available in Kindle, eBook, and print versions on Amazon.com and Kobe eBooks. Right now, the PalmerHiggs store is the only place you’ll find it. I’d like to thank PalmerHiggs, a small business based in Victoria, Australia, for the great service they offer a first time self-publisher. It has been a long process bringing Life Changing to publication, and throughout it all Joy Childs at PalmerHiggs has been consistently professional and helpful. I recommend this company to anyone who is publishing online. Show PalmerHiggs some love by purchasing your eBook on their site.

Life Changing marks the end of a personal journey. For the past fifteen years, I have been studying, teaching, and applying transformative philosophy in my own life, first as a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, then as a lecturer at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and more recently in my Philosophy for Change course, which I’ve run at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney. My guiding intuition throughout has been that it is possible to distil from philosophical ideas a kernel of practical wisdom, and that this practical wisdom can be communicated through simple exercises that students can apply to their own lives.

This intuition is core to Life Changing. The book is structured about five practical exercises. Each incorporates a life-changing insight. The exercises show you how to muster the courage to change; how to control yourself like a Stoic philosopher; how to cultivate your Nietzschean will to power; and how to use Spinoza’s philosophy to supercharge your social life. They show you how to take adventure from the heart of crisis and fulfilment from the struggle with adversity.

Sound good? You better believe it! Here is the exercise program in full:

Exercise One: The Last Day
Fire your passion. Take an Existentialist approach to life and change.

Exercise Two: The Power Within
Get a grip on yourself. Cultivate tranquillity with Stoic self-control.

Exercise Three: Urban Renewal
Unleash your powers. Affirm life with Nietzsche’s thought experiment.

Exercise Four: Live From the Heart
Diversify yourself. Cultivate agility with Spinoza’s approach to friendship.

Exercise Five: The Moment of Vision
Change time. Transfigure life with a visionary approach to change.

I’d like to give special thanks to Mark Junkunc for his fantastic work on the front and rear covers, and Mat Peden for the laborious layout work. Gentlemen: I am (as ever) in your debt.

I am currently lining up speaking work to promote Life Changing. To book or just throw around ideas, please email tim [at] philosophyforchange [dot] com [dot] au.

What is philosophy and why should I care?

It happened again. This time in a public place. I was walking with the crowd into Central Station when I stopped to talk to one of the charity workers who hover like butterflies about the station entrance. These guys usually freak me out a bit – with their friendly handshake that holds you in place and their sales patter cloaked as bonhomie – but I was feeling playful on the day, and so I went along with it, waiting for my chance to explain how I was already donating to a handful of charities and would rather keep my credit card details to myself, thank you very much.

The spruiker must have picked me for a tough sell because he played the long game. Instead of diving straight into an account of his employer’s good works, he decided to inquire into mine.

‘That’s an interesting set of sideburns you’re sporting, mate’, he said. ‘I bet you have an interesting job. What do you do?’

Did I groan aloud? I’m pretty sure I swallowed it. But I knew what was coming.

‘Well, I write’, I said. My interlocutor beamed expectantly. ‘Philosophy’, I added, after a pause. ‘I am a philosopher’.

That killed it. It always does. I’ve never had a hostile reaction from anyone. But the response is rarely what I’d consider positive. Usually, you see a glazed look appear in the other’s eyes. I imagine cogs and wheels turning in their brain as they try to slot you into some recognizable social role. Philosophers don’t fit – that’s the problem. A philosophy academic passes muster because he or she has an office, working hours, a salary and tax bracket – all the things that go to comprise a recognizable social function. But philosophers per se have no function. It confuses people.

‘Philosophy’, the spuiker replied, recovering himself. ‘That’s great! So … what is your philosophy?’

Learning how to love

‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.

Socrates as entrepreneur (4): philosophy as a tool of war

CHAPTER FOUR: PHILOSOPHY AS A TOOL OF WAR

But why are we talking about Socrates? If you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in practical wisdom to help you deal with contemporary crises and challenges. What could possibly be relevant in the story of a philosopher who died 2400 years ago? Isn’t this perpetuating the bad habit of looking to the teachings of long-dead white men for answers in a young, multi-ethnic, post-feminist world? Worse, it seems to be celebrating that hoary old intellectual chestnut, ‘reason’ – and reason has earned itself a bad reputation in recent years, deservedly so. The twentieth century saw reason applied to abominable ends: the rational extermination of millions of people in death camps; the establishment of the technocratic state, which claimed the right to socially engineer its populace in the name of rational gain; the ascendency of neo-liberal economic management, which posits every individual as a rational, value-maximizing agent (and too bad for you if you don’t fit the paradigm); the invention of the atomic bomb, turning war into Mutually Assured Destruction and international relations into game theory.

Why should we think about Socrates in the middle of cleaning up the mess that has been made by his descendants? Sure, Socrates is interesting – as a relic. But here in the second decade of the twenty first century, we have more important things to do than reflect on things that happened in the long-distant past. I hear these kinds of views from people all the time. I agree with the criticisms to a large extent. Still, I think that, in this particular case, there is good reason for us to delve into the story of a dead white philosopher. The story of Socrates has immense value today, especially for those people concerned to address the challenges of the present and our transition into a sustainable future.

Socrates as entrepreneur (3): what is poetic truth?

CHAPTER THREE: WHAT IS POETIC TRUTH?

