This essay was originally read as the Keynote Address at the 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice and 4th International Conference on Humanities Therapy, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, Republic of Korea, in July 2012.

It was originally published as Lou Marinoff, “Humanities Therapy: Restoring Well-Being in an Age of Culturally-Induced Illness,” Keynote address, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice (Humanities Institute, Kangwon National University), 27–48.

It is republished here by permission of the Humanities Institute and the Journal of Humanities Therapy.

Introduction

Distinguished Members of the International Organizing Committee, Fellow Practitioners, Esteemed Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for inviting me to deliver this address. It’s a signal honor to open this important conference, and a delight to have the opportunity to share with you some thoughts on its vital mission and central theme.

The structure of this address is two-fold. First, I should like to ground the notion of Humanities Therapy in its larger historical context, briefly tracing the birth and development of the Humanities themselves, along with the allied concept of humanism, initially from a Western perspective. In the process, I will also and inevitably juxtapose Western and Asian traditions. Asian humanism predates its Western counterparts by centuries, but its teachings remained unknown to the mainstream West until relatively recently. Ever since the 1960s, holistic Asian therapies have become increasingly pervasive and popular in the West, because they offer robust remedies to the panoply of culturally induced illnesses currently afflicting Western nations. Viewed in the context of the history of ideas, Humanities Therapy as compassed by this conference represents the evolution of a celebrated and venerated idea, whose time for rerenewal is nigh.

Second, I should like to expand upon a central claim (or rather, a cluster of claims) of this conference’s Call for Papers, claims that would be viewed as heretical in orthodox Western psychiatric and psychological circles. To quote from the Call for Papers: