Michael Picard

This is Michael Picard's translation of Gerd B Achenbach’s _Philosophische Praxis_ Beset by life-problems you can neither get rid of nor solve? Stuck? Over- or under-burdened by reality? Not living up to your potential? Philosophical Praxis is the alternative to psychotherapy for people not satisfied to muddle through life or merely exist. Not a method or a teaching, not diagnosis, treatment, or therapy, not a ready-made rule of life for you to conform to. It is no preformed application, but the use of philosophy to aid the individual, organization and society to come to self-understanding, so that people may thrive and live up to being themselves. Philosophical Praxis is not the prepossession of any trained philosopher, but a specialization in the practice of philosophy aimed to liberate guests (not ‘clients’) through sympathetic co-thinking toward their own fresh appraisals of their life and its circumstances. This book is the chief statement of German philosopher, Gerd B. Achenbach, founder of Philosophical Praxis, who in pioneering this revival of philosophy for life spawned a global movement.

This is Michael Picard's translation of Gerd Achenbach’s Vom Richtigen im Falschen. This book develops a philosophical account of Lebenskönnerschaft—the art of living rightly under conditions that cannot be mastered, purified, or finally consoled away. Across meditations on evanescence, contradiction, trust, humor, happiness, consolation, and aging, it argues that finitude is not an accidental limit placed upon life but the very medium in which wisdom must take shape. The chapters move through biblical lament, Greek and Roman moral reflection, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Freud, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Améry and Bobbio, testing inherited consolations against suffering, death, uncertainty, moral ambiguity and the comic disproportions of modern life. The central conclusion is that right living does not arise from evading what is wrong, transitory, ridiculous, painful or old, but from learning how to bear and answer it without self-deception. Trust is shown to be unavoidable, humor to disclose the right in wrong, happiness to resist direct pursuit, consolation to require presence rather than doctrine, and aging to demand recognition rather than repression. The book therefore presents philosophy less as a system of remedies than as disciplined wakefulness: a practice of seeing human life as it is and still consenting to live it well.