Askēsis as a Way of Life
On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers
In this newsletter you will read about:
Two images of philosophy: Propositional and Practical
Conversion and paideia in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
The lesser-known genres of philosophical expression
Contemplation and scholarship
I had a great time talking with Erik Davis last night at The Alembic in Berkeley.
The crowd and discussion were both great—no small feat for a philosophical event hosted on a Friday night in the Bay.
I’m posting below the write-up for my talk. If you’ve been following along with my last few entries, you’ll see some of that thinking incorporated here in a more comprehensive way, along with some new material.
As always, if you enjoy The Base Camp, consider forwarding this email to your friends and colleagues, or just share this link with your networks.
Philosophy is a way of getting in touch with Being, and some of the time that takes the shape of using our propositional skills to present to ourselves different ways of talking about Being and our relationship with Being.
But propositional knowing is not the only way of getting in touch when it comes to our engagement with Being.
And this applies to our thinking as well as our writing.
There is a certain kind of thinking wrapped up in the style of writing that we generally associate with philosophy. And this is a very important skill to have.
I’m not trying to downplay this style of thinking at all.
What I want to do instead is to open up this conversation about what happens to philosophy when we view it from the perspective of practice, and this includes practices of reading, writing, and dialogue but it’s not limited to them.
What I have in mind more specifically are practices like fasting, prayer, meditation, contemplation, temperance, a cultivation of the senses, trials of endurance, skepticism, aesthetic mastery, and cultivation of virtue.
These are what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot calls spiritual exercises, and these for Hadot and myself are central to the philosophical life.
I lead with the question, what is the relation between practice and the deliverances generally thought of as the fruit of philosophy?
My view is that it’s often these practices that are the vehicles by which philosophical illumination can be achieved.
In my dissertation research, I’ve been exploring this question in the context of different time periods of philosophy, including Platonism and Neoplatonism, Christian contemplative traditions, phenomenology, mysticism, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy.
Today I’ll talk about some of that research.
One assumption I use in my work that not everyone will agree with is that when we look at philosophy from the perspective of practice—and especially if we see practice as key to delivering philosophical insight—then the types of figures rightly positioned for philosophical conversation expands.
Hence my subtitle On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers.
I want to say that there’s something important—and historically justifiable—in putting these figures in dialogue with one another for the sake of philosophical inquiry.
My goal today is to present a view of the Western tradition of philosophy as a practice tradition and as a contemplative tradition, now and in history.
Just to give you a sense for my plan today. I have four parts prepared for you:
I’m going to start by contrasting two different images of philosophy. One rooted in propositional knowing exclusively, and one rooted in a broader practice life.
Then I’ll move onto discussing the role of practice in philosophy. More than that, I want to give you all a sense for philosophy’s kinetic basis. That is, how philosophy is rooted in movements of thought and soul, and I’ll look at one movement in particular: conversion or turning around.
This focus on practice raises a number of questions about how we should think of philosophy as a genre. If we want this broader picture of philosophy, then we need more genres of philosophy.
I’ll close with a final problem that brushes up against the reality of contemplation and mysticism as predominantly non-verbal in nature and what to do about that in terms of our expressing this mode of relating to Being in words and books and descriptions. I’ll end on this question of the relation between contemplation and scholarship.
That should put us in a good place for me to have a short dialogue with Erik, and then we’ll open up for a more general group discussion.
The Two Philosophers
I want to start off by looking at the description I wrote up for this talk where I contrasted two views of philosophy. The first one suggests a view of philosophy as rooted in concepts, propositions, and systems.
The second suggests a view of philosophy as rooted in exercise, the Greek word for which is askēsis. I’ll have a lot more to say about askēsis later on but for now I just want to suggest that this path sees the root of philosophy in something more basic—in a transformation or overcoming of the self through practice.
I think this is a helpful contrast to start with, but I’ll let you know right now that once we’ve had a look at this contrast and what it can reveal to us about philosophy, I’m going to abandon it in favor of a third image.
In any case, this first view is from my perspective derivative of the second. And this relation between, let’s say practice and expression, is the problem I’ve been exploring in my research for the past 6 or 7 years.
I’ve found that in comparing the two it’s better to shift the conversation away from talking about two different systems of philosophy and towards two different people, two different philosophers equally engaged in philosophical pursuit.
