Askēsis & Perception

Notes from my dissertation defense

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art

---

A number of you know that I’ve been working on a dissertation for some time now, at points taking a year or more off in between drafts and revisions.

I’m happy to report that the manuscript is now done, and yesterday I successfully defended Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life to my committee. I’d describe it as the longer, more technical version of the work I put out on this Substack.

I’ve included my presentation notes for the oral defense below.

— Adam Robbert, PhD

---

I think I’ll start with a few details. The dissertation I’ll be defending is titled Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life. It includes five main chapters and an introduction and conclusion, coming in at about 75,000 words or just around 290 pages of text. I want over the course of my time to set up and defend four claims:

1. There is a view of philosophy that opens up when we look at it from the perspective of askēsis, one that both complements and challenges the contemporary view of philosophy as primarily a discursive project rooted in reasoning and conceptual analysis. This view holds onto these discursive elements but embeds them in a surrounding space of practices that work at the level of perception itself, and this requires expanding what we take philosophical training to be.

2. I want to link this broader view of philosophy rooted in askēsis to a particular account of perception and knowledge, one wherein both are approached as outcomes of different kinds of practice and that the test of these practices isn’t argument alone but includes the need of transformation and demonstration taken as a kind of reorientation that changes what comes to presence for us in perception in the first place.

3. I want to defend the idea that there is a particular form of askēsis that we today need to emphasize, and that this emphasis has to do with the nature of philosophical practice as having an ontological purchase. When we take up the idea of practice from a modern or postmodern point of view, there is a tendency to read these changes on the model of an internal or individualized psychological change alone. What we are less inclined to do, at least some of the time, is view these practices as having an essential connection to reality itself, and to how that reality presents itself to us in new ways on the other side of these practices.

4. Askēsis, in the sense I am using the term, invites us to expand what properly constitutes philosophical training to include a wider complement of faculties. Sensation, perception, thought, feeling, imagination, intuition, and contemplation reemerge on this account as sites of philosophical refinement and attunement, not reductively as assistants or underlaborers to reason, but as crucial constituents of the cultivation of perception as such.

What I want to show is that askēsis, so understood, is neither a preparation for philosophical insight nor a supplement to it, but the medium through which such illumination is achieved. In this sense, the practices of self-transformation that the philosophical tradition offers us alter what comes to presence for the practitioner as intelligible, and thus bear directly on the practitioner’s relation to reality itself.

Those are the main claims that I will be exploring.

But let me walk you through the text by starting with the title.

The key word here is askesis. The most basic translation we have for this word is exercise, as in the repetitive training an athlete would undergo to transform themselves for competition. Pierre Hadot borrowed the more precise phrase spiritual exercise from the Spanish Catholic priest St. Ignatius of Loyola to define askesis in a way that would include a wider variety of exercises, each engaged with the aim of personal transformation. These exercises include physical and sometimes nonverbal activities, including fasting, renunciation, solitude, meditation, contemplation, prayer, visionary experience, and aesthetic exercises related to art and artistry, but they also include a number of distinctly intellectual ones, such as research, investigation, reading, memory practices, and dialectics, as we find in Plato’s dialogues.

I spend the opening sections of the dissertation exploring these different senses of askesis we find in history—first by looking at how these practices inform the work of philosophers in general, and then by looking more specifically at how different schools deployed these exercises in their own ways. In the introduction, I look at Hadot himself and then his treatments of Plato, the Stoics, and Plotinus to give a sense for how askesis shows up in these contexts. I also introduce here a methodological problem that Hadot was keenly aware of. In many cases, these spiritual exercises were taught as part of an oral curriculum deployed in tandem with the written materials, lectures, and instruction of the school’s teacher. This makes the textual interpretation somewhat difficult, since we often rely on the reporting of students and the descendants of these schools to learn about the practices themselves.

Moreover, as we can already see, many of these practices have a nonverbal character not easily translatable into the written word. This tension—between nonverbal practice and discursive expressiveness—is alleviated by the fact that writing, reading, and studying are themselves among these spiritual exercises, when treated in a certain way. In addition, as Hadot is careful to point out, there is also much to be said for the work of philology, etymology, and genre when approaching these texts—but a tension remains here, and it is a tension that I hold throughout the dissertation; namely, that with askesis we are engaged in a work of translation of a different kind when it comes to the insights of the practices themselves thought alongside their lexical expressiveness.

