Practice in Still Life 1: The Practice of Return
This week's newsletter is part of the serialization of my new book (+ audio)
Welcome to The Base Camp Newsletter.
These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. (Full publication details are available here.)
A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, the book explores how philosophical and contemplative practices transform our perception and understanding of reality.
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Thank you and enjoy the chapter.
— A.E. Robbert
The Practice of Return
Claude Monet often painted the same scenes multiple times to capture them in different seasons, at different hours, and in different lights. This let him demonstrate how the same fleeting subjects could be shown to the viewer in varied ways, disclosing in this process the ephemeral nature of perception and light. Rather than trying to capture a single definitive view of his subjects, Monet understood that reality was constantly shifting based on environmental conditions, externally, and perceptual conditions, internally, in the viewer. By painting the same subject repeatedly under different lighting and weather conditions, he could document these subtle variations and show how our visual experience of the world is never static. Through these paintings, Monet demonstrated how a seemingly simple subject could become endlessly complex and worthy of sustained artistic investigation, a consequence of these repeated studies and the detail that unfolds within them.
In a different register, I think Monet’s method illuminates something important about philosophical practice. Where he returned again and again to his water lilies, sunrises, and cathedrals, rendering new qualities and aspects in his subjects in each attempt, the philosopher returns to questions, texts, and practices, discovering through renewed attention what was not apparent in earlier readings. What follows in this work is a series of such philosophical repetitions—expressed in essay form rather than paint, concept instead of color—each one exploring the importance of meditative reading and writing and what unfolds in perception as we return to the same texts over the course of weeks, years, and decades. Here we’ll see that concepts throw their own light and shadow—both on other concepts and on the phenomena they help bring into presence—in the same way that seasons and times of day throw light and shadow on the environments we perceive.
Specifically, these essays examine how aesthetic perception, philosophical exercise, and contemplative practice come together to transform ourselves as persons and how we engage with the larger world around us. The ideas and figures treated herein are likewise varied in senses at once historical, disciplinary, and existential. That is, they explore themes from phenomenology, philosophy, and religion alike. They are both practical and metaphysical, first personal and communal, dealing as they do in questions of perception and agency but also theology and ultimacy. In a phrase, this work is about the relation between practice and perception, on the one hand, and how these practices both mediate and join us together with the reality we bring to presence, on the other.
These ideas about repetition, practice, and perception relate to one another in a few important ways that are worth introducing at the outset of this collection. Most centrally, the Greek term askēsis—which originally meant “training,” “practice,” or “exercise”—will offers us the foundation for the writing to come, not as a static starting point, but as an active force making us capable of transformation, even allowing a kind of conversion experience (metanoia) to unfold. Throughout this work, I use practice and askēsis to denote those deliberate activities by which we cultivate our capacities for perception, attention, and understanding. These practices function as constituting processes that fundamentally shape who we are as perceiving beings and include exercises like fasting, prayer, investigation, meditation, contemplation, concentration, memorization, aesthetics, self-examination, and dialectic.
While there are many kinds of transformative exercise, philosophical askēsis differs from these other forms of practice—in the arts and athletics, for example—in that it aims at transforming how we apprehend reality itself, including in its theoretical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions, rather than at grasping a specific domain within it, as we find in the special sciences or the humanities in general. Another way to say this is that while other disciplines focus on specific subjects, events, or time periods, philosophy is interested in Being qua Being, to borrow a famous phrase. However, where this theme is often taken up in philosophy in terms of a relation between thought and reality, I will in these pages take up the issue in a slightly different, though connected way, by focusing instead on the relation between practice and reality. Practice in this broadest sense is about the deliberate shaping of the person in such a way that reality comes to appear differently to the practitioner. Thus while we can observe that the practices of philosophers, artists, and athletes share in a certain reflexive quality—a sense in which the practices turn back upon the practitioners—we can note how philosophical askēsis is distinguished from these other modes of transformation in its explicit orientation toward more general questions of meaning, understanding, and value.