The aim of the first philosopher is to represent a certain set of metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic problems by adumbrating responses to these problems in the form of propositions and arguments written down in papers and books so that others can assess their validity.
The American philosopher John Cooper is a good representative of this view, and I want to share two quotes from him on how he sees this kind of philosophy:
The essential core of philosophy is a certain, specifically and recognizably philosophical, style of logical, reasoned argument and analysis. . . . One must take with utmost seriousness that what the ancient philosophers, following Socrates’s innovative lead, are proposing is that we live our lives from some set of argued through, rationally worked out, rationally grasped, and rationally defended ideas about the world and one’s own place within it. . . . A philosophical way of life is therefore in fundamental ways quite a different thing from any religious way of life.
He’s taking up the term “religious” here to differentiate his view from Hadot’s. Here he is arguing against Hadot on philosophy as spiritual exercise:
These nonrational practices that Hadot describes as “spiritual exercises”—meditation, self-exhortation, memorization, and recitation to oneself of bits of sacred text, causing in oneself devoted prayerful or prayer-like states of consciousness and mystical moments—had, and could have, at most a secondary and very derivative function in the philosophical life during the heyday of ancient philosophy.
The essential task of this philosopher is to stay committed to intellect, reason, and rationality. The work of this philosopher is to give an account of the world in these terms alone. The world, or Being, or any of these other large existential categories have to somehow fit within the language of reason.
This is and will remain an essential task of the philosopher.
But my question is upstream of this view.
How is it that a person becomes a philosopher in the first place? What shapes intellect, reason, and rationality in the first place?
This is the emphasis of the second philosopher. This second type is engaged in practices of formation and re-formation of thought and perception, and, perhaps most importantly, of a certain kind of trained attention.
Henri Bergson once suggested that whatever else philosophy ends up being, it is at its core an act or a process of transforming attention and perception.
And there is an image of the human embedded in this idea, right?
The image is that the human being is in some important sense open-ended, that our intellectual, emotional, and perceptual faculties aren’t just given to us once and for all, but they are shapeable and moldable, and necessarily so.
They can be more or less attuned to the things the philosopher cares about.
This is the premise of askēsis—that attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology. They are skills you shape with your practices.
Down to the level of physical sensation we are interpretive beings.
I like to say attention is an art form or perception is a skill.
And you can see this in the related word askein, which means to adorn, to prepare by labor, to make someone adept, capable, by exercises. Or you can see it in the noun askete, this is a skilled worker who practices an art or trade and knows how to fashion or refine materials in high-level ways.
This mode of refining resembles another Greek word, techné, which just means the art or technique of the trades and craftworkers, but our emphasis here is not the work of carpentry or the skilled production of artifacts per se, but on the self, the person.
Askēsis is a mode of training the self takes upon itself in order to change itself.
This shaping process is central to what the second philosopher cares about. And this is where askēsis comes into fuller view. It’s true that askēsis just means exercise, but this isn’t really a complete picture of what it is and does.
Askēsis, we could say, comes into its own as a whole set of techniques for shaping the person aimed in a certain direction. This sense of aim or telos is essential to these practices of perception, you’re not just practicing in any which way for any random reason, but for a purpose, and I’ll return to this idea a little later.
In askēsis, we are aiming at something and attuning to something.
For now I just want to emphasize that it is this person-shaping activity that leads to these shifts or transformations in perception in the first place.
In other words, who you are as a person has everything to do with how you see and act, and how you see and act has everything to do with who you are.
To change how we see means to change who we are, and to change how we are means to change how we see. We can say, seeing and being are closely linked.
We should think of philosophical schools as those communities of practice engaged in different types of transformation. This is what the Hadot meant when he said that philosophy is a way of life.
“The philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”
That is, philosophy is a collective activity, and the activity is organized around the principles of the various schools of philosophy as a whole formula for living in the world. Transforming our way of being-in-the-world is what’s primary.
I’ll quote Hadot on this point:
“To be a philosopher was not to have received a theoretical philosophical education, or to be a professor of philosophy. Rather, it was to profess, as a result of a conversion which caused a radical change of life-style, a way of life different from that of other people.”
Here we see that philosophy in Hadot’s sense means something more than studying for a degree in philosophy. It has something to do with that key word he uses towards the end of the quote, conversion.
