The Relevance of Aristotelean Ethics to the Conception of Existential Psychotherapy
Introduction
Existential psychotherapy attempts to challenge the technological understanding of psychotherapy and reductionist tendencies in modern medicine. It does so by developing a psychotherapeutic practice based on a more holistic understanding of human being, not aimed at curing or healing patients but rather at achieving authenticity for clients. The main theoretical problem for existential psychotherapy is that it wants to understand itself as a psychotherapeutic method, commonly understood as a form of medical technology. Yet, existential psychotherapy wants to distance itself from the medical and technological framework of understanding and practice. This paper tries to solve this problem by discussing whether and how it is possible to re-conceptualize existential psychotherapy as an Aristotelian practice of ethics.
Psychotherapy as technology and applied science
According to Martin Heidegger, modern technology is the dominant way of revealing Being in modernity and it is characterized by a challenging (Heidegger 1977: 14). Through this technological revealing, human being anthropocentrically positions itself in the middle of the world and assumes dominion over everything including itself. Human beings, then, only have the meaning of being available as resources. There is a widespread tendency to conceive psychotherapy as a form of technology and applied science. According to Joseph Dunne, in modern times, we tend to define rationality as coextensive with technology. We rationalize almost every domain of human engagement from an instrumental reason, concerned with instructional outcomes (Dunne 1993: 5). Likewise, Louis Berger criticizes this attitude in contemporary psychotherapy by addressing what he terms techno- therapies. According to Berger, these techno-therapies are characterized by a strong reliance on instrumental thought and by an attempt to establish empirical evidence for the efficacy of the instructional outcomes of therapies, especially in terms of symptom- reduction (Berger 2002: 9).
The rationality and essence of arts
Existential psychotherapy must to be based on an alternative to the technological reason and challenging of Being, underlying the techno-therapies, and here Emmy van Deurzen indicate that one can turn to the kind of rationality, which is embedded in the practice of arts (Deurzen 2005: 216). According to Heidegger, the revealing of Being involved in this practice is different from the challenging that rules in modern technology. Thus, art is a kind of revealing characterized as a bringing-forth of something from concealment into un- concealment to appear as it is in itself (Heidegger 1977: 14). In other words, the rationality of arts is involved in a bringing forth of that which is already present but hiding in the phenomena.
Ancient ethics
In the 1980s and 1990s, the need within philosophy to find an alternative to technological rationality led to a widespread revitalization of ancient ethics as an art of living. Among others, Martha Nussbaum highlighted how the ancient idea of ethics did not involve a technological challenge of human being as a resource. Ancient ethics rather involved a rational addressment of existential and emotional needs, embedded in a practice aimed at bringing forth human flourishing (eudaimonia) (Nussbaum 1994: 3). Whereas modern human being tries to control itself and its surroundings as resources, the ancient Greeks considered human life as vulnerable to factors beyond human control. The Greeks invented ethics in a search to develop a rational art of living, dedicated to the realization of the good human life, safe from luck and reliance upon the external world (Nussbaum 1997: 3). Thus, the Greeks had the idea that logos is to illnesses and maladies of the human soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the human body (Aristotle 1994: II:iv.). More specifically, this meant that ethics as an art of living should create human flourishing as a healthy state of the soul in balance, whereas the art of medicine should create bodily health by getting the body into balance
Aristotelian ethics
Usually, Aristotelian ethics is thought to be the clearest representative of ancient Greek ethics. Aristotle’s ethics is grounded in a naturalistic teleology. That is, Aristotle describes how human existence has an end (causa finalis) and this end is human flourishing (eudaimonia), which is the goal of practical philosophy. Thus, whereas theoretical philosophy is dealing with theoria as exact knowledge of necessary facts, Aristotle states that practical philosophy deals with praxeis as human actions in a changing life. All human actions have an ultimate end, which is human flourishing. Likewise, the purpose of practical philosophy is not to achieve cognition or knowledge but to be good practice (eupraxia) that has the aim of attaining flourishing. According to Aristotle, human being is not only individual. It is also social being. Whereas ethics is the art of the good life dealing with the flourishing of the individual, politics is the art of the good life concerned with the flourishing of society.
Thus, ethics is a rational answer to the question of what it takes to become a good person and thereby achieve the good life. Human flourishing is the unfolding of the substantial and universal form of human Being (causa formalis). Thus, the end of human being is the realization of its essential capacities that are already present (ibid, I.vii.).
In the discourse of ethics, human flourishing is an expression of human