In what follows, I will present less a theory of Being in the sense of an ontology or science of existence, and more as a stance in relation to Being, a stance taken up and supported by our practices of shaping and holding perspectives. My view is that philosophy is centered first on an encounter—in a rupture of everyday experience caused by wonder or astonishment (thaumazein) that draws us into deeper reflection—and then on those practices that could secure, clarify, and deepen this initial moment. This practical dimension is essential to seeing how philosophy is more than propositional knowledge or discursive argument. As important as these areas are, they are not the whole of what philosophy is. Indeed, the philosopher, viewed from the perspective of askēsis, exceeds argument and discourse alone, as the tools of logic on this understanding operate only inside of a larger and more encompassing space.
For the philosopher William Desmond, this larger space is fundamentally an aesthetic space. How so? Desmond understands the aesthetic not merely as a category of art or beauty, but as our primary mode of receptivity to Being—a receptivity that both enables and exceeds our logical operations. His position stems from the recognition that before we can analyze or categorize anything, we must first encounter it as given. We must be affected by and receptive to its presence in appearance. Understanding the relation between these logical and aesthetic spaces will be important for the discussions to come, and Desmond offers a particularly clarifying image that will helps us understand their relation. Desmond raises to mind the figure of William of Ockham and his famous (and figurative) razor, noting how the razor itself describes not just a philosophical instrument of a certain kind but more importantly that the instrument implies both a wielder and an environment in which it is put to use. As he says, “Ockham’s razor is all very well as a methodical tool of logic; but the human thinker wields that razor, and hence already testifies to something in excess of the razor.”[1] The image expresses a simple point: the razor emerges in the context of an overdeterminate richness, an open and aesthetic field not yet culled by reason and rationality. Desmond’s argument is that the human being contains a receptivity to this aesthetic dimension that exceeds our attempts at logical analysis, and this primordial openness to what is constitutes our primary relationship with reality.
This can be an enchanting and romantic view of the human, but the critic might respond that while it’s true that there is more to the world than what logic describes, what we want when we’re doing philosophy is precisely to cut away this illogical surrounding, getting to the core of what’s really real. I would respond to this criticism in two ways. First, I would say the aesthetic doesn’t stand in opposition to truth but provides its necessary foundation. Our aesthetic engagement with reality forms the prerequisite ground from which logical thinking emerges. Before we can abstract, categorize, and analyze through logical operations, we must first perceive, feel, and intuit. Logic requires this prior aesthetic encounter with phenomena to have anything to work upon. Second, the practice of logic itself—even at its most formal—remains embedded within an aesthetic context. The philosopher’s pursuit of logical clarity involves elements that transcend pure logic: intuitions about what problems matter, judgments about coherency in argument, and a sense of conceptual harmony that guides inquiry. The aesthetic in this sense is both prior to and persists within the space of reasons that logic describes, and many of the practices I concern myself with in this volume are about this larger space.
To be clear, these aesthetic dimensions don’t invalidate logic but rather situates it within a broader human enterprise. In other words, these aesthetic dimensions don’t merely ornament logical inquiry but are integral to its truth-seeking function. Thus, the “aesthetic excess” Desmond references shouldn’t be read as a subjective overlay that distorts reality, but rather belongs to Being itself—it is Being in its mode of presence and appearance that exceeds yet enables conceptual articulation. This excess is not a deficiency in our knowledge but a positive feature of reality itself; and in this sense, the aesthetic just is part of the real. It is how the real shows itself in perception and that showing is downstream of our skills of perceiving, and this gives us a different way of thinking about the relation between appearance and reality. In this view, appearance is Being in the mode of showing, rather than an apparition that needs to be overcome or undercut by our philosophizing. And that part of Being that escapes representation is also Being—Being in the mode of excess or concealment, the unshown, and perhaps even the unshowable, the integral ground of all appearing.
There is a certain complementarity here between aesthetics and logic, but more importantly, we can see how both of these levels point back to a more primary dimension—to the person, rather than the system, implement, or approach. This is to say that philosophy in the sense I’m interested in is about shaping this person in a direction where a different kind of attending and perceiving can emerge—the kind that underwrites the ability to think logically and discursively to begin with. Thus when we think of askēsis as foundational to philosophy, then we do so not to discount the razor, but to look back at the person who wields it, opening up a space where philosophy, in its aesthetic and practical modes, may in the end be more about shaping than cutting, a fashioning of a particular kind—the shaping of attention in relation to Being through the art of perception. How Being shows up in this relation has everything to do with how these practices of attention both presuppose a prior reality and help to make it present in different ways through our practices. We can say of this relation that in terms of philosophical priority, Being is prior to us, but it shows up for us only through the practices of perception by which we make sense of our situation as human beings, including through logic and aesthetics but also through science, music, poetry, religion, and much else. In other words, we humans come to awareness in the midst of an already existing state of affairs, but the quality of this attentiveness is dependent on our practices. This isn’t to suggest that our practices create Being’s own contours, but rather that they condition how Being discloses itself within our experience.