For this reason, I open the dissertation with three framing quotes from Hadot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. These read:

The philosophical act transcends the literary work that expresses it. (Hadot)

What can be shown, cannot be said. (Wittgenstein)

It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of knowledge; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter. (Plato)

If I said that I want to hold onto this tension rather than resolve it, it is because the relation between the saying and the showing, to borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase, is neither linear nor straightforward. And as Rick has been reminding me throughout this process, it is also true that acts of expressiveness in a sense also fold back onto our understanding, generating new insight through the act of creation itself. Hadot uses the phrase “reciprocal causality” to gesture at a similar idea in regards to the use of practice alongside the written commitments of a given school—the two form an entangled circle of mutual transformation. The task, as I see it, is to hold the two together.

In this spirit, my aim in the introduction and in chapter 1 was to show two things:

First, as Hadot notes, all the major schools of philosophy in antiquity had their own forms of askesis, and these practices were essential to what it meant to live a philosophical life, even as each school informed their practices with their own teachings and philosophical orientations.

Second, what I came to find is that askesis has a unique relation to perception, and this is where the second word of my title comes in. Now, if you look at the examples of askesis I gave earlier—especially in their modes of privation, such as fasting, renunciation, or solitude—we can see that askesis bears a strong relation to its modern English cognate, asceticism. Part of what askesis can involve is a strict self-denial, a rigorous austerity that often involves disciplining the body and mind in a certain way.

This is certainly a part of the word’s meaning, but askesis in the sense I’m using the word, isn’t just privative—a set of protocols about what not to do—but productive, and I mean that in two senses. (1) It includes a set of protocols about what you should do, and do often. And (2) more importantly for our purposes, it is productive in the sense that through askesis you are transforming who you are as a person, and through that transformation of becoming-different, you begin to see differently. The phrase I use in the dissertation is that seeing and being are linked. And this link offers us a first pass at how we can understand the relation between askesis and perception. Person transformation is also perception transformation. Perception transformation is also person transformation. In both cases, a kind of conversion of attention is involved—a turning around or redirection of our fundamental view of things.

In the dissertation, I explore the relation between askesis and perception by investigating more closely attention (prosochē) itself.

To look at a few examples, in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is described as having “turned his attention to his own intellect” (prosechanta ton noun), a paradigmatic instance of the kind of deliberate reorientation that askēsis enables. For Plotinus, such a reorientation is possible because the soul occupies a median position among sensible and intelligible things alike, one capable of turning upward toward intellect (nous), downward toward discursive reasoning, or outward toward sensation. Attention, on the Plotinian view, determines which orientation is active, and askēsis is the discipline by which the practitioner gains facility in sustaining these orientations, which, as Plotinus observed, may “fatigue” the thinker without the necessary training.

In part inspired by Plotinus, Henri Bergson identified philosophy itself with this kind of “conversion of attention,” a displacement of awareness from practical urgency toward a perception of things as they are in themselves. It is this identification that led Hadot to describe the essential contribution of Bergsonism as “the idea of philosophy as the transformation of perception.” Askēsis, on this account, underwrites the capacity for attention, and attention in turn guides and transforms what perception can receive.

Along these lines, in the Christian monastic context, we can point to a range of practices ordered to this end, including vigilance toward intrusive thoughts (or logismoi), in which the practitioner learns to observe and redirect the movements of the mind as they arise; the cultivation of inner stillness (hesychia), which clears the interior space within which sustained attention becomes possible; and disciplines of simplification and renunciation—such as fasting, withdrawal, or solitude—which reduce the influence of what else might compete for the soul’s attentive capacity. These practices are not themselves the act of attention, but they prepare and deepen our capacity for it.

So, in terms of the askesis of attention, we have practices of attending and surrounding practices that in many ways serve to deepen, or guard, the capacity to attend.

