I

One of the most well-known features of ancient philosophy, starting with Socrates and through to the post-Aristotelian philosophical traditions of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, is the idea that philosophy must play a role in helping us to lead the good life.Footnote 2 In contrast to the predominantly more academically-oriented conception of philosophy that one finds in current philosophical discourse, ancient philosophers adopted a more expansive conception of philosophical practice, where even when these philosophers employed techniques recognisably similar to those of contemporary philosophy, figures such as Plato and Epicurus appeared to rationalize the use of such techniques by markedly therapeutic goals.Footnote 3 For example, Socrates links conceptual analysis with the moral improvement of himself and his interlocutors, cf. Apology 38a.

However, whilst ancient philosophy can be understood to emphasize the link between philosophical reflection and personal/communal flourishing,Footnote 4 such an explicit connection between the theoretical and the practical is not a feature that one would prima facie associate with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical tradition. On the contrary, they appear to be focused on more technical debates in metaphysics and epistemology, involving claims regarding synthetic a priori knowledge, the objective validity of the Categories, the ideality of the finite, and so on. Furthermore, there seems to be good reason to suppose that philosophy in general hardly appears to be therapeutic, given how technical issues such as the problem of vagueness or of other minds have been the focal points of debate in academic philosophy. Nonetheless, despite the appearance of some lack of interest in drawing connections between philosophical reflection and the good life,Footnote 5 I will argue that there is in fact every reason to suppose that the German Idealists were staunchly committed to drawing such a connection. I wish to focus in particular on Hegel's views on the relationship between theoretical reason and practical life. Specifically, I would like to draw attention to how Hegel came to adopt a therapeutic approach, where Hegel's therapeutic conception of philosophy sets itself the therapeutic goal of helping us feel ‘at home in the world’.Footnote 6

Hegel's views on the relationship between theoretical reason and practical life are partly motivated by his dissatisfaction with Kant's understanding of how exactly our conceptual capacities enable us to think about the world from our specifically human perspective, which Hegel precisely sees as preventing us from feeling ‘at home in the world’. What Hegel finds unattractive about Kant's understanding of categorial concepts (and conceptual form) is his worry about subjectivism, where because the categories are ‘only our thoughts’, we then seem to ourselves to be cut off from the fundamental nature of reality, with all the disquiet that must lead to, Kant's consoling words notwithstanding.Footnote 7 Another interesting dimension to Hegel's charge of subjectivismFootnote 8 is that there is good reason to suppose that Hegel chastised Kant for accounting for human discursivity independently of its historical and social contexts. As a result, Hegel thinks of the Kantian subject as a res cogitans: Kant overlooked the nature of the human subject as a res ambulans and a res dormiens, which goes alongside its rational nature, once again leaving us estranged, this time from ourselves. To put the worry another way, Hegel criticises Kant for having failed to properly surpass Cartesianism.Footnote 9 Ultimately, then, Hegel's fundamental worry about Kantianism, that transcendental idealism is too narrow and too restricted, can be seen to be as much about the question of how we can come to be ‘at home in the world’, as it is about technical questions and puzzles, such as the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge or disputes concerning the nature of space.

Given that Hegel's principal philosophical concern is with establishing how one can come to be at home in the world, this may shed light on why Hegel insists that philosophy has an important role to play in the Bildung of man as opposed to being an esoteric practice with little or no relevance to our ultimate well-being.Footnote 10 In making this claim, we can begin to see how Hegel conceives of philosophy as a therapeutic discipline. To understand this in detail, we need to look more closely at the relationship between Kant and Hegel on this issue.

Despite Hegel's misgivings about transcendental idealism, there is something about Kant's metaphilosophical commitments that Hegel finds not just to be important but also largely correct. Hegel seems to think that Kant conceives of philosophy as having an edifying or normative/existential function: as I understand Kant, the critique of theoretical reason would involve a transformation of not just our cognitive practices but also how we understand the role of thought in our lives. By understanding ourselves in a new way, as laid out by the Copernican turn in the discipline, we realise that our cognitive constitution does not merely serve as mechanical conditions to experience things in certain ways — we also realise that the kind of cognitive constitution we have determines the type of phenomenological relation we have to our cognitive environment. For example, our categorial structure is based on concepts such as causality, necessity, unity, and substance. These concepts do not just enable us to experience a world sans phrase, but they also serve to enable us to experience the world in a specific way: being endowed with concepts provides human beings to represent the world as a phenomenologically robust environment: we are acquainted with a world that has nomological properties and objects that persist through change. In other words, one of Kant's central insights is the notion that being endowed with a capacity of conceptual thought and reflection does not merely enable human beings to experience things, but crucially also enables human beings to see the world from a particular perspective. This perspective, moreover, is the foundation for the superstructure of how we go about our daily lives. Hegel can be seen as finding Kant's insight into how thought has this normative/existential function to be fundamentally important.