The ontological priority of Being and the phenomenological primacy of perception exist in a relation where neither can be reduced to the other. I would describe this relation neither as passive reception nor active construction, but as an ongoing encounter between the two, mediated by our practices. Defining these terms more precisely will explain what I mean. By “perception” I refer not only to sensory apprehension but to the full range of ways in which reality becomes present to us, including in sensation, action, imagination, artistry, intellection, contemplation, and even a kind of loving devotion or reverence, as we’ll see. And by “Being” I mean that which manifests itself to perception, the reality that both calls forth and responds to our attention. Their relationship, I would argue, is one of mutual constitution: our practices of perception shape how Being appears to us, while Being itself guides and solicits these practices through its grain and composition. The space where this meeting occurs—what Plato called the metaxu or the “in-between” of appearance and reality—is where philosophical practice takes place. Practice works within this intermediate realm, refining our receptivity to what shows itself while acknowledging that something always remains hidden or excessive to our grasp. This oscillation between revealment and concealment, between what is given to perception and what exceeds it, affords the space where transformation becomes possible. This book is about that relation.
Conversions of Looking
Monet’s method of approaching his subjects from multiple perspectives finds another parallel in this book’s structure, which likewise offers contrasting levels of philosophical engagement. The writings differ in style and depth, reflecting both the many angles from which we approach philosophical practice and the different modes of engagement required of a genuine philosophical pedagogy. A number of these chapters, especially the “fragments,” are intended as short meditations on singular concepts or themes. They are meant to be read with relative ease, introducing short injunctions for thought. The essays, in turn, offer longer studies of similar ideas and subjects, offering expansion to what in the fragments was offered only in brief form. Finally, the lectures are written adaptations of conference papers and public talks I’ve given over the past 2–3 years. These entries are both the longest and the most traditionally academic in terms of citation and engagement with debates in the existing literature.
My hope is that this mixing of styles—fragments, essays, lectures—can offer readers of many backgrounds a way into the basic ideas of this book. In this spirit, the intended audience includes both scholars and the intellectually thoughtful public at large, and I think the style of writing you’ll find herein reflects that approach. For newer or less traditionally academic readers, I recommend starting with the fragments, moving to the essays, and then concluding with the lectures. Those approaching this work with a more academic view may appreciate starting with the lectures, where the distilled style of the fragments gains in support from a more detailed investigation. That being said, there is, in the end, no right way to read these pieces. They can be read sequentially, thematically, or randomly. They walk through a landscape of ideas and practices that can be taken in as parts or as a whole, depending on the reader’s state of mind.
The orienting idea behind this work’s structure and style is that it will open up in distinctive ways through repeated engagement from different angles, each glance showing the work in a different light. In no uncertain terms, this book is about looking and how we look and, most centrally, how practicing our capacity for looking changes substantially both the looking of the person and what’s looked at over time, again recalling this repetitive method and the certain yield of such repetition. The chapters collected here thus return to similar themes from different views. Several pieces consider how aesthetic training shapes philosophical understanding, while others explore how contemplative practice transforms perception itself. The collection moves in this way between historical studies of these practices—in ancient philosophy and religion, medieval monasticism, and modern thought—and into investigations of their contemporary relevance.
To speak more concretely, the work unfolds in four parts. In Fragments I, we begin with “Attention is an Art Form,” examining how perception and attention are cultivated skills or arts rather than passive faculties. This leads to investigations of philosophical transformation in “Turning and Conversion” and “The Kinetic Philosophy,” before exploring how reality appears differently relative to our skills of perception in “Eidos and the Art of Perception.”
The longer essays that follow develop these themes in broader contexts. “Cross-Pressured Spaces” examines the tension between individual and collective dimensions of religious life through Charles Taylor’s reading of William James. “Mind, Memory, Consciousness” explores medieval understandings of consciousness through Middle English mysticism, while “Thinking as Gathering” investigates how the saint–philosophers St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa understood the gathering of thought through meditative attention. “The Desert Philosopher” examines the fourth-century Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus and his contemplative psychological insights, showing their relevance to questions of afflictive and virtuous thinking.