Perception, on this view, is indexed to the skills and habits of the perceiver, in the sense that the perceiver must be formed into the kind of being to whom the character of a thing can present itself in a certain way. Indeed, when we look at the literature on askesis we find an emphasis on this kind perception directed both inwardly—at the interiority of our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and intuitions—and outwardly, onto the presence of the phenomena that show themselves on the other side of our cultivated perceptual capacities.

In this context, the theologian Thomas Merton offers a helpful description of asceticism, which speaks to its broad applicability across domains and to its connection to perception. He writes,

“[Asceticism] comes from the Greek askein: to adorn, to prepare by labor, to make someone adept by exercises. (Homer uses it for ‘making a work of art.’) It was applied to physical culture, moral culture, and finally religious training. It means, in short, training—spiritual training.”

That askēsis means both to labor and to adorn, to borrow Merton’s phrasing, indicates the subtle possibilities implied by ascetic exercise: To practice is to work, and through work, to make more elaborate, specifically to make one’s own perception more elaborate, or more adorned, in a certain direction governed by the aims of practice. Such an elaboration of perception need not always imply greater complexity, as the austerity involved can just as well point to a simplification of our focus.

As Patricia Dailey observes, ascetic practices across history have been concerned with the development of the inner and outer senses, in other words, with the development of perceptual ability, seen both as the introspective quality of attention to oneself and as the refinement of the body’s senses through practical transformation. In the so-called spiritual senses tradition, the cultivation of perception includes the five physical senses—sight, sound, touch, scent, and taste—each treated as pathways to a deepening and multisensory encounter with God and the divine.

Thus, in a very real sense, perception transformation isn’t at work on the levels of apperception, intellect, or conceptual reasoning alone, nor is it simply a matter of being able to reflect on an experience felt in sensation after the fact and then conjure up a deeper story about its meaning; it is, more precisely, the training of the senses themselves, so that what begins to show up for you in your everyday waking perception of things is transformed. Your sensibility is itself the medium transformed by your practices. In short, through askesis, we are engaged in the reshaping of the horizon of experience on purpose.

There is in this sense an aesthetics of perception conjoined with the ascetics of practice. I pick up this theme in more detail using Gabriel Trop’s work on poetry and artistry as its own kind of askesis, where again we find this theme that through creation both artist and art viewer are transformed. Trop in his work positions art as a way of life, an askēsis, as he says, “that continually modifies, often imperceptibly, the manifold patterns of being—whether they are perceptual, behavioral, or affective of the person who undertakes it.”

Taking the aesthetic in a more philosophical context, in the Enneads, Plotinus borrows Plato’s earlier metaphor in the Phaedrus of the soul being something like a statue that you shape and reshape through your practice and way of life. Likewise, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing likens contemplative practice to a kind of woodworking or carpentry, except in this case, as in the image of the statue, the wood being worked on is you as a person, and the woodworker is the practice, shaping your soul into a new constitution, thus placing it into a new relation with the world. The author writes:

To put it more exactly, let that thing [the contemplative practice] do with you whatever it pleases and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it be the carpenter; you simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there. (chapter 34)

I want to note a subtle detail here. If so far I have discussed askesis as a certain kind of willful activity, in the mode of a person actively engaged in a deliberate project of self-transformation, then here we can pause and observe that with contemplation another dimension shows itself. I would say, instead of acting and beholding, we transition into receiving and being beheld. However, as with the entanglement of saying and showing, we can point here to an entanglement of willing and receiving, as the contemplative posture involves both initiating a practice and then letting oneself be absorbed by it. I take up this theme in the dissertation by appealing to Simone’s work and her welcome rejoinders to Hadot’s often Stoic-inflected sense of askesis as willful, and sometimes individualized, self-transformation.

We have to think of effort and grace together, to borrow Simone’s title.