This view is supported by Hegel's discussion of Kant's Antinomies of Pure Reason, where he claims that Kant's insights are some of ‘most important and deepest advances in philosophy in the modern period’ (EL §48). Of course, Hegel is also very critical of Kant's treatment of the Antinomies. However, why Hegel thinks Kant's treatment of the Antinomies is dissatisfying is not because Kant simply got things wrong; rather, Hegel's critique is based on his view that Kant failed to draw more Antinomies from the structure of thought. This is what Hegel means by claiming that Kant is restricted by ‘finite categories’. For Hegel, what Kant ought to have done is notice how ‘antinomy finds itself … in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts and ideas’ (EL §48). In other words, Kant appears to have failed to develop his important insights.

Hegel's means of ‘completing’ this Kantian programme is his notion of the forms of consciousness. The reason why the forms of consciousness serve this particular function is that they properly bring out the existential significance of the antinomial conflict. This goes beyond the purely theoretical goal of highlighting the ubiquity of contradiction in discursive thought, because such a goal is still abstract despite being systematic. Rather what Hegel wants to achieve is to illustrate how antinomial conflict manifests itself in experience and how antinomial conflict actually impacts on our ways of representing objects, ourselves, and the world as a whole. Such a project is the only one that has justified claims to being a philosophical science. The way in which Hegel conceives of thought as impacting on both our cognitive and practical lives is by conceiving of a form of consciousness as amounting to a Weltanschauung — a way of seeing the world from a particular perspective. To put this very briefly, every form of consciousness that the phenomenological subject traverses through — from Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing — is a different way of representing oneself and the world for the purposes of achieving ‘at homeness’ in the world. In other words, the dialectic of human thought through its phenomenological development is the historical illustration of our attempts to find a way of looking at ourselves and our world that enables us to flourish. As such, the connection between theoretical reason and practical life lies in how whatever form of consciousness one adopts determines how one will act in the world: if one thinks about oneself as radically separate from one's environment, then such a worldview will result in the subject being unable to properly interact with others, viz., the struggle for recognition; or if one fails to conceive of social institutions as being capable of reform and structural revision, then such a worldview will result in the subject finding that social institution incapable of enabling societal improvement and development, viz. Hegel's analysis of Antigone. For Hegel, the drama of consciousness in its constant flux from one form of consciousness to another is equivalent to consciousness desperately trying to find a way of being at peace with various philosophical problematics, such as the relationship between universality and particularity, identity and difference, desire and duty, scepticism and dogmatism, hope and despair, and the state and the individual. The task of finding a way of being at peace with these antinomial conflicts effectively amounts to finding a way of enabling human beings to flourish. As such, for Hegel, there is compelling reason to regard his speculative philosophy and phenomenological method as making him a member of the therapeutic tradition broadly conceived.

As we saw earlier, the therapeutic tradition broadly conceived goes back to the Socratic schools. However, since the mid-20^thcentury this tradition has been more narrowly associated with a particular conception of therapy, which is known as ‘quietism’.Footnote 11 In what follows, I shall argue Hegel conceives of philosophy as therapeutic and that he has a nuanced form of philosophical quietism.

II

Wittgenstein is usually credited with having pioneered philosophical quietism.Footnote 12 Broadly speaking, quietism is the methodological view that philosophers should aim to eliminate, as opposed to solve, philosophical problems and return us to a state of intellectual peace.Footnote 13 To see what this means, we need to understand various sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. In §125, Wittgenstein writes,