A second set of fragments considers what’s gained and lost in different modes of philosophical transmission and expression. “The Astonishing Wealth of Modern Printing” examines the transition from medieval manuscript culture to modern printing, while “The Lost Art of Memory” explores what’s at stake when technology lessons the need for practices of memoria, as exemplified in this case by St. Thomas Aquinas. “Via Negativa and Platonism” investigates how Platonic thought might best be understood through what it rejects rather than what it affirms.
The adapted lectures that conclude the volume address how these historical practices might be renewed in our time. “Askēsis as a Way of Life” presents philosophy as originally practice-based rather than purely theoretical. “The Craft of Contemplation” explores contemplation as a teachable skill that shapes the practitioner—in the way a woodworker might shape wood—by examining the practices of Dionysius the Areopagite and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. “Apologetics for Philosophy” argues for the unique value of the humanities and philosophical practice in our time, while “The Shape of Thought to Come” considers how such practice might evolve in light of different metaphysical commitments, especially as expressed in the works of Plato, Pierre Hadot, and Friedrich Nietzsche, with additional recourse to readings from Martin Heidegger and Nishitani Keiji.
In the end, these pieces reflect my own questions, practices, and concerns, and in that sense they are both philosophical and autobiographical. However, in the last chapter especially, I have tried to be ambitious in laying out my cards as they pertain to first principles that I hold. To be sure, there is nothing final about these principles. They reflect simply where I find myself today. I do not say that as a hedge or to be noncommittal. I simply do not pretend to have any foreclosed stances regarding the mysteries of reality I explore herein, though I do have some inclinations. In fact, if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that there is perhaps no bottom to the question of Being. In this sense, staying present and bearing witness to Being’s unfolding wonder and perplexity is perhaps the most primary practice of all, one I try to practice here. This involves, centrally, a certain kind of theōria (contemplation), as we’ll see.
Along these lines, philosophical writing could be viewed as a response to a call, to a solicitation that seeks expression in words, but lacks in this expression—both in its initial inspiration and in its ongoing representation—a sense of total completeness. There is, we could say, an initial moment of seeking indexed within the mystery of that which one seeks. Eric Voegelin describes this movement as a certain kind of “tension,” a tension to understand led by the pull that begins the search to begin with. He writes:
I am using the term tension to signify that existential tension of the ignorance that is in search—the Platonic zetesis—of something and, in order to be in search of the something, must be moved already by some sort of knowledge of that something into searching for it. Because if there were no movement, no pull (what Aristotle calls the kinesis, the pull toward searching for something), nobody would search for anything. So the zetesis and the kinesis are the movements really experienced by human beings in their quest: [the] Aristotelian aporein, questing for something that is not known, but known to be there somewhere, and somehow to be expressed and to be found language for.[2]
I have said that this work is about looking and how we look, but it’s also about what guides this looking and, principally, how our looking is drawn forward by what holds our attention. This drawing forward (the kinesis) not only calls out our attention but transforms it through being drawn and then explored (the zetesis). In both cases, this drawing is initiated by the pull into the unknown (the aporein) and is led by the experience of wonderment (thaumazein), a kind of generative amazement at existence in which philosophy begins, as Plato and Aristotle both argued. We could say, then, that the modes of askēsis this book describes are concerned not only with our awareness of these movements in philosophical consciousness but also with our capacity to sustain, shape, and nourish them. These are practices for deepening attention and for moving towards that which guides them and draws them forward to begin with.
New Forms of World Understanding
Beyond these specific themes and figures, the book also has another aim. Reading is an archetypically solitary activity, as is writing, and such solitary meditations are essential to the practices I’m describing. However, while it’s true that individual human practices shape what aspects of reality become visible and meaningful to us—in the sense of a disclosure of truth (alētheia)—what motivates this work goes beyond the efforts of single human beings. Indeed, the lineages that transmit practice open new possibilities for shared perception. One point I want to underscore here is that while individual transformations in perception do arise through sustained practice—through ways of attending to and engaging with reality that gradually reveal new aspects of the world—there is another level of perception and engagement that becomes possible only through these shared forms of practice transmission.
