Collected Essays No. 1
January–April, 2024
Readers,
I’ve published a number of essays since the start of the year—Substack tells me since January 5—and I thought now, roughly a quarter ways through the year, would be a good time to round up these essays and collect them all in one place.
That’s what you’ll find below: 13 essays on Eric Voegelin, Evagrius, Pierre Hadot, St. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, the Middle English mystics, Simone Weil, Plato, and more. I’ve included titles and short descriptions of each piece, along with some of the key concepts and practices that each essay explores.
If you’ve been enjoying these essays so far, do share this list with your friends and networks.
There’s much more to come.
— Adam
Consciousness and Luminosity: An Introduction to Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was a German-American political philosopher who wrote both a philosophy of history and a philosophy of consciousness. This essay is an introduction to his work, especially on consciousness, language, and reality. Voegelin is in my view a criminally underread philosopher, and this piece highlights his responses to the role of philosophy in questions of pluralism and realism and immanence and transcendence using three of his key essays.
Know Thyself: Evagrius on Care and Knowledge of the Soul
This is part 2 of my essay on Evagrius. I look at his work as a phenomenology of the soul and its afflictions, centered on the practice of self-observation (nēpsis) and how this practice recalls the earlier Greek imperatives to “know thyself” (gnothi seauton) and “care for oneself ” (epimeleia heautou). This type of paying attention is the center of the Evagrian psychology—a nonmodern practice of self-examination so appropriate for our times of being open to manipulation by subtle external forces.
The Desert Philosopher: A Brief Introduction to the Evagriana
Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399 AD) was a Christian monk, ascetic, and theologian. He is best known for his teachings on prayer, asceticism, and his analysis of logismoi, or “afflictive thoughts,” and noēmata, “virtuous thoughts.” This essay introduces key concepts from Evagrius, centering the relation between practice (praktikē) and contemplation (theōria) in the soul’s development.
Askēsis as a Way of Life: On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers
This essay is a write-up for a talk I gave at The Alembic in Berkeley, CA. Here I discuss what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) calls spiritual exercises. 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.
Thinking as Gathering: The Art and Asceticism of Thought
St. Augustine (354–430 AD) and Gregory of Nyssa (335–395 AD) have much to offer the art and asceticism of thinking. This piece looks at the role of thinking (cogitare), gathering (cogere), and memory (memoria) in Augustine and the practices of contemplative ascent in Gregory, especially in relation to kataphasis (saying), apophasis (unsaying), and aphaeresis (clearing).
Mind, Memory, Consciousness: A Middle English Phenomenology of the Soul
I look here at the relation between thought (dianoia) and contemplation (noēsis) in the Middle English mystics (Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing), especially in relation to what Bernard McGinn calls “the handbook tradition.” Aristotle also makes an appearance as a bridge between philosophy and Christian mysticism.
The Kinetic Philosophy: Back to the Moves Themselves!
Philosophy is a kinetic activity. What does this mean? It means that one takes a practice-oriented view on the fruits and deliverances of the philosophical life. This view of philosophy calls us back to askēsis, or spiritual exercise, in the philosophical life, a concept that returns us not to any specific system of thought and world, but back to the moves themselves that enliven philosophical living. I explore here philosophy from this practice-oriented perspective.
Attention and Reformation: We Become What We Behold
This essay builds on an earlier essay on conversion experiences, the “turning around” of the soul led by transformations in our attention. I center askēsis (exercise) as that set of practices that order and reorder our attention through transformative engagement. The world as given to us is not arrayed by sensory data alone. It shows up to us as purveyed by values. The attentional dimension here is at once moral and perceptual. I explore these notions using some of Charles Taylor’s insights.
What Is The Base Camp?: An Introduction to This Newsletter
The premise of The Base Camp is this: Attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology. They are skills you shape with your actions. In this piece, I look at scholarship, contemplation, and writing as sacramental and meditative exercises aimed at transforming our attention, to borrow from Simone Weil. Scholarship is this kind of attention, a deep listening aimed at unfolding texts, thoughts, and ideas.
Turning and Conversion: On Collective Practices of Transformation
Discussions of conversion experience—transformations in one’s being, way of life, or religious orientation—often center the “turning motion” (conversio, in Latin), emphasizing the action “to turn” (vertere). This essay explores how conversion is also a collective effort—the prefix “con-” (com) means “with” or “together.” In short, conversion involves turning around, but it’s also always turning with, turning together, and this is as essential as the movement itself.
The Astonishing Wealth of Modern Printing: The Impoverishment of Excessive Availability
The astonishing wealth of modern printing gives us almost unfathomable access to all available texts in history—for which we should be eminently grateful. But there is an impoverishment here, that of excessive availability and reproducibility. The text can grow mute with such ease of reproduction. In this piece, I look at the production and reproduction of texts in the Middle Ages (ca. 900-1200) and the immense physical labor involved in the manual creation of texts.
Via Negativa and Platonism: What Is a Minimum Viable Platonism?
The Plato scholar Lloyd Gerson makes the point that identifying what “Platonism” is is fraught with controversy in the scholarly literature. The questions are many. Is it the dialogues alone that constitute “Platonism”? Further, are the dialogues a unitary whole, a developmental sequence (early, middle, and late), or a series of unsystematic aporias and divergent paths full of competing perspectives? I answer these questions by following Gerson in taking a via negativa approach to identifying Platonism.
Saying and Showing: The Introduction to Askēsis and Perception
The Base Camp is in many ways a place where I can share bits of research related to the larger work I’m preparing, Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life, a 300+ page manuscript dedicated to exploring the relation between practice and perception in, among others, Plato and Platonists, neoplatonic and medieval thinkers, Christian saints and mystics, and the cultures of ancient and modern philosophy. This post shares the short introduction to that work.