Since my time here is limited, I want to move ahead by saying that what I’ve just presented is what I think of as context-setting for the later chapters of the dissertation. In those later sections, I pick up several other themes that I will quickly summarize here: I haven’t mentioned the role of practice spaces—the gymnasia of the Greek philosophers in general or Plato’s Academy in particular. I haven’t mentioned Simone Weil or the role of contemplation in scholarship more specifically. I’ll leave that for another time. I’ll also leave aside the discussion surrounding my subtitle: philosophy as a way of life. Suffice to say I’ve included the phrase in the title as a nod both to Hadot and to the now burgeoning field of scholarship that goes under the same name. I would count both Jake and Simone as key figures in this field, to say nothing of the work of philosophers like Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk who have joined Hadot in generating much discussion on the theme of askesis in a variety of journals, at least two book series by that name, and a growing number of organizations dedicated to this ideal.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to Eric Voegelin and what he calls reason in the noetic sense. There I show how the philosophical education (paideia) dramatized in Plato’s Cave Parable is itself a necessary component of askēsis, as is the turning of the whole soul (periagōgē), enacted in the dialogue as the prisoner’s turn away from the cave wall. I then take up Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Plato’s Seventh Letter, arguing that both can be read along the lines of this deeper sense of turning and transcendence.

In the chapter that follows, I treat askēsis from a historical perspective, examining how its classical vision changes under the pressures of modern social, institutional, and intellectual life. I draw first on Hadot’s account of philosophy’s transformation in the medieval and modern university systems. With Max Weber, I then show how askēsis in this period is progressively rationalized, interiorized, and instrumentalized, and with Charles Taylor I trace what he calls the transition from “found” to “constructed” orders, a movement that narrows a shared ontic horizon while also opening up new forms of freedom for individuals. I close with a portrait of Descartes as a figure who inherits the tradition of philosophy as spiritual exercise whilst enabling its transformation into a more disengaged and mechanized program of self-mastery.

Hopefully we can return to this material in the discussion, but what I want to do here in the second half of the presentation is make my way back to Plato. This will also let me offer my own account of askesis and perception from within the context of Plato’s philosophy, as I’m reading it.

There is much to say here.

Where I’ve left us so far is with a view of these exercises, in their various modes, as ends in themselves, performed for the sake of personal transformation. That is, as individual practices, they cultivate distinct and intrinsically valuable internal goods, insofar as they develop the person’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual faculties. At the same time, these practices are also ordered toward a larger horizon that we have so far only briefly mentioned. Indeed, in many cases, these practices are said to reconfigure attention and perception so that the whole of the ordered cosmos could come to presence for the practitioner in a new way. In this sense, the various internal goods achieved through practice aid in the larger transformation of the way the person sees and experiences the world at large.

The Greco-Roman and Christian practices to which Hadot dedicated his life to recovering tied these individual transformative exercises towards a more conscious participation with this larger whole. As Michael Chase, Hadot’s student and translator, puts it:

These exercises, involving not just intellect or reason, but all of a human being’s faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoints and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos.

In other words, askēsis is a spiritual exercise that results in a transformation of perception through the cultivation of a certain mode of being, one that in turn transforms the practitioner’s relationship to the greater Being in which the philosopher is embedded and of which the philosopher is a unique expression.

Hadot picks up this theme in several places. For example, Hadot identifies Plato’s Socrates as marking a certain distance from everyday human knowing and being. “One becomes aware,” writes Hadot, “of the superhuman character of wisdom: a divine and transcendent state, in relation to which human beings can only recognize the immense distance that separates them from it.” Likewise, in Aristotle’s works, we find, Hadot says, exercises of “thought and contemplation” that “seem beyond the human condition,” such that “wisdom is a state in which man is at the same time essentially human and goes beyond the human, as if the human essence consisted in being beyond itself,” a point I will develop in more detail below.

We can see in these perspectives a two-fold movement: first, a movement of detachment or distance, and second, a countermovement of immersion, or deepening, into the broader presence of the world. This turning of the person toward the cosmos is at once an expansion and a letting go of a relation to the world as something useful for one’s needs alone. In other words, it requires a letting go of the instrumental relation between self and world, instead finding in this new attitude the intrinsic value of the whole as a whole and of the individual beings that come to make it up.

Whatever shape this figure takes, whether aesthetic or philosophical, Hadot concludes, “it is within ourselves that we can experience the coming-into-being of reality and the presence of being.” Note that Hadot here references Being (on) in general, rather than this or that particular being (ónta), echoing the distinction made by Aristotle, for whom Being is the object of the science of metaphysics, or the study of “being qua being” (to on he on), as opposed to a study of individual beings, which is the concern of the special sciences. But note also that Hadot does not speak here of a “science” of being qua being, but the “presence of being.” Elsewhere he speaks of an “experience of world qua world.”