According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems (which he defines in §111 as ‘deep disquietudes’) are not meant to be solved in the sense that philosophers aim to find a satisfactory answer to the question that causes us aporias. Rather, these problems are meant to be eliminated or undermined by understanding the framework that gives rise to the disquietude in the first place. In other words, unlike the problem-solving model of the philosophical enterprise, which grants legitimacy to various philosophical questions, quietism denies that various philosophical questions are legitimate, and as such rejects the idea that they should be answered, and that one should even raise these issues in the first place.Footnote 14 As Wittgenstein writes, ‘[eventually] the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one … that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question’ (PI §133). So, for example, a quietist solution to the Problem of Interaction in philosophy of mind and the Placement Problem in metaphilosophy would look something like this: the question ‘How is it possible for the mind and the body to interact with one another?’ should not be asked, because it assumes that mental phenomena and physical phenomena are fundamentally distinct to begin with, where it is precisely this dualist framework gives rise to disquietude here. Once we understand that this dualist framework is the cause of the aporia, we must provide a more cogent framework which will give us intellectual peace. The Placement Problem,Footnote 15 however, is more complicated to deal with: the question ‘How is it possible to place normativity in nature, given that normative phenomena appear to be outside the scope of the natural?’ should not be asked, because the question is in and of itself flawed, and the question leaves itself open to two fundamentally dissatisfying answers.Footnote 16 In the first case, the question is based on a mischaracterisation of normativity; in the latter case, our framework for answering the question is restricted to either bald naturalism or rampant Platonism.Footnote 17 Once we understand that a problematic characterisation of normativity and a poor conceptual framework are the cause of the aporia, we can then be in a position to improve our framework by adopting liberal naturalism in the hope that this position will give us intellectual peace.Footnote 18

Of course, my outline of these quietist solutions is meant to be very sketchy, for my outline is aimed at revealing the methodology of quietism, rather than being directed at addressing those two philosophical issues. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, ‘[t]he philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness’ (§255). In other words, the methodology of quietism roughly follows the approach of curing some kind of ailment or disease. Just as a physician will first diagnose the condition and then administer some cure, the quietist philosopher must first diagnose the relevant intellectual problem and then work out a cogent means of curing the aporia.

For Wittgenstein, the diagnosis of our maladies philosophiques is that we enter into conceptual difficulties by misusing ordinary language. The ‘metaphysical’ use of ordinary linguistic terms is the cause of our philosophical anxieties. What this signifies is that philosophers are the source of problematics, not because philosophers aim at deliberately muddying conceptual waters, but rather because philosophical speculation appears to inevitably conflict with our everyday linguistic practices. As mentioned previously, Wittgenstein claims that conceptual problems emerge from running up against the limits of language. Now, whilst the Tractarian Wittgenstein would have been inclined to remedy the problem by trying to improve or cleanse ordinary language, the later Wittgenstein seems to think that such a view is ultimately too philosophical. Rather, the cure for our cognitive maladies consists in understanding how ordinary language works and how we must stick with ordinary language. And what that linguistic enterprise involves is returning us to a form of life where we reflect non-philosophically. This, in other words, means that the true philosopher is the one who realises the futility and nonsense of philosophical enquiry. Only by becoming quietists can we achieve the Tractarian goal of kicking away the ladder and saying only what can be said. Philosophy, then, for the Wittgensteinian quietist eschews any positive doctrines — rather than being concerned with defending substantive theories about the good or the true, it is concerned with exposing misuses of language.

Hegel, of course, is no Wittgensteinian and would almost certainly balk at the idea of eschewing any positive doctrines and admonishing philosophical reflection in favour of a retreat to ordinary consciousness and its binary categories of thought. But, given this, it seems difficult to maintain, let alone motivate, the case that he has a quietist conception of philosophical therapy. However, such a difficulty only arises if we think of quietism exclusively in Wittgensteinian ways. If we recall our previous definition of philosophical quietism, quietism is the methodological view that philosophers should aim to eliminate, as opposed to solve, philosophical problems and return us to a state of intellectual peace. Crucially, if one is inclined to eliminate/dissolve philosophical problems rather than solving them head-on, one can do so by either adopting Wittgenstein's diagnostic and therapeutic approach or by adopting a Hegelian diagnostic and therapeutic approach. Namely, one can dissolve the relevant problematic either by finding it to be the result of a misuse of ordinary language and therefore recommend a return to common sense; or by finding it to be the result of a limited and non-dialectical conceptual structure and therefore recommend a dialectical critique of the relevant philosophical stance in question.

The following passage from the Phenomenology probably best illustrates Hegel's diagnostic approach.

