The Purpose of Public Philosophy is Personal Development

What does public philosophy have to do with personal development?

Our first thought might be that they are two separate things.

Public philosophy is the domain of philosophers. Philosophers deal with abstractions like “justice,” “human rights,” and “the good.” Their tools are logic and reason.

Personal development is the domain of psychologists. Psychologist deal with cognition, emotions, and whether beliefs and behaviors are adaptive or dysfunctional. Their tools are instruments, metrics, and psychotherapy.

Even the epistemologies are different. Philosophy is rational. Psychology is empirical.

What, then, does public philosophy have to do with personal development? And why should we be talking about them in the same place?

Let me begin with an observation made by a friend who is a therapist. He reports that in the week following the 2024 election he had no fewer than eleven suicidal clients.

These clients were afraid for their rights to speak, to vote, and to control their own bodies.

They were shocked that, after inciting a mob to hang the vice president, after being ordered to pay millions of dollars to a woman he was adjudicated to have sexually abused, after having been convicted of thirty-four felony counts, after all of the racist, misogynistic, and fascistic language of the campaign, after threats to use the military to neutralize the “enemy within,” that same man was elected by a majority of their friends and neighbors to the highest office in the land.

They wondered if they would not now be included amongst America’s “internal enemies.”

And they were unsure how they could ever again feel safe among these same people who had voted to empower such darkness — people who knew for certain in 2024 what they might plausibly have not known in 2016.

My friend’s clients were frightened enough, and despondent enough, to talk openly of suicide. And they were talking of suicide because of things that matter to philosophers — things like justice, human rights, and democracy.

We live in a world that likes to compartmentalize. And so colleges have separate departments for philosophy, psychology, and political science. When election time comes around people go to news outlets to learn about the “issues.” And when folks are feeling bad about the election they go to therapists to talk about their feelings.

There’s no denying that this is functional. As we’ve already observed, the methods of philosophy are different from the methods of psychology. And newspapers can’t be concerned about people’s feelings when they report the news. It’s just that out in the real world philosophy, psychology, issues and feelings mix in all sorts of ways that — for the sake of manageability —  we ignore in our institutions.

That’s one reason why it makes sense to talk about public philosophy and personal development together. It’s every bit as important to think about how these domains are connected as it is to think about how they’re separate.

The other reason takes us back to the story behind the title of this journal.

You probably know it from your history classes. One of the religious communities who established colonies in America was the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Along with most other Europeans at the time, they saw America as a blank slate to be written on. A place to make a fresh start.

A colony in the New World was both a place where a community could be free to live according to its own values and believes and at the same time a kind of demonstration project for the rest of the world. A successful colony would signal that God’s favor was with this project, and it would be a demonstration of the validity of values and beliefs of the community.

The feeling among the colonists was that the eyes of the world were upon them, either to see them stand up in righteousness and prosperity as their God had intended, or to stumble and face-plant on the rocks of Plymouth.

One of the more eloquent leaders famously used the biblical metaphor of a “City on a Hill” to impress upon his fellows how they were being watched — how exposed they were to criticism and, at the same, time how visible and influential their success would be. A “light unto the world” would not be an exaggeration of how they saw themselves.

Essential to this project was the idea that the community was bound ethically to their God and also to each other. This was spiritually and ethically formed community. At its center was a spiritual story which informed the community’s conception of who they were and what their purpose was. And that same spiritual story told them not merely how they were to treat each other, but also what they were to strive to become. And to support all of this, there were institutions — religious, political, and educational — that held people as they developed, allowing them some latitude to make mistakes, while they learned and grew as human beings, even into adulthood.

We would say today that these institutions were too much of a straight jacket. And we would say that the spiritual narrative at the heart of the colony was only one of many that people might hold. Neither the narrative nor the institutions could be sustainable in a pluralistic society such as ours.

And, yet, the metaphor of a City on a Hill remains attractive. We would like to think of our more pluralistic society in the same way — as a well-functioning example of how people might live together, as a place embodying wisdom and that supports people in their development, and as a beacon that might gain the attention of the rest of the world.

That does not sound very much like our society at the moment, and nothing at all like the government Americans have just elected. Our light is presently seen less as a beacon and more as a lighthouse, warning ships of rocks that they might founder upon.

And it’s fair to say that this fact weighs upon us.

True, there are those among us who wish only for America to be feared. But there are more of us, I hope, who wish for America to be admired, and who wish to live in an enlightened City on a Hill. Not the straight-jacketed, monocultural, mono-religious, fascistic city that is the fantasy of the Puritans’ evangelical spiritual descendants, but an open, compassionate, and democratic city, whose purpose is the development and well-being of all of its citizens.

