The Epistemic Virtues of Tarot: Self-Discovery, Self-Transcendence, Adventure, & Playfulness
In November 2025, I practiced tarot card reading. It goes like this: after formulating a question, you draw tarot cards randomly and read into them the answers to your query. I took to it very easily, and had a tremendous amount of fun going through the playful process of interpretation. What, at first glance, looks like an irrational tool of prognostication, actually exhibits the key features of a philosophical exercise. This gives me a completely different outlook on divination practices.
Discovering tarot card reading was extremely simple and fun. Before starting, the most intimidating thing about it for me was the grand total of 78 cards, each of them presenting a strange and intricate illustration. But you only interact with a few cards at a time, and when a card comes up, you can find its usual meaning by typing the name of the card in your internet search engine, and picking a tarot website. (The Labyrinthos website was my favourite for this.) Doing this, you’re already 90% of the way there. But I suppose that, for most people, the most intimidating thing about tarot, if someone else is not doing the reading for them, is the responsibility of interpreting the cards in relation to their own lives.
You must come up with a meaningful question, and then read into the cards you draw (and the order you draw them in) the answer to that question. One way to do it, for instance, is to consider the first card you draw as representing your past, the second the present, the third the future. I took very easily to that process, but I might be an outlier in that regard. I know that some people have hang-ups when it comes to flexing their own interpretative creativity and the mere fact of being the ones who came up with something makes the thing feel arbitrary and inadequate in their eyes. I don’t have that problem. I’m an enthusiast (from Greek enthousiasmos, from enthousiazein “be inspired or possessed by a god”): I’ll speak in tongues! I’ll do automatic writing! And I won’t feel like I’m faking it. (I assume that tarot isn’t as divine-frenzy-based as those extreme examples, but maybe it depends on what your hang-ups are). Not everyone is like me, so I wanted to acknowledge that. All I can say to those for whom there is a greater timidity, a greater barrier for entry, is that I had a lot of fun on the other side of that barrier, and that there are a LOT of tarot enthusiasts out there who can help you get into the process little by little. People will help you, because they love that kind of stuff! I’d probably start by watching YouTube videos about it, if I needed more onboarding.
However, there is a potential problem there. What if the unenthusiastic person’s timidity is in part or in totality fuelled by a perception of tarot as something epistemically vicious? A perception that is not at all helped by my cavalier references to divine-frenzy and god possession. Indeed, a lot of people roll their eyes at tarot. It seems to be the peak of irrationality to trust the randomness of cards and the human impulse to project patterns onto meaninglessness, when it comes to trying to get insight into anything, especially the future. That sceptic would either not try the practice, or if they were to try it, they wouldn’t want to turn to the community of enthusiasts for help. The timidity that blocks them, would be treated as a problem to fix by the enthusiasts, but as a guardrail against irrationality by the sceptic. They wouldn’t accept the help and wouldn’t go far. Well, with that particular point, maybe I can help. For all my facility for enthusiasm-based practices, I did start from a place of pronounced scepticism towards divination practices. It’s the usual spiritual polarization: one camp is really into the spiritual technique, but they start claiming supernatural stuff (yikes), and the other camp rejects the supernatural, but are total spiritual philistines (um… not good either). When it comes to tarot, I was the spiritual philistine. A couple of philosophical articles helped me out of that.
1) It can be a tool of self-discovery.
2) It can be a mood-management device (and as suggested by their last book – “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think” – this “mood-management” has deep ramifications for rationality; to be in the mood for wonder is to be in the mood for philosophy).
3) It can improve decision making when there is a benefit to randomizing your decisions (for instance, in game theory scenarios where you need to become unpredictable against an adversary).
In her article, sub-titled On the Brilliance of Tarot and the Breadth of Epistemology, Georgi Gardiner provides an even longer lists of potential ways in which tarot card reading might be reasonable and beneficial. Some of those items overlap with the previous categories, but from the rest, yet another big theme emerges:
4) Epistemic playfulness can improve cognition. “We muse, explore, and play with ideas freely. We make creative connections and invent evocative concepts.” It improves our hermeneutical toolbox in a fun way.
These two accounts of tarot card reading complement each other really well. Each tackles a difficult point which doesn’t make the cut in the other: in the short post, Helen de Cruz glosses over the “self-discovery” part, whereas Gardiner tackles head on how such “self-discovery” is no solipsism at all and no small benefit either. Conversely, Gardiner might be glossing over how the “randomness” of the activity might be a key ingredient as such1, and this is where Helen de Cruz fills the gap with their remark about the benefit of random decision making. Look, sure, very few of us need to randomize decision-making in order to be more efficient at hunting deer. And I don’t really recommend becoming a zig-zagging ball of chaos just to confuse your enemies (there’s got to be better things to do than that...). However! Even in the domain of self-help I think we can get stuck in a rut because we will always pick the same options over and over, regardless of how well it serves us. The overachiever will always think: "I fell short of my goals, I need to do more, I’m such a slacker". The underachiever will always think: "where has my freedom gone, I need to slow down, I’ve become such a 'dull boy'". Each will triple down on the attitude that they have already doubled down on. Each will think they are in the opposite category that they really are. This is an epistemic mess! We will always diagnose the same problem and prescribe the same remedy to ourselves, over and over. I think it is not surprising that introducing a little bit of randomness into the process of self-help leads to a more well-rounded approach to life.