In both cases, Hadot accents an experiential or phenomenological component to the theme of Being and its coming to presence in human perception, a coming to presence delivered in part by the askēsis we have identified as central to philosophical formation, but also by a moment of profound differentiation, “a conversion: a radical rupture with regard to the state of unconsciousness in which man normally lives.” Such a conversion marks a turning around of the person’s life into a new domain of attention, an entry point into a new philosophical way of living.

One could say that askēsis is premised on the practitioner’s relation to Being through an encounter, one mediated by practice and experience. Indeed, in Plato’s Republic, at 486d, we learn that having this relation to Being is one of the philosopher’s essential characteristics. Consider the following translations of the passage. The soul referenced here is the soul of the philosopher:

“Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is to have a full and perfect participation of being?” (Jowett)

“The goal of philosophy, as Socrates claims, is to engage in the ‘theōria of all being.’” (Nightingale)

The relation to Being—or to “that which is” (in the last translation)—takes the shape of “participation,” “theōria” (or beholding), and “grasping.” These actions are described as essential to the philosophical life, and thus to any of the practices that we may consider “philosophical.”

If the philosopher’s askēsis, in Plato’s sense, culminates in a conversion toward Being as such, the Republic presses one step further. At 509b, Socrates insists that what orders and makes Being available to thought is itself beyond Being (epekeina tēs ousias). We find in the Reeve–Grube edition of the Republic, the following translation of these passages, calling forth Plato’s famous analogy between the Sun and the Good (as that which is beyond Being):

“What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.” (508c)

“The sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, with growth, and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.” (509b)

“Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.” (509b)

The Good, in these senses, gives individual beings both their being and their intelligibility, while the Good is itself neither being nor intelligibility but something more primary than both. Theōria, as Plato conceives it, therefore consists in another double motion: it bears witness to Being and, in the same act, orients the soul toward what gives Being its order and truth.

In Plato’s language, it opens our seeing to the “beyond” of Being—not as another thing to grasp, but as the possibility by which beings are encountered to begin with. Thus the “beyond” of Being mirrors, ontologically, what we first described aesthetically and epistemologically as the “beyond” of the human “that goes beyond the human.”

Theōria is, in this sense, a transcendent beholding that mirrors, in the human being, the transcendent nature of the Good itself in comparison to intelligible forms more generally. Hadot’s account of askēsis as the transformation of perception presupposes this twofold orientation—as a receptivity to Being and a formation by the source that patterns it. Philosophy in this mode is a set of practices that enable theōria, or this bearing witness to Being, especially as made available by contemplation and the philosophical arts of perception cultivated through practice.

Askēsis in this basic sense is the shaping of the shape of one’s being in concert with receptivity to this greater Being. Without this orientation, askēsis risks becoming a practice of self-transformation alone—or, worse, even a means of self-enclosure—a discipline of subjective refinement without correspondence to the deeper structures of meaning and being in which the person is already embedded. Practice, in this more limited view, becomes unmoored from any measure beyond itself, and in doing so loses its intelligibility as philosophy, and with it, any meaningful purchase on reality. “The passion of the philosopher to make sense of things,” William Desmond says, “remains a futile self-transcendence, outside of some unsurpassable sense of the worth of the whole.”

It is this relation—between the practices of the person and the orderings of Being—that gives askēsis its philosophical meaning. Askēsis, in the sense I am arguing for, is a response to Being’s generativity, and the practices that emerge in its wake are themselves shaped by the modes of givenness they seek to receive. These practices, in their repetition and refinement, make possible a deeper participation in that which exceeds the practitioner, and this participation becomes a source of both transformation and understanding within our waking perception.

In the remaining portions of the dissertation, I continue to elaborate on what Plato might still have to teach us about practice and perception, but I have done so following a particular reading of Platonism that is worth spelling out before I close. There is much consternation surrounding Plato’s work and whether we can even speak plainly about “Plato’s philosophy” as such or, even if we could, if this philosophy, with its often bemoaned dualisms and hierarchies, is worth holding onto in the first place.

