An Idea Whose Time Has Come

As Eastern Europe’s recent history testifies, ideas count. More to the point, some ideas count more than others. Philosophy is the process of sorting out which is which.

Good consumers that we are, we in the West tend to regard philosophy as a passive process. Ideas come to us whole--like hams or Hondas--and when we discard them, it is less a matter of conscious choice than planned obsolescence. As the American thinker William Barrett once pointed out, our society would be improved if we only could recapture that active relationship between man and his ideas implied by philosophy’s Greek roots-- philos-sophia, love of wisdom.

It strikes us, therefore, that one of this new year’s most welcome bits of news comes from the Netherlands, where a small but growing number of philosophers, rather like psychotherapists, have left the academy and set up private practices in which they charge clients hourly rates for discussions of their ideas. “There is a new generation of philosophers who want to take part in society,” said Ad Hoogendijk, whose practice is in Amsterdam. “We are making use of philosophical tradition to exchange thoughts with clients over whatever subject they want.”

According to Hoogendijk and Holland’s dozen or so other private guides to the perplexed, most of those who seek their counsel are at some emotional watershed--workers facing retirement, parents whose children have grown and left home or students faced with life after graduation. Often, Hoogendijk told a reporter, such “people have made choices in life on the basis of what they think is available, not on their ideals.”

While Socrates dispensed his wisdom for free, his Dutch descendants charge up to $50 per hour. Lovers of wisdom will have to sort out whether that represents the ubiquity of materialism or the flexibility of a market mechanism that can be made to distribute even what Boethius called “the consolation of philosophy.”