For Hegel, an important symptom of philosophical disquietude is how we tend to regard certain ideas to be fundamentally irreconcilable with one another. And we think in that way due to having a non-dialectical understanding of negation. Our ordinary (or natural) understanding of negation is one which sees the negation of a position as the complete obliteration of that position. This, in turn, serves as the grounds for the strength of the Law of Non-Contradiction. However, whilst our ordinary understanding of negation has both plausibility and practical value, the problem with this framework is not that the framework is false or incoherent, but rather that the framework cannot adequately make sense of the notion of development and growth. Hegel's concern, then, with negation is with the philosophical aporias we run into when we reflect on the history of philosophical enquiry and how we try to understand the movements from one philosophical tradition to the next. We remain paralysed by these kinds of aporias, if we reflect only from the ordinary perspective of negation. Therefore, the remedy for this is to improve our philosophical understanding. For Hegel, specifically, one way of successfully accomplishing such a task is by distinguishing between reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand). Unlike Kant, Hegel does not claim that “these terms … designate completely independent functions or faculties. Reason is simply the necessary result of the immanent movement of the understanding”.Footnote 19 In other words, reason is in some sense part of understanding, insofar as reason is a form of analytic explanation, but in another sense, reason is distinct from understanding, insofar as reason is also a ‘form of holistic explanation, which shows how all finite things are parts of a wider whole’.Footnote 20 For Hegel, the principal advantage of drawing this distinction between reason and understanding is that we can be in a position to not be wrapped up in the various dualisms which are the inevitable consequence of reflecting only from the perspective of understanding, i.e., purely analytical forms of reflection. What reason provides consciousness with is the means to avoid the pitfalls of dualisms and the problems of analysis by thinking dialectically, i.e., by drawing distinctions yet establishing interconnectedness to a whole.

This particular brand of quietism is perhaps best explicated by Hegel in this famous passage from his Lectures on Fine Art:

The arguments Hegel gives in this engaging passage — namely that the task of philosophy is to lead our ways of understanding all aspects of our world away from purely dualistic and oppositional ways of thinking, and to enable us to reflect on the intelligibility of both difference and unity in our world — serve as a powerful critique of quietist strategies that aim to provide philosophical cures by means of effectively ignoring the philosophical nature of certain problematics. As he writes, only a dialectical conception of philosophical enquiry and a dialectical conceptual resource can provide the conditions for achieving ‘full satisfaction’. What this means is that the kind of quietist strategy advocated by Wittgensteinians may very well provide some satisfaction to enquirers, but ultimately that sense of intellectual disquietude is hollow and is in fact disquieting more than substantially therapeutic. The kind of intellectual approach that can provide ‘full satisfaction’ is one which explicitly tarries with the negative — this is because only that model of enquiry and its corresponding conceptual resources make concerted efforts to unify conceptual contraries in a nuanced way to remove the initial and powerful image of opposition and to move us to seeing them as constituting harmonious determinations of a complex whole.

By now, it should be reasonably clear that one can make a good case for conceiving of Hegel as a particular kind of philosophical quietist. In what follows, I would like to explain how exactly Hegel's brand of philosophical therapy — his variety of quietism — can and should be understood as anticipating crucial features of classical pragmatist metaphilosophy. However, before moving on to this issue, it is important that we first have a basic grip on what exactly one means by ‘pragmatism’.

III

Hilary Putnam has identified four characteristics of pragmatism:Footnote 21 the rejection of scepticism; the commitment to fallabilism; the rejection of strict dualisms such as the distinction between nature and freedom; and what he has called “the primacy of practice”.Footnote 22 For the purposes of this paper, I want to focus on the latter two characteristics. A locus classicus for rejecting strict dualisms is William James's famous discussion of the conflict between the ‘tough-minded’Footnote 23 and the ‘tender-minded’. As Christopher Hookway writes, ‘[t]he tough-minded have an empiricist commitment to experience and going by “the facts”, while the tender- minded have more of a taste for a priori principles which appeal to the mind. The tender-minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic and religious, while the tough-minded are normally materialist, pessimistic and irreligious. The tender-minded are “free-willist” and dogmatic; the tough-minded are “fatalistic” and sceptical’.Footnote 24 According to James, one cannot resolve this dispute by favouring one or the other.Footnote 25 In other words, we cannot claim that empirical and natural science trump religiosity and Romanticism, and we cannot claim that religiosity and Romanticism trump empirical and natural science. To use John McDowell's terminology, neither bald naturalism nor rampant Platonism will do the required work. Instead, we must find a ‘mediating philosophy’ to reconcile the scientific image with the manifest image, to reconcile “empiricist epistemic responsibility with moral and religious optimism”.Footnote 26 Such a particular type of philosophy is needed, because only a mediating philosophy can properly represent a ‘method for settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable’.Footnote 27

An important question to ask now is how we should understand James's notion of of ‘settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable’. As I see it, there is no reason to suppose that James's idea of settling a dispute that appears to be interminable should not be thought of in terms of the broad philosophical quietist strategy of dissolving problematics to enable us achieve a sense of intellectual peace.Footnote 28 Given this, we now need to explain why only a mediating philosophy is able to dissolve problematics and enable us to achieve a sense of intellectual peace. To do so, let us briefly consider two instances of apparently interminable disputes: (i) the mind-world dualism; and (ii) the individual-society relation.