I think the answer to both questions is a resounding yes, but we must, on my view, do so in a particular way. Here, then, are six key points about Plato we ought to emphasize if we want to think about something called Platonism in the context of askēsis and perception in the 21st century.

I don’t have time to expound on each point, so I will leave each one as a claim we can explore further together, or which you can read more about in the dissertation.

1. “Platonism” so-called is older than Plato, a tradition he inherits and refashions rather than invents, and its commitments can be specified via negativa, through five negations. On Lloyd Gerson’s reading we reach Plato’s philosophical commitments through five negations, antimaterialism (reality is not exhausted by materiality, and forms are real), antimechanism (explanation cannot be reduced to blind motion or chance), antinominalism (universals are real rather than mere words or linguistic conveniences), antirelativism (knowledge of truth and goodness is possible), and antiskepticism (genuine knowledge of reality is attainable). Alongside these negative commitments, Gerson reads the Old Academy, especially through Speusippus, as continuing a program that sought to articulate a set of first principles, chiefly the One, the Good beyond Being that is its source, and the Indefinite Dyad. So understood, “Platonism” describes an instance within an older tradition that predates Plato, going back at least to the Pythagoreans, and that extends through Aristotle, the middle Platonists, and the Neoplatonists, all of whom share these negations and an affirmative engagement with the first principles while differing in emphasis and in the final status they assign them.

2. Reading Plato fully means admitting the unwritten teachings of the Academy alongside the dialogues, and this inclusion dissolves much of what makes the dualistic reading seem unavoidable. The issue is whether one accepts the “inner” teachings of the Academy in addition to the “outer” teachings of the published dialogues. On Sean O’Brien’s account Schleiermacher and Strauss both take a sola scriptura approach, where only what is written in the dialogues counts as valid testimony of what Plato thought (for Schleiermacher the “inner” is the protreptic genre of the dialogues themselves, for Strauss the ironic or hidden meanings staged within them). The Tübingen school, by contrast, treats the “inner” as the unwritten doctrines of the Old Academy, above all the first principles of the One, the Good beyond Being, and the Indefinite Dyad, with the dialogues pointing toward these teachings. I follow the Tübingen reading in treating the unwritten doctrines as essential to Plato’s philosophy, because they are precisely what generate an image of Platonism that does not fall prey to the strongly dualistic interpretation. Admitting these principles reframes the apparent two worlds as levels within a single order descending from one source, so the dualism softens into a continuity of degrees rather than a split between realms different in kind.

Dimitri Nikulin:

If one takes the testimonies about Plato’s inner-Academic teachings and discussions seriously, one is likely to find a picture of Plato quite different from the one Platonic scholarship has been presenting for the better part of the last two centuries. The simplistic two-world scheme—that of the ideal world of forms and the world of the becoming of bodily things—is simply not there. The ontological picture that arises from testimonies is more subtle, nuanced, sophisticated, and complex. However, such an interpretation neither contradicts nor ignores the existing texts of Plato but complements them and in fact clarifies certain points that remain either not fully spelled out, or only raised and slightly touched on, in the dialogues.

This interpretation of the corpus Platonicum, which draws heavily from the so-called Tübingen interpretation of Plato’s extant works, includes the existing dialogues, the Platonic letters, the several commentaries from Plato’s peers and students (principally Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus Mathematicus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics), and a variety of other testimonials descriptive of the “inner-Academic teachings” of Plato’s academy, the foremost of which have been published in a collection as the Testimonia Platonica. Together these sources constitute the “unwritten doctrines” of Plato, doctrines that, on Nikulin’s reading (in agreement with Gerson’s), complement rather than contradict Plato’s known texts published in the dialogues.

3. The distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Plato describes not two worlds but a continuum of modes of apprehension, through which form is given and received in different ways according to our skills of perception. Eric Perl and James Findlay share the understanding that the sensible-intelligible distinction should be read not as an opposition between two worlds different in ontological kind but as a distinction falling within a single continuum, disclosing itself through different modes of cognition as the multiplicity of sense and the unity of intelligibility. All modes of cognition, from sense to intellect, are the apprehension of Being, that is, of form. The key lies in the words eidos and idea, whose root is the verb idein, “to see,” in the sense of “what one sees,” or an “appearance.” Form is therefore the “look” through which a thing shows itself, thought in tandem with the way it is given to awareness, rather than a separable entity residing elsewhere. Hence why Perl reads Plato’s “seeing” as close to what phenomenology calls intuition (Anschauung), the immediate togetherness of seeing and seen, the conjugal togetherness of thought and being. Read this way, Plato’s metaphysics is an account of the existential condition of being human rather than a theory of abstract entities.

