Nancy J. Matchett is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Northern Colorado, and a client counselor certified by the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. Philosophical counseling is one of many ways she thinks philosophy can make a difference to how people live.
1. What types of civically engaged or public philosophy work do you do?
My approach is informed by my interest in and training as a philosophical counselor. The emphasis of philosophical counseling is on doing philosophy with clients in order to resolve problems that arise from their personal and professional lives. The basic idea is that even when problems do not seem overtly philosophical, they still stem from the concepts and patterns of reasoning that shape the client’s worldview. Sometimes a client just needs help to clarify the structure of a problem, but in many cases a client’s worldview turns out to be implicated in the problem in a way that also blocks its resolution. This is where dialogue with a trained philosopher can be put to especially good use: first, by helping clients identify the unexamined beliefs and desires that are contributing to their practical difficulties, and second, by reflecting on those beliefs and desires to see whether they are worthy of the client’s continued allegiance. This second step frequently involves exposing the client to concepts and arguments from the philosophical literature, but there is still a difference in emphasis from traditional classroom teaching. Rather than helping the client understand exactly what other philosophers have said and why, the goal is to clarify the meaning of the client’s most basic concepts and see what does, or does not, follow from the client’s own thinking.
2. Give an example of a successful philosophical counseling encounter.
Every philosophical counseling encounter is unique (there isn’t a standard protocol or methodology), so this is hard to do in a few sentences. But a general issue that leads to many practical problems is a tendency to conflate the thought that a person did something wrong with the thought that the person is blameworthy, irresponsible, or uncaring. Helping people understand when they are in a situation where the latter judgment does not follow from the former can restore self-respect, facilitate forgiveness between colleagues or friends, etc.
One crucial takeaway from such encounters is that a client’s problem is never solved by having them “read two chapters of Aristotle—or Confucius or Simone de Beauvoir or Philippa Foot—and call me in the morning.” It is only solved when the client is able to articulate a worldview that is both philosophically sound and makes them “feel better” in some sense of that term. At a minimum, philosophical counseling should enable the client to resolve whatever problem brought them to the philosopher in the first place. But it can also increase their self-understanding in ways that are quite transformative. There are lots of more detailed examples in the literature; good entry points are the journal Philosophical Practice 4.3, Lou Marinoff’s Plato not Prozac!, and Peter Raabe’s answer to the question, What is Philosophical Counseling?
3. In what ways does the work inform your research and teaching (or vice versa)?
All of my academic work involves putting philosophy to some kind of practical use. I used to write about best practices in ethics teaching, and I’ve done quite a bit of organizational consulting—mostly helping colleagues have more constructive conversations about ethical issues in their workplaces. More recently, I’ve begun to explore the efficacy of philosophical counseling for alleviating moral distress and moral injury. Moral distress is a well-documented phenomenon in the nursing profession, and moral injury has more recently been identified as a challenge for veterans that is distinct from both traumatic brain injury and PTSD. There’s some evidence, from both domains, that ethics education combined with opportunities to tell one’s own story can be helpful. My hunch is that a constructive dialogue with a trained philosopher combines the most beneficial elements of both those approaches, so I’ve been developing IRB-approved studies to test that hypothesis through philosophical counseling with nurses and vets.
In the classroom, I try to get students to think concretely about what it would mean to live in accordance with philosophical material we are studying. This takes a variety of forms, so here are two examples that form the ends of a spectrum. I have a standard policy on all my syllabi encouraging students to turn in “other stuff” for credit. If they can show me how a concept or argument from the class helped them make better sense of an event in the news, a problem at work, or anything else going on in their lives, I’m always willing to grade it, either in addition to—or sometimes in lieu of—the more standardized assignments I’ve developed. That’s the low end of my engagement spectrum. The high end occurs in an upper division environmental ethics course where I require all students to complete some kind of real world project. I don’t typically identify a civic engagement site ahead of time—my main rules are that students must produce something with or for a public audience and must develop their own metrics for determining what counts as success (they cannot just write a paper designed to show me how well they understand material I told them to study). My hope is that this gets them to reflect more deeply on how and why they conceptualize whatever they identify as environmental problems and consider to be solutions. It also encourages them to think about how they might get other people to “see” the problems too, or at least to change their behaviors in ways that ameliorate those problems.
4. What does this work offer to wider communities?
Transcendence! That’s a lofty claim, I know. But philosophy brings it back down to earth and shows that it’s available in some small measure to anyone with the time and resources to really think things through. (Note that I don’t mean to suggest that people who lack this are lazy or thoughtless. Since I don’t think philosophy is a luxury, it’s quite distressing that many people, including college students, literally do not have the time.) At its core, philosophy explores the reasons we have for thinking and caring about things in the ways that we do. Sometimes we discover that we have good reasons, sometimes that we have bad ones, and oftentimes that the reasons are inconclusive. This can be unsettling, but it’s also freeing. It affords us an opportunity to exercise what Ruth Chang calls our “normative superpowers.”
5. What motivates you to do this work?
I honestly don’t know how to do philosophy any other way. For me it has always been a practice. This doesn’t mean I’m hostile to theory. Since I don’t think the lines between theory and practice are very clear, I’m glad that some folks get excited by questions I find to be purely theoretical—they often make unexpected discoveries that turn out to have practical consequences even if that wasn’t the original goal. But I don’t get excited about clarifying possible relations between ideas or tracing out logical implications of arguments unless I can see how the results could make a real difference to how people live. By contrast, I do get really excited when I notice alternative ways of conceptualizing a situation, all of which fit the evidence, but each of which suggests a subtly different approach to life. And I’m endlessly fascinated by the different ways in which human beings make sense of themselves and our world, and the reasons why ideas that some people find self-sustaining are found by others to be depressing or vague.
6. If someone wanted to do this work at their own institution, what steps or resources would you recommend?
The American Philosophical Practitioners Association offers training sessions in philosophical counseling at least once per year, and there are lots of other resources on their website. But mostly, remember that dialogue is essential. Nothing is experienced as a problem—or a solution—simply because some philosopher said so, no matter how good the arguments. Each of us is only one of many windows on the world, and real change only happens when people work out their thoughts and feelings in light of genuine alternatives. We don’t have to be on the same page, but it sure helps to understand how our ideas relate to others’. That’s true whether we are trying to effect personal change or craft social policy.
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