Regarding (i), what was partly characteristic of early modern philosophy was the idea that there was a fundamental gap between mind and world — between the subjects of experience and the objects of experience. The picture of empirical reality as presented by that tradition is of a realm of separate and inert objects, which requires us to first understand each object individually and then determine its connectedness with other objects. Not only that, but the mind is also fundamentally separate from the world of experience. We are passive recipients of raw and non-conceptual representational content, which we then process in order to have an epistemic grip on the world. However, in contrast to the Enlightenment's portrayal of minds as mirrors of nature, James (as well as Peirce and Dewey in differing ways) aimed to dissolve the strict distinction between mind and world not by collapsing one into the other but rather by reconceiving the content of experience as well as the relation between the subject of experience and their cognitive environment. Experience provides a rational and intelligible structure constituted by directly perceivable ontologically complex, determinate objects. And to be a thinking subject is not to be a disembodied res cogitans that is separate from the world and is little more than a cognitive voyeur. Rather, to be a thinking subject is to be an embodied being embedded in the world. As Matthew Ratcliffe writes, ‘[w]e do not philosophise as disembodied loci of rational thought, stripped of our practical, affective, bodily attunement to things’.Footnote 29 And as James writes himself:

Philosophical enquiry, for James, must not be conceived of in the way that early modern rationalism characterised philosophical enquiry. While the Cartesian project of pure enquiry aimed to provide substantive conceptions of knowledge by avoiding corporeality and sociality, James conceived of pragmatism as the philosophical school of thought to provide substantive conceptions of truth and knowledge by embedding all human capacities in the world. As he famously wrote, the most pressing problem with early modern rationalism is that it ‘seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides’.Footnote 31 Such a critique appears to be characteristic of opponents of Cartesianism, ranging from the post-Kantian idealists, through Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, to Rorty.Footnote 32 Though all these philosophers differ from one another in important respects, they are all committed to the view that the mind-world relation must be understood in terms of cognitive intimacy rather than cognitive voyeurism. And to do so necessarily involves emphasising how thinking is necessarily bound up with direct bodily engagement with things and implicit social relations with other rational agents in the world. Once we frame the concepts of mind and world in this way, then the dispute is dissolved and we are no longer troubled by the philosophical anxieties arising from the aporias caused by the strict dualist framework.

Regarding (ii), the classical pragmatist approach to the dualism of society and the individual is one which finds the framework that gives rise to oscillating between authoritarianism and anarchism or conservatism and liberalism to be the source of the philosophical malady. For example, Dewey is critical of classical liberalism for conceiving of the individual as prior to society and that social institutions must therefore be organised in such a way so as to serve the interests of pre-societal individuals. In the same way that the early modern tradition conceived of the phenomenological relation between mind and world as one of fundamental separation, Dewey claims that classical liberalism is a practical exemplification of ‘the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking’,Footnote 33 namely dividing up and separating phenomena into strict distinctions from one another. Contra this picture of the individual and its corresponding conception of freedom, Dewey aims to eliminate the philosophical pathology of a radical separation of the individual and social institutions by advocating a nuanced political holism:

As with the dissolution of the mind/world dualism, the individual and society are no longer conceived of as fundamentally separate from another, pace the classical liberal picture according to which one's freedom is understood exclusively negatively as autonomy from any external constraint on one's ability to pursue such-and-such. Rather, according to Dewey's political holism, we understand freedom in terms of a positive capacity to realise oneself. Crucially, moreover, such realisation can only be achieved by conceiving of individuality as necessarily embedded in a reflective and social environment. To put this more simply, where the previous philosophical traditions separated mind and world and individuality and sociality, the classical pragmatists hoped to make mind and world and individuality and sociality interdependent with one another. In shifting our way of thinking from separating phenomena to understanding the fundamental interdependency between phenomena which appear to be conceptual contraries, we dissolve the dispute and are then able to have a sense of peace.