The story of Socrates is a kind of fiction. This is not to say it is untrue. The story represents one of the great half-truths of Western civilization. It is a story that is recounted time and time again in undergraduate classrooms and introductory texts – the self-congratulatory tale of a simple man with a sharp mind and an aversion to nonsense, made all the more poignant for the fact that Socrates was condemned to die for his activities. Socrates is the Christ of philosophers. As with Jesus Christ, there is a tendency among the faithful to see Socrates in an apolitical light as a humble teacher and sage. Yet Socrates, like Christ, was a revolutionary of his time. Through his way of living and speaking to his fellow citizens, and through his constant quest to test the truth of the oracle’s statement and to settle the matter for himself, Socrates dealt hammer-blows to the cultural cement that had grounded Greek society for centuries.

This is the story that I want to unearth. My aim is to bring Socrates down to earth, so to understand him, as he was, as an innovative thinker at war with his society and time.

On the commons: reflections on sustainable community

When I was nine years old, my family travelled to England to visit the extended tribe. Mum and Dad had emigrated from England to New Zealand in the early nineteen sixties. It was the first time that my siblings and I – Kiwis born and bred – encountered the full contingent of British grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins to whom we were biologically related. It was the summer of seventy six and England put on her best weather – a heatwave in fact. We travelled through Dorset, Surrey, Devon, and Cornwall. I will never forget it.

England, for me, was a sweltering dream. It was like a fantasy novel full of rolling landscapes, verdant forests with horses and deer, thatched roof cottages, stone circles, Roman roads and castles. And the commons. I remember fishing for Sticklebacks with my cousin Helen on Broadstreet common. I had never been on a commons before. All I knew about the commons came from episodes of The Wombles. Helen, a hardcore tomboy, brought a bag of maggots for us to use as bait. I let her bait the hooks. The weather was perfect. We sat tending our lines as I marvelled at the untamed landscape about us and wondered how a commons continues to be.

Socrates as entrepreneur (2): who is Socrates?

CHAPTER TWO: WHO IS SOCRATES?

He was not pretty and he was not well bred. Socrates was a plebeian, of common stock, which set him at a disadvantage in the aristocratic world of ancient Greece. Socrates was a muscular, thick-set man, with a snub nose and heavy brow. He had served, at some point, in the hoplite infantry, but whatever physical presence he possessed was diminished by his self-depreciating sense of humour and unmanly instinct for philosophical discussion. Socrates would make a practice of wandering barefoot about the marketplace, chatting to the people that he met. When he was alone, he’d stand for hours lost in thought. People thought he was very strange. He was polite, for the most part. But he didn’t seem to fit in.

Socrates did not charge a fee for his services, unlike the Sophists, the professional thinkers of the time. Unlike the philosophers who came after him, he did not establish a school or training institute. Socrates wrote nothing and he claimed that he had nothing to teach. Yet Socrates, more than any other ancient philosopher, is responsible for creating philosophy as we know it today.

Socrates as entrepreneur (1): a visit to the oracle

CHAPTER ONE: A VISIT TO THE ORACLE

Chaerephon of Athens trudged up the Sacred Way toward the temple at Delphi. Soiled clouds hung across the face of Mount Parnassus and the limestone facing on the steps was slippery with rain. Chaerephon kept one hand on the balustrade, sounding out each step with the tip of his staff. He paused at the tier of Athena to catch his breath. Ah, Delphi! It was a splendid view from the spur of rock upon which the ancient temple sat across the flank of the mountain and the valley. One could imagine Apollo flying down that flinty slope to choose the location for his sacred temple. In the valley below, Dionysus and his nymphs had cavorted in the days when deities walked the earth, when the myths were as alive as the forests and the corn in the field.

Chaerephon the Elder rapped his staff resolutely on the ancient stone. He had to stop Socrates. Gathering his toga about him, he continued up the stair. The sun was breaking through the clouds and Chaerephon had a date with the oracle.

Vision and empowerment: the Spiderman moment

What goes through Peter Parker’s mind when he first realizes he has superpowers? This scene in the original Spiderman movie sent chills up my spine. What goes through your head in a moment of vision? ‘I am alive, I am empowered, I have the capacity to think, feel, act, and experience life in some way’. In a moment of vision, we understand our sources of power and our powers themselves. We realize that we are empowered through having the capacity to think, feel, do, and be.

Thinking, feeling, doing and being are the building blocks of human experience. Together they encompass an incredible range of capacities and abilities. If we located all the different species in the world on a graph showing their relative powers, with insects and reptiles with basic sensory and motor functions at the one end of the graph, and the higher primates with rudimentary cognitive and affective powers at the other end, human powers would be off the scale. Of all living creatures, only humans have the power to seize on an issue and think it through; to attune themselves empathetically to the needs and desires of other human and non-human creatures; to respond to a situation with a complex and deliberate set of actions; and to assume a social role and become a certain sort of person in a social context.

We call our species homo sapiens, the wise man. We might just as well call ourselves homo potens, the powerful man. Wisdom is only one of our powers. It is all too rarely applied.

Commoning is making common

How do we make a commons?

One answer is: through law. King Henry III granted commoners rights to use the English forests in the Charter of the Forests. When people have a common right to use some good, and a law that defends this right, we have a commons. As historian Peter Linebaugh argues, there is a cultural process presupposed in this – a process by which a group of people agree that such and such a set of goods and resources should be held in common, and act together in a way that preserves the commons. Affirming the plenitude of their shared stock, and inspired by the goodwill that they receive from others and feel eager to return, they contest the limits of public and private ownership and demand a law that secures their common rights to sustain themselves, to live with dignity, and to assemble with their peers.