Perl:

The distinction between sense and intellect, in short, is not a distinction between two classes of object, but rather between apprehending an intelligible nature as one and many.

If the levels of reality are levels of presentation and apprehension, then the many “ascents” in the dialogues, the images of “going to” the forms or true being, express not a passage from one “world,” one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality. This, above all, is why Plato’s metaphysics is no mere “theory,” a postulation of abstract entities called “forms,” but is rather an account of the existential condition of human beings.

4. The body in Plato is not necessarily some prison to be escaped but an eidetically patterned field to be cultivated, so that the soul-body relation is one of calibration through training rather than disdain. Kevin Corrigan rejects what he calls the false picture of Platonism as abstract and unconcerned with (or even hostile to) embodied life, reading the “separating” soul of the Phaedo and the Symposium as an incarnate soul moving away from a single fixed point of view in order to see a world at all, and to see it intersubjectively. He describes Plato’s philosophy as a dynamic, coextensive continuum of an eidetically saturated sensible world, where body, mind, and soul come together in an integrative and eidetic structure. The body itself partakes of patterned form, but this form is realizable in multiple ways, requiring the shaping of askēsis to manifest. Coleen Zoller makes the complementary case from the side of practice, distinguishing a normative dualism from an austere one, and observing that it would be counterproductive for a Platonic inquirer to abhor or ignore the physical world of bodies and senses while undertaking to comprehend the forms, since the soul’s task is to organize and interpret the streams of input the body supplies. In both accounts the physical senses are to be refined rather than overthrown, and the dogmatic two-world dualism turns out on Corrigan’s account to be the view of the opiner, an expression of doxa rather than knowledge.

5. Appearance and sensibility are an indispensable medium of access to form, the first site at which the soul becomes responsive to the intelligible, so that the approach to forms runs through sensibility rather than away from it. This point follows directly from the readings of form and the body above. Alessandro Stavru has clarified in his work that the relation between phainesthai (the word means “to appear,” referencing how a phenomenon “shows itself”) and truth (alētheia) in Plato’s Republic is one of reciprocity and entanglement rather than opposition. On his reading, what Plato calls the phantasmata are not straightforwardly deceptive illusions but what he calls “divine” (theia) appearances that “guide the soul until it sees the best part of reality” (532c5–6). Stavru emphasizes that this disclosure is a gradual one, wherein Plato employs comparatives (alēthestera, “truer”) and superlatives (alēthestaton, “truest”) to indicate that things reveal different degrees of truth depending on “the amount of alētheia they unveil.” Thus, the “ascent” to the forms is not a leap out of sensibility but a movement through it, with each stage of appearing bringing the soul closer to a truer disclosure, through a repeated and deepening “acquaintance” with form. Returning to our earlier discussion of alētheia, we can see that without the appearing of things, truth “would not become visible at all.” Phainesthai and alētheia are in this sense mutually implicated in the soul’s journey toward intelligibility. In these gradations, Stavru says, we find again the metaphor of the sun, which in this sense is “the source of every possible alētheia.”

6. Far from initiating the slide from alētheia to orthotēs that Heidegger alleges, Plato holds disclosure and correctness together, so that the unhiddenness of form to a perception shaped by practice is what generates the correctness of whatever we then say about it. I pick up in the dissertation the work of researchers Eric Perl (on alētheia in Plato), Paul Friedländer (on the historical etymology of alētheia), Henry Wolz (on the pedagogical design of the dialogues), and Mark Ralkowski (on Heidegger’s changing reading of Plato from his 1930s to 1940s lectures) to explore Heidegger’s narrative that Plato subordinates truth as alētheia, the unconcealing of Being, to truth as orthotēs, the correctness of representation, setting the West on its course through the long forgetfulness of Being. What Perl, Friedländer, and Wolz are pointing to in different ways is a two-fold recuperation of Plato in light of the Heideggerian critique, which I would summarize in the following way:

(1) Heidegger is wrong, historically, that alētheia had a more original meaning and priority in the pre-Platonic Greeks that is lost, or begins to be lost, in Plato (there is more continuity here than Heidegger alleges). As Friedländer has shown, in placing alētheia and orthotēs in strict opposition, Heidegger misses that the ontological sense of alētheia (the unhiddenness of being) and the epistemological sense (the correctness of apprehension) coexist in Greek usage from Homer and Hesiod onward. For example, Hesiod’s Theogony already employs ἀληθές to designate “correctness of perception,” precisely the meaning Heidegger attributes to Plato’s supposed corruption of the term. Friedländer further argues that when Heidegger describes alētheia as “put under the yoke of the idea,” he converts a relation of conjunction into one of subjection; in Plato, however, idea and alētheia remain coordinated, with the idea serving as the source from which truth radiates in its threefold sense (the ontological reality of being, the epistemological correctness of apprehension, and the existential truthfulness of the knower)

(2) Epistemologically speaking, alētheia may have a certain phenomenological priority but it need not eclipse the importance of orthotēs in our philosophizing. Why? The event of some truth showing itself must come before the later statements that express it or evaluate it, but this should not undercut the importance of this kind of propositional labor. In Friedländer’s words, “For Plato, there is in ἀληθής [spoken truthfulness] and ἀλήθεια [truth as event] an equilibrium between the revealing truth, the unhidden reality, and the truthfulness which measures that reality by this truth. Plato did not corrupt the concept of alētheia, as Heidegger claims. Plato sharpened the concept, systematized it, and heightened it.”

Perl’s position is that in Plato we find a more complex account of truth than what Heidegger alleges. Rather than a fixed representation picking out a static idea residing in a separate elsewhere, forms on Perl’s reading are, as we have seen, the very “looks” or intelligible identities through which things show themselves to awareness in the flux of perception. Perl in this way recovers a Plato for whom alētheia remains central insofar as it represents a disclosure of truth as an event in reality (as opposed to a truth residing as a correct representation in the mind), one that requires the cultivation of a perceiver capable of receiving it. My contention is that askēsis, as a practice of transforming perception, alters our attunement to things, and thus to how they show themselves. This attunement to beings is made possible by alētheia, and this attunement is shapeable by practice. Askēsis is a practice of disclosure.

If we can accept these six points, I think this excerpt from my dissertation, which I will close with, becomes defensible:

In viewing the sensible and the intelligible as two facets of the same one world disclosed through different methods, that is, through different faculties that can be refined and reshaped through a variety of different practice regimes, we have not just a static correspondence of perceptual faculties with different strata of Being, as in the adequation or agreement between knower and known, but a correspondence that emerges out of and is then continually re-established through the transformation of perception. On this view, the emphasis lies on the practices, the modes of askēsis, which develop those faculties and are then generative of different styles of apprehension that receive Being in unique ways, each marked by different techniques of understanding.

The sympathy between knower and known is thus secured not as the simple pre-established harmony of Being’s givenness to consciousness, nor as the correctness of representation and idea, but as the ongoing re-establishment of a conversion of attention which gives Being to perception on the other side of practice.

In the final analysis, then, we can talk about askēsis and perception but we can also talk about an askēsis of perception, the training of ways that phenomena are shaped as heightened appearances by the skilled perceiver, the shaping of Being’s appearing into perception through practices of attention. The differences in the appearance of Being’s givenness to perception amount to differences in our stances and locations regarding Being, but also in regard to our skills or practices of perception that refine and shape this givenness in more or less attuned ways, depending on the aims of our perceiving.

Beyond these specific acts of perception, being awake to this convergence of Being’s eruption into appearance, rather than to the reality of this or that appearance in particular, is the act that philosophical conversion points to, not as only the turning away from appearance to reality but towards the awareness of the ongoing interplay between appearance and reality, which just is Being’s ongoing activity as presented to the minds of the living. Philosophy is the name for these preparatory exercises, and its education is the training of perception, broadly conceived.

Thank you. I will stop here. I look forward to the conversation.