This understanding is important for the present moment, as we seek new modes of intellectual community that might carry forward these age-old practices. The state of academia today represents a rather Byzantine system of economic and bureaucratic capture—one that often impedes rather than enables the kind of deep attention and repeated engagement that philosophical practice requires. This moment is further complicated by the fact that we’re also living through a great contraction of the humanities in the university system—of English, history, philosophy, the classics, and more—and this situation demands new forms of collective response. Thankfully, history offers us alternative models for organizing intellectual communities, models that can create the conditions for communal modes of perception and engagement that transcend individual capability.
We might look at the notion of the medieval guild as an example of an alternative form of collective practice. The original guilds date back to thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe, and the older Roman collegia (from which comes our word college) date back to at least the second century BCE. These were both professional associations and complete ecosystems for the transmission of knowledge and practice. Collegia, for example, were held together for a common purpose, often for people with a shared profession or craft, as a form of community organization for social groups that offered mutual aid, or as a way of preserving religious rites, creating a form of collective agency for the people involved, enkindled by the compounding power of group effort.
Guilds and collegia alike thus responded to a critical need of their time—that of creating forms of social organization through which people could cultivate their arts and techniques, share knowledge, and mutually support one another’s development. These organizations provided structured ways for their members to develop expertise, pass on traditions, and build meaningful communities around shared practices over longer, more historical time periods (as opposed to the biographical lifespan of a single person). Both systems offered knowledge transfer and group solidarity, creating spaces dedicated to collective learning and practice. But these institutional forms were more than structures for coordinating action alone. We should also see them, perhaps primarily, as shared means for transforming how the world can appear and be engaged with.
To understand this transformative capacity, we might turn to the ancient Greek word logos (from legein, “to gather, to speak”). The concept referred not only to speech but to the underlying patterns that give intelligibility to reality itself—through the gathering together and articulation of meaning itself in form and identity. What these organizations made possible was something we might call a collective logos. Through the gathering together of shared understandings and purposes, the expressing of these ideas and practices in documents and traditions, and the creation of patterns and orders organized towards an aim, they created conditions where reality could appear in new ways, where aspects of the world invisible to individual perception became manifest through cooperative engagement. This logos, properly understood and manifested in appropriate forms and activities, enabled communities to achieve levels of world disclosure that no individual could attain alone, resting as they do on a larger horizon of meaning afforded by the practices of a shared life lived in communion with others.
Thus when I refer to a collective logos, I have something in mind like the following: On one level, it refers to the practices of an associated community of practitioners acting in their social milieu (the guild, the collegia, and so on) and, on another, it refers to the symbolically structured architecture of the world that itself comes to presence through these practices. I believe these ideas about collective perception speak directly to our present moment in that our age of rapid change presents us with a challenge of adaptation but also an opportunity for transformation in how we collectively see and act in the world. In this way, our very crisis (from the Greek krisis, “decision, turning point”) might offer an opportunity for renewal. Indeed, a closer look at history will show you that “the humanities” have often had an ambiguous relation to established institutions, to say nothing of their sometimes-tenuous standing with official authorities. Indeed, some of the most vital periods of humanistic inquiry have occurred in spaces of relative institutional independence, where communities of practice could develop their own methods of teaching, learning, and publication.
My view is that new forms of media—like the printing press in an earlier era—allied with new forms of institutional social organization will play an important role in the reformation of philosophical practice today. The task today is not simply to make our institutions more efficient or responsive regarding this or that instrumental goal, but to design them as forms through which communities can achieve original modes of perception and understanding—in short, to realize new, old, and timeless ways of letting reality show up and be engaged with on a historical level. While traditional academic publishing remains vital to scholarly life, novel forms of knowledge transmission are emerging that can complement these established channels. These emerging forms enable more direct connections between writers and readers, affording new spaces for public philosophical discourse and more united intellectual development. I would like for this work—through its mix of fragments, essays, and lectures offered directly to readers—to participate in these new possibilities of philosophical practice, while also aiming to create spaces for sustained and shared attention outside traditional institutional boundaries that nonetheless maintain rigorous standards of thought.