What I liked about tarot is how little of a problem it was that it is a bad tool for prognostication. It is neat how it can sometimes predict the future in a “self-fulfilling prophecy” kind of way, but by and large it is very bad at telling the future. Once, the cards gave me advice that would have been quite good in the context of my usual daily life, but completely off the mark and useless a few hours later when I received a phone call that completely changed what my priorities should be for the week and sent me on an adventure far away. That wasn’t really a problem. And I am not going to bend over backwards to try to see how I misinterpreted the cards (I tried but it would be a stretch). It’s all fine: tarot is bad at telling you the odds. In fact, what I discovered, and what I liked, is that it seemed to be by design. It was nearly impossible to ask the deck questions of the form of “what happens next?”, the meanings that are available in tarot force you to ask more reflective and interesting questions. Questions that touch on your own psyche. That was a huge discovery for me: how good the design of tarot was. It doesn’t feel at all like merely shaking a magic eight-ball (given the nature of this blog I might later discover that the magic eight-ball is an extraordinarily rich and interesting tradition; this is my blessing and my curse).
I found tarot card reading to be a proper philosophical exercise. Let me remind you how I would define this (you can skip this paragraph if you already know). First of all, “philosophy” is the critical examination of all our presuppositions: we think about how we think about things. But a “philosophical exercise” is a distinct form of philosophical work because it is a way of thinking about thinking which is sensitive to two (often overlooked) aspects of our cognition: the timing and the setting, the when and the where. Someone will whisper a “memento mori” in the ear of the general precisely in the midst of his triumph. Someone will make sure to remind themselves in the morning that humankind is one family, worthy of love, before they go out to face the world and its annoyances. These people are doing philosophy. They are not merely reaping the rewards of philosophy, they are actively thinking about thinking & things, but in a way that is sensitive to the flow of time and space. They are aware of their own re-occurring efforts and they try to produce the best thinking they can over time and in key moments. The general examines his current surge of pride through the lens of the fact of mortality. He tries to avoid hubris. The lover of humankind examines their heart through the lens of the social harmony that could be. They try to bridge the gap between the moral norm they intuit and their thoughts & feelings in daily life. From the outside, it looks like these rituals can only happen if a philosophical question (for example, what are the implications of the fact that we will die?) has hardened into dogma, a belief held definitively and without the possibility of reform (for example, the vanity of fame and riches in the face of death). But this is not true. From the inside, it does not feel like a slavish application of a framework of interpretation. No, a philosophical exercise is the effort to create, refine and put to the test a framework of interpretation. It is lively work. This refinement happens in artificial training grounds (while writing your diary) or in the field, in the moments when it matters most. This unique way of doing philosophy enables things that are hard to achieve otherwise: for example, self-transcendence. I am talking about a kind of cognitive self-transcendence where you are able to think about topics that are of deep concern to you and yet to surpass the narrow lens of your own ego. Countless people have found that they need philosophical exercises in order to achieve this.
Tarot earns its place among philosophical exercises thanks to its engaging design. The symbols on the cards are both complex and compelling; they are a mix of great archetypes and weird dreamy images, never flat uninspired clichés. They deter simple questions about the future, and encourage self-reflection instead. They also encourage thinking through images rather than words: this is something that took me very strongly by surprise, and threw me back into the pond of intuitive action. In any case, they get the mind working. Building up on that, the process of drawing cards and linking cards, is also structured in a way that unites and conjures epistemic virtues. It is no accident: the randomness is what creates the sense of epistemic playfulness, this sense of adventure (this new mood of awe & wonder) is what allows self-transcendence, and, finally, this self-transcendence is what makes self-discovery possible, by getting you out of the usual patterns. All in all, going through a tarot card reading does amount to constructing a new framework of interpretation that you try on for size. It helps you to consider aspects of your life that you need to think about, but that you have a hard time attending to on your own.
Before drawing the first card of the day, I always felt trepidation, as if I was about to cut through old patterns with a sword.
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(15/12/2025)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
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1“I described this essay, briefly, to a skeptical friend. He is a software engineer. ‘Ah’, he replied, ‘so
tarot functions like a random thought generator?’ But tarot is far more valuable than that: The
thoughts aren’t random. […] tarot decks are a conveniently-sized art gallery of the human
condition.” From section 3 of the article: “Ambiguous, Evocative, Significant: The Table-Top Art Gallery of the Human Condition”
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