Thus far, we have seen how classical pragmatists took their novel ideas to be therapeutic: they dissolve philosophical problematics by rejecting the conceptual framework that gives rise to the problematic in the first place. And by dissolving the problematic and advocating a nuanced conception of the philosophical issue in question, they hoped to return enquirers to a state of philosophical quietude. Crucially, though, one should not think that the classical pragmatists are best interpreted in a Wittgensteinian mode, even though they share the broad idea of dissolving philosophical problems: unlike Wittgenstein, the classical pragmatists’ remedy for intellectual aporia involves a substantive philosophical improvement rather than a return to a pre-philosophical form of life.Footnote 34 Such substantive philosophical improvement, to use Dewey's expression, involves ‘getting over’ philosophical problems stemming from pre- modern conceptual frameworks, to the extent that philosophy would directly contribute to social and political development. For example, the fundamental concern of Peirce's Pragmatic Maxim and a fortiori his variety of pragmatism is to establish human flourishing by properly understanding the metaphysical picture of reality and properly understanding the nature and methods of enquiry. As Hookway writes, ‘Peirce's work in ethics is motivated by a desire to explain the possibility of adopting the life of science as he understands it’.Footnote 35 This is elaborated by Paul Forster, who claims that ‘[o]n [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world through the active realisation of intelligent ideals’.Footnote 36 What is at stake when one puts forward philosophical theories or even when one does philosophy is not merely whether or not one attains sufficiently good levels of representational accuracy. Peirce is not particularly interested in this purely theoretical mode of cognitive activity. Rather, what matters for Peirce is ‘an ultimate, impartial, binding and rational framework for the organisation and fulfilment of human potential’.Footnote 37 The explanation for why Peirce was so explicitly opposed to nominalism and its philosophical correlates is that nominalism and its philosophical correlates are obstacles to the organisation and fulfilment of human potential: nominalism seeks to restrict enquiry and by doing so, nominalism prevents us from actualising our rational capacities. And because our rational capacities fail to be fully realised by nominalism, the possibility of us flourishing does not obtain.

It should be clear that Hegel's brand of therapy anticipates a crucial feature of classical pragmatist metaphilosophy, given how he explicitly claimed that the task of philosophy is to dissolve and overcome strict dualisms and binary categories of thought.Footnote 38 This conveniently leads to understanding the ultimate thrust of Hegel's brand of therapy and how exactly it anticipates classical pragmatist metaphilosophical commitments. What is the value to be gained by dissolving problematics and rejecting strict dualisms? One can recall previously that a characteristic of pragmatism is the Primacy of Practice. I take this idea to refer to conceiving of a philosophical endeavour as being significant if and only if that philosophical endeavour has demonstrable effects on us and the world we inhabit.Footnote 39 The diagnostic part of what can be called pragmatic therapy, as developed respectively by Hegel and the classical pragmatists, has two purposes: the first is to locate and establish the cause of our intellectual and existential disquietude; and the second is to determine which questions are worth worrying about in the first instance. Consequently, the recommended therapeutic programme offered by Hegel and the classical pragmatists — though differing in important ways — is specifically designed to foster and engender a genuine sense of autonomy and human bien être. Both Hegel and the classical pragmatists are committed to seeing human beings as amphibians of sortsFootnote 40 — we are intellectual and affective; we are rational and also capable of irrationality; and we are animals that are self-interpreting. But the kind of rationality we exhibit when we develop our second nature and cultural agency is one which recognises the need to avoid transcending the empirical world in an effort to cope with the variety of unpleasant and harmful things in the world. We recognise the deficiency of being too tender-minded. Crucially, though, this does not mean that human mindedness either adopts a depressing and pessimistic stance or a jocund Panglossian attitude to the strife we find all around us. On the contrary, it means that we are compelled to find genuinely meaningful and practical reasons to conceive of the world as rationally intelligible, not because the intelligible structure of the world illustrates that we can know everything about the world if we exercise our conceptual capacities in the best possible way, but because our rationality enables us to think and feel that we can make sense of things. However, we can only make sense of things and thus feel at home in the world if we are provided with the freedom to conduct our enquiries with epistemic and moral responsibility. Hence, for both the Hegelian and classical pragmatist conception of therapy, there is no separation of our philosophic lives from our social/political/daily lives, and that the concept of abstract philosophical ideas which have no concrete significance to our efforts of feeling at home in the world must be committed to the flames.