Thus, in the same way that individual perception can be transformed through practice, our social capacity for understanding depends on the lineages through which knowledge—and not just knowledge, but practices of formation and transformation, as well—is transmitted. Whether through traditional academic channels, independent scholarship, or new collaborative practices, the way we organize and share philosophical work shapes what becomes possible within it. The key lies, I would argue, in seeing that successful institutional forms are not simply patterns to be implemented from the outside but collective achievements that emerge from within shared coordination itself, through the careful alignment of form, practice, and purpose. When this alignment is achieved, institutions can become vehicles for transformation in our very capacity to perceive and engage with reality. This is the deeper purpose of institutional life. We must coordinate individual action but also enable forms of shared awareness and engagement that transform what’s possible for human communities. While pockets of this transformative work persist within existing institutions, we find ourselves in a moment that calls for—and perhaps uniquely enables—the emergence of new social forms, some complementing current structures, others challenging their limitations.
Shapes of Philosophical Life
These collaborative practices both arise from and return us to philosophy’s contemplative nature, which opens a space where both the familiar and the unknown—perhaps even the unnamable—can appear. Here I am taken by Michael McGhee’s sense that philosophy can be understood, in his words, as “an activity that begins already before reflection, in silence and meditation, which are conceived as conditions for the emergence and cessation of contending states of mind that influence perception and action. The philosopher thus becomes a kind of cartographer of a shifting interior landscape.”[3] These essays map such a landscape, charting the territories where thought meets its own limits and learns to reside there. They suggest that philosophy’s task is not exclusively about pushing these boundaries but in cultivating ways of attending to what emerges when we learn to rest at their edge, especially when supported by appropriate lineages and practices, enabling whole communities to achieve levels of world understanding that most individuals cannot attain alone. In this sense, if we are to treat practice as a means of alētheia—of opening up, of disclosure, of unconcealing—then we must do so in a contemplative mood that remains attentive to the still hidden and concealed background from which disclosure emerges. This is where contemplative thought dwells.
The practices of attention described in these essays—whether in contemplation, reading, or philosophical inquiry—find their fullest expression not only in solitary pursuit, though this is central, but also in these properly structured and shared forms. In the terms of traditional monastic practice, we could say we need both eremitic and cenobitic forms of contemplation, both the solitary practice of the hermit monk (from the Greek eremos, meaning “desert” or “solitary”) who pursues contemplation in isolation, and the common life of monks living and working together in organized communities (the Greek koinos bios). Like these ancient forms of monasticism, philosophical practice requires both individual depth and communal participation.
The institutional question, then, becomes inseparable from the philosophical one. How do we create spaces and communities that enable deeper modes of seeing and understanding? The answer lies in recognizing that individual transformation and institutional form must develop together, each enabling and enriching the other. In this work, I want to attempt this synthesis in both content and medium. Through its varied modes of expression—from fragments to essays to lectures—I hope to create different angles of approach to philosophical practice, and through its method of publication and distribution, I want to contribute to the emergence of media forms that might better serve the transmission of philosophical understanding, offered through channels of publication that themselves may echo earlier historical forms of knowledge transmission such as pamphlets, handbooks, letters, dialogues, and devotional texts.
The future of philosophy depends on both individual insight and practice and on our ability to create and sustain institutions that enable this shared philosophical engagement. And this is the mission before us, as I see it: to develop forms of philosophical practice and institutional life that can meet the demands of our time. Here we can recall Monet one last time. As with his return to the same subjects in different lights and atmospheres, this practice of return applies not only to individual perception but to our shared methods of engaging with and transmitting knowledge. We must build spaces where individual contemplative practice can flourish alongside communal inquiry, where timeless wisdom can speak to contemporary needs, and where new modes of seeing and understanding can emerge through sustained communal effort. This work is one small gesture in that larger direction.
[1] William Desmond, Being and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 106.
[2] Eric Voegelin, “Structures of Consciousness” in The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939–1985, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 362.
[3] Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), précis.
This chapter is an excerpt from Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.
Incredible work here. You get at the relation between aesthetics and logos really well. I often find that thinkers tend toward one at exclusion of the other. Perhaps the most exciting contribution here is the gesture toward new intellectual communities.
I think the oscillation of being between showing and concealment can also be thematized as habituation and shattering, objectification and differentiation, synthesis and intensity. I think habit may be a conjunctive concept that links practice and perception...
Did you happen to study with Desmond? If not, how did you come across him. I took classes with him years ago but I've rarely seen him referenced. Now here I see his work on Substack of all places. So curious how you came across him.