Turning and Conversion
This is one example of what I mean by focusing on the movements of philosophy, rather than just the content of philosophy.
Conversion has an interesting double meaning.
It means “to turn around” but it also means “to transform,” and the transformation is of a significant kind—it’s a change in spirit, in the substance of who you are as a person; you’re turning towards a whole new direction in life.
Your life was pointed in one direction, and now another.
The turning is one sense metaphorical but in another sense it’s very literal.
In conversion, your soul has actually turned around, this turning is transformative, and both are essential to philosophy.
I’ll quote Hadot one more time:
“It is possible to say that the idea of conversion represents one of the notions that are constitutive for Western consciousness. Indeed, one could describe the whole history of the West as a ceaselessly renewed effort to perfect the techniques of ‘conversion’: that is to say, to perfect the techniques which aim at transforming human reality, either through bringing it back to its original essence . . . or through completely modifying this reality.”
This quote is from an essay Hadot wrote on this history of conversion as this type of transformative movement.
He begins with the concept as found in the Ancient Greek philosophers. First in Platonism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism and out into Judaic and Christian accounts of conversion and then on into accounts of conversion in philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.
The point is, this turning motion is all over the history of philosophy, and Hadot doesn’t make this point, but we can do a kind of sociology of philosophical activity and observe that even today philosophers are engaged in his project of turning.
The linguistic turn, the turn to the subject, the realist turn, the post human turn—
These are events that turn the community of scholars in a new direction, to illuminate a new area of inquiry. They ultimately serve to disclose different aspects of Being in new ways. The turning, then, is a turning of our attention.
Alfred North Whitehead says, “Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher,” and I believe what he’s pointing to is this kind of conversion experience where we come to see things anew as a function of our turning in attention.
Now, I don’t want to draw us out into a long discussion of these figures and movements—we don’t have time for that—so I’ll look at just one example instead.
I want to look at one such move, and that is paideia.
Now, for the most part when we think of paideia, we think of the well-known Greek system of education designed to give students a broad cultural understanding, on that’s especially geared towards public life and the formation of political virtue—it’s role is the formation of the soul in the direction of justice—politeia and paideia
This includes intellectual education, but also moral development and aesthetic refinement; often associated with the formation of an elite class within society
The exact list and timing of the education varies depending on the source, but we’re often talking about music, art, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, gymnastics, and so on.
I want to draw less on these systems and more on the etymology of the word. Enkyklios paideia, “circular education,” the root here is the same as for a type of “turning wheel” or “training in a circle” (encyclopedia).
Ilsetraut Hadot noted that the enkyklios paideia is both a circular structure and a movement, a cyclical activity (kyklos can mean both “circle” and “cycle”), suggesting a unity and completeness in this program of study.
To do this I want to draw on a famous historical example of how paideia is deployed in philosophy to illustrate this kind of motion in thought.
The illustration I want to use is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, especially as Werner Jaeger describes this scene and its importance. Here’s Jaeger:
“And now,” Socrates begins the famous parable, “compare our nature, from the point of view of paideia and lack of paideia, to an experience like this.” He imagines men in an underground cave, which has a broad entrance open to the light. They have been chained down there since childhood, by their legs and neck, so that they cannot move, and cannot turn round and look behind. They have their backs to the entrance. Above and behind them, some distance off, a fire is burning: its rays fall above the heads of the prisoners on the back wall of the cave, towards which they are looking. Between them and the fire there is a road, along which runs a low wall, like the stage of a marionette-theater, upon which conjurors show their puppets. Behind the wall there are people carrying along all sorts of objects and figures made of wood and stone, some talking and others silent. The objects show above the wall, and the fire throws their shadows onto the back wall. The prisoners cannot turn round, so that they have never seen anything all their lives except the shadows. They naturally take the shadows for reality, and the echoes of the voices for the speech of the shadow figures. (Jaeger, 291)
The cave in the allegory is of course the visible or sensible world of appearances; the fire corresponds to the sun; and the ascent to the world above is the soul’s ascent to the intelligible world of reality.
The key is that for the ascent to begin, the turning itself must occur. The ability to turn must be exercised (turning is a kind of askēsis). Crucially, for Jaeger, this movement of turning, this paideia, cannot occur in any direction whatsoever. It’s not just a turn around and round or a turning away, but a turning towards.