We cannot, then, separate our emotional well-being — or the perceived quality of our lives — from the political and philosophical system in which we live. And this is a second reason why it makes sense to talk about public philosophy alongside personal development.

The third reason, which is closely related to the second, appears when we compare the Plymouth colony — with all of the powers and shortcomings just discussed — with our own liberal model of social organization, which has some well-known powers and shortcomings of its own.

Plymouth was not a liberal colony in the strict way in which we think of liberalism today. Modern liberalism is roughly described by the first of John Rawls’ two principles of justice: “Each person is to have the same claim to basic liberties, consistent with the same liberties for all.” In other words, the society we want to live in gives us maximum personal liberty, consistent with other people having the same.

There is in Rawl’s system a second principle of justice, which states roughly that, “Social and economic inequalities are to be attached to positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity and that they are to be permitted only to the extent that they are of benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.” In other words, we know that there are going to be inequalities but let’s make sure that everybody gets a fair shot, and let’s make sure that those inequalities aren’t so great as to leave some people worse off than they would have been under a more egalitarian system.

I allow that it is the first principle, more than the second, that forms most people’s impressions of modern liberalism. Most people are far more focused on rights and personal liberty than they are on equality and the well-being of the least advantaged members of society.

What we have, then, is a conception of liberalism in which everyone is (or ought to be) free to live as they please and to pursue their own ends, insofar as this is consistent with the same rights for everyone else. It’s not quite a free-for-all because we are constrained by other people’s rights. But it’s not exactly socialism, either. The liberalism most people subscribe to begins and ends with rights and liberty. What other people do with it is their own interest, and their own responsibility.

One might wonder whether there is, in a society so conceived, sufficient unity of purpose and sufficient moral commitment to the well-being of our fellows to sustain social cohesion. Recent evidence would suggest that maybe there isn’t. There is, within the MAGA movement, a strong motivation toward unity of purpose, at least insofar as a uniform narrative and a narrow set of values is concerned. But there is a conspicuous lack of fellow feeling, without which it is impossible to reestablish a uniform society on the Plymouth model that they deem so desirable.

Indeed, it is precisely the lack of connection we feel with one another that plagues us.

Consider the social groupings that are most popular at the moment. We seek most of all to group people according to ethnic and gender identities. It matters very much if you are Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, or a woman. And while this is okay as far as it goes, it doesn’t go very far. Or very deep. What shared purposes do we have as a member of one of these groups, apart from a shared interest in obtaining for ourselves the equal recognition owed to us under the first principle of justice. Blacks and Hispanics fight for minority rights. Feminists fight for women’s rights. Gays fight for gay rights.

All well and good. But I repeat my question: what shared purposes and ideals bind us together as Americans? What is our story? What are we striving for? What are the obstacles we must overcome?

Perhaps this is part of the reason why the MAGA movement is so attractive to so many. It answers these question. Our story is that America was once great place, where people like you were respected. We are striving to make it that way again. And when the people in our way — the elites, academics, and deep-state liberals — are removed from power, we will succeed.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t even have to make sense. It just needs to give people hope and a shared purpose. It just needs to be meaningful.

Is it possible, on the liberal side, to tell a better story? I believe that it is.

But — and this is a big “but” — it requires something deeper than even Rawls’ second principle of justice. Yes, we want equal liberty. Yes, we want equal opportunity. But if that’s all we want — if that’s as deep as it goes with us — then I think the MAGA story still wins.

Why?

Because the MAGA story has something the liberal story doesn’t have. It has meaning. It has hope. It has a vision. And it has a plan for achieving it.

If America is going to be a City on a Hill, then it needs a meaning that is larger than, “Come here and do what you want as long as it’s within the law.” That’s not to say that it has to be straight jacketed the way the Puritans would have conceived it. We don’t have to be a mono-religious society, or a society with any religion at all. But it is to say that the essential elements of the original vision have to be there. And those would be (1) a spiritual core, (2) an overarching narrative that binds us together and gives us purpose, (3) a vision of what we want to become as human beings, and (4) a moral commitment to help each other become our best selves.

And so the third reason for believing that it makes sense to talk about public philosophy and personal development is that these two things are bound together in a single vision for the kind of society I believe most of us would like to live in — a society whose purpose is the personal development of each member of that society, in accordance with a broadly overarching vision of what it is to be a human being.

That is the City on a Hill that I wish to imagine and work out here. I hope you’ll follow along, and even more that you’ll join with me in this project.