This turning towards has a name that Jaeger identifies as a type of metanoia—a “conversation experience”; “turning towards”—so that metanoia is a turning about that involves the soul’s redirection and reformation in both body and mind. In the Latin, the prisoners in Plato’s cave undergo a conversio “turning about” that’s also a turning towards. But to what do they turn in this story?
To the Sun, or the Platonic Ideal of the Sun (itself a symbol of the Good). The Good, for Plato, is in turn, the source of Being which makes possible the perception of individual beings. “The soul, with all its faculties—intellectual, affective, volitional—turns its gaze towards the ordering principle of reality.” (Bertucio, 510)
Therefore the essence of philosophical education is “conversion,” which literally means “turning round.” “Conversion” is a specific term of Platonic paideia, and indeed an epoch-making one. It means more specifically the wheeling round of the “whole soul” towards the light of the Idea of Good, the divine origin of the universe. (Jaeger, 295)
In the state of apaideusia (lacking paideia), you are locked into place, unable to turn towards the sources of your own representations. This inability to turn, I contend, is the space of idolatry, ideology, fundamentalism, and dogmatism.
It’s a state of unacknowledged ignorance.
Paideia, then, is this capacity for movement, for turning back to the sources of one’s representations, loosening them up for reconfiguration or transformation, and askēsis marks a set of practices that keep you mobile and able to turn.
So this is one way we can think of philosophy as spiritual exercise, as a set of enabling conditions that activate paideia and metanoia.
And that is when we start to think about things like askēsis and conversion as these sorts of fundamental movements or drivers of insight and transformation, then we land in a place where we can engage in all kinds of discussions not just between different philosophical camps but between different traditions of practice.
And this is the second strand in the research I’ve been doing, and this is to turn our attention to a history of practices instead of a history of ideas.
Some of you know that this was also the premise behind The Side View, which was a publication I founded in 2018. It’s currently on hiatus, but what I wanted to do there was just this kind of turning towards practice and to look at history from this perspective.
So taking a side view is another one of these maneuvers in attention.
Instead of looking at history as a completed set of books, arguments, or ideas we look at history from the side and instead look at the practices that cultivated the people who made these artifacts.
This is a phrase I took from Peter Sloterdijk who is engaged in a similar project.
And this is very much a perspective that applies not only to philosophers, but to artists, scientists, and contemplatives as well.
So that we can think of the ascetic practices that are involved in the work of science—as a kind of privation of our senses that’s limited to empirical testing and hypothesis building.
You’re practicing a stance of skepticism and disengagement in regards to Being so that you can achieve something called neutrality or objectivity, but I think from the perspective of askēsis it would be better to say that you’re practicing a mode of cultivated attention than it is to say that you’re trying to get rid of your own perception altogether.
Or we can think of the ascetic practices that let artists do what they do.
I love this quote from the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper who describes the artist’s training like this:
“Long before a creation is completed, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for things previously overlooked. In short: the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality, and, thus challenged, additionally acquires the inner capacity to absorb into his mind such an exceedingly rich harvest. The capacity to see increases.”
This brings me to the second half of my title, Askēsis as a Way of Life: On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers. We have in this formulation a way of looking at each of these groups as different expressions of the practicing life.
And here my two philosophers can come together.
Philosophical Genres
The first philosopher, focused on texts and arguments and systems, is living a practicing life just as much as the second, it’s just a question of what practices are being engaged.
I think if we’re doing this right, then we come to find that the two philosophers can be one philosopher who is training different faculties of attention.
My stake in this conversation is that I want to expand the number and kind of practices that are regularly associated with philosophy.
One way to look at this expanded view in the history of philosophy is to simply look at the role of genre in philosophical thinking.
I keep pushing propositions to the side, but I want to stress again that this type of rational and systematic thinking is essential to philosophy.
Giving a logical and systematic presentation of ideas, fixed into print, is an important genre of philosophy.
It’s just not the whole of it.
Propositions are well suited to argument and debate, to articles, books, and essays of a certain kind, and to gaining a certain clarity about what we think is going on.
But even in the written word, philosophy trades in many other genres. So we can look at some examples: dialogues, autobiography, meditations, spiritual direction, scripture, prayer, aphorisms, myth, and allegory are all prominent in philosophy.
Here are a few examples:
Plato, Dialogues (a dialogical exploration of ideas that depends on interpretation, engagement with others, and transformation; this is not just a fixed presentation of ideas)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (a dialogue that Marcus has with himself in order to transform himself)
Augustine, Confessions (religious-philosophical self-examination on the span of a lifetime)
Evagrius, Antirrhetikos (Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combatting Demons)
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (a poetic dialogue written to an imaginary spirit, a woman, who personifies philosophy)
Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, the anonymously authored, The Cloud of Unknowing, or Julian of Norwich’s, Revelations of Divine Love.
When we look at the texts of the contemplative and mystical traditions they are written in the style of spiritual direction.
Bernard McGinn calls this the handbook tradition.
That is, they belong to a group how-to texts often written in the vernacular (i.e., not in Latin, but in Middle English, in this case) that include practical instructions (for contemplative prayer, in this text), guidance on how to navigate those practices (discretion in their use and misuse), and philosophical and theological context (in the form of excerpts or summaries) of relevant preceding ideas (from scripture, theology, and philosophy).
The style is often teacher-to-student, written as spiritual direction.
Though these texts have a practical style, it would be too much to say that these were simply popularizations of more complex intellectual works.
They do presuppose a history of study and practice.
It’s just that their overall tone and vernacular language, along with their practical orientation, made them more accessible.
And we could list many other examples:
St. Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises (meditation, prayer, and contemplative practice in the genre of spiritual direction)
Descartes, Meditations (picking up the Stoic tradition of meditation and self-examination)
Nietszche, The Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of Morals, Human, All too Human, and Zarathustra span these genres of essays, literary works, aphorisms, and myth-making.
Contemplation and Scholarship
Writing, as well as reading and studying, exemplify their own types of askēsis.
We can take this idea one step further, as Simone Weil does, and say that the exercises of education can be thought of sacramentally, as implements that train our spiritual attention.
Weil sees the sacramental gifts of education working on two levels.
First, they work in the sense that the difficulties of interpreting a text (or, say, grasping a mathematical proof) require achieving a precise quality of cultivated attention.
Second, and more importantly, this type of attention works to train the same focus used in spiritual exercise, as for example in the practices of prayer or meditation.
These habits of attention drive the capacity to pay close mind to the life of the soul. The prayerful life is a studious life, and the studious life a prayerful one.
The life of scholarship is in these ways already a life of spiritual exercise, wherein studious intention flowers out into sacramental attention.
In this sense, cultivating the arts of speech and writing invite their own kinds of transformations, as many writers and speakers already know.
But even though there is this sacred dimension to scholarship, it’s still not quite what we mean by contemplation, even though the two have a deep relation, as I’ll show in momentarily.
And this is the last section I’ll leave you with.
I’ve been talking about askēsis as this kind of effortful exercise. It’s very much this will-involved activity, and it often has this muscular kind of aesthetic, but this isn’t true of all kinds of practice.
And on this point I want to recommend a book by my advisor, Simone Kotva, who wrote a wonderful book called Effort and Grace, and I really have to credit her for this shift in my thinking around askēsis.
And what is this shift? It has to do with how we think of doing and not-doing in regards to our practices. And you can see this is contemplation.
Contemplation is unlike askēsis in that its key activity is no activity. It is rest, rather than action. Stillness, rather than movement. Silence, rather than sound. Unknowing, rather knowing. And yet, it is also a process. The process, crudely construed, is a movement of saying to unsaying (an assertion and its negation), and aphaeresis, or a clearing away, of thoughts, sensations, images, or ideas.
The word itself means to “mark out a space for observation” or “to gaze attentively.” The suffix “templum” in the word is the same as in the word “temple,” which in a more literal and concrete way also “marks out a space for observation,” as one might find in a monastery, retreat center, or library.
The word scholar contains a similar double meaning.
The Greek skohlē notes a mode of “holding back, a keeping clear” but also a physical building for learning—the school or academy—much as the Latin schola marks a “meeting place for teachers and students.”
In other words, the contemplative and the scholar are in the business of creating spaces for openness and receptivity, spaces that give way to the creative work of insight and inspiration.
So, in the end, we can say that askēsis is about effort, movement, action, but it’s also about stillness, receptivity, and grace, to use Kotva’s words. Putting these two together in relation is, then, what I mean by the phrase